For one hundred and eleven years a handful of monks have prayed, studied and given small mercies, first at Pershore, then Nashdom, then Elmore, and now at Salisbury. The Trust is the quiet hand that holds the lamp.
The Trust's constitution, signed at a Bloomsbury solicitor's office on the 13th of November 1937, names what the brothers had already been doing since Pershore: pray, learn, lift up the poor. We have not strayed from that small list.
The Daily Office is sung at four hours under the Holy Rule of St Benedict. Compline at Eight is open to the public on Tuesdays; on most evenings around twenty visitors join the brothers in the side chapel.
The Dom Gregory Dix Liturgical Studies Programme funds seven scholars a year at Sarum College, in memory of the prior who shaped Anglican liturgy in the twentieth century. Our library of 14,800 volumes is open to readers by appointment.
Forty-seven small grants in 2024 went to foodbanks, hospices, and refuges across Worcestershire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire — the four counties of our pilgrim history. The largest was £4,200; the smallest, £180.
Bursaries that cover the full cost of a 2- to 5-night retreat for guests who would otherwise be priced out — carers, ordinands, hospice chaplains, and (since 2022) refugees in early resettlement.
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Seven scholarships each year for postgraduate students of liturgy at Sarum College, honouring the prior of Nashdom whose 1945 book The Shape of the Liturgy still shapes Anglican worship.
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Trained volunteers visit 6,240 isolated older neighbours across 42 villages between Salisbury and Pershore. The average pairing now lasts 4.2 years; the longest stretches back to 2009.
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Awards named for Dom Anselm Hughes (director of music 1922–1945), supporting four singers and one organist each year to study plainchant and Anglican choral tradition.
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Small unrestricted grants — average £1,580 — to 47 foodbanks, women's refuges, hospices and homelessness charities in the four counties of our pilgrim history. £74,200 paid out in 2024.
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Every Tuesday at 20:00 the brothers and twenty or so neighbours, students and passing visitors gather for sung Compline. No address, no collection — only the seven Psalms and a quiet leaving.
Read moreWe are asking for £90,000 by 31 March 2026, so that we may keep small relief grants steady through a cold winter. By the close of April we had £62,400 — a long way along the path. Every £25 buys a week of bread and milk for an elderly neighbour through Sunday Doors.
Twenty-eight men and women — teachers, nurses, a Welsh shepherd, a London surgeon, two retired bishops — keep a private rule under our guidance from their own kitchens and offices. You can begin a year's enquiry by writing one letter.
Lay men and women who keep a Benedictine rule of life in the world.
Hosted within Sarum College — by morning or by week.
The brothers in residence, plus two long-term postulants.
Including the Prior and four lay members elected for five-year terms.
After her husband Tom died in 2019 Margaret stopped opening her curtains. Eilidh, a befriender from Salisbury, has been visiting every Wednesday for four years. They drink tea and read the parish magazine aloud.
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A doctoral student on the Dix Programme uncovered a 1937 letter from Dom Gregory in our archive that revised — gently — what scholars had assumed about Anglican Papalist liturgy. The paper appeared in Studia Liturgica last March.
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"I came on retreat after losing a contract that had been my life for two decades," she says. "I have come back every year since. It is the only place I do not have to be useful."
Read the storyEach bar represents the number of small relief grants paid in a calendar year. The dip in 2020 reflects the pandemic suspension of the application window; 2022 was our largest year so far.
While cataloguing a 1937 box donated by the family of Eric Mascall, our archivist Rev. Dr. Frances Holloway found a fold of correspondence between Dix and the then-Bishop of Birmingham.
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An annual review of the fellowship, with a profile of three guests — a Syrian midwife, a retired headteacher and a nineteen-year-old on a gap year — and what they did with their five quiet days.
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Where the money went, in plain pounds and place names. The 2024 round of Cloister & Common Bread saw a small rise in foodbank applications and a sharp rise in women's refuge requests.
Read moreIt is the only place I am allowed not to be useful. I came after I lost a contract that had been my life for twenty-two years. The brothers asked nothing of me. That was the gift.
I had not opened the curtains for four months. Eilidh started coming on a Wednesday in October 2020, and I have a friend again. She brings the parish magazine and we read out the death notices. We laugh.
The Dix archive lets a Cardiff boy with two part-time jobs sit alone with sources that you cannot get anywhere else outside Lambeth Palace. They asked nothing of me except that I cite the Trust if I publish. I do.
