Saint Samson {d c480 - 565}


Saint Samson. Detail. Stained glass window inaugurated on 7 April 2007 of the master glassmaker Emmanuel Prutanier.
Chapel of Saint-Samson. Ploemeur-Bodou. Britain.~ Source

# 454: (d 565) Bishop of Dol, Brittany. He was a Welshman who was trained by Saint Illtyd.

He became a hermit on Caldey Island. One of the Scilly Islands is named after him and it is on this  Spot that Tristan fought the Morholt. Like many other Celtic monks he was a great missionary. It is possible that he fled to Brittany due to the political unrest following the passing of Arthur at Camlan. His feast day is 28 July.

# 678: According to the earlier biography, Samson left Illtyd while he was still a young man and established his own monastery on Ynys Pyr (Caldey Island). While he was there he was visited by some ‘distinguished Irishmen’ returning from a pilgrimage to Rome. Samson went to Ireland with them, and while he was there he obtained an Irish ‘chariot’, some sort of horse drawn cart, in which he could carry his books on travels, and it accompanied him wherever he went. 

He returned to Caldey but did not remain there for long. He planned a journey that would enable him to visit many places in Cornwall before sailing for Brittany from Golant. We are told that Samson heard that he had been elected Bishop of Dol, while he was still with Illtyd at Llantwit Major. He was said to be so distressed at the thought of leaving his beloved master that he wept bitterly, his tears falling into a stream ‘that still bears his name’. Dol himself Honoured Samson with a stained glass window made in the thirteenth century. It shows the Welsh saint on his travels with two companions. The boat is under full sail and captained by a cherub. # 454 - 678

St Samson of Dol 485-565 succeeded the abbot of Caldey Island off Pembrokeshire after the former abbot fell down a well while intoxicated. His biographer notes, "no one ever saw him [St Samson] drunk".

Saint Samson ~ French Page

After Samson's ordination an attempt was made on his life by two nephews of Saint Illtyd, who were jealous of his ordination. So Samson left the community and lived for a time under Piro on the island of Caldey (Ynys Pyr {Piro's Island}) off the coast of Pembrokeshire, where he served as cellarer.

His father and his uncle, Umbrafel, joined him there after his father had recovered from a serious illness during which he received the last rites from his son. When Piro died, Samson succeeded him as abbot of Caldey Abbey, but he resigned after a preaching tour to Ireland.

Prinknash Park

The following Article is an excerpt taken from "A History of Prinknash Abbey" produced in 1978 to celebrate the 50th. anniversary and later revised in 1989. For the complete article visit Prinknash Abbey. Information compiled by David West.

     For nearly nine hundred years the land known as Prinknash Park has been associated with Benedictine monks. In 1096 the Giffard family, who had come to England with William the Conqueror, made a gift of the land to Serlo, Abbot of St. Peter's, Gloucester. A large part of the present building was constructed during the abbacy of William Parker, last Abbot of Gloucester, around the year 1520.

     It remained in the Abbey hands until the Dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 when it was rented from the Crown by Sir Anthony Kingston who was to provide forty deer, anually, for Henry VIII, who used the House as a hunting lodge. Prinknash Park continued to be used as a home for the gentry and nobility of Gloucestershire during the next few centuries and each generation left its mark upon the property.

     On 1st. August 1928 a Deed of Covenant was made out by 20th. Earl of Rothes, the grandson of Mr. Thomas Dyer Edwards whose wish it was that Prinknash should be given to the Benedictine monks of Caldey Island. These monks had converted to the Catholic faith in 1913 and were led by Aelred Carlyle, later to become a famous Abbot.

     Caldey Island was eventually sold to the Cistercian monks and on October 26th. 1928 six Benedictine monks arrived from Caldey Island to convert the house at Prinknash into a monastery. The rest soon followed and after some years of poverty they managed to purchase all the land around the house to make Prinknash as it is today.

Prinknash Abbey
 

     We have seen so far that the land at Prinknash was given by the Giffards of Brimpsfield to the Benedictines of Gloucester in the 11th century, became more extensive in the 12th and 13th century and there was a mill there. There is another ancient document, which says that, though the Giffards held Brimpsfield and all their lands for a military service of 9 soldiers, the Abbots of Gloucester held theirs in alms.

     Later we are told that the Abbey had a park there and free warren in all their demean lands granted by Edward III in the 28th year of his reign and confirmed by Richard II in the first year of his reign. It is very probable that there was a hunting lodge here and occupied by a Woodward. From internal evidence some parts of the house are as old as the 14th century. In 1339 the Bishop of Worcester granted a license "for the Abbot of Gloucester and his fellow monks to celebrate Mass or to have it celebrated by a suitable chaplain in an oratory within their manor of Princkenasch." This document makes it clear that already in the 14th century Prinknash was a manor and had a chapel where mass was said. Free warren means the right to hunt deer and other game and it would be perfectly natural for the owners of this property to keep a lodge with hunters and hounds and all the necessities for their maintenance.

