Mount St Bernard Abbey is a Roman Catholic, Trappist monastery 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.
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 thay 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.
History
Mount St Bernard Abbey was founded in 1835 on of land 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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
