The King's School, Canterbury

The King's School, Canterbury is the oldest continuously operating school in the English-speaking world. The school was founded in 597 AD by St Augustine of Canterbury when he established his mission of Christianisation at the court of King Æthelberht of Kent — making the school 1,429 years old. The school sits today in the medieval precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, primus inter pares of the Anglican episcopate.

The school's continuous educational lineage runs unbroken from St Augustine through the medieval cathedral schools, through King Henry VIII's 1541 royal re-foundation (after which it took the present name "The King's School"), through the dissolution of the monasteries that closed many sister institutions, and through the Reformation. The Headmistress is Jude Lowson. The school is co-educational ages 13-18, with around 958 pupils across the Senior School and a substantial boarding population, plus an integrated Junior King's School ages 3-13.

The school's literary alumni list is unparalleled in any English school. Christopher Marlowe — the Elizabethan playwright whose Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine and Edward II were the principal models for Shakespeare's early tragedies, and whose mysterious death in a Deptford tavern brawl in 1593 cut short the only career of his generation that might have surpassed Shakespeare's — was educated at the King's School in the 1570s on a Canterbury Cathedral scholarship. The novelist W. Somerset Maugham — orphaned and sent to the school as a Victorian boy, an experience he fictionalised mercilessly in Of Human Bondage — was the most commercially successful English novelist of the 1930s, and his The Razor's Edge defined the late-modernist British search-for-meaning novel.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor DSO OBE — the SOE officer who, in 1944, parachuted into Nazi-occupied Crete and kidnapped the German general Heinrich Kreipe (an exploit later filmed as Ill Met by Moonlight) and the author of the canonical inter-war travel trilogy A Time of Gifts / Between the Woods and the Water / The Broken Road — was a King's School boy, famously expelled. Walter Pater, the Victorian aesthete who defined late-nineteenth-century aestheticism ("To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life"), was a pupil.

In film, the school has produced two of the great twentieth-century English directors: Michael Powell (A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes — half of the Archers partnership with Emeric Pressburger) and Sir Carol Reed (The Third Man, Oliver!). The contemporary actor Orlando Bloom — Legolas in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean — was a King's School pupil. Sir David Gower OBE — England cricket captain through the 1980s, scorer of 8,231 Test runs — was at King's.

The school operates a substantial bursary programme via the Cathedral and the King's School Foundation, maintaining the founding principle of educational access for the boys and girls of Kent regardless of family means.