The Thomas Hardye School

Being the second son, Thomas needed a job. He found one working for Sir John Paulet, the heir and son of Sir William Paulet, the first Marquis of Winchester, who served as England's Lord Treasurer.
Thomas appears in a number of documents from 1579 onwards that record the beginning of a strong Protestant movement in Dorchester. These documents include the provision of a master for the Free School and a preaching ministry at Holy Trinity church, for which he donated the majority of his modest estate in the area. Thomas appears to have returned to Dorset after the death of his patron. He also appears with his relatives the Brownes and Adyns.
The Hardye family is said to have originated in Jersey.
Due to their pro-English sentiments, the le Hardy family left Normandy for Jersey in the eleventh century. These sentiments appear to have persisted because an Edmond Hardy is listed as having "ostage des peskeuers de Grantchamp" in 1419.
A Jean le Hardy, who arrived in England around 1490, is said to be related to our Hardyes because he was the grandfather of our Thomas.
John Hutchins, a historian from Dorset and a former student of the Free School, advises using the same coat of arms of the two families as evidence, but that is all we have.
Assuming the Hardyes were derived from Jean Le Hardy, it is odd that, if they were aware of it, they did not use their connection to Jersey gentry to claim a Norman pedigree, which was the aspirational gentry's goal at the time.
The issue here may be that one Clement le Hardy, the father of the Jean who immigrated to England, seems to have spent the last of his days in a filthy prison following a dispute with Matthew Baker, Henry VII's choice of governor; if the pedigree had such a bad apple lurking in the very recent past, it was probably best avoided!
The best theory so far for the adoption of the Jersey family crest in Dorset, if there was no real connection, is that Hugh Paulet, a distant relative of Thomas Hardye's patron John Paulet who served as governor of Jersey from 1559, may have told Hardye at some point that his family was "entitled" to use the crest of the Jersey family.
Whatever the reason, the arms came to represent the family and, eventually (and most likely fairly late), the school.
The Dorchester Free School was established in 1567-9 as a Protestant grammar school for the free instruction of local boys in (Latin) grammar prior to attending college (on the site of the Hardye Arcade in South Street).
Robert Cheeke, one of the two Puritan leaders of Dorchester, had rebuilt it by 1618, once more primarily at the town's expense but also on his own.
All that is left of the C17th school is the oak screen, which was built to the west end of the classroom at this period, and the Queen's arms, which are currently on exhibit at the Thomas Hardye School.
and the Free School was transformed into a small Anglican country grammar school run by a succession of pluralist clergymen who appear to have paid little attention to the buildings' condition, which was nearly in ruins by 1824 and appears to have required almost constant repair for the following fifty years.
Thomas Ratsey Maskew served as the last Master of the Free School from 1846 to 1879. He was the inspiration for the names of two characters in Moonfleet by John Meade Falkner, who spent a year there in 1869.
Postcard depicting the facade of the renovated Grammar School in Crickmay after 1883.
As was common during this period, the school was from time to time almost entirely devoid of pupils, and was lucky to survive; it was eventually closed for rebuilding in 1879 by the Charity Commission.
It re-opened in 1883 with the official title of Dorchester Grammar School, with an imposing new Tudorbethan front by Crickmay, but retaining the original schoolroom behind, with a further storey on top.
It took till 1965 to dismantle this school.
Slowly the school grew, building more accommodation including science labs, on the premises between South Street and Charles Street.
Following the Balfour Act of 1902, as education was increasingly funded by the State via the newly- formed County Councils, the school gradually prospered, and eventually moved from the increasingly crowded site in South Street to a healthy site on land purchased from the Duchy of Cornwall, on the hill at Fordington: in 1928 the new school buildings were opened by the Prince of Wales.
In 1928, the Prince of Wales inaugurates the brand-new school in Fordington. ' Hardye's' continued on the Fordington site as a boys' grammar school matched by the 'Green School' or girls' Grammar School in Queen's Avenue, in about 1930.
The Butler Education Act of 1944 gave rise to the Dorchester Secondary Modern School in 1945, at the end of Queen's Avenue.
The three schools became two comprehensive schools, Hardye's boys' at Fordington and Castlefield girls' on the Secondary Modern site, in 1980; these were fed by the two Middle Schools, Dorchester Middle School taking over the Green School site, and St. Osmund's being purpose-built on the SW edge of the Hardye's site.
It was not until 1992 that the merger of the 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 in1579.