But it is not in honour of St Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, that the monastery at Parkminster is dedicated, but of quite another saint.
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.
This monastery, founded in the Weald, upon October 17, 1877, is a great, if not a beautiful, pile of buildings, and is, in fact, one of the largest houses of the Order in the world. The visitor rings at the gate, and is admitted by a lay-brother dressed in the beautiful white habit, caught about the waist by a leathern girdle from which a rosary hangs. Upon his feet are rough shoes and his head is shorn but he greets you with a smile of welcome and leads you into a large quadrangle, where before you is the great Romanesque church with a chapel upon one side and the refectory upon the other, and all about are cloisters. Here over the entrance to the church is a statue of St Hugh. Within, the church is divided by a screen into two parts, the choir for the Fathers, the nave for the lay-brothers. Over the screen is a rood, and beneath, two altars, dedicated in honour of St John the Baptist, who went into the desert, and St Bruno, the founder of the Order. From the church one is led to the Chapter House, in which there stands an altar and Crucifix, and there upon the walls are depicted scenes from the martyrdom of the London Carthusians in the time of Henry VIII. From the Chapter House one is led to the Chapel of the Relics, where there is a beautiful silver reliquary that belonged to the English Carthusians before the Reformation, and in it is a relic of St Thomas of Canterbury. Here, too, is the stole of St Hugh and a bone of St Bruno.