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 landPurcell, Edmund Sheridan. Life and Letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, p.66, Macmillan and Co., Ltd., London, 1900 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."March Phillipps, Charles (1779–1862), of Garendon Park", The History of Parliament 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.Pevsner, Nikolaus et al: "The Buildings of England: Leicestershire and Rutland", Second Edition, 1984, published by Penguin Books pages 323 – 325
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."Mount Saint Bernard Abbey: A Brief Historical Sketch", late 20th-century leaflet by St Bernard Monastery
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.Purcell 1900, pp. 61–2 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.Young, Victoria M: "A.W.N Pugin's Mount Saint Bernard Abbey: The International Character of England's Nineteenth-Century Monastic Revival".
The monastery is sheltered on the north side by a large outcrop, which was known as Kite Hill.Fletcher, J.M.J: "A Visit to the Monastery of Mount Saint Bernard in Leicestershire: With a Short Account of Monasticism", 1872 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'Lacey, Andrew: "The Second Spring in Charnwood Forest", published by East Midlands Studies Unit, Loughborough, 1985 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 Concise History of the Cistercian Order: With its Revival in England at St Susan's, Lullworth and Mount St. Bernard Leicestershire", by "A Cistercian Monk", 1852, p.282-3 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".Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 1843 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.C.N.Hadfield, Charnwood Forest, 1952
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".De Selincourt, Ernest: "The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth; The Later Years " 1939, p. 1082.
As a youth, in 1851, the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Edward Burne-Jones visited the fledgling monastery while staying with relatives close by.MacCarthy, Fiona: "The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination", Harvard University Press, 2012 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".Burne-Jones 1904, vol. 2, p. 285. 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."Anson, Peter: "Building Up The Waste Places – The Revival of Monastic Life on Medieval Lines in the Post-Reformation Church of England"
Charles Dickens is reputed to have spent some time in retreat at the abbey,Nottingham Evening Post, 29 December 1926 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.Weekly Telegraph, 17 May 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.