Gueles, a griffen rampant volant argent, upon the shoulder for difference a rose gules seeded or barbed vert.
In 1563, the sixty-three year old John Roysse gave £50 to the Corporation of Abingdon and specified that it should be used to build a schoolroom that was to be sixty-three feet long for sixty-three free scholars In itself this was a relatively small sum of money but it ensured that Abingdon School was able to survive the financial hardship that had followed the dissolution of Abingdon Abbey in 1538. Roysse also endowed the School with property in Birchin Lane in the City of London and for three hundred years the rents from this property were used to support the School. It is appropriate that Roysse’s griffen, with its ‘difference’ - a red rose on the shoulder - should be at the centre of the School’s coat of arms and of our 750th anniversary logo.
The images shows the coat of arms of John Roysse in a window in the Roysse Room, the sixty-three-foot long schoolroom of the old grammar school now part of the Guildhall, Abingdon.
