Amazing grace

It was in 1814 that the Benedictine monks arrived in Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset from Douai in Flanders where, in 1606, they had established an exiled, but English, monastic house. They were forced to leave the Continent in 1795 after revolutionary France had declared war on England. They wandered a bit until they finally bought a decent house built in 1700 and a farmhouse with 21 acres at Downside. This book tells a complicated saga of the building of the present abbey and school that will enthral those readers fascinated by the morphology of the Gothic Revival. But it could appeal equally to those gripped by the ultra-montane tendencies in the history of English Catholic life.

Downside Abbey’s church tower is what first strikes any visitor. It is some 166 feet high (55 metres) and the church itself is the largest neo-Gothic church built in England since the Reformation. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner admired it and thought the use of the Gothic style represented ‘a splendid demonstration of the renaissance of Roman Catholicism in England’.