Peter Blundell, one of the wealthiest merchants of Elizabethan England, died in 1601, just before the great Queen, leaving money and lands to found a School in his home town to maintain sound learning and true religion. No expense was to be spared in its construction. Generous lands were provided in Tiverton and South Devon for its maintenance and Blundell’s executors established links between the School and Balliol College, Oxford and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, which still survive to this day. Blundell’s was to be a School much larger and grander than any other in the West Country.

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