Britain’s Remarkable Monastic History, Told with Admiration, Humor, and Pathos

(This review was first posted at Rorate Caeli but is reprinted here for the benefit of NLM readers, who will also find much that is of liturgical interest in the book under review.)

Britain is full of monastic ghosts. Street names carry them: Monks Lane, Priory Road, Abbey Close. The landscape, too, still bears the imprint of communities that shaped it for a thousand years. The ruins of Fountains, Rievaulx, Tintern, and dozens of lesser houses stand in fields and valleys across England, Wales, and Scotland, drawing visitors who admire their picturesque qualities while knowing almost nothing of the civilization that produced them.

Joseph Kelly, in his new book Long Reign of Silence: A History of Monasticism in Britain (Cruachan Hill Press, 2026), has set out to remedy this ignorance, in what is surely one of the best popular histories of British monasticism ever written.

The scale of what has been lost and forgotten is remarkable. Kelly observes that almost nine hundred religious houses were targeted under Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541, and that their combined population in the thirteenth century numbered some twenty thousand souls in England alone (out of a total population of well under three million). By any measure, British monasticism was a civilization within a civilization, and its disappearance was not simply a matter of institutional change but of a comprehensive cultural rupture.

Kelly argues, convincingly, that the subsequent neglect of monastic history has not been accidental. The powerful new property-owning class of the Reformation whose wealth depended directly on expropriated monastic land had strong reasons to discourage nostalgia, and the cultural legacy of their prejudice is still with us. (We can also sense, against this backdrop, why the Oxford Movement, and even more the revival of monasticism among Anglicans, ignited such fury in the Establishment.)

One of the book’s most interesting segments is its account of how monasticism first took root in Britain. Kelly begins in fourth-century Egypt with Anthony and Pachomius, the desert fathers whose radical withdrawal from the world gave the monastic movement its distinctive character: poverty, common life, manual labor, and ceaseless prayer. That impulse travelled west through Gaul, was received by figures like Ninian and Patrick, and then flowered with extraordinary intensity in Ireland, a land Rome had never touched but whose tribal social structure paradoxically made communal religious life feel native rather than foreign.

The result was a monasticism of vibrant originality, whose hermits and peregrini carried the Gospel across Britain and continental Europe with zeal. Kelly vividly describes beehive huts on Skellig Michael, huddled against the Atlantic, and the monastery-city of Kildare, where the treasures of kings were stored alongside the treasures of God, and readers begin to understand that what was dissolved in the sixteenth century was not a decayed institution but the living continuation of a tradition stretching back to the first Christian centuries.

For the traditional Catholic in particular, this phenomenon matters in a way that goes beyond historical curiosity. The Celtic and Benedictine monks of Britain inhabited a sacramental cosmos wherein prayer was not private therapy but the Church’s essential public work, offered on behalf of the whole of creation—and shaping it in turn. Their monasteries were, as Kelly suggests, the heartbeat of a civilization. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, what ceased was not merely a way of organizing property, but a way of interacting with reality itself. The consequences are well traced by other authors such as Sebastian Morello in his Mysticism, Magic, and Monasteries.

The central chapters of Long Reign of Silence, concerning the Benedictine reform under King Edgar and the three monk-bishops who orchestrated it (Dunstan, Æthelwold, and Oswald), deserve particular attention from readers interested in what authentic Catholic renewal actually looks like, especially when (N.B.) ecclesiastical culture is resistant.

By the early tenth century, monasticism in England had largely collapsed, its communities hollowed out by continuous Viking raids and dominated by married clergy who sang the Office and drew an income while ignoring the Rule. What followed was one of the most complete reversals in ecclesiastical history. The pious King Edgar, supported by his austere Bishop Æthelwold, instituted a thoroughgoing purge, expelling the unworthy and refounding house after house on strict Benedictine lines. The instrument of that reform was the Regularis Concordia, a document Æthelwold produced after convening the kingdom’s leading ecclesiastics at Winchester, mandating in precise detail how every monastery in the realm was to be governed.

Kelly tells this story with a novelist’s instinct for character: Dunstan, brilliant and combative, thrown bodily into the marsh by disgruntled monks and returning years later as their abbot; Æthelwold, who translated the Rule into English for the benefit of laypeople, and whose armed thanes arrived at Winchester to enforce compliance when persuasion failed; Oswald of Worcester, a descendant of Viking invaders who converted and became a champion of the civilization his ancestors had plundered. What makes this episode so interesting is that the reform succeeded not through accommodation to the surrounding culture but through an alignment of sacred and secular authority that is almost inconceivable today—together with a willingness to use “tough love” with gloves off, also quite foreign to our flaccid age.

(A few sample pages)

I’d particularly like to highlight the physical beauty of the book itself, which is a pleasure to hold and to read. The layout is clean and professional, and the more than sixty color illustrations—photographs of ruins, abbey churches, manuscript pages, beehive huts on Skellig Michael, the Book of Kells, and landscapes from Egypt to the Scottish Highlands—are reproduced with a clarity and care that genuinely enhances the text rather than merely decorating it. This is the kind of book you find yourself lingering over, turning back to an image to look again. Cruachan Hill Press and Joseph Kelly have produced a truly beautiful work that every traditional Catholic should own and read.

Long Reign of Silence has real virtues: narrative confidence, historical range, an accessibility that makes it suitable for any educated reader rather than Church history buffs alone. As a Brit from Oxfordshire, Kelly tells the story with a passion for the subject that only an English Catholic could bring. The endnotes are generous and point toward primary sources and scholarly literature with discernment.

Those with an interest in medieval history, in the roots of British culture, or simply in understanding what was lost when the monasteries fell will find much here to reward them. Anyone who has spent time in a functioning Benedictine monastery will recognize the life Kelly is describing, and will feel its absence in the landscape all the more acutely for having read this book. Perhaps, one might dare to hope that some of its readers will be among those whom God is calling to become monks or nuns, to help restore to the West its invisible heart, enclosed in visible walls.

Joseph Kelly’s Long Reign of Silence is available from Amazon. Alternatively, receive a 15% discount by pre-ordering at the Cruachan Hill webstore before the end of June.

The Shrine of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey

St Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, died on January 5th of the year 1066. His body was buried the following day in the church of a Benedictine abbey which he himself had built, in a tomb right in front of the altar. When he was canonized 95 years later by Pope Alexander III, a shrine was built for his relics, but this no longer exists, since the whole abbey, originally titled to St Peter, but known simply known as Westminster Abbey, was completely rebuilt in subsequent centuries. His feast day, October 13, is the date of this translation, which took place in 1163, under St Thomas Becket, who would also be canonized by the same Pope.

The shrine of St Edward is one of two such shrines in all of England which were not destroyed by the impiety of Henry VIII and his successors. (The other is of a Saint called Wite of whom nothing is known.) A few days ago, I stumbled across this very interesting video about it on the YouTube channel of a man named Allan Barton, which gives a nice summary of the history of his cultus, and of shrine chapel as it now stands in the abbey, and the relics which it preserves. The second video talks about the tombs of the Plantagenet monarchs which were later added to the chapel. 

“The Old Leaven” of Catholic Truth, Part 1: Eucharistic Language and Eucharistic Faith in Medieval England

Aristotle believed not only that “words mean something”—an increasingly bold assertion in the twenty-first century—but also that carefully chosen words have a special power to “create knowledge in us.” He singles out metaphor, that central pillar of rhetorical and poetic language, as a mode of communication that “most brings about learning” and “creates understanding” (On Rhetoric, III.10.2). Liturgical, doctrinal, or devotional aggiornamento allows us to see Aristotle’s views in action, as we observe how knowledge and understanding are modified—or simply lost—when language changes from Latin to vernacular, or from poetic to prosaic, or from mystical to mundane.

Detail of Allegory of the Holy Eucharist, by Miguel Cabrera (d. 1768).

Belief in the Holy Eucharist has deteriorated in alarming fashion. If the statistics can be trusted, the situation is dire. The reasons for this are many, but some are of greater import than others, and language is surely among the more urgent factors. Modernized, banalized, and in some cases simply erroneous discourse has for decades obscured the truths of the Eucharist and the eucharistic liturgy. Perhaps the primary effect of all this is simply confusion, but confusion leads to misbelief, and misbelief to irreverence, and irreverence to further degeneration of language. And thus the cycle—a vicious one indeed—continues.

Illumination on parchment, fourteenth century.

The severity of this state of affairs is unprecedented, but the problem itself is not new. It is striking to read, for example, a description of eucharistic malpractice that sounds all too familiar, despite being eight hundred years old: the author of Vices and Virtues, a homiletic prose dialogue written in the Middle English of the early thirteenth century, laments the “misbileaue” (misbelief) and “unwurscipe” (irreverence) of those who received the body of the Lord “al swa unwurðliche swa me nimð ðat bread of ðæ borde — as unworthily as one takes the bread of the table.” The metaphorical reflections in this text show us the strong, evocative, and deeply Catholic language that abounds in the literature of medieval England:

Take what you see, bread and wine in appearance; and in your thoughts believe what you see not: that is, Christ’s flesh and His blood. And know in truth, as truly as bread and wine feed the body, while in this life it dwells, so this holy corpus Domini truly feeds both soul and body unto eternal life. And as truly as the tree of Paradise was called “knowing both good and evil,” so truly bears this same tree the fruit that turns many to life, and also some to death, for [their] misbelief and [their] irreverence.

The term “eucharist,” a borrowing from Greek via Latin and French, does not appear in Vices and Virtues, and in fact, it does not appear as an English-language word in any document from the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons until sometime in the fourteenth century. English Catholics of the early and high Middle Ages had various other titles for the Blessed Sacrament, and these titles give us an opportunity to consider how their eucharistic language formed their eucharistic faith—and a formidable faith it was, despite the unedifying individuals mentioned in Vices and Virtues, who were surely the exception. On the eve of the Reformation, the sacramental body of Christ was still “the focus of all the hopes and aspirations” of the English people:

As kneeling congregations raised their eyes to see the Host held high above the priest’s head at the sacring, they were transported to Calvary itself, and gathered not only into the passion and resurrection of Christ, but into the full sweep of salvation history.[1]

Part of a very long Corpus Christi procession winding through a town in eighteenth-century Bavaria. I can imagine something similar occurring in pre-Reformation England.

Though England’s ruling class succeeded in dismantling the vast and magnificent edifice of English Catholicism, the Anglican Church did not fully repudiate the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. The Articles of Religion published in 1571, during Queen Elizabeth’s reign, state that “the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ, and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ.” However, eucharistic belief and practice were strategically diluted, and transubstantiation was condemned as “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture.” One senses that the elites carried out as much doctrinal vandalism as the common folk would tolerate. Gilbert Burnet, Anglican bishop of Salisbury from 1689 to 1715, admits as much in his Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England: an earlier version of the Articles spoke strongly against belief in the “Real and Bodily Presence ... of Christ’s Flesh and Blood in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper,” but this version was suppressed, because

the design of the Government was at that time much turned to the drawing over the Body of the Nation to the Reformation, in whom the old Leaven had gone deep; and no part of it deeper than the belief of the Corporeal Presence of Christ in the Sacrament; therefore it was thought not expedient to offend them by so particular a Definition in this matter; in which the very word Real Presence was rejected.

“The old Leaven had gone deep”: Yes indeed, Rev. Burnet! The Old Faith went deep and was still as alive and vigorous as golden, foaming, freshly poured English ale. The people of merrie olde Catholic England didn’t want your watered-down “Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper,” and that’s why your Protestant forebears had to foist it on them with their shifty language and Machiavellian tricks.[2]

At least the bishop was honest enough to acknowledge that, decades after Henry VIII exchanged Christendom for Anne Boleyn, the English people were still seriously committed to “the Corporeal Presence of Christ in the Sacrament”—so committed, in fact, that the lords of the realm deemed it “not expedient to offend them.” What a fine compliment the bishop here offers to the common folk of his once Catholic nation! Their hearty faith and respect for tradition forced the Innovators to preserve at least one crucial aspect of eucharistic Truth. As a result, the Anglican Church became an example of moderation amidst Nonconformists and continental zealots who, in their wanton assault on ancient sacramental belief, found a new way to profess that which is “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture,” wherein we read, “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life.... For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.”

In Part Two of this article, I’ll discuss the eucharistic vocabulary of medieval England and consider how this vocabulary helped English Catholics to know, understand, and love the Blessed Sacrament.

NOTES

1. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, p. 91.

2. In fairness to Machiavelli, he surpassed the Reformers in his understanding of tradition: “Princes should learn ... that they begin to lose their state the moment they begin to break the laws and to disregard the ancient traditions and customs under which men have long lived” (Discourses on Livy, III.5).

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