The School was founded in 1577 but, like many others, lapsed during the Civil War. In 1662 Robert Marryott, ‘the great eater’, hosted a feast for local worthies in Woodbridge which started at the Crown Hotel and finished at the King’s Head. From these indulgencies emerged the reincarnation of the School which today enjoys the curious claim of being the only independent school in the country to have been founded in two public houses!

The Free School, Woodbridge, was an expression of the new confidence in England following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Local citizens contributed generously to the founding of the School in 1662, appointing a headmaster on an annual salary of £25 to teach, without charge, ten ‘sons of the meaner sort of the inhabitants of the town’. Additional pupils paid an annual fee of £1.

Thomas Seckford

After a difficult start, including the ravages of the plague in 1666, the School flourished and enjoyed a glorious era in the eighteenth century when the East Anglian gentry enrolled their sons in great numbers. By the mid-nineteenth century, the cramped School building was proving inadequate and in 1861 the School integrated with the Seckford Trust, an almshouse charity, becoming a part beneficiary of an endowment left to the town of Woodbridge in 1587 by Thomas Seckford, Master of the Court of Requests to Queen Elizabeth I.

In 1864 the School moved from the centre of town to its present site with 45 acres of rolling, wooded grounds overlooking the beautiful market town on the banks of the River Deben.

The intervening years have seen Woodbridge School flourish, expand and develop into one of the country’s leading and most progressive independent schools. In 1974 the School became fully co-educational and today thrives with over 950 pupils attending its three schools.