Building on history

Harrow School, London HA1 The property of the Keepers and Governors of the Possessions, Revenues and Goods of the Free Grammar School of John Lyon within the Town of Harrow on the Hill. As the school celebrates its 450th anniversary, John Goodall looks at its early history and principal buildings

- John Goodall

ON February 19, 1572, Elizabeth I issued a charter in favour of one John Lyon, a yeoman in the parish of Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex. By the terms of this splendidly presented document, authorised with the Great Seal of the Realm, Lyon was permitted to endow a school in his native town as a perpetual institution henceforth to be known—slightly cumbersomely—as the ‘Free Grammar School of John Lyon within the town of Harrow-on-the-Hill’. It could hold property up to the annual value of £100 and would be run by a schoolmaster and his deputy, an usher. In addition, Lyon was granted permission to sustain two students at both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and also to improve the roads between Edgware and the nearby capital, London.

It is to this charter that Harrow School— the buildings of which now encircle the crown of the town’s distinctive hilltop site—ascribes its foundation almost exactly 450 years ago. That ascription is correct, but it overlooks an important complication. Christopher Tyerman in his authoritative A History of Harrow School (2000) points out that the royal charter describes the institution as being ‘re-endowed’; Lyon was not founding a school, but patronising one of unknown, earlier origin. This one certainly existed in the 1550s and attracted some well-connected pupils, including several Gerrards, members of a local gentry family. Indeed, Lyon himself might have been educated there. Whatever the case, his re-endowment of Harrow came at a watershed moment.