St Edmund's College is a coeducational private day and boarding school in the British public school tradition, set in in Ware, Hertfordshire. Founded in 1568 as a seminary, then a boys' school, it is the oldest continuously operating and oldest post-Reformation Catholic school in the country. Today it caters for boys and girls aged 3 to 18. History Douai: 1568–1793 St Edmund's College is a continuation on English soil of the English College that was founded by William Cardinal Allen at Douai in Flanders, France in 1568. Originally intended as a seminary to prepare priests to work in England to keep Catholicism alive, it soon also became a boys' school for Catholics, who were debarred from running such institutions in England. Many of its students, both priests and laymen, returned to England to be put to death under the anti-Catholic laws. The college includes amongst its former alumni 20 canonised and 138 beatified martyrs. Silkstead, Twyford, Standon and Old Hall Green: 1662–1793 A small Catholic school was started in Hampshire in the second half of the 17th century. It was opened by a priest at Silkstead some time before 1662, and transferred to Twyford, near Winchester. It was conducted in great secrecy, and was for boys of preparatory-school age who intended to proceed to the English College to complete more advanced studies. The poet Alexander Pope was a student at the school, although he did not proceed to Douay. Twyford was closed in 1745 on account of anti-Catholic feeling caused by the Jacobite rising, but Bishop Richard Challoner re-established the school in Hertfordshire at Standon Lordship in 1753, in a property owned by the Aston family. In 1769, Bishop James Talbot moved the school to its current site at Old Hall Green, near Puckeridge, and it became known as Old Hall Green Academy. Old Hall Green: 1793 – present The work of the English College in Douay was brought to an end by the French Revolution, and in October 1793 the college property was confiscated. Professors and students came back to England, where Relief Acts had considerably relaxed the penal laws against Catholics. John Douglass, Vicar Apostolic of the London District, realised that the time had come to replace the English College, and the earliest refugees joined the students at Old Hall Green Academy. On 16 November 1793 – the feast of St Edmund of Canterbury – a new college