[4] A precursor institution of the college was founded in 1593 by Father Robert Persons SJ at St Omer,[5][6] at a time when penal laws prohibited Catholic education in England.

[7] On an adjacent site, its preparatory school, St Mary's Hall, provides education for boys and girls aged 3–13.

[8] Its alumni/ae include three Saints, twelve Beati, twenty-two martyrs, seven archbishops, seven Victoria Cross winners, a Peruvian president and prime minister, a New Zealand Prime Minister, a signatory of the American Declaration of Independence and a number of writers, sportsmen, politicians, and European royals.

Richard Shireburn began building the hall, which was enlarged by his grandson Nicholas who also constructed the ponds, avenue and gardens.

[10][11] The story of the school may be traced back to establishments in St Omer in what was then the Spanish Netherlands in 1593, where a college, under the Royal Patronage of Philip II of Spain, was founded by Fr Robert Persons SJ for English boys unable to receive a Catholic education in Elizabethan England.

[14] Stonyhurst Hall underwent extensive alterations and additions to accommodate these numbers; the Old South Front was constructed in 1810, only to be demolished and replaced with larger buildings in the 1880s.

[15]: 178 The original preparatory school to Stonyhurst, Hodder Place, came into the hands of the Jesuits as part of the estate donated by alumnus Thomas Weld.

[18][15]: 140  During World War II, the English College left Benito Mussolini's Italy and occupied the hall.

[15]: 194  As successor to Hodder Place, St Mary's Hall claims to being one of the oldest surviving preparatory school in Britain.

[20] In 2004, the old gymnasium at St Mary's Hall was converted into new nursery and infant facilities named Hodder House, for those aged three to seven.

It stands for the Latin phrase Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam which means For the Greater Glory of God.

Adjacent to the Old Infirmary is the Rosary Garden, a place for spiritual contemplation, at the centre of which is a stone statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

[27] Its sports facilities, including the swimming pool and all-weather pitch are available for public use; the latter was used for competitors training for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

[30] Many of its facilities such as its swimming pool, leisure complex, golf course, grounds and museum are open to the public.

[35] Education during the college's early history was based on St Ignatius' Ratio Studiorum, with emphasis upon theology, classics and science, all of which still feature prominently in the curriculum.

[15]: 25–39  The educational practice, observed at the College of St Omer, of dividing a class into Romans and Carthaginians continued long after the migration to Stonyhurst but is not employed today; each pupil would be pitched against an opponent with the task of picking up on the other's mistakes in an attempt to score points.

[15]: 195 Until Catholics were admitted to Oxbridge in 1854, Stonyhurst was also home to "philosopher gentlemen" studying BA courses under the London Matriculation Examination system.

The Arundell Library, presented in 1837 by Everard, 11th Baron Arundell of Wardour, is the most significant; it is not only a country-house library from Wardour Castle but also has a notable collection of 250 incunabula, medieval manuscripts and volumes of Jacobite interest, signal among which is Mary Tudor's Book of Hours, which it is believed was given by Mary, Queen of Scots to her chaplain on the scaffold.

[38] Among those collections kept away from public view are numerous blood-soaked garments from Jesuits martyred in Japan, the skull of Cardinal Morton, ropes used to quarter St Edmund Campion SJ, hair of St Francis Xavier SJ, an enormous solid silver jewel-encrusted monstrance, the Wintour vestments, a cope made for Henry VII, and a thorn said to be from the crown of thorns placed upon Jesus' head at the crucifixion.

[12]: 137–140 The school owns paintings, including a portrait of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia and another of the Jesuit Henry Garnet.

[5] An older observatory, built in 1838, is now the Typographia Collegii, but was once one of seven important stations in the country when the Meteorological Office came under the auspices of the Royal Society.

[43] The observatory is today used for astronomical purposes again, whilst also functioning as one of four weather stations used by the Met Office to provide central England temperature data (CET).

[50] Stonyhurst has provided inspiration for poets and authors who include former classics teacher Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poems feature details of the local countryside, and former pupil Sir Arthur Conan Doyle whose "Baskerville Hall" was modelled on Stonyhurst Hall, and who named Sherlock Holmes' nemesis, Moriarty, after a fellow pupil.

[45][51] J. R. R. Tolkien wrote part of The Lord of the Rings in a classroom on the Upper Gallery during his stay at the college where his son taught Classics; his "Middle-earth" is said to resemble the local area, while there are specific resonances in names such as "Shire Lane", (the name of a road in Hurst Green) and the "River Shirebourn" (the Shireburns built Stonyhurst).

[15]: 188–192  Most recently they include Iain Balshaw and Kyran Bracken, who both played for England when they won the 2003 Rugby World Cup, whilst another member of that team, Will Greenwood, went to Stonyhurst Saint Mary's Hall, where his mother taught maths until 2007.

The Stonyhurst Officer Training Corps assembled for the first time on 16 October 1900, in the Ambulacrum, overseen by The First Volunteer Battalion, the East Lancashire Regiment who gave instruction in drill and musketry.

[62] It also appeared on parade annually for the spectacle of the Corpus Christi celebrations until the practice became obsolete after Vatican II.

[74][15]: 188–192 Notable alumni include: Contemporaries Since the college's foundation in Flanders in 1593, there have been 78 headmasters, (variably known as presidents, rectors, superiors and directors).

On 14 May 2002, in evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, journalist David Rose described the operation as "a scandal in itself" and an "expensive...

[82] Another priest, Father Paul Symonds, at Stonyhurst between 1972 and 1979, was arrested in November 2009 for having allegedly abused a 13-year-old boy for three years.