Pray, learn, lift up the poor.
Three things, kept for a long time.
The 1937 Memorandum names three purposes. We have done our best, eighty-eight years on, not to add a fourth. The Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, by which we order our days, is patient with smallness and impatient with sentimentality.
The charitable objects of the Trust, set out in clause 3 of the 1937 Articles, are unchanged: the advancement of the Christian religion, the general furtherance of religious education and knowledge, and the relief of poverty and suffering. The clause adds, almost as if quietly tucking a fourth thing under its arm, that these works are to be carried out "in accordance with the Holy Rule of Saint Benedict." That is the whole of our governance.
We have taken these three purposes, over the decades, and given them their Latin Benedictine names — Ora, Studium, Misericordia. They are the load-bearing walls of the house. Programmes come and go; bursaries open and close; the names of our partners change every decade. The three purposes do not change. What follows is, very plainly, what each one means in 2026.
I. Ora — the work of prayer
The Daily Office, in our house, is sung at four hours: Lauds at 7am, midday prayer at 12.30 before lunch, Vespers at 6.15pm, and Compline at 8pm. The hours and their psalms are, in this, identical to what would have been heard at Nashdom in 1930 or at Elmore in 1995 — even when, as today, only three or four voices are doing the singing.
The Trust pays nothing directly for prayer. It pays, indirectly, for the chapel candles, the maintenance of the small chamber organ, and the printing of the weekly Office sheets that allow visitors to join in. The largest gift of recent years from the Trust to the work of prayer was the £24,000 paid in 2019 to retune the seventeenth-century chamber organ; it had been almost unplayable since the move from Elmore.
The first work of a monastic house is to pray for the Church and the world. If we are doing nothing else, we are still doing that. — Rule of Benedict, chapter 19, on the practice of common prayer
Once a week, on Tuesday at 20:00, Compline is sung in the chapel with the doors open to the public. Around twenty visitors come most weeks — students from the College, neighbours from the Close, the occasional bewildered tourist who has wandered in from the Cathedral Green. There is no homily and no collection. There is, by long custom, a single beeswax candle. It is the simplest, plainest, oldest service of the Christian week. It is also, in our experience, the easiest one to give as a gift to a stranger.
II. Studium — the work of learning
Saint Benedict, with characteristic moderation, says that monks should read for two hours a day. We read a little less than that in winter. The Trust holds a library of 14,800 volumes — most of it the working theological collection assembled by Dom Gregory Dix between 1936 and his death in 1952, with later additions from the estate of Dom Anselm Hughes and from a generous bequest by Bishop Henry Mascall in 1979. The library is housed within Sarum College and is open to readers by appointment four days a week.
The flagship of the Trust's educational work is the Dom Gregory Dix Liturgical Studies Programme, established in 1972 on the twentieth anniversary of his death and substantially re-endowed in 2014. It funds seven postgraduate scholars a year — usually doctoral candidates, occasionally a clergyman or laywoman taking a sabbatical — at Sarum College. Each scholar is paid £6,800 toward course fees and is offered a free residential cell in the College for the duration. We do not require that they be Anglican, or even Christian. We do require, in the words of Dr Awdry, that "they like libraries and do not mind silence at breakfast."
Alongside the Dix Programme, the Trust supports the Anselm Bursary for Sacred Music, four singer-bursaries and one organist-bursary a year for students at Sarum College and at the Diocesan Choir School. It also supports, in smaller and quieter ways, the work of the Liturgical Conference for Religious Communities (a small annual gathering at Sarum College) and the digitisation, ongoing since 2021, of the Nashdom manuscript archive — a project running with the University of Birmingham.
III. Misericordia — the work of mercy
The third purpose of the Trust is, in the wording of the 1937 Articles, "the relief of poverty and suffering." This was, for many decades, a small ad hoc fund: Br. Stephen Tovey, the bursar from 1953 to 1981, kept a discretionary cheque book and gave away, on average, £180 a month to people in need who wrote to the abbey. We have, in 2018, regularised this into the Cloister & Common Bread Fund.
The Fund is open four times a year to small charities — under £400,000 annual income — working in the four counties of our pilgrim history: Worcestershire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. We pay small unrestricted grants, averaging £1,580 each. In 2024 we made forty-seven such grants, totalling £74,200. Twenty-one went to foodbanks, eleven to women's refuges, eight to hospice respite, four to homelessness charities, and three to community mental-health initiatives. The largest grant of the year (£4,200) went to a small foodbank in Pershore; the smallest (£180) to a parish lunch club in Speen, which had been founded by the brothers in 1989 and had run out of jam.
The Trust does not directly run foodbanks or refuges. We are a contemplative house, not an outreach service. What we do is hold the door to small mercies open with small unrestricted gifts; we trust the people closer to the wound to know what to do with them.
A monastery should never lack for guests. Let all be received as Christ.— Rule of Benedict, chapter 53, on the reception of guests
Where we fall short
We owe our donors honesty. We will be honest, then. We are a small Trust supporting a small, ageing community. Our average age in the cloister is sixty-three. We have made one solemn profession in the last decade. We could, twenty years from now, be three brothers and a postulant, or no brothers at all — and the Trust would, in that case, become a body that holds the books, the silver, the library and a small endowment in trust for whatever Anglican Benedictine life arises next. We hold open the possibility that we may, in the end, hand the lamp to others.
We do not run a national programme of poverty relief. £74,200 a year is a small flame against the cold. We do not, like some larger nonprofits, count "people supported" in the millions; we count them in the dozens, and we know most of them by name. We are not all things; we are these few things. We hope that is enough.