     In a visitation of the Abbey in Gloucester in 1301 by Winchley, Archbishop of Canterbury, the Abbot is limited to 8 hounds and 4 harriers which are to be kept by one huntsman and one pageboy only.

     Later mention of Prinknash as a residence of the Abbot of Gloucester is in 1526 when an Abbey lease is granted to a tenant in Upton with the obligation of felling and transporting sufficient wood to the house of the Abbot of Prinknash as long as the Abbot should be in residence there. We can safely say from documentary evidence that Prinknash was already an abatable manor in 1339, though there are architectural features of later developments. The work of rebuilding and enlarging the house was the achievement of the last of a long line of distinguished Abbots of Gloucester, William Parker [alias Malverne]. Parker was his family name; Malverne may have been territorial.

     Abbot Parker had held the office of Master of the Works in the Abbey before he was elected Abbot in 1515. Among other things he supervised several improvements in the buildings of the Abbey itself.

     He entertained Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn for a week during the King's progress in Gloucestershire in July 1535. From his letters and papers we know that the King took leave of the Abbot of Tewkesbury and rode to Gloucester where he was met by Abbot Parker and lodged at "...the [Vin]yerd, the [Abbo]ttes place". This Vineyard was probably the manor built by Abbot de Staunton in c.1337 at Over, only two miles from the city. That he was entertained by Abbot Parker in the vicinity of Prinknash is documented but there is no certain evidence that he ever stayed in the house.

     The story that the last Abbot of Gloucester died of grief at the suppression of the monasteries is a pious legend. He died many months before, as the request of the community for a 'conge d'elire' on account of his death clearly shows. The Abbey was surrendered on 2nd January 1540 by the Prior and monks under the conventual seal. The monks were pensioned off and the King created the county of Gloucestershire into an Episcopal see with the Abbot of Tewkesbury as the first Bishop of Gloucester. The Abbey church was made a Cathedral and the bishopric endowed with part of the monastic lands. The Bishop was given the Abbots house in Gloucester as his palace and the Vineyard as his country manor.

     Thomas Dyer Edwards was born in 1847, educated at Rugby and Clare College Cambridge, and owned houses at Waverley, Hyde Park gate, London, and a villa in Nice. He married Clementina Lucy Drummond Villiers in 1879 and had a daughter Noel who married the 19th Earl of Rothes in 1900. Immediately after his purchase of Prinknash, Thomas Dyer Edwards embarked on the most extensive alterations in the house, the pleasure gardens and the park. He added an apsidal sanctuary to the chapel and furnished it with plate and embroidered vestments. He constructed the avenue, which winds its way through the park from the Cheltenham Road to the Port way, nearly a mile in length, and built two lodges for the entrance gates.

     He also made the sunken garden and the steps descending to the stables, which he enlarged to contain a team of six white Spanish mules, carriage house, harness room and coachman's house. He was a Magistrate for the County of Gloucestershire. There was a regiment of gardeners and farmers to look after the grounds and the park, and a bevy of peacocks to adorned the gardens.

     Mr. Dyer Edwards became a Catholic in 1924 and invited the Benedictines of Caldey to make a foundation at Prinknash Park. They had originally been founded by a young medical student in the Anglican Church who was later to become famous as Abbot Aelred Carlyle, and in March 1913 they had been received into the Catholic Church. It had been a struggle to make Caldey Island economically viable but without success. The gift of Prinknash seemed providential and they eventually sold the whole island to the Cistercians.

     A deed of Covenant was eventually made out in 1925 when the monks were in a position to move. Dom Wilred Upson and Dom Dyfig Rushton [later the first and second Abbots of Prinknash respectively] came to inspect the property and the former wrote in his diary on 10th February 1926: " To Prinknash. First visit since the transfer of property. On arrival, Southard [the caretaker] informed me of a wire he had just received announcing the death of Mr. Dyer Edwards in Naples. We went at once to say prayers for his soul. Our first official act as owners of the property. Stayed at the Royal William Inn near by - very comfortable." They would have not been so comfortable had they known that they were not the owners of the property, since the death of the owner, coming so soon after the Deed of Gift, had made the Deed inoperative.

     The whole estate passed legally to the grandson of Dyer Edwards, Lord Lesley, who succeeded his father as the 20th Earl of Rothes in 1927. Lord Rothes could have excused himself from sacrificing a valuable and historic part of his inheritance to provide a home for a catholic Benedictine community but with a generosity and disinterestedness, which the community will ever gratefully remember, he did in fact honour his grandfather's wishes in this matter. A new Deed of Conveyance was made out, dated 1st. August 1928 and signed by him, in which the Grantor conveys to the Trustees "all that message or tenement known as Prinknash Park, with the stabling, electric light house, and the chapel, pleasure grounds and lands, containing in all 27 acres, 1 rood, and 21 perches."

