Cathedrals -- England; England -- Description and travel
When Henry II. set out to found a Carthusian house in England in
obedience to the Pope, the place he chose for it was Witham in
Selwood, a solitude, for the Rule of the Order demanded it, and that
is also why we have this monastery in the Weald to-day. It bears
witness as nothing else could do to-day, perhaps, to the true
character of the Weald.
Witham, it is true, was not so desolate as the Grande Chartreuse, but
it was in the heart of the Forest, far from the abode of men. Even to-
day Witham is not easy to reach by road. This house, thus founded did
not flourish; whether the place was too hard for the monks, or whether
there was some other cause we know not, but the first two priors,
though both from the Grande Chartreuse, failed to establish it. Then
King Henry was advised to beg of the mother-house her great and
shining light, Hugh of Avalon, not of Avalon in England, but of Avalon
in Burgundy. He was successful in his request. The Bishop of Bath and
Wells, his ambassador, then in the Alps, was able to bring Hugh home
with him, though the loss of that "most sweet presence," as the Prior
declared, widowed his house; and Hugh came to England and to Witham
and was received as "an angel of the Lord." It is in honour of this
great and holy man, later Bishop of Lincoln and known as St Hugh of
Avalon, that the Carthusian monastery of Parkminster is dedicated. I
have here no room to speak of him, the true founder of the Order in
England, of his holy, brave and laborious life in Selwood or of his
rule there of ten years. He is forgotten even at Witham and his name
no longer, alas, means anything to us whom he served. Only the
Carthusians have not forgotten, and to the keeping of no other saint
in the Calendar could they so honourably have entrusted their new
house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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