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.

The monastery proper lies behind the church, where a vast quadrangle,
the Great Cloister, some three acres in extent, opens out, surrounded
on three sides by the little houses of the monks, with the graveyard
in the midst. Here the monks live, and are buried without coffin or
shroud in their white habits, the hood drawn over the face. The cells
are delightful to look upon, "a solitude within a solitu