Westminster School -- Westminster, London, UK
N 51° 29.961 W 000° 07.756
30U E 699249 N 5709264
The Westminster School educating young men since 1179 (and young women since 1973) is listed in Wikipedia
Waymark Code: WMT6KB
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 10/04/2016
Views: 6
Young men have been educated at Westminster School since 1179, when the school was run by the Benedictine Monks at nearby Westminster Abbey as a source of novitiates for their monastic order.
In 1540, when Henry VIII abolished the monasteries and appropriated the Catholic Church's lands and holdings as part of the Reformation, exempted the school from his orders. In 1560, his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I became its Royal Patron.
Bombed by the german Luftwaffe in 1940, the school continued on, around the rubble and repairs to its buildings.
In 1973, after nearly 8 centuries of "tradition," young women were finally admitted to the school, long a bastion of wealth, power and privilege in this highly-class-conscious society.
From Wikipedia, the first paragraph of a VERY LONG article about the Westminster School [too long to be reproduced here]: (
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"Westminster School is a private school within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, England. It currently has the second highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rates of any secondary school or college in the world. With origins before the 12th century, the educational tradition of Westminster probably dates back as far as AD 960, in line with the Abbey's history. The school's alumni include Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, Edward Gibbon, Henry Mayhew, A. A. Milne, Peter Ustinov, Tony Benn and seven Prime Ministers. Boys are admitted to the Under School at age seven, and to the senior school at age thirteen; girls are admitted only at sixteen. The school has around 750 pupils; around a quarter are boarders, most of whom go home at weekends, after Saturday morning school. It is one of the original nine British public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868. Charging up to £7,800 per term for day pupils and £11,264 for boarders in 2014/15, Westminster is the 13th most expensive HMC day school and 10th most expensive HMC boarding school in the UK."