Editing St Benet's Hall, Oxford (section)

===Benedictine antecedents===
[[File:St Benet's Hall.jpeg|right|200px|St Benet's Hall]]

[[Benedictines|Benedictine]] monks had studied at Oxford since at least 1281, when [[Gloucester Abbey]] founded [[Gloucester College, Oxford|Gloucester College]]. The area today known as [[Gloucester Green]] was named after this college. In 1291, [[Durham Abbey]] founded [[Durham College, Oxford|Durham College]], and in 1362, [[Christ Church Priory]] in [[Canterbury]] founded [[Canterbury College, Oxford|Canterbury College]]. All three Benedictine houses of study were closed between 1536 and 1545, during the [[dissolution of the monasteries]] under [[Henry VIII]]. Gloucester College was eventually re-founded as [[Worcester College]]. Durham College was re-founded as [[Trinity College, Oxford|Trinity College]], but the original college's name is preserved in Trinity's Durham [[Quadrangle (architecture)|Quadrangle]]. Canterbury College's property was acquired by [[Christ Church, Oxford|Christ Church]]. Until the establishment of St Benet's Hall in 1897, the Benedictines had been absent from the university for over 350 years.{{citation needed|date=March 2021}}

St Benet's Hall was not a re-foundation of any of the former Benedictine colleges of Oxford. Rather, the hall had a tenuous connection with [[Westminster Abbey]] by virtue of its establishment by [[Ampleforth Abbey]]. In the 960s or early 970s, Saint [[Dunstan]], assisted by [[Edgar of England|King Edgar]], installed a community of Benedictine monks at [[Westminster]]. Although the Benedictine priories and abbeys in England were closed during the dissolution of the monasteries, one solitary Benedictine monastery was re-established in Westminster Abbey in 1553 by [[Mary I of England|Mary I]] as part of her unsuccessful attempt to restore Catholicism in England. After Queen Mary's death, [[Elizabeth I of England|Elizabeth I]] dissolved the monastery once again. By 1607, only one of the Westminster monks was still alive, [[Dom (title)|Dom]] [[Sigebert Buckley]] (c. 1520–1610). In 1608, Buckley "aggregated" two English exiles who had become monks of the Italian [[Subiaco Cassinese Congregation|Cassinese Congregation]], and thereby allegedly passed on to them the "rights and privileges" of the mediaeval English Benedictine abbeys (to be distinguished from the post-Reformation [[English Benedictine Congregation]]). In 1615, these two English monks became part of a community which took up residence in the abandoned [[collegiate church]] of Saint Laurent, in the town of [[Dieulouard]], near [[Nancy, France|Nancy]] in the [[Lorraine (region)|Lorraine]] region of north-eastern France. The monks adopted [[Lawrence of Rome|St Lawrence]] as their patron saint. In 1792, Dieulouard Priory was closed and the monks were expelled from France as part of the hostility against the clergy associated with the [[French Revolution]]. They opted to return to England.{{citation needed|date=March 2021}}

At that time a Benedictine monk-priest, Fr Anselm Bolton, was the chaplain to Lady Anne Fairfax at [[Gilling Castle]], [[North Yorkshire]]. She was the only daughter of Charles Gregory Fairfax, 9th and last Viscount Fairfax of Emley. She built Ampleforth Lodge for Fr Bolton just before she died in 1792.{{citation needed|date=October 2020}} In 1802, Bolton handed this house over to his brethren from Dieulouard who had been living in England without a permanent home for a decade. The lodge became their new monastery, Ampleforth Priory. In 1803, the monks established [[Ampleforth College]], today an independent Catholic secondary school.

The priory was elevated to the status of an independent [[abbey]] in 1899 by [[Pope Leo XIII]] in the [[papal bull]] ''Diu quidem est''. Ampleforth Abbey renamed the hall of studies as St. Benet's Hall in 1918 when it became a permanent private hall of the university.{{citation needed|date=March 2021}}