Monastery
Mount St Bernard Abbey is a Roman Catholic monastery belonging to the Trappist Order, near Coalville, Leicestershire, England, founded in 1835 in the parish of Whitwick and now in that of Charley. The abbey was the first permanent monastery to be founded in England since the Reformation and is the sole Trappist house in England. The monks brew the only Trappist beer in Britain.
History.
Background.
The early history of Mount St Bernard Abbey is linked with an earlier, short-lived foundation of Cistercian monks in Lulworth, Dorset and with the Abbey of Mount Melleray in Ireland. Following the suppression of monasteries in France, a small colony of dispossessed Trappist monks had arrived in London in 1794, with the intention of moving on to found a monastery in Canada. They came to the attention of Thomas Weld, a Catholic recusant and philanthropist who distinguished himself in relieving the misfortunes of refugees of the French Revolution and who provided the monks with land on his estate in East Lulworth, where they could establish a monastic community.
The monks remained at Lulworth until 1817, when they returned to France to re-establish the ancient Melleray Abbey in Brittany, following the Bourbon Restoration. This refondation was short-lived as, following the July Revolution of 1830, the monks were again persecuted and left to found Mount Melleray Abbey in Ireland (1833). It was from the Irish monastery of Mount Melleray that a small colony of monks was dispatched to found the monastery of Mount St Bernard in 1835.
The Cistercian order dates back to the 12th century and the Trappists, in their origins a Cistercian reform, to the mid-17th century. Mount St Bernard is the only abbey belonging to this order in England.
Foundation.
Mount St Bernard Abbey was founded in 1835 on of land purchased from Thomas Gisborne MP, by Ambrose Lisle March Phillipps, a local landowner and Catholic convert who wanted to re-introduce monastic life to the country. After his father died in 1862, Ambrose took the additional name of de Lisle, becoming Ambrose Charles Lisle March Phillipps de Lisle. He was attracted to the Trappists because his family mansion, Garendon Hall, had been built on the site of the pre-Dissolution Cistercian Garendon Abbey.
The land that the monks took possession of in September 1835 was largely uncultivated, but it contained an ancient enclosure known as Tynt Meadow. The monks made their home in the near-derelict Tynt Meadow House, a four-roomed cottage. The first monks were Augustine, Luke, Xavier, Cyprian, Placid, Simeon and Fr Odilo Woolfrey.
Work began on a temporary monastery, opened in 1837, to the designs of William Railton, an architect known today for having designed Nelson's Column in London. Railton carried out several commissions for Ambrose March Phillipps including Grace Dieu Manor. The monastic buildings were neo-Tudor. The church was consecrated by Bishop Thomas Walsh, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, on 11 October 1837. Railton's buildings were soon replaced by a more ambitious monastic complex.
In 1844, a new, permanent monastery opened, thanks to donations from John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, and other benefactors. It was designed by Augustus Pugin, who offered his services free of charge. "The whole of the buildings", wrote Pugin, "are erected in the greatest severity of the lancet style, with massive walls and buttresses, long and narrow windows, high gables and roofs, with deeply arched doorways. Solemnity and simplicity are the characteristics of the monastery, and every portion of the architecture and fittings corresponds to the austerity of the order for whom it has been raised."
The church was consecrated on 20 August 1844, the feast day of Saint Bernard, but was to remain unfinished for more than ninety years. Only the nave of Pugin's monastery church was built, due to a lack of funds. It was then walled off at the point where Pugin had planned a crossing tower with spire, and eastern chancel. A makeshift two-bell turret was fashioned over the eastern end of the unfinished church so that the monks could be called to office, and a small quatrefoil window of the Virgin and child by William Warrington, a medieval-revival stained-glass artist, was inserted under the gable.
The monastery is sheltered on the north side by a large outcrop, which was known as Kite Hill. According to an early publication with a foreword by Abbot Burder (1852), this site would have been the preferred location for the original monastery designed by Railton, but soon after the purchase of the land, there had been some dispute as to whether the rock belonged to the monastic grounds or to the parish of Whitwick. Huge opposition to the founding of the monastery had been mounted by Francis Merewether, Vicar of Whitwick, who preached and wrote prolifically against the revival of 'Romanism' and parish authorities had apparently "spoke of holding parties of pleasure upon the rock and of over looking the monks". The county constable was called in to resolve the dispute and gave a decision in favour of the monks, obliging the opponents, therefore, to refrain "from any further molestation of the religious in the erection of their new monastery".
A calvary was erected upon the summit of the rock. This is open to the public, reached by a winding footpath with an ascent aided by stone steps fashioned by the monks.
