Well is this monastery dedicated in honour of St Hugh.  And if you do not know why let me write it here.  It is well known that after the murder of St Thomas and Henry II.’s public repentance for his part in all that evil, Pope Alexander III. gave him for penance a crusade of three years in the Holy Land, but when that was found not to be convenient he commuted it for the building of three monasteries of which one was to be Carthusian, for the Carthusians at that time had no house in England.  This Order had been founded at Grenoble in 1086 by St Bruno, who had been sent by St. Hugh, Bishop of Grenoble, to a desert spot in the Alps 14,000 feet above the sea.  There St Bruno founded his monastery known as the Grande Chartreuse.  His monks were hermit monks, each had, as each has still, his own little dwelling.  The Order, which has never been reformed—­Cartusia nunquam reformata Quia nunquam deformata—­and has uniformly followed the Rule approved by Pope Innocent XI., recognises three classes of brethren, the fathers, the conversi or lay brethren, and nuns.  Each house is governed by a Prior and each monk lives, as I have said, in a separate dwelling of five little rooms and a tiny cloister, or rather ambulatory, facing a little garden.  His food is given him through a hatch at the foot of the stairs leading to his rooms.  He attends Mass in Choir, Matins and Vespers too, but the other Hours are said in his cell.  As the Carthusians were when they first came into England so they are to-day.

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