The Communities, Cats and Catalogues of St Beuno's
- Jamie Hennessy Jackson
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Over the past six weeks I have been living and breathing St Beuno’s, the Jesuit house and centre of Ignatian Spirituality which started life as a theology college for the English Province. I look back on my experience cataloguing their archives and attending a long weekend retreat there for research and relaxation purposes last month.
St Beuno’s was founded in 1848 by Fr Provincial Randall Lythgoe SJ in the Clwyd Valley in North Wales (“Our Valley” to some Jesuits), in response to the need for a standalone college for higher studies. The house was named for Saint Beuno, a Welsh abbot who is credited with miracles of raising the dead including his niece Saint Winifred. The college offered ordination courses until 1926, when the theologate moved to Heythrop College in Oxfordshire, and from then on Beuno’s was a place for tertianships, the final year of Jesuit training. This remained until the 1970s, when growing revival of the Spiritual Exercises meant that the house began to offer retreats, and in 1980 the tertianship ended and St Beuno’s shifted focus fully to retreat and spirituality work. This continues to this day.
Having tasked me with cataloguing their collections, Rebecca (Province Archivist) suggested that before getting stuck in I first sign up to their bi-annual staff retreat, as a good opportunity to gain a more personal insight into the place I would be working on.
The Retreat
I arrived late on the Friday evening as a result of considerable train delays, which my Welsh co-passengers comfortingly assured me was business as usual when entering the valleys. Accordingly, I missed dinner but made it just in time to join the tour from Brother Alan Harrison SJ, a fascinating wander through the labyrinthine corridors of the impressive neo-gothic buildings, peppered with insights from his more than six decades with the Jesuits. As we walked, he explained the significance of the artwork, told stories from his time training there half a century ago, and pointed out the invisible lines which women had been barred from crossing. Immediately striking was the depth of silence; the five of us undertaking the retreat were the only non-silent retreatants in the building, and this combined with its fairly isolated location made for a serenely peaceful setting.
For some reason I was expecting fairly spartan accommodation, but I was given a lovely en suite room on the first-floor gallery overlooking the gardens. The weekend was a pleasant mixture of group sessions and reflections with our spiritual directors, walks in the stunning Welsh countryside, time to ourselves, and great food and drink. The freshly baked cakes and made-to-order English breakfasts ensured we were incredibly well-fed! The house and grounds are beautifully curated, and you can’t go far without encountering wobbling lambs or the house cat Pushkin. We also visited the Rock Chapel, a tiny construction with capacity for no more than 12 people, built on the hill known as St Michael’s in 1866 by a Jesuit student named Ignatius Scoles. I went again in the early morning on our final day at the suggestion of Alex, one of the spiritual directors, to see the morning sunlight shining through the beautiful rainbow-coloured stained glass windows created by artist Claire Mulholland.
By the time we were saying our goodbyes on Monday morning, I felt thoroughly rejuvenated. A weekend spent detoxing from the bustle of London life and its accompanying noise, light, and air pollution, as well as using my phone only to take photos, had allowed me to focus fully on my immediate surroundings. I felt I had gotten to know the place well and was ready to start working on its records.
The Cataloguing
I then spent the following month getting to grips with the St Beuno’s archives and arranging them into a cohesive collection. Like many Jesuit institutions, record-keeping was meticulously detailed in some areas whilst fairly scant in others. Beadle’s logs provide the best unbroken record of the college’s early history, with daily entries dating from 1853 until the move to Heythrop. A range of other sources fill in the gaps including Minister’s Logs, the diaries of individual Jesuits, and the records of the Debating and Essay Societies. Moreover, there are some particularly interesting papers concerning local archaeology. Two sets of human remains were discovered at Holywell, held in the St Beuno’s sacristy and theorised to be the bones of the 17th century Welsh Martyrs Phillip Evans SJ and Charles Baker SJ (you can discover more about these bones by visiting this online exhibition Holywell bones | Jesuit Collections). Correspondence with professional archaeologists reveals that the bones’ age and traumatic manner of death (decapitation and quartering, with their heads impaled on spikes) are consistent with the violent executions that these martyrs suffered. Fr Charles Newdigate SJ recorded many such notable archaeological and anthropological findings from the local area in a dedicated notebook, complete with hundreds of small illustrations.
It was fascinating looking back through the collections and encountering early historical records for some practices which still exist today. While I was there, Ruth (Director of St Beuno’s) spent an afternoon splitting one of the beehives which St Beuno’s keeps, so it was interesting to learn later on that beekeeping has been continuously practiced at St Beuno’s since at least 1887 and in the past yielded as much as 1700lbs of honey annually. This, alongside the farmland and gardens, provided a substantial source of income for the house, and in the early days also fed the residents.
Finally, I came across material commemorating a pilgrimage taken to the Rock Chapel in July 1954, including flyers, a scrapbook, and the draft of a sermon. I wondered how a sermon might be given to masses of people in a chapel that I had seen first-hand wouldn’t comfortably fit more than 10 people – but this confusion was dispelled when I came across photographs of a large congregation crammed onto the small hilltop surrounding the chapel.
Reflections
Towards the start of the year, I reflected on my experience cataloguing collections of personal papers and navigating the idiosyncrasies of our archival finding aids, sifting through reference numbers which seemingly no longer exist (or possibly never did?). Now, having been here for over half a year, these issues still present themselves when tackling the larger institutional collections that I have been cataloguing, but experience means I am learning to recognise the signs which suggest that certain items might not be quite as lost as they first appear, if you know where to look. There is considerable satisfaction in the detective work occasionally required to piece together missing links, and the St Beuno’s archives form a fairly complete collection.
I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the community at St Beuno’s, relishing in its beauty and steeping myself in its nearly 200-year history. Fittingly, my next cataloguing project will be the archives of its spiritual successor, the place to which the theologate was relocated in 1926: Heythrop College.
The catalogue descriptions for the above collections will soon appear on our online catalogue. If you would like to view these papers please contact us to make an appointment.
Comments