During cultivation of the monastery estate, on 2 June 1840, Lay Brother John Patrick McDanell, together with labourers William Hickin and Charles Lott, unearthed an urn with their plough, which contained approximately 2000 Roman coins, "conglomerated together, and covered with the green oxide of copper". The coins were identified as being from the time of Gallienus and Tetricus I in the third century AD, and the find led to speculation that the land may have been inhabited during Roman times. Writing in 1852, Father Robert Smith noted that, "Besides the coins, there was discovered a small arrow or spear-head, three inches long. Also a small round article, having the appearance of a Roman lamp, and composed of terra-cotta. Pieces of Roman vases, and pottery, were found in great abundance". Father Robert believed that these finds and the presence of "several ancient mounds" in the immediate vicinity indicated that there had been a Roman military post here. That the site of the hoard's discovery occupied "one of the highest spots in the forest, [commanding] a very extensive view of the surrounding country" was felt to lend credence to this theory. More recent historians have tended to the idea that the hoard may have been placed here 'in hiding' and forgotten about. The remaining coins are housed at the Newarke Houses Museum in Leicester.
The new monastery soon attracted sightseers. Amongst the visitors to the infant monastery were William Wordsworth and Florence Nightingale. Many illustrious English clergymen came, such as Nicholas Wiseman, John Henry Newman, Henry Edward Manning, William Bernard Ullathorne and George Stanley Faber and the monastery also drew writers and men of affairs from abroad, including Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire, Ignaz von Döllinger and Henri, Count of Chambord.
Wordsworth, who visited in 1841, wrote: "[We] drove to a part of Charnwood Forest where they are erecting a monastery for Trappists. The situation is chosen with admirable judgment, a plain almost surrounded with wild rocks, not lofty but irregularly broken, and in one quarter is an opening to a most extensive prospect of cultivated country. The building is austere and massy, and when the whole shall be completed, the chapel is not yet begun, the effect will be most striking in the midst of that solitude. Several monks were at work in the adjoining Hayfields, working most industriously in their grey woollen gowns, one with his cowl up, and others, Lay brethren I believe, clothed in black".
As a youth, in 1851, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones visited the fledgling monastery while staying with relatives close by. The experience was to have a profound impact on him and forty-five years later he wrote: "I get no time to myself - not five minutes ever in the day- and I am growing angry. ... More and more my heart is pining for that monastery in the Charnwood Forest. Why there? I don't know, only that I saw it when I was little and have hankered after it ever since". After his death in 1898, his widow wrote: "Though it is doubtful whether he ever saw the place again with his bodily eyes, the thought of it accompanied him throughout his whole life. Friends, wife, and children all knew the undercurrent of longing for the rest and peace which he thought he had seen there that day; he did not disguise it from them, and in his later years often spoke of the dream which had walked step by step with him ever since, of somehow leaving every one and everything and entering its doors and closing them behind him."
Charles Dickens is reputed to have spent some time in retreat at the abbey, though he is not enumerated amongst the list of celebrated visitors in the monastery's 'Brief Historical Sketch'. He is known to have sent two of his employees, Edmund Yates and Thomas Speight there, to write articles about the monastery for publication in his weekly magazines, "All the Year Round" and "Household Words".
A number of eminent architects found inspiration in Pugin's work at Mount St Bernard. Joseph Hansom visited the monastery twice during the 1850s; one of his grandsons was to join the community, taking the name Brother Alban, and was one of the victims of the influenza epidemic in 1919. Another architect, the Anglican George Frederick Bodley, was so stimulated by Pugin's monastery that he is said to have kept a description of the abbey at his bedside.
The monastery has throughout its history been a place of refuge for the poor and hungry. Luigi Gentili, a priest associated with De Lisle's mission, wrote that there were extremes of rural poverty to be found in Leicestershire that could not be matched, even in the most poverty-stricken parts of his native Italy. This number was increased by the influx of many Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine of the 1840s. So great was the scale of the poverty during this period that the monks were feeding many thousands of people each year. In 1845, 2,788 people were given lodgings at the monastery and 18,887 were given food. In 1847, "36,000 people received charity and hospitality from the hands of the monks".
In 1848, the monastery was granted the status of an abbey by Pope Pius IX and its first abbot, Dom Bernard Palmer, received the abbatial blessing on 18 February 1849. That same year, the adherence of the monastery to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance or Trappists by a papal brief.
In 1862 John Rogers Herbert painted "Laborare est Orare" (To labour is to pray), which depicted "the monks of Saint Bernard's Abbey, Leicestershire, gathering in the harvest of 1861, assisted by some of the boys from a neighbouring reformatory in their care". This painting was purchased by the Tate Gallery in 1972. As this painting depicts a church building with a tower and spire, it has been argued that Herbert's portrait does not represent Mount St Bernard, as the abbey was without a tower until the twentieth century and has never had a spire. However, the catalogue entry at the Tate Gallery explains that Herbert used Pugin's original designs to depict the church in line with the architect's vision. Herbert was a close friend of Pugin and had painted him in 1845. The abbey guest book confirms that "Mr. Herbert, an artist from London" visited the abbey on 22 July 1861. Herbert depicted himself in the extreme foreground.
In 1878, the Leicestershire coalfield suffered a severe depression in trade, resulting in much distress being caused to the miners and their families. Large numbers of the unemployed made their way to the monastery on a daily basis, where soup in large quantities was supplied without charge. This practice was repeated on a similar scale during the General Strike of 1926.
The abbey suffered from financial problems and a lack of monks joining the community through the 19th century. This improved in the 20th century and the church building was extended between 1935 and 1939 from the designs of Albert Herbert of Leicester, although it was not consecrated