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After being expelled
from France in 1795, our community was first received
by the Smythes, a Gregorian family, in their Shropshire
house at Acton Burnell. When we finally arrived at
Downside in 1814, we found ourselves near the well-established
Catholic mission in Bath.Nevertheless, thanks to
the energy of community and the determination of
two Priors in particular, Dom Bernard Barber and
Dom Peter Wilson, our community was quickly able
to establish the pattern of life we had lived in
Douai.
Numbers increased and
extensions to the buildings were made in 1823 and
1854 to accommodate the growing school. At this time
the monastery remained in the Old House, on one side
of the Old Chapel, with the school rooms on the other.
In 1873 Prior Bernard Murphy laid the foundations
higher up the hill of the present site of the Church
and monastery. Building began with the Main School
Refectory and Dormitory above (now the St Bede Centre),
together with the monastery building itself at the
West end of the Church. They were occupied in 1876-8.
The Abbey Church Tower, with the adjacent Transept
of the Abbey
Church, the earliest section of the Abbey Church
to be built, was started in 1880, under the direction
of Prior Aidan Gasquet. |
The
result of this move was to allow the school to develop
around the Main Quad while the monastery could do
so in its own space, and on a scale reminiscent of
the great monasteries of the Middle Ages. Today
visitors are struck by the seclusion of the monastery
and its grounds from the hustle and bustle of the
school.
The Middle Ages
were in vogue. In England the normal organisation
of the Church in dioceses and parishes had been restored
in the wake of Catholic emancipation. It was a time
of a revival of medievalism in secular culture, and
the influence of traditional monastic values was
also felt from the continent where Benedictine life
had been revived in France and Germany. Our monks
too were looking to the monastic tradition of England
before the Reformation to imagine the part Downside
would play in the future.
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