     The death duties were, however, so heavy that the donor was forced to sell all the valuables in the house before handing it over to the community. The medieval heraldic glass was bought by public subscription and transferred to the cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral; mantels and chimney pieces of value were also removed from some of the rooms; some hundreds of feet of oak panelling in six of the rooms was sold and re-erected in a historic period room, called the Prinknash Park Room, in the City Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. In 1987 this panelling was sold by the museum to Mr. F. Koch who installed it in Sutton Place, near Guildford, Surrey, when he was renovating his old Tudor house as a home for his Art collection. The house, gardens and art collection are now open to the public, phone 01483 504455 for further information. For more information about the panelling itself see this page.

     The community of Benedictine monks of Caldey Island were now ready to face the formidable business of moving. When the monks sailed away from the island the boat passed directly through a rainbow and this could be taken as symbolic of God's blessing upon the faithful community and the work that lay ahead of them. When six monks arrived at Prinknash on October 6th 1928 everything was chaotic and cold. It was to be the coldest winter in living memory, with no heating in the house, and the first wash in the morning in ice.

     The chapel had to be adapted, large rooms had to be partitioned to make thirty bedrooms and on the other hand small rooms had to be enlarged to make a refectory for the thirty monks. Twice a week during November two lorries were loaded at Tenby for the heavy work of transport. Arriving during the evening and unloading during the day in the snow and bitter cold it took two months for the move to be completed. On December 19th 1928, the fourteen monks left on Caldey spent their last night there. They arrive at Prinknash at 7 pm next day and monastic life had started at Prinknash.

     Like all living things the community grows. In 1928 there were about 25 monks, today there are three times that number distributed in three monasteries. In the early days attics were opened up and provided with dormer windows; temporary extensions were added to the south-west of the house to provide 24 small rooms, guest quarters and a chapter house; the choir of the chapel was doubled to provide stalls for the monks and a new transept was built for the laity.

Dom Columba Marmion

This is an excerpt from an Article by Aidan Nichols, author of many books of theology, the latest of which is Epiphany. A Theological Introduction to Catholicism (Collegeville, Minn. 1996) here looks at the life and teaching of Dom Columba Marmion. 'In an age such as our own, where spirituality too often sinks in a morass of psychotherapy and sentiment, Marmion's exultation in the sheer objectivity of the divine plan, life, nature makes him a needed prophet for the times.' Go here to see the Original Article

At this period, the Beuronese Congregation (and so Maredsous) had an interest in England, where during the Kulturkampf between Bismarck and the Catholic Church they had made a foundation against the day of possible exile: Erdington Abbey (now a Redemptorist house) near Birmingham. Through English monks of Erdington, former Anglican clerics both, Marmion came to play a crucial role in the reconciliation with the Church of the Anglican Benedictines of Caldey  - island of dunes and limestone, topped by impossibly picturesque white walled, red roofed monastic buildings, a Cambrian Patmos off the south coast of Wales. Under his watchful care the monks of Caldey (and their sister community of women at Milford Haven) were ushered into Catholic communion and the Benedictine family, and Abbot Aelred Carlyle priested at Maredsous in July 1914. Though Carlyle had to resign his abbacy and left the island owing to difficulties Marmion could not have foreseen, it was through Marmion’s good offices that the future monasteries of the Caldey succession - Prinknash (Gloucestershire) and Pluscarden (Morayshire) have been able to exercise their spiritual influence on the Catholicism of the British Isles since his day.

The following is a small excerpt from a document that is available below. It is noteworthy here as to its reference to Caldey Island and interest to some members of our own Guild.

Across the world a number of religious orders staff parishes which *may* be more open to LGBT people than others. Of special note are the following orders: 

*The Dominicans [Order of Preachers] -There are some conservative Dominicans, but the Order has taken explicitly pro-gay stances. 

*Franciscans [Capuchins, Order of Friars Minor, Conventuals] -One has to be very careful. Some Franciscans are living witnesses to the creed of love advanced by St. Francis. Others are vigorously anti gay. 

*The Order of St. Benedict and the Cistercians -These two monastic orders long provided refuges for gay men, and some "refounded" monastery's [e.g. those descended from Caldey] were founded by gay men. Members of these orders are often very sympathetic. 

For more information please see the: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Catholic Handbook  or Dignity/USA Website  [http://purl.oclc.org/NET/lgbh/ [A PURL is an OCLC maintained "Persistent URL" which will always point to the real location of a website]]