This article sifts the surviving evidence to assess the career and character of the founder of Bampton School, Robert Veysey (c. 1555-1635). He appears as deserving a contemporary’s judgment of him as ‘crafty’, but also as a man remarkable for raising not just himself but also his extended family to the ranks of the gentry, with a sphere of influence that stretched from Chimney in Bampton to Burford and Taynton. This essay is the necessary background for further published work on subsequent Veysey generations’ attempts to maintain the status bequeathed them by this pater familias, and on the bequest of hundreds of Veysey family books to Lincoln College, Oxford by Robert Veysey’s collateral descendant, William Vesey of Taynton (d. 1755).
