User:Philip coventry uk/sandbox

Old Grammar School, Coventry.
The building in Coventry on the corner of Bishop Street and Hales Street is known locally as the Old Grammar School. It was originally built as a hospital cum chapel between 1154 and 1179 by Prior Laurence of the Benedictine Monastery for the Knights Hospitallers. The Knights Hospitallers were also called the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, and were founded as the medical side of the army going on Crusade to the Holy Lands. If you consider that prayer can help the sick to recover from their illness, then why not treat the illness in a chapel where prayers for their recovery are said six or seven times a day. During the Dissolution of the Monasteries around 1544 it was closed down and then sold to John Hale with King Henry VIII setting a condition that Hale started a Free School in Coventry. This he did and a few years later moved the school, named after the king into the hospital. In 1565 Queen Elizabeth visited Coventry entering via Bishop Street Gate and as she passed the school it was mentioned that her father had caused its foundation. She entered in and gave a donation for its upkeep. The school King Henry VIII School, Coventry moved in 1885 to its present location in Warwick Road. When the street outside of the Old Grammar School was widened, a part of the school was demolished and the street was then called Hales Street. After standing empty for the last twenty years it has been announced today (4.4.2012) in a local newspaper, The Coventry Telegraph that plans are afoot to open the Old Grammar School as an offshoot of the Coventry Transport Museum.