Belmont Abbey

Belmont Abbey

Belmont Abbey
Hereford
Herefordshire
HR2 9RZ

Tel: 01432 374 710
Fax: 01432 374 749
E-Mail: procurator@belmontabbey.org.uk

Web: Belmont Abbey

About Belmont Abbey

Benedictine monasticism was part of the landscape of Mediaeval Britain, but the Reformation in England and the Dissolution of the Monasteries brought an end to the monastic life in England and Wales. The age of the great Abbeys like Canterbury, Westminster, Gloucester and St Albans was over, but monasticism itself was waiting to be restored. In the seventeenth century Englishmen and Welshmen went to the Continent and re-established the English Benedictine Congregation in exile.
This Congregation, which itself goes back to the 13th Century, founded Belmont in 1859 as the Common House of Studies for the three existing monasteries (now be Downside, Ampleforth and Douai). At the same time it was the Cathedral for the Diocese of Newport and Menevia which covered the whole of Wales and Herefordshire.
When this black and white photograph was taken, at the Golden Jubilee of Belmont in 1909, Belmont was about to enter into a new phase of its history. In 1917, the General Chapter of the Congregation declared Belmont to be an independant Priory, and in 1920 the Holy See raised it to the rank of an Abbey by the Papal Bull Praeclara Gesta.
Dom Aelred Kindersley, a monk of Downside had been appointed as the last Cathedral Prior in 1915, and it was he whom the young community elec