Norwich School

Norwich School is one of the oldest schools in England. It was founded in approximately 1096 by Herbert de Losinga, the first Bishop of Norwich and the founder of Norwich Cathedral itself. The original school operated as a song school attached to the cathedral, providing choristers and Latin education in the medieval pattern. It was refounded by King Edward VI in 1547 as the Free Grammar School of King Edward VI, in the post-Reformation reorganisation of monastic and chantry endowments. The school has been continuously occupying its present location in Cathedral Close, immediately beside Norwich Cathedral, since the twelfth century — making it one of the oldest schools in the English-speaking world still on its original site.

The school became co-educational in 2000 and is today an HMC day school of around 1,170 pupils aged 4-18 across the Lower School and Senior School. The Head Master is Steffan Griffiths. The school provides choristers to Norwich Cathedral and the cathedral chapter is represented on the governing body.

Norwich School's most internationally famous alumnus is Horatio, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson — the Norfolk-born Royal Navy commander who won the Battles of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar — who attended Norwich School in the 1760s before joining the Navy at twelve. Nelson's bust stands in the Cathedral Close and the school's connection to him remains central to its institutional identity.

In the visual arts, the school is connected to the Norwich School of landscape painting through John Crome, the founder of the school and the most influential English landscape painter outside the Constable–Turner mainstream. Crome was a master at Norwich School in the early nineteenth century. In literature, the seventeenth-century polymath and physician Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Hydriotaphia), the Victorian traveller George Borrow (The Bible in Spain, Lavengro) and the Gothic novelist Charles Robert Maturin (Melmoth the Wanderer) were all educated at Norwich School. The eighteenth-century classical scholar Samuel Parr, whose Parrian Club of former pupils was the school's first formal alumni society, is another distinguished Old Norvicensian.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Old Norvicensian Society.