Aelred Carlyle

Who was Aelred Carlyle?

Aelred Carlyle, O.S.B. founded, around 1895, the first Anglican Benedictine community of monks.

Born Benjamin Fearnley Carlyle, he was educated at Blundell's School. In 1892, he commenced medical training at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London. He did not complete his medical training. Instead, influenced by the Oxford Movement of the period, he embraced a vision of monastic life as he envisioned it having been followed in the Middle Ages, full of ritual and tradition. A charismatic individual, Carlyle succeeded where others had failed in having the vision of such a life within the Church of England approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury. By 1895 he had established a community of monks under his leadership, taking monastic vows under the monastic name of Aelred, assuming the role of abbot.

After several moves, Carlyle's community was established on Caldey Island, South Wales in 1906. When the Caldey Island community came into conflict with the Bishop of Oxford in 1913 over conformity to Anglican practices, Carlyle and most of his monks became Roman Catholic. They were only the second such group to be received in a corporate manner into the Roman Catholic Church, the example having been set by the Society of the Atonement in the U.S. several years earlier. Due to financial pressures, the community moved to Prinknash Park, Gloucestershire in 1928.