The Story of November 21. The date of November 21 echoes throughout the history of Portsmouth monastic community. For those who are not monks, or even those who are, excepting the English Benedictine Congregation, the date may not hold particular significance. Yet somehow it has come to link several notable occasions:

• On November 21, 1918, the first Benedictine novice took up residence at Portsmouth. In a marginal note of an essay on the “Dies Memorabilis,” Dom Damian Kearney writes: “Dom Benedict Brosnahan, first novice, took up residence at Portsmouth, saying Mass in village to allow Dom Leonard to celebrate the first Mass on 11/27/18.” He adds that November 27 was the First Sunday of Advent that year, auspicious for the beginning of the new community.
• On November 21, 1949, coinciding with the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lady, with Dom Gregory Borgstedt as superior, Portsmouth’s establishment as an independent house of the EBC was officially promulgated.
• On November 21, 1958, ground was broken for the present Belluschi church and monastery, forty years to the day after the first monk moved into the Manor House.

Dom Leonard Sargent, OSB

Why November 21? The day holds great symbolic value to the English Benedictine Congregation. It conjures a kind of apostolic continuity, a perseverance, and tells a story of humility and simplicity. It points to November 21, 1607, when Dom Sigebert Buckley was the last surviving monk of Westminster Abbey, and “his community consisted of himself alone,” as “the only Benedictine monk in regular standing left in England.” Benedictine communities had been severely suppressed during the Reformation, and the Catholic faith itself remained under severe threat. As Fr. Hugh Diman recounts in an article from 1940, the singular Benedictine monk left in England, Dom Sigebert “inherited in his own person, both legally and canonically, all the rights, privileges, and powers that belonged to the Congregation as a whole.” These rights and privileges were thus at this time hanging by the slender thread still held in the enfeebled hand of this ninety year old monk. Here is the story as told by Father Hugh in the “Raven” (a School publication) of 1940-41:

Fr. John Hugh Diman

“Among the Catholic exiles living in foreign countries, there were several young Englishmen who had become students for the priesthood, and who were looking forward to being sent back to England on the dangerous mission of helping to bring back the English people to the old Faith. Among these were two who had joined the monastery of St. Justina of Padua, in Italy, and so had become Italian Benedictines. Soon after their novitiate was ended, they were permitted by their Superiors to join a band of missionaries who were returning to England. It is well known that, at that time, for a priest to say Mass in England or to preach or in any way to propagate the faith meant punishment by death. Nothing, however, could deter the young religious who were resolved to help restore the Catholic faith in their fatherland or to give up their lives in the attempt. As has been said, two of them were young Englishman, who had joined a Benedict monastery in Italy. It was their great desire not only to take part in the missionary work in England, but to do so as members of an English Benedictine Community.

“While these thoughts were in their minds, probably before their return to England, they heard of the survival of this old Benedictine, Dom Sigebert, and determined to go and see him and to make the request that he would affiliate them to his own Community, if in anyway this could be done. As his own Community consisted of himself alone, he certainly had the right to do this, if anyone had it – in fact, it had been established a short time before this by those who knew all the circumstances, that, as Dom Sigebert Buckley was the only Benedictine monk in regular standing left in England, he inherited in his own person, both legally and canonically, all the rights, privileges, and powers that belong to the Congregation as a whole. As a result of this, on that late November day in the year 1607, he received these two young Benedictines – English by birth, but belonging to an Italian house – as members of his own Community, all that was left of the famous Saint Peter's Monastery of Westminster.

“The names of these young men were Robert Sadler and Edward Maihew, and the fact that they joined at exactly this critical time, when the only monk left in England was ninety years old, is what has made the day a Dies Memorabilis from then until now. The old man who was nearly or totally blind at the time, and who died three years afterwards, in the reign of James I, was the connecting link which saved the long Benedictine line in England from total extinction. With the reception of these two young monks, the Congregation began the recovery that finally has brought it to its numbers and strength in the present day.

“Looking back in the other direction from this memorable day, we trace the unbroken history of Benedictine life in England to the landing of St. Augustine, afterwards called St. Augustine of Canterbury, who had been sent from the Monastery of the Caelian Hill by Pope Saint Gregory, the Great, (the patron saint of our Priory), and who landed with his forty companions in Ebbsfleet, England, in 597.

“The continuity of all the Benedictine houses of the English Congregation today in England and America with the Houses before the Reformation, was saved by this one man and he, ninety years old, blind and feeble, and with a record of over forty years in prison as a confessor of the Catholic faith. J.H.D.”

The Rest of the Story? While Fr. Hugh rightly calls us to honor this day and the heroic perseverance of Dom Sigebert, we also discover that there is some historical ambiguity surrounding these events. In an unpublished essay entitled “The Dies Memorabilis and the Founding of the E.B.C.,” Father Edmund Adams (1939-2016), a monk of Portsmouth, presents some of the complexity in the historical background here, and concludes that there was in fact no canonical basis for Dom Sigebert’s passing of “rights and privileges” to Maihew and Sadler. Briefly addressing the complex politics, both secular and ecclesial, of this period, Fr. Edward makes the case that the claims of the Cassinese monks to have inherited the rights of the Benedictine congregation must be understood more fully in their historical context. He points to “pro-Jesuit” versus “pro-crown” Catholics, and notes that Spanish Benedictine monks disputed the validity of the claims of Sigebert’s “community”:


Citing the decline of Spain, the waning of the “Counter-Reformation spirit“, and the dwindling influence of the Jesuits, Fr. Edmund sees conditions as ripe to help create a context in which the Order of Saint Benedict could be re-introduced as a kind of open “third force” between the Jesuits and the Appellants: “…it is in the 1590s that a number of students from the English colleges at Valladolid and Rome begin to leave and enter monasteries in any appreciable way first, as a trickle, then, as a flood… From the beginning the connection between the Appellants and these English Benedictines was strong; so strong, that when these monks were finally given permission to go to England in 1602, the pope made them take an oath to stay out of clerical politics altogether.“

The complexities of relations between civil and ecclesial authorities provide a critical piece in understanding the intent and stakes in the return of Maihew, who had proposed the idea of returning at the general chapter of his Cassinese congregation in 1594. Concern that a new monarch in England could potentially return to the Catholic faith also brought the concern that the Jesuits might claim former monastic lands and possessions. Such concerns, and not simply the spiritual ideal of a kind of apostolic Benedictine continuity, were a part of the mix in claiming the “right and privileges“ claimed to be possessed by Sigebert. “Certainly, when these Cassinese monks reached England (1603) the first thing that was on their mind was to link up with Father Buckley, who had just been released from Framingham Castle with the succession of James I. They met Father Buckley at the house of Frances Woodhouse at Caston in Norfolk. From then on, until his death in 1610, Father Buckley was provided for by these two monks. And it was in the last few years of his life that Father Buckley passed on the Benedictine heritage to them… celebrated as the Dies Memorabilis”


Fr. Edmund notes that the old English monasteries had not been grouped into a “congregation“ in any juridical sense. Each house retained autonomy, thus there were not shared rights and privileges of the congregation. Even if such rights did exist, Fr. Edmund argues, with the papal declarations, “whatever had existed before became canonically extinct.”

Fr. Edmund Adams at a football game

His conclusion is that one can only think of the inheritance of November 21 as a symbol – “but a very important one, especially for that time.” He highlights a passage from David Lunn, a historian of this period: “Buckley‘s inherited rights were regarded as something inalienable from himself – the sort of heirloom which the holder can neither dispose of nor will away from the next of kin. It is of the essence of an heirloom to have a sentimental and quasi-sacred value in the family, to which belongs, whatever its real value may be; and Sigebert Buckley‘s inheritance was of that nature. At the time, when English Catholicism was largely in embattled squirearchy, it became important, for social as much as for polemical reasons, to preserve any claim to continuity with the medieval past.”

A personal “Dies Memorabilis” for Fr. Edmund – receiving a belated Portsmouth

diploma from head of school Dr. James DeVecchi at graduation (2013)

The symbolic value of November 21 remains firmly in place in the present day English Congregation – certainly, it would seem, in this house. To align the beginning of this community, its establishment as an independent house, and the building of its church with the Dies Memorabilis provides ample evidence of that. And now, more than 400 years after Sigebert Buckley’s bequest, we still find it to be held as a great achievement of monastic perseverance and evidence of a legacy of the continuity of the Benedictine heritage.

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