Stonyhurst College as a school dates back to 1593 when its antecedent, the Jesuit College at St Omer, was founded in Flanders to educate English Catholics. The history of the present school buildings dates as far back as 1200 AD.
Stonyhurst Hall
The earliest deed concerning the "Stanihurst" dates from 1200 AD and can now be found in the Arundell Library in the college, whilst the earliest evidence of a building on the site is from 1372 when John de Bayley was licensed to have an oratory there; the archway in the Bayley Room, within the 'Blind Tower', is believed to date from the fourteenth century, and may well be the only remnant of that earlier building. The oldest portion of the extant buildings however, the Shireburn Mansion (Stonyhurst Hall), was founded by the Roman Catholic, Richard Shireburn, a descendant of the Bayley family, whose son attended the College at St Omer. He built the gatehouse and open cupolas (known as "the towers") on top of an older settlement dating from 1592. The design of the gatehouse incorporates four of the classical orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite). Three similar designs appear on the buildings of Merton and Wadham College in Oxford, though those at Stonyhurs predates them all by more than a decade. In places the exterior walls of this part of the building are as much as thick.
In 1648, during the English Civil War, Oliver Cromwell's army encamped near the hall on their way to the Battle of Preston. Cromwell spent the night at Stonyhurst and is reputed to have slept on a table, in the middle of the Great Hall, in full armour. He is said to have preferred this option to a bed because of fear of assassination and mistrust of his Catholic, royalist hosts. He was quoted as saying it was "the best half house" he had seen (the Hall was at that time still unfinished).
Richard Shireburn's successor and grandson, Sir Nicholas Shireburn, began an extensive building scheme to extend the "half house", and completed the great hall, gardens and avenue so that it could be a great manor house. Two ponds, each measuring by were constructed in 1696, along with the "causeway" between, today known as the Avenue. His son Richard was poisoned in the gardens in 1702, and with no male heir Nicholas ceased building. Upon his death in 1717, the buildings passed to his wife and then to their sole heir, Maria Shireburn, Duchess of Norfolk. The Duchess was married to Thomas Howard, 8th Duke of Norfolk, and lived at Arundel Castle in Sussex. Unoccupied, the buildings at Stonyhurst began to fall into disrepair. Eventually the houses were inherited by her cousin, Thomas Weld in 1761. Already living in Lulworth Castle, and able to dispense with an additional estate, Thomas, an old boy of St Omer, generously donated the property to the Society of Jesus, with of land, in 1794.
The original hall has been altered and extended over the years to become one of the largest inhabited buildings in Europe and achieving Grade I listed status from English Heritage.
The village of Hurst Green, Lancashire developed with the hall. Richard Shireburn built the village school in 1686. He also built an almshouse on Longridge Fell, the predecessor of the Shireburn Almshouses, which his son Nicholas built in about 1707. The latter was dismantled in 1946 and re-erected in the village.
The College
1593-1794
The story of the school starts at St Omer in what was then the Spanish Low Countries in 1593, where a college was founded by Father Robert Parsons for English boys, unable to receive a Catholic education in Elizabethan England. As such it was one of a number of expatriate English schools operating on the European mainland during the centuries when Catholicism was proscribed in England.
In 1762, when the French Parlement turned against the Jesuits, the school, in what was then a part of France, was forced to move. During subsequent decades, when the Jesuit Order was suppressed in most countries, the college was one of the institutions through which it managed to maintain a continuous existence.
After St Omer (still known in Stonyhurst parlance by its old English name of St. Omers), the college settled in Bruges where it continued until 1773 when it was again forced to move, reassembling at Liège, under the protection of its bishop.