One small community, four homes, one hundred and eleven years.

In February 1913 the Anglican Benedictine community on Caldey Island, off the coast of Pembrokeshire, was received almost in its entirety into the Roman Catholic Church. Of the thirty-three men who had kept the Daily Office under the Rule of Saint Benedict the previous Christmas, only one — Brother Anselm Mardon — remained an Anglican. He travelled north, alone, to a borrowed house in the shadow of Pershore Abbey in Worcestershire, and on a damp evening in May 1914 began to keep Vespers again. There was no congregation. There was, by some accounts, only a single beeswax candle.

That is where we begin. The community now numbers seven men, plus two postulants, and lives in four rooms within Sarum College on the Salisbury Cathedral Close. The Trust that holds its property and administers its modest income is named after the three abbeys the community has called home: Pershore from 1914 to 1926, Nashdom in Buckinghamshire from 1926 to 1987, and Elmore near Newbury from 1987 until 2010. We took the third name because Elmore was the last home in which the community had its own walls; we kept all three because none of them was the whole of us.

The legal Trust was formally incorporated as a Memorandum and Articles of Association on the 13th of November 1937, in a Bloomsbury solicitor's office, at the bidding of Abbot Denys Prideaux. He had been the first abbot, elected in 1922, and he wanted to be sure that whatever befell the community after his death — he died, in fact, the following year — its books, its silver, and its small bank balance would be held under the same Rule that ordered its days. We have been holding them under that Rule since.

Three short amendments were entered into the Articles in March 1950, in March 1989, and in May 1989. The third of these was, in the careful words of the minutes, "drafted by the solicitor in such a way as to anticipate the eventual relinquishing of large premises." It was an admission that we knew Elmore could not be kept. We were right: in 2010 we left it and came to Salisbury. The Trust holds three things now, and three things only: a small investment portfolio, the right to receive certain dignified legacies, and a duty to keep the small fire of Benedictine life burning in the Church of England.

We have learned to call this scale a gift, not a failure. — The Prior, in the introduction to the 2024 Annual Report

An honest line

It would be dishonest to call us a thriving order. In May 1914 the community had one professed brother. In 1965 it had forty. We have, today, seven. We are not the abbeys of Saint Hilda or of Saint Gregory in Three Rivers, Michigan, our American daughter-house that became larger than we did and which now, in its turn, faces its own narrowing. We are smaller still than we were in 2010 when we left Elmore.

The Trust's work is necessarily modest — a £290,000 stewardship in 2024, not a £29-million campaign. We pay no salaries to the brothers, who live on small Church of England pensions and the gifts of friends; the Trust's expenditure is almost wholly turned outward, into the work of religious learning, hospitality, and the relief of poverty. We have learned to call this scale a gift, not a failure. The Holy Rule prefers the small, the slow, and the local. It does not prefer the empire.