Merchant Taylors' School

Merchant Taylors' School was founded in 1561 by the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors of the Fraternity of St John the Baptist in the City of London — one of the twelve "Great Livery Companies" of medieval London — under the direction of the Company's then Master Richard Hilles and the new headmaster Richard Mulcaster. Mulcaster, who served as Head from 1561 to 1586 and is regarded as the most innovative Tudor schoolmaster, established Merchant Taylors' on the principle of teaching the vernacular English language alongside Latin and Greek — a radical Renaissance pedagogical choice. The school was named in the Clarendon Commission of 1864 as one of the "Nine Great Schools" of England (with Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, St Paul's, Shrewsbury and Rugby).

The school operated in the City of London for over three hundred years before moving in 1933 to its present Sandy Lodge campus — a 270-acre rural estate at Northwood, Hertfordshire, with cricket pitches, rugby fields, a competition swimming pool and a substantial chapel. Merchant Taylors' is a boys-only day school with around 959 pupils ages 7-18, divided between an integrated Prep School and Senior School. The Headmaster is Simon Everson.

The school is governed by the Worshipful Company of Merchant Taylors and is an Eton Group member — the informal grouping of around a dozen leading day schools (including St Paul's, Westminster, City of London and Highgate). A-Level results place Merchant Taylors' consistently in the top quintile of UK day schools by Oxbridge offer numbers.

Merchant Taylors' most internationally celebrated alumnus is the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, whose The Faerie Queene (1590-96) remains the great allegorical epic of Elizabethan English literature. The Hollywood star Boris Karloff — born William Henry Pratt, the actor whose performances as Frankenstein's monster and as the title character in The Mummy defined the Universal horror cycle of the 1930s — was a Merchant Taylors' boy. The Scottish nutritionist John Boyd-Orr, Baron Boyd-Orr, was awarded the 1949 Nobel Peace Prize for his work as the first Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. The screenwriter Andrew Davies — whose adaptations include the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones's Diary and the US House of Cards — was a Merchant Taylors' boy.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Merchant Taylors' Educational Charity.