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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 |
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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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