A Victorian cleric named Joseph Leycester Lyne dreamed of establishing an Anglican monastery at Llanthony, Wales. Lyne took the name of Father Ignatius and has gone down in history as one of the most eccentric and and energetic of all Anglo/Catholic pretenders.
Ignatius of Llanthony
During the first years of my quarter of a century living in the damp lands I would spend my holidays touring England with my sister in my beat-up, vintage Volvo—exploring the less-visited corners of my beloved adoptive country. I’d head for the backroads, and in those days (the mid 1980s) there was an abundance of bed-and- breakfast establishments.
Toward late afternoon, tootling along some narrow road in the West country, we’d spot a rickety sign indicating a “Farmhouse Bed and Breakfast” and turn to bounce down a dirt lane to find a farmer’s wife, a friendly welcome, and cozy accommodation.
Our road atlas had “Places of Interest” marked, so in taking the luck of the road we expected serendipitous experiences (if that is not an oxymoron). The “Places of Interest” could be an old mill, a grand country house, a railway museum, a ruined abbey, historic gardens, a royal lodge, the remains of a Roman villa, or a neolithic chambered tomb. Every inch of England is crammed with history, and exploring the countryside in such a haphazard manner was a delight.
On one of these adventures we found ourselves in the Black Mountains in one of the most unspoiled corners of Britain—the Welsh Marches. This mellow borderland between Wales and the English Midlands is the home of rolling hills, pleasant river valleys with lush forests, hill farms, and country market towns. Nestled there in the Black Mountains, the “place of interest” we discovered was the ruined priory of Llanthony.
Llanthony was founded by was founded around 1100 by Norman knight, Hugh de Lacy (sometimes recorded as William de Lacy), who renounced his warrior life after a spiritual vision and established a hermitage on the site. By 1118, it had evolved into a priory for Augustinian canons, becoming one of the great monastic houses of medieval Wales.
I was in my late twenties at the time, and that summer afternoon I felt very strongly that I wanted to return to this romantic ruin and re-establish the monastic life in the Church of England. It was one of my more unrealistic and romantic pipe dreams, but not too long after our visit, I learned that I was not the only romantic religious to dream of renewing medieval monasticism in the Arcadian idyll of Llanthony.
I learned that a Victorian cleric named Joseph Leycester Lyne also dreamed of establishing an Anglican monastery at Llanthony. Lyne took the name of Father Ignatius and has gone down in history as one of the most eccentric and and energetic of all Anglo/Catholic pretenders. Lyne made it as far as being ordained a deacon, but could not find a bishop of the established church to raise him to the presbyterate. Undaunted by the discouraging attitude of the hierarchy and disinherited by his wealthy family, Lyne adopted the monastic habit and summoned young men to join his fledgling order. He supported the itinerant community by preaching missions around the country—his style mixing robust evangelicalism with Catholic- styled devotions.
The owners of Llanthony Priory ruins refused to sell to Father Ignatius, so he bought 32 acres ten miles up the valley at Capel-y-ffin, where he eventually erected some monastic buildings and the transept of a planned reproduction of Llanthony Priory Church. The little community lurched from disaster to disaster, while Father Ignatius continued his itinerant preaching ministry. Reports of healings, hauntings, and an apparition of the Blessed Virgin all spice up the tale. The curious story of Father Ignatius and his monastic adventures has been told in several biographies, but the best one is Building Up The Waste Places by Peter F Anson—also known for Bishops at Large—his fascinating chronicle of Anglican episcopi vagans: aka wandering, renegade bishops which I reviewed here.
Father Ignatius pursued his monastic dream at the same time the Catholic Church was being re-established in Britain. Despite the fact that Catholic Benedictine monks were returning and establishing authentic monastic life, Father Ignatius declined even to visit them, much less learn from them. Instead he was the self-appointed restorer of Benedictine life, and insistent that it should be within the Church of England—despite the fact that most Anglicans were resolutely opposed to high ceremonialism and any whiff of papist monasticism.
Anson also records the efforts of two or three other Victorian, Anglican wannabe monks and nuns: Aelred Carlyle among them. The others are not quite so eccentric as Father Ignatius, but all of them persevered in their pretense, sidestepping not only the claims of Catholicism, but also the discipline and direction of their own Anglican superiors.
An example of Father Ignatius’ freelance monasticism is that he eventually accepted ordination to the priesthood at the hands one of the ecclesiastical rogues from Anson’s other book, the notorious Mar Timotheus—aka Joseph Vilatte a French-American wandering bishop who claimed apostolic succession from the Jacobite Syrian Orthodox Church and later the American Catholic Church. Mar Timotheous turned up at Capel-y-ffin one day in 1898, offered to ordain Father Ignatius, did so, then disappeared on his travels.
What is entertaining (and tragic) about clergymen like Father Ignatius is the blend of ignorant naïveté, unfailing optimism combined with folie de grandeur. All of it is illustrated by the Anglo-Catholic penchant for ceremonialism, clerical costumery, and (in current slang) LARPing—(Live Action Role Play). Apparently a good number of serious well-wishers reminded Father Ignatius that “the habit does not make the monk,” but he refused to accept that the costume, the churchy bric