Katherine, Lady Berkeley obtained a royal licence and formally endowed a chantry school at Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire — one of the oldest surviving schools in England.
On 20 October 1384, Katherine, Lady Berkeley secured a royal licence to formally endow a chantry school in the small market town of Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire. The foundation combined a religious chantry — where priests would say masses for the souls of Katherine and her family — with an educational function, providing instruction to a small initial cohort of scholars, variously recorded as two to six boys.
This act situates Katherine among a very small number of medieval Englishwomen known to have personally founded and endowed an educational institution. Secondary sources credit her school as the first school founded by a layperson, the first founded by a woman, and the first to offer free education in England, though these claims are difficult to verify with absolute certainty against the full historical record of European educational foundations. Nevertheless, the endowment is considered pioneering within the English context, at a time when formal education was almost exclusively the preserve of the Church, monastic houses, or wealthy male patrons.
The school she established survives to this day as Katharine Lady Berkeley's School, making her foundation one of the oldest continuously operating educational institutions in England. Her act of philanthropy reflects both her personal wealth and status as a widow of the powerful Berkeley family, and her independent agency in directing that wealth toward a lasting public institution rather than solely toward private or dynastic ends.