English Benedictine Congregation
Like all the professed monastic, canonical, and mendicant religious at the time of the Henrician dissolution, English Benedictine priests or scholars were assumed into the reformed secular clergy of the Church of England if they assented to the Supremacy.A relative few were martyred, with some monks tortured to death by being Hanged, drawn and quartered, some in provocative locations like their own Abbeys and associated holy sites or in the place where common criminals were executed on their abbatial estates.[5] As more rampant persecution emerged in reprisal to the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and fearing the congregation would die with him the last of the Westminster monks professed under Abbot Feckenham, the aged Dom Sigebert Buckley O.S.B, "aggregated" Doms Robert Sadler and Edward Mayhew O.S.B, two English monks, priests, and missionaries of the Abbey of Santa Giustina, Padua, and four other lay brothers and oblates to the near-extinct Chapter of Westminster (and thereby the English Benedictine Congregation) on 21 November 1607.The Deed of Aggregation was an unofficial, clandestine affair, treasonable under English law and without prior papal consent, with only Buckley, Sadler, and Mayhew personally present.The present congregation owes its original spiritual identity primarily to the Spanish Cassinese communities its monks were formed in, the dangerous situation of persecution, the need for priestly and catechetical workers in the English mission, and the general climate of Tridentine monastic reform.[10] In 1608 another community (ancestor of Ampleforth Abbey) was established in the disused collegiate church of Dieulouard, dedicated to St Laurence of Rome, in the Duchy of Lorraine (modern France).The missionary work of the EBC monks among the recusant Catholics in England began to attract women to the monastic life and 8 postulants travelled to Flanders with Dom Benet Jones lead by Gertrude More, great-great granddaughter to St Thomas More, settling near Douai.