Thomas Hardye School Community Lectures

'The le Hardy family migrated to Jersey from Normandy in the twelfth century, owing to their pro-English sympathies, which appear to have continued to cause problems - an Edmond Hardy is recorded as being "ostage des peskeuers de Grantchamp" in 1419! A John Hardy migrated to England in about 1490, and his son Thomas, of Toller Whelme, married Joan Ferret (possibly Feret, another Jersey family) of Cerne. They had two sons – Edmund who became, by his second marriage, the lineal ancestor of both Admiral Hardy and Thomas Hardy the novelist, and our Thomas, who had one daughter, Thomasina.

'The family became quite substantial property owners in West Dorset and Hardy owned property in and around both Melcombe Regis and Dorchester. On the death of his father in 1561 his mother married John Browne of Frampton House, where Hardy died in 1599. Hardy’s name only acquired its curious final ‘e’ in 1861, courtesy of Messrs. Shipp and Motson, editors of the third edition of Hutchins’ History of the Antiquities of the County of Dorset!

'The Dorchester Free School was built in 1567-9 (on the site of the Hardye Arcade in South Street) by the efforts of the townspeople, as a Protestant grammar school, designed for the free education of local boys in (Latin) grammar prior to university ... It was not until 1992 that the merger of ... two comprehensive secondary schools created The Thomas Hardye School on the Castlefield site which fulfilled the dream of the sixteenth-century Burgesses of Dorchester in offering, in the one school, "the necessary education and instruction of Children in all degrees in good Discipline", as had been proposed in the Deed of Endowment 430 years ago in 1579.'