The English Carthusian Community at Nieuport, Flanders

Summary

Editor's note

The documents here published for the first time (Blount MSS, D 9/19–23) are five in number and are kept in the archives at Mapledurham House, accompanied by an impressive manuscript history of the English branch of the order (Blount MSS, E 32, not transcribed here). Although the financial arrangements of nuns are the primary subject of this volume, the attempt to rescue the Nieuport Charterhouse sheds further light on the precarious financial position of English religious houses.

The Sheen Anglorum Charterhouse was a community in Flanders of English Carthusian monks driven out of England into exile in 1539. They settled in Nieuport in Flanders in 1626, remaining there until 1783. The Prior at the time of the fundraising efforts of Michael Blount II of Mapledurham (1719–92) was Dom Gilbert Jump (1712–74), who succeeded Thomas Yate as Prior in 1743 and had previously held the office of Procurator. The establishment was always small. It seems to have been financed by charitable donations, with a large proportion coming from London tradesmen, whereas a large element of convent funding came from the families of the nuns themselves. It is noteworthy that some contributions to the Charterhouse fund are indicated as being from Protestant donors (including a few clergy); no such indication appears with the convents.

Michael Blount's preface to his account book well explains the context of the attempt to rescue the establishment. His younger brother Walter (name in religion: Maurus) was a monk there. He was born in 1727 and died at the age of eighteen, a Benedictine monk at Douai, on 14 October 1746, according to Croke; the transition from one order to another and one establishment to another is unexplained.

The text presented here is a transcript of the fair copy bound record of donors (Blount MSS, D 9/19), in the hand of Michael Blount II, the prime mover in this initiative. The remaining items consist of the documents used by Blount in compiling the fair copy; they are:

1. 1. Blount MSS, E 32: ‘A history of the English Carthusians or Charter monkes … With an appendix of the dignitie of a monasticall life’. Handwritten copy of a printed book(?). Late seventeenth century (c. 1670–80), contemporary leather binding.