PREFACE The records printed in this volume belong to the history of the English Benedictine Congregation in the seventeenth century. The Society has already printed a considerable number of records concerning English Benedictine nuns (in Vols. VI , IX, XIII, XIV, XVII and XIX), but has not so far dealt with the English monks. The records here printed do not pretend to completeness, for a complete collection of the extant documents would occupy several volumes; but, so far as they go, they provide historical material of primary importance. In order that the reader may be able to place these records in their proper setting , we may be allowed to set before him the following brief outline of English Benedictine history. That history may be distinguished into three periods. First, there is the primitive period of isolated monasteries, with little or no relation one to another, a period which begins with the advent of St Augustine and his companions and extends through Saxon and Norman times down to the thirteenth century . Secondly, there is the central period, when the monasteries obeying a decree of the Fourth Lateran Council ( 1215) embraced the congregational system , their superiors meeting in general chapters and taking counsel for the benefit of the whole body of autonomous monasteries. This period extends from the year 1218 down to the general dissolution of the monasteries under King Henry VIII. In Queen Mary's reign there was an attempted revival in which Westminster Abbey was re-established; but the revived monastery was dissolved again by Queen Elizabeth . It provided , however, a connecting link between the second and third periods of English Benedictine history in the person of one of its monks, Dom Sigebert Buckley, who lived on into the reign of King James and through whom the present-day Congregation has full juridical continuity with the pre-reformation Congregation. Thirdly, there is the modern period of the present English Benedictine Congregation just mentioned , a Congregation established in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, with its monasteries abroad and its monksvisiting England only in the guise of missionaries. This Congregation has grown considerably in size, its houses are now all situated in the home country, its work has developed and changed, its government has been revised ; but it remains still the Congregation which was re-established at the beginning of the seventeenth century . is with this Congregation, and with the history of its early years, that the records assembled in this volume are concerned. These records are of two main kinds . Of the six items here printed, four are of a more purely historical type (Nos. 2-5), whereas
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