In 1559, St Saviour's parish sold a quantity of silver plate to fund a new sixty-year lease on the church from Lady Day, dated 6 June 1559.
A condition of the lease was that within two years the parish would establish a building and employ a schoolmaster for a free grammar school.
On 16 May 1562 the parishioners paid £42 for a thousand-year lease from Matthew Smith on a building associated with the Green Dragon Inn, which had previously been owned by Lady Cobham.
Under the first schoolmaster, Christopher Ockland, the school moved into this new home, known as Green Dragon Court, lying just south of St Saviour's Church and now part of the site of the Borough Market.
The chief figure of the Board of Governors was Thomas Cure, the senior Warden of St Saviour's, a special corporation chartered by King Henry VIII to look after both the great priory church and various local charitable bequests.
Cure was the Royal Saddler, effectively a haulage contractor,[citation needed] for Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I and lived near the north-west corner of St Saviour's Church.
The High Master (headmaster) was paid £20 per year and initially only boys from St Saviour's parish could be admitted for a fee of half a crown (2s.
The last-named was to become a major local benefactor, and his principal endowment for Dulwich College was to ensure the continuance of St Saviour's when it was likely to be dissolved almost three hundred years later.