Foundation

The future abbey was founded in 1623 at Cambrai as the monastery of "Our Lady of Consolation", catering for English Catholic expatriates. The project was initiated in 1621 by an English Benedictine (EBC) monk called Benet Jones, who had been in contact with several interested young women in England while on mission duties there.^[3]

The nine original members were escorted by him from England to Cambrai (which the English then called Camerick),^[4] where they took over the ruined town-house of the defunct Benedictine abbey of Saint-Étienne-de-Fémy, restored it and moved in at the end of 1623. Since they were still laywomen they had to serve a noviciate, so three nuns from the English monastery at Brussels were lent to provide the formation. Two of them later joined the nascent community, including Dame Frances Gawen who served as the first superior. The monastery was only considered to have been formally founded when the noviciate was completed and the novices made vows, at the start of 1625.^[5]

The most notable among the foundresses was 17-year-old Helen More, professed as Dame Gertrude More, who was the great-great-granddaughter of St Thomas More; her father, Cresacre More, provided the original endowment for the foundation of the convent. Solemnly professed Benedictine nuns of the English tradition use the honorific "Dame" in the same way that EBC monks are called "Dom", (not to be confused with the lay title, Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire). In the same tradition, abbesses used to be referred to as "Lady" which echoed the noble status of abbots and abbesses in pre-Reformation England.

The English Benedictine mystical writer Augustine Baker trained the young nuns in a tradition of contemplative prayer which survives to date.^[6]

The other eight foundresses were: Catherine Gascoigne,^[7] Grace and Ann More (cousins of Dame Gertrude), Anne Morgan, Margaret Vavasour, Frances Watson – these were choir nuns; and two claustral or extern sisters, Mary Hoskins and Jane Martin. The latter were not bound to the Divine Office or to keep monastic enclosure, so were responsible for shopping and for routine contacts with the outside world.^[8]

Life at Cambrai

The first abbess was elected in 1629. Lady Abbess Catherine Gascoigne was to serve for forty years, being re-elected every four years as is the peculiar English Benedictine custom (Benedictine abbots and abbesses are traditionally elected for life)^[9] She had to obtain a papal dispensation when first elected, as at age twenty-eight she was below the statutory age of thirty. The community members were very young then.^[10]

A daughter house in Paris was founded in 1651, which became independent in 1656 and was eventually to become Colwich Abbey in England.^[11] The two communities were to come together again in 2020, 364 years later.

The nuns were in Cambrai for 170 years, but little is known of their history because of subsequent destruction of records. However, the community had a good reputation for strictness of observance and for keeping enclosure. One oddity was that they ran a small school for girls inside their enclosure, with the pupils being subject to the monastic routine. As well as school fees, the sisters did the traditional remunerative work of enclosed nuns which is fine needlework and embroidery, especially on vestments and liturgical textiles. One unusual source of income was from fine paperwork, which involved cutting sheets of paper into complicated patterns and figurative depictions for decorative purposes. The nuns also had active intellectual lives, for example in translating French spiritual writings into English. A good library was accumulated.^[12]

A report preserved in the city archives has this:

The situation of the house of these English ladies (French: Dames) is healthy and sufficiently commodious, but not spacious. The buildings are very simple and close together, made of brick. Their church is extremely small but particularly neat and seemly, and there the Divine Office is solemnly celebrated in an edifying manner. The nuns are very observant of their Rule.^[13]

Despite the cramped site, the nuns had their own cemetery. Since they were under the authority of the Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation and not that of the bishop, they had no right of burial at the local parish church.^[14]

The nuns became French subjects in 1678 when Cambrai was annexed by France.

A memory of the monastery is preserved at Cambrai in the street name Rue des Anglaises, or "Englishwomen's Street".

Imprisonment and exile

In 1793, during the French Revolution, twenty-one of the nuns were arrested and evicted from their original monastery on 18 October and all their property confiscated. They were taken to Compiègne and imprisoned there for eighteen months in the former Convent of the Visitation, during which time four of them died from the harsh conditions which included inadequate food and an outbreak of typhus.^[15] Among their fellow prisoners were the future Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne. After petitioning to be allowed to go into exile in England, the seventeen survivors were released in April 1795 and put on a boat at Calais, which took them to Dover where they arrived destitute on 2 May. They were wearing the lay clothes left behind by the Compiègne martyrs, which hence became second-class relics.^[8] One of the nuns died in temporary lodgings in London.^[16]

Their convent in Cambrai was looted and turned into a prison. It was subsequently demolished.^[15]

Nuns at Woolton

The Benedictine monks in England (EBC) took the community under their care and sent them to the EBC mission in Woolton, near Liverpool, on 21 May 1795. There they were given a house, and a pre-existing girls' school to run. They were also told that they could not wear the religious habit - the EBC monks did not do so themselves at that time. While there were no English sumptuary law against the habit, popular anti-Catholic hostility could have led to the nuns wearing habits being charged with a breach of the peace.^[17]

Initially, the community occupied two houses, (45 and 47 Woolton Street), and later expanded into a third adjoining property. They had to depend on donations to survive, but the government granted the nuns a pension of one and a half guineas (£1.575) per month, which gave the community an annual income of £302.40^[18] (or £36,617 in 2020 values).^[19] Their small school, for girls aged five to thirteen, was a success and had eighteen pupils by 1807, each charged a fee of 18 guineas per annum (£18.90, £2 289 in 2020 values).^[20] The nuns also taught a few primary age boys. One of these, John Bede Polding, would become a monk of Downside Abbey and the first Roman Catholic archbishop of Sydney in Australia.^[21]

In 1807, the nuns decided to move. They regarded themselves as temporary refugees waiting to go home to Cambrai, but attempts to reclaim their property from the French government proved futile. Meanwhile, four of the community had died but seven new postulants had joined.^[20]

Move to Warwickshire

An interim home was found in 1808 at Salford Hall, Abbot's Salford, Warwickshire which was a mansion built in 1602 by a recusant family, the Stanfords. It contained a priest hole, and a public Catholic chapel fitted out in the early 18th century and served by EBC monks from 1727 until the end of the century.^[22]

The nuns took their school with them, and were able to resume wearing the habit and created an enclosure (they divided the chapel with a grille). However, the house was only lent to them and was not for purchase. The nuns bought a purpose-built convent twenty-eight years later, in 1835.^[23]

Augustine Lawson, EBC chaplain at Salford Hall, until he died in 1830, helped the community to find a permanent home. His dying wish was to be buried with the sisters. When they moved in 1838 he was disinterred and re-buried at their new home. His body was found to be incorrupt.^[24] That same year of 1830, the last Cambrai nun died.^[25] Salford Hall is now a hotel and Grade I listed building.^[26]

Stanbrook construction

In 1835, with the encouragement of Bernard Short based at Little Malvern, later the abbey chaplain, the nuns bought Stanbrook Hall at Callow End in the parish of Powick, (52.1473°N 2.2428°W / 52.1473; -2.2428 (Stanbrook Abbey (former site))), near Malvern, Worcestershire in the Severn Valley. This was a country mansion, built in 1755 by Richard Casean, alderman of Worcester.^[27]

The nuns decided to keep it as the presbytery for their EBC chaplain and his domestic staff. For their own residence, they employed the architect and county surveyor, Charles Day, who was a brother of one of the nuns.^[28] He added two conjoined blocks to the west wing of the Hall, one with a chapel was for the community, the other for the school. The two-storey edifice in red brick, completed in 1838, had no traditional monastic features.^[2] The nuns' chapel is significant in the architectural history of the period owing to its neo-classical style and the role of Baroque design influences on its interior.^[29] The original entrance to the new abbey precinct was to the south, on Upton Road, where a pair of semi-octagonal gate lodges survive and are Grade-II listed.^[30] The sisters' graveyard was laid out between the Presbytery and Abbey with Lawson re-interred there.

Pugins' patrons

In 1863, Laurence Shepherd was appointed chaplain and served until his death in 1885. He helped the nuns become noted practitioners of Gregorian chant, through the influence of the liturgical tradition being revived by Prosper Guéranger at Solesmes Abbey in France. He also aided them in revising their monastic constitutions in line with Guéranger's ideas. The community was growing rapidly, as vocations to the religious life were plentiful at the time. He encouraged the community to build a complete new abbey, reflecting the high-status of a medieval monastery with buildings around a square cloister.^[31] The plans for the scheme were drawn up by Shepherd with the assistance of Hildebrand de Hemptinne, a Belgian Benedictine monk from Beuron Archabbey. The architectural work was entrusted to the family of the late Augustus Welby Pugin, which was based in Ramsgate.^[28] Work was to continue until the end of the century, but left unfinished.^[2]

Stanbrook Abbey Press

Stanbrook Abbey has been celebrated for its Gregorian chant, the publication of devotional literature, and fine printing.

The Stanbrook Abbey Press was established in 1876 and was at one time one of the oldest examples of a private press in England. Stanbrook Abbey.^[45] It acquired an international reputation for fine printing under Dames Hildelith Cumming and Felicitas Corrigan. Collections of the press are held at Boston College^[46] and the University of Maryland.^[47]

Although digital printing and publishing continues at the Abbey on a small scale, the fine letterpress printing which made the Press famous had ceased by 1990. That year marked the death, at 95, of Dame Werburg Welch, an artist whose work in a range of media can be found across the country; she was also an arboriculturist, taking care of the orchard at Stanbrook.^[48]

Examples of work from the Stanbrook Abbey Press include:

• St Teresa of Avila; tr. by Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey (1921). The Interior Castle or The Mansions. London: Thomas Baker.
• Meinrad Craighead. The Mother's Birds: Images for a Death and a Birth. Worcester: Stanbrook Abbey Press, 1976.
• Teresa of Avila; tr. by Benedictines of Stanbrook Abbey (2007). The Way of Perfection; St Teresa of Avila. Cosimo, Inc. ISBN 978-1-60206-260-3.

Jamberoo Abbey

The first Roman Catholic archbishop of Sydney in Australia, John Bede Polding, had been taught by the nuns as a little boy. In 1849, he appealed to the abbey to provide nuns for a monastery that he was founding at Rydalmere, New South Wales, to be called Subiaco after the Italian location where St Benedict had begun monastic life. In response, Dame Magdalen le Clerc was sent to join Sister Scholastica Gregory from Princethorpe Priory (not of the English Benedictine Congregation, hence not a Dame), and the two founded what is now Jamberoo Abbey.^[68]

Abadia de Santa Maria, São Paulo

In 1907, a group of young women from São Paulo in Brazil entered the noviciate in order to become the founding community of the Abadia di Santa Maria in their city. This was founded in 1911, and itself became the mother-house of three other women's monasteries in Brazil as well as one in Argentina, Abadía de Santa Escolástica in Buenos Aires. From the latter are descended six monasteries: four in Argentina, one at Montevideo in Uruguay and one in Chile.

One of the Brazilian daughter houses, Abadia de Nossa Senhora das Graças in Belo Horizonte, has itself given rise to four further foundations in Brazil.^[69][70]