EDITORIAL
This issue of the Colcestrian is devoted entirely to a history of the School; the detailed record is to the year 1900, while a brief chronological summary carries the story forward to the present day.
This history goes into greater detail than any known previous record, and deals at some length with the School's well—known claims to antiquity. It is of special interest in that it has been written by a present scholar of the School.
While no claim is made that it is an official history, every care has been taken to make it as accurate as possible. The manuscript has been circulated as widely as circumstances allowed among Old Boys and others interested in the School. We should like to thank those who made suggestions; those who very kindly sent old copies of the Colcestrian for our files; and the municipal authorities in the Town Hall and the Museum for placing special information and special documents at our disposal.
CHAPTER 1
There is a stone tablet over the entrance to the main school building that must have caught the eye of all Colcestrians, with its inscription, VITÆ CORONA FIDES, 1539—1909. The second date marks the completion of the building, while the first is that officially accepted as the beginning of the School's history, being the year when King Henry VIII granted to the "Bailiffs, Burgesses, and Commonalty" of Colchester the income of two Chantries in the town "to found and maintain within the said town a free School" (ad erigendum et stabillendum infra dictam villam unam liberum Scholam).
Forty-five years later, in 1584, the Letters Patent containing this decree were cancelled as certain conditions therein had not been fulfilled, and a new decree for the foundation of a "free Grammar School" was issued by Queen Elizabeth. To the Colchester School, therefore, falls the rare distinction of owing its foundation, as we hear in the School Prayer, both to Henry VIII and to Queen Elizabeth. Officially, then, the School completed its fourth century in the year 1939, the opening year of the Second World War.
Except perhaps for its doubly royal foundation here is a typical English grammar school, founded in the Tudor period; but there is a current belief to be considered that what was effected in 1539 was not the creation of a new school so much as the refounding of an old one which had already been in existence for more than three centuries, as well as a somewhat vague theory that this earlier school is the oldest English grammar school on record.
