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24
January 2012
– at the end of the two-minute silence on Remembrance Day the School bell rang 63 times –
why 63? It’s not, as some might think, because 63 members of the Abingdon community died in the two
world wars – that number is 122 – it’s because 63 is the number that has been associated with Abingdon
School ever since 1563 when a former pupil, the sixty-three-year-old John Roysse, donated £50 towards
the cost of refurbishing part of the old Abbey as a new schoolroom to replace the old medieval one. There
was to be space for 63 free scholars and tradition has always claimed that the room was 15 feet wide
by 63 feet long. The room, now known as the Roysse Room and part of the Guildhall, is certainly 15 feet
wide but whether it was ever 63 feet long it’s no longer possible to say. In addition to this outright gift, on
his death in 1571 Roysse bequeathed the School two properties in the City of London, the rents from
which augmented the Headmaster’s salary for the next 300 years.
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out of the past
Why Sixty-three?
Bicentenary
– for the 200th anniversary of Roysse’s endowment,
the Headmaster Henry Bright presented the School with a
wooden board painted with a newly devised coat of arms
together with the dedication, ‘To the honour of the Blessed
Trinity, John Roysse of London, Mercer, founded this Free
School AD 1563 Aged 63 for 63 boys.’ But, however much
Protestant eighteenth-century Abingdon might want to
deny its school’s Roman Catholic origins, John Roysse did
not found Abingdon School in 1563; the School had been
in existence since at least 1256 and quite possibly since
the establishment of Abingdon Abbey in 650 and Roysse
himself had been a pupil there in the 1510s. It is unthinkable
that an important town like Abingdon would not have had a
school until 1563. Roysse was a vital benefactor of the post-
medieval school out of which the modern school has grown,
but he was not its founder.
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1563
1763
– by the 350th anniversary the
School had moved to its current site
and celebrations included lunch for
over 300 people on Upper Field.
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1913