Downside’s monks abandon ship
In a few weeks’ time, the monks will be leaving Downside Abbey, where their community prayed and built for 200 years. The last eight men will lodge in a house in the grounds of Buckfast Abbey, Devon.
The departure from Downside in Somerset may be unthinkable to some. The school and monastery appeared immovable. Sir Gilbert Scott’s 166ft tower to the largest neo-gothic church built in England since the Reformation seemed to the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner “a splendid demonstration of the renaissance of Roman Catholicism in England”. Its abandonment is certainly striking – to some as if Eton College were to close. The school at Downside will continue under lay administration. Its remarkable historic library will remain.
As for the community of St Gregory, as these Benedictines will still call themselves, is this the end? I’m not sure.
For the Benedictines of England, the low ebb (since St Augustine of Canterbury arrived with his monastic brethren in 597) came in 1582 with the imprisonment of Westminster Abbey’s last monk, Dom Sigebert Buckley. Surprisingly he survived until his release, aged 86, by James I in 1603, and formed the nucleus of a new English congregation.
In exile, a Benedictine community at Douai saw two centuries’ perseverance in adversity end in disaster at the French Revolution – the monastery plundered, its church in ruins, its library dispersed. The survivors found refuge at Acton Burnell in Shropshire, moving to Downside in 1814.
But it would be wrong to think of the public school that developed at Downside being by the middle of the 19th century as anything like its modern state. After all, Winchester had only 70 boys in 1860. Downside had about 60 boys then, taught by nine or 10 monks all under 30 years old. In the judgment of the historian Dom David Knowles (1890-1964), “the teaching was poor ... and the intellectual attainment contemptible”. Still, as Knowles’s biographer Dom Adrian Morey pointed out, a boy “of no great abilities” was, even in 1828, coached through the whole of Horace, three books of Livy, four satires of Juvenal and some Terence in a year.
The reason the monastic schoolmasters in those days were under 30 is that the monastery was expected to supply clergy over that age to staff parishes all over England. This was a historical leftover from the penal centuries after the Reformation. So a monk would scarcely know the stability of monastic life, chanting the psalms of he monastic office and living in a community, which lie at the heart of the Rule of St Benedict.
This anomaly began to rankle in the heart of Knowles. He also became convinced that acting as public-school masters distracted monks from their life of prayer. In the early 1930s, he attempted to start a small new monastery to combine liturgical worship, prayer, study and physical labour. He became leader of a faction and unluckily provoked the abbot, Dom John Chapman to implacable opposition.
Chapman, brilliant and volatile in manner, but serene in religious observance, wrote on mental prayer, making his motto: “Pray as you can and don’t try to pray as you can’t.” In his last illness, he ensured Knowles left Downside for the monastery’s good. He ended up under the influence of the strange psychiatrist Dr Elizabeth Kornerup.
Now the remnant of Downside will seek their own path without the manpower that Knowles or Chapman could draw upon. They’re back to the handful around Sigebert Buckley.