Web Design Thetford

The school website conjectures its origin traces back to 631, and through its Roll of Headmasters to 1114. The Independent Schools Inspectorate assert in their 2012 report that “The school was originally founded in the 10th Century” but without any evidence provided. It appears to have ceased from around 1496 until its refoundation from the will of Sir Richard Fulmerston in 1566. The refoundation was confirmed by an Act of Parliament in 1610. Part of the school is built on the site of a thirteenth-century Dominican Friary (Blackfriars, Thetford), which may have been built on, and incorporated parts of, a Norman cathedral. This building, now known as “Old School”, comprised the entire school for about 300 years, and is where the lawyer Roger North and the political activist Thomas Paine were educated.

In 1998 archaeologists from the television programme Time Team excavated at the school for three days in search of the Norman cathedral of Herbert Losinga, which was only located at Thetford for twenty years or so, before relocating to Norwich. They did not find any Norman stone building, perhaps because the short-lived cathedral was a re-used Anglo-Saxon wooden church which has not survived.