The school website conjectures its origin traces back to 631,[2] and through its Roll of Headmasters to 1114.

[3] It appears to have ceased from around 1496 until its refoundation from the will of Sir Richard Fulmerston in 1566.

In 1998 archaeologists from the television programme Time Team excavated at the school for three days in search of the Norman cathedral of Herbert Losinga, which was only located at Thetford for twenty years or so, before relocating to Norwich.

They did not find any Norman stone building, perhaps because the short-lived cathedral was a re-used Anglo-Saxon wooden church which has not survived.

[2] Since 2017 the school has been owned by China Financial Services Holdings, a Hong Kong–based company.