Edward Bartlett Byfield (10 July 1928 – 23 December 2021) was a Canadian teacher, journalist, historian, and publisher. He co-founded Saint John's Cathedral Boys' School and Saint John's School of Alberta, started the Alberta Report, BC Report and Western Report newsmagazines, and published two 12-volume history book series, Alberta In the 20th Century and The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years.

Edward Bartlett Byfield was born into a Unitarian family in Toronto, Ontario, in 1928 as the son of Caroline (née Gillett) and Vernon "Vern" Byfield, a reporter for the Toronto Telegram and Toronto Star. During WW2 Byfield attended Lakefield College School for two "unforgettable years. The place established the first positive values of my life--moral, mathematical, literary--and introduced me to the Christian faith." Byfield then moved with his parents to Washington, D.C. in 1945 at the age of 17.

He began his journalism career as a copy boy for the Washington Post. He returned to Canada in 1948 and worked at the Ottawa Journal and Timmins Daily Press and married Virginia Byfield. In 1952, the Byfields moved from Toronto with their two children under two, to Winnipeg where Ted Byfield began working at the Winnipeg Free Press. Covering Winnipeg city hall news, he once "crawled into an air conditioning duct in order to eavesdrop on a secret city council meeting enabling him to get a scoop on a funding scandal".

While a political reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press Byfield was enlisted by recently elected MLA Stephen Juba in a bid for mayor. Juba's win was "the upset of the decade in Winnipeg municipal politics. Once his man was in power Ted made great use of his favored status. In particular, he enlisted the mayor’s support for a personal project he had just begun – a weekend boys’ club. The effect, of course, was to give the project instant credibility. But more importantly, it got the kind of publicity no money could buy."

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In 1952, Ted Byfield underwent a profound religious conversion. Inspired by the writings of Christian apologists, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton, the couple committed to living their Christian faith fully. Through the St. John's Cathedral choir, Ted Byfield became part of a cell or group of seventeen men, which included Frank Wiens, that shared similar beliefs. They founded what they first called the Dynevor Society, and later the Company of the Cross, a lay Anglican order affiliated with the Anglican Church of Canada. The boy's choir at St. John's Cathedral became a club, then a weekend residential school starting in 1957, and finally, in 1962, a full-time "traditionalist" Anglican private boarding school for boys. The Company of the Cross had acquired the abandoned Dynevor Indian Hospital in Selkirk, north of Winnipeg where they held their weekend schools. The cell officially changed their name from Dynevor to the Company of the Cross under the Manitoba Societies Act.

In 1962, Byfield and five other members of the Company opened the first in a series of St. John's full-time boarding schools for boys "dedicated to the reassertion of Christian educational principles"—Saint John's Cathedral Boys' School. The school operated intentionally on "traditional" methods. They used mathematics textbooks from pre-World War II advancing from "arithmetic to calculus" with constant testing. Ginger Byfield taught French "developed from French-Canadian history." They watched hockey on the French channel. Byfield taught history which required that students read copiously from Thomas Costain to Francis Parkman. In 1973 parents were paying $1700 a year tuition.

"Without real challenge and real adventure," said Byfield in a 1968 CBC TV documentary on why the school promoted such a challenging physical education program, "we will never produce real men."