Downside’s downfall: the dissolution of a monastery

The monks of Downside Abbey in Somerset elected a new abbot last Thursday, according to sixth-century rules laid down by St Benedict. The next day, they sent an email notification saying they had voted ‘to make a new start and to seek a new place to live’. It was a shock to those who know the place. The monks will leave behind a beautiful abbey church built in the Gothic Revival style — its 166ft tower visible for miles around — a monastery and cloisters, the largest monastic library in Britain and a grand-looking public school with more than 300 pupils.

It’s as if a piece of English Catholicism, like a decaying chunk of church masonry, has fallen away. But it has been a long time coming. So many of the monks I knew while at school at Downside in the early 2000s — some of them towering figures, it seemed at the time — have died or left already (some with their reputations intact, others with their lives in ruins).