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Stanbrook Abbey is a Catholic Church contemplative Benedictines Monastery with the status of an abbey, located at Wass, North Yorkshire, England.
The community was founded in 1625 at Cambrai in Flanders (then part of the Spanish Netherlands, now in France), under the auspices of the English Benedictine Congregation.O'Donnell, p. 116 After being imprisoned during the French Revolution, the surviving nuns fled to England and in 1838 settled at Stanbrook, Callow End, Worcestershire, where a new abbey was built. With the steep contemporary decline in monastic life, the community left their Grade II-listed property, to relocate to Wass in the North York Moors National Park in 2009. The former Worcestershire monastic estate, as of 2020, was operated as a luxury hotel.
The nine original members were escorted by him from England to Cambrai (which the English then called Camerick),Büsching, A. F: New System of Geography - Hungary, Transylvania, Sclavonia, Dalmatia &c 1762 p. 569 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.
The most notable among the foundresses was 17-year-old Helen More, Religious vows 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 abbot 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.
The other eight foundresses were: Catherine Gascoigne, Grace and Ann More (cousins of Dame Gertrude), Anne Morgan, Margaret Vavasour, Frances Watsonthese 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. Weld-Blundell, Edward. "Stanbrook Abbey." The Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 14. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912. 27 October 2022
A daughter house in Paris was founded in 1651, which became independent in 1656 and was eventually to become Colwich Abbey in England.Eaton, Robert: The Benedictines of Colwich Sands & Co 1929 pp. 24, 28 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.
A report preserved in the city archives has this:
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.
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".
Their convent in Cambrai was looted and turned into a prison. It was subsequently demolished.
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 (or £36,617 in 2020 values). 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). 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.
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.
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.
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 Incorruptibility. That same year of 1830, the last Cambrai nun died. Salford Hall is now a hotel and Grade I listed building.
The nuns decided to keep it as the Clergy house 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.Ecclesiology Today, Issue 38 May 2007 p. 37 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. The nuns' chapel is significant in the architectural history of the period owing to its Neoclassicism and the role of Baroque design influences on its interior. The original entrance to the new abbey precinct was to the south, on Upton Road, where a pair of semi-octagonal gatehouse survive and are Grade-II listed. The sisters' graveyard was laid out between the Presbytery and Abbey with Lawson re-interred there.
In 1935, when the abbey was its height, the community numbered eighty-two. This total comprised fifty-two choir nuns, nineteen conversae, seven novices, and four extern sisters. The 'conversae' or claustral sisters were not bound to the Divine Office and did the domestic and manual work, but stayed in the enclosure. The externs were the ones who ventured outside as necessary.S. Patriarchae Benedicti Familiae Confederatae 1935 p. 954 The community had two EBC monk-chaplains resident at the Presbytery. The height of Edward Pugin's grand Gothic high altar obscured the great rose window at the church's east end which contained stained glass in honour of the Virgin Mary. As a result it was cut down in 1937 by Geoffrey Webb. The monstrance throne cavity was filled with a sculpture of Christ the King by Philip Lindsey Clark.Ecclesiology Today, Issue 38 May 2007 p. 41
In 1950, the community was still flourishing and comprised around seventy, a number it kept for the next twenty years. This made it the biggest women's monastery in Britain. Around this time, the lush decorative wall in the church sanctuary, which included depictions of Christ and the saints, was partly painted over.
The failure to complete the new buildings left the abbey's facilities not fit for purpose. Ambulatories in red brick occupying the missing two sides of the cloisters were designed by Martin Fisher in 1965. Historic England dismissed this work as "not considered to be of interest". The community numbered seventy-one at that stage.S. Patriarchae Benedicti Familiae Confederatae 1965 p. 462
Further reconstruction occurred when the church sanctuary was re-ordered in 1971 by Anthony Thompson, with the loss of the original Pugin fittings including the cut-down high altar, the surviving wall paintings, and the Mintons encaustic tile for a plainer style.New, Anthony: A Guide to the Abbeys of England and Wales Constable 1985 p. 357 The wrought iron rood screen was donated to Birmingham Art Gallery, and the altar in the extern chapel (dedicated to the Sacred Heart) was also removed.
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. The Stanbrook Abbey Press: Ninety-two Years of its History. Worcester, England: Stanbrook Abbey Press, 1970. It acquired an international reputation for fine printing under Dames Hildelith Cumming and Felicitas Corrigan. Collections of the press are held at
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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 Arboriculture, taking care of the orchard at Stanbrook.
Examples of work from the Stanbrook Abbey Press include:
In April 2002 Abbess Joanna Jamieson announced that the Abbey would move from its Victorian abbey, with its of monastic buildings, "to make the best use of its human and financial resources". This led to controversy about priorities as shown in a letter to The Times newspaper, on 23 January 2006:
Three sisters, including, Catherine Wybourne, also known as 'Digitalnun') left the community, and in September 2004 founded Holy Trinity Monastery at East Hendred in Oxfordshire.They moved to Wormbridge in Herefordshire in 2012, and are now (2020) known as Howton Grove Priory. They have received no vocations, were down to two in 2020, and with Wybourne's death in 2022 only one remains.Benedictine Yearbook 2020 p. 177 The Abbey bought Crief Farm at Wass in the North York Moors National Park. Construction of the new monastery began on 18 June 2007. The community moved into the new Stanbrook Abbey at Wass on 21 May 2009, after the first building phase had been completed. It involved shifting a 40,000 volume library of books and archives from Stanbrook, which was overseen by the theologian and former hermit, Mary Boulding, near the end of her life.
The architects at Wass were Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. The relics of St Fulgentia were taken out of the altar when it was dismantled, and put into store until the new abbey church at Wass could be built. After May 2009, the original abbey church was formally deconsecrated in preparation for the sale of the property. Contrary to monastic tradition at the time of a move, the Stanbrook community took its former name to Wass.
The set of new abbey buildings was given a RIBA National Award in 2016. In 2020 the community numbered nineteen, including one oblate not in vows but sharing the life in all respects.Benedictine Yearbook 2020 p. 111 The Abbey is the second largest Benedictine convent in England, after Ryde Abbey with twenty-eight.Benedictine Yearbook 2020 p. 151 Two remaining able-bodied nuns went to live at Wass from the dissolved Colwich Abbey (1656), evolved as a daughter house from the Cambrai foundation.
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.Benedictine Yearbook 2020 p. 113
The new owners erected an imposing entrance gateway west of the original one, laid out car parks and converted the nuns' cells, with no plumbing, into en-suite bedrooms. The grave markers on the sisters' graves were removed to allow the layout of a lavender garden on the graveyard, and were attached to a nearby wall. The abbey entrance in the east range was enhanced by a monumental new entrance portico with attached champagne bar. A roof terrace was added to the west end of the north range. A large marquee-style hall to serve as an events venue was attached to the Old House, and both of these additions were deliberately done in a contemporary style in contrast to the original buildings. The hotel was opened in 2015.
In 2017, the hotel was sold on to Hand Picked Hotels, which continued the conversion of cells to bedrooms in the north range and fitted out the former refectory as a fine-dining restaurant. in 2020 there were seventy bedrooms.
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