The sixth verse of Floreat Dunelmia, the beloved song of Durham School, goes as follows:

 'So Hal the Eighth, when he bore rule,

He spoiled the church, but spared the school; 

Good Hal!—we'll waft his praises far, 

Singing "Floreat Dunelmia".'

Discounting Henry VIII's Shakespearean designation of 'Hal', the song is accurate, as it was during the English Reformation- and the accompanying Dissolution of the Monasteries- that Durham School was refounded from the state it had been previously. Indeed, Henry VIII is the eponymous 'King' of Durham School's famous King's Scholars.

The persistence of Durham School students in referring to Durham Cathedral as 'the Abbey' is an example of folk memory of the days before Henry VIII, when it was still a monastic institution. The Dissolution of the Monasteries had significant effects on both Durham School and the Chorister School. The priory at Durham surrendered to royal commissioners (led by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey) on the 31st December 1539; sixteen months later, on the 12th May 1541, it reopened as a Cathedral. The two schools were in trouble even before this, however, as the suppression of the nearby Jervaulx Abbey after the Pilgrimage of Grace led to the endowment that paid for the school teacher's wages being diverted to the royal treasury. The future of Durham School, to quote Geoffrey Moorhouse's The Last Divine Office (2008), "seemed bleak". It was up to Bishop of Durham Cuthbert Tunstall to attempt to sort this problem.

Tunstall, like many Bishops of Durham, was a man heavily involved in the political world of his time. In particular, his name appears multiple times in accounts of Henry VIII's marriages. After Catherine of Aragon's banishment to Kimbolton Castle, it was Tunstall who was sent to convince her to take the Oath of Supremacy and disinherit her daughter in 1534. He was also a heavy advocate of education, particularly in mathematics; a cousin of the Parr family, he taught the young Catherine Parr from a young age, and was even the executor of her father Sir Thomas' will. Aware of the issue with the Jervaulx endowment, on the 14th November 1537 Tunstall wrote a letter to Thomas Cromwell. According to the Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, this asked "him to give orders for the payment of the stipends of the two chantry priests, schoolmasters of the grammar school and song school in Durham, [and] for the maintenance of which land was given to Gervaux Abbey, [with] the copies of the grants being entered in Mr. Pollard's books." According to one source, the letter said that unless something was done about the arrears "the said two schools… shall thereby be laid down, which were to the undoing of that poor country and the hindrance of youth in those parts."

Sure enough, an entry on the 29th September 1539 stated that funds from the Jervaulx monastery were requisitioned to fund "Hen. Stafforde and Wm. Cockey, schoolmasters at Durham." Henry Stafford was the Headmaster of Durham School from circa 1538 to 1543; William Cockey, meanwhile, was Song Master from 1521 until the chantry was dissolved in 1548. 

But it was on the 31st May 1541 that Henry VIII truly saved the school by re-founding it from the two separate Langley schools that had existed previously. According to the charter drawn up at the time- now located at the Durham University Library- the King "had endowed it with possessions and has decided and arranged, in order that good learning may flourish in that place, that eighteen boys should be found to be regular students of Latin and ten boys to be regular students of singing at that place." It is certainly true that there were ten Choristers at the time, whose names still survive to this day. This charter was signed by Cuthbert Tunstall ("by divine permission Bishop of Durham") and witnessed by clerk Robert Hyndmer.

A fuller version of the school at the time is present in the Durham Cathedral Statutes, also written in 1541. Chapter twenty-eight discusses the school in detail, providing a wonderfully vivid image about what should be done about those students from lower sets: 

"But if any one of the boys be blameworthy for noticeable slowness or dullness, or for a natural dislike to letters, we will that he, after considerable trial, shall be expelled by the Dean and sent away to some other place, lest, like mildew, he may consume the honey of the bees." One wonders how many 'mildew-like' boys the teachers encountered in the 1530s to put such a statute in place. The text continues: "And here we charge the conscience of the instructors to apply all the pains and diligence in their power that all the boys may make progress and profit in letters. And let them not suffer any boy who is notably defamed of the vice of sloth to abide longer among the others to no profit, without immediately laying his name before the Dean, in order that he may be removed and another more suitable person admitted in his stead." 

The statutes elsewhere discuss the requirements laid out of Durham School: 

"In order that piety and good learning may for ever bud, grow and flower in the said church and in due season bear fruit for its adornment, we order and decree that there be for ever in the church of Durham eighteen boys, poor and destitute of the help of friends, to be nourished on the goods of the church, and so far as possible with native talents fit for learning; and we should not that they should be admitted poor boys of the cathedral church of Durham before they know how to read, write, and, in the judgement of the Dean, have a fair knowledge of the rudiments of the grammar." 

Most of all, however, these statutes lay out Henry VIII's interest in providing the poorer students with the ability to join the school. This ethos would transfer into the King's Scholarship, which had continued to this very day.