The beautiful abbey church at Downside is one of the great master pieces of the Gothic Revival, with furnishings to match. Pevsner described it as “the most splendid demonstration of the renaissance of Roman Catholicism in England…Pugin’s dream of the future of English Catholicism at last come true”. The late Fr Anthony Symondson SJ wrote: “In the diversity of hands that have contributed to the design, in its lack of uniformity, it equals the building development of medieval Gothic.”
Between 1605 and 1607, a group of English and Welsh Benedictine monks from various continental monasteries gathered at Douai, in Flanders, with a desire to set up an exiled English monastic house. Among them was Dom Sigebert Buckley, who had taken monastic vows at Westminster Abbey under Mary I in the late 1550s. The community at Douai, numbering about 24 monks, flourished until 1794 when revolutionary France declared war on England. The community had to leave; the monks lived first at Acton Burnell Hall in Shropshire, courtesy of the Catholic Smythe family.
