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Rugby School, located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire, is a co-educational boarding school and one of the oldest public schools in England. The Good Schools Guide called it the "number one choice among all the co-ed boarding schools."[1] Rugby School was founded in 1567 as a provision in the will of Lawrence Sheriff, who had made his fortune supplying groceries to Queen Elizabeth I of England. It is one of the nine English public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868. Since Lawrence Sheriff lived in Rugby, the school was intended to be a free grammar school for the boys of that town. Gradually, however, the nature of the school shifted to become fee-paying, and so a new school – Lawrence Sheriff Grammar School – was founded to continue Lawrence Sheriff's original intentions; that school receives a substantial proportion of the endowment income from Lawrence Sheriff's estate every year. In addition, Rugby School continues to offer a large number of scholarship places for outstanding students from the local community, who come from state (maintained) primary schools in the immediate vicinity of Rugby.[citation needed] The school's new Arnold Foundation has been established to enable it to offer similar support to children from outside the Rugby area. The core of the school (which contains School House, featured in Tom Brown's Schooldays) was completed in 1815 and is built around the Old Quad (quadrangle), with its fine and graceful Georgian architecture. Especially notable rooms are the Upper Bench (an intimate space with a book-lined gallery), the Old Hall of School House, and the Old Big School (which makes up one side of the quadrangle, and was once the location for teaching all junior pupils). Thomas Hughes (like his fictional hero, Tom Brown) once carved his name onto the hands of the school clock, situated on a tower above the Old Quad. The polychrome school chapel and new quadrangle were designed by the well-known Victorian Gothic revival architect William Butterfield in 1875, and the smaller Memorial Chapel was dedicated in 1922. Lord Peter Wimsey, the private investigator created by Dorothy L. Sayers, rather unkindly referred to the school as little more than a railway junction (see David Cannadine (1994) Aspects of Aristocracy).
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