Stonyhurst Saint Mary's Hall

Stonyhurst St Mary's Hall is the preparatory school to Stonyhurst College. It is an independent co-educational Catholic school, for ages 3-13, founded by the Society of Jesus . It is primarily a day school but has some boarders. As the lineal descendant of Hodder Place the school lays claim to be the oldest preparatory school in the country.It is adjacent to Stonyhurst College, outside the small village of Hurst Green, near Clitheroe in Lancashire, England.HistoryJesuit CollegeStonyhurst College was founded in 1593 as the English Jesuit College at St Omers in present-day France, at a time when Catholic education was prohibited by law in England. Having moved to Bruges in 1762 and then Liege in 1773, due to the persecution of the Jesuit order which ran the school, it finally settled at Stonyhurst in 1794. An attempt had been made to found a preparatory school to the College at St Omers, which would have been based in Boulogne, but this was abandoned and ultimately thwarted by the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1762. In 1768 new buildings were erected for a preparatory school at Bruges; this 'Little College' was closed in 1775, two years after the migration of the College to Liège. Thirteen years after the settlement in England the preparatory school was finally established in 1807.