Prinknash Abbey

Prinknash Abbey
The Abbey of Our Lady and St. Peter at Prinknash

St Peter's Grange, Prinknash Abbey
Monastery information
Order	Benedictine, Subiaco Congregation
Established	681 at Gloucester as St. Peter's Abbey
Disestablished	1539
Reestablished	1928
Mother house	Benedictine monks of Caldey Island
Diocese	Diocese of Clifton (Roman Catholic Church)
People
Founder(s)	Abbot Serlo (1072-1104), re-founded under Ælred Carlyle (1928)
Important associated figures	Dom Bede Griffiths, Ælred Carlyle, Stephen Horton

Prinknash Abbey (/ˈprɪnɪdʒ/) is a Roman Catholic monastery in the Vale of Gloucester in the Diocese of Clifton, near the village of Cranham. It belongs to the English Province of the Subiaco Cassinese Benedictine Congregation, which is itself part of the worldwide Benedictine Confederation.

For nearly 900 years the land known as Prinknash has been associated with Benedictine monks. In 1096 the Giffard family, who had come to England with William the Conqueror, made a gift of the land to Serlo, Abbot of St. Peter's, Gloucester. A large part of the present building was built during the abbacy of William Parker, the last Abbot of Gloucester, around the year 1520.

It remained in the abbey's hands until the suppression of the monasteries in 1539 when it was rented from the Crown by Sir Anthony Kingston who was to provide 40 deer annually to King Henry VIII, who used the House as a hunting lodge. Prinknash Park continued to be used as a home for the gentry and nobility of Gloucestershire during the next few centuries and each generation left its mark on the property.

On 1 August 1928 a Deed of Covenant was made out by the twentieth Earl of Rothes, the grandson of Thomas Dyer Edwards, a Catholic convert, whose wish was that Prinknash should be given to the Benedictine monks of Caldey Island. These monks had converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism in 1913 under the leadership of Abbot Ælred Carlyle, although he left monastic life in 1921 to work as a missionary priest in Vancouver.