Description: This view of the Grammar School is taken from a commercial postcard, postally used on 11 June 1911.
The School was founded in 1594. The buildings shown date form 1846 and were extended in 1878. They were listed Grade II in 1977. Originally called Chesterfield Grammar School and then Chesterfield School, it moved from this site in 1967 to a newly-built school in Brookside, Chesterfield, which itself closed in 1991 after nearly 400 years of history (information kindly supplied by Frank Gorman).
The following information is a quotation from A History of Derbyshire by Gladwyn Turbutt (1999):
'Chesterfield had a grammar school which was flourishing in the mid-thirteenth century and dependent on the Parish Church. The first record of the school occurs in a letter dating from the reign of Henry III in which Henry, a clerk of Ashbourne, wrote to the vicar of Chesterfield thanking him for his assistance in securing his appointment as schoolmaster of the Chesterfield school ... Only one other reference to a Chesterfield schoolmaster occurs in the medieval period: this is to Sir Henry of Sutton, described as 'master of the schools of Chesterfield', in a deed of 1337 and again in one of 1346-7. The school no doubt continued, probably under the auspices of the Guild of St Mary and the Holy Cross, until the dissolution of the chantries and guilds in 1548. The location of the medieval school is unknown. When the later grammar school was established in 1598, as a result of the testamentary bequest of Godfrey Foljambe of Walton, the chapel of St Helen's was apparently converted into a school house, which remained in use until the early eighteenth century when new premises were built nearby.'