Downside Abbey

The community was founded in 1607 at Douai in Flanders, then part of the Spanish Netherlands, under the patronage of St Gregory the Great (who had sent the monk, St Augustine of Canterbury, as head of a mission to England in 597). The founder was the Welshman St John Roberts, who became the first prior and established the new community with other monks from England who had entered various monasteries within the Spanish Benedictine Congregation, notably the principal monastery at Valladolid. In 1611 Dom Philippe de Caverel, abbot of St Vaast's Abbey at Arras, built and endowed a monastery for the community. The Priory of St Gregory was therefore the first English Benedictine house to renew…

The building of Downside abbey church began in 1873 with the transepts and the Lady Chapel. The foundation stone was laid on 1 October 1873 and the ceremony was reported in the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette on 9 October 1873: <blockquote>Yesterday week the foundation stones of the new church and collegiate and monastic buildings were laid amidst much ceremonial. Archbishop Manning presided at the ceremony, and he was accompanied by Bishop Clifford of Clifton, The Bishop of Newport and Menevia, the Cistercian Abbot of Mount St Bernard's, Leicestershire, Monsignor Capel, Monsignor Parfitt, Dr. Neve, the Vicar-General of the Diocese, Dr. Williams, President of Prior Park College, and among…

The church is built in the Gothic Revival style, in Bath stone ashlar with plain red tile roofs; the east chapels are roofed in copper sheeting. It is designed to rival in size the medieval cathedrals of England that were lost to the Catholic Church through the Reformation. The earliest part is the decorated transepts by Archibald Matthias Dunn and Edward Joseph Hansom, dating from 1882. The choir is the work of Thomas Garner (who is buried there), and was opened on 20 September 1905, when the monks celebrated a Requiem Mass for all of the deceased members of the community. The nave by Giles Gilbert Scott (c. 1923–25) remains unfinished, with its western wall in crude Lias stone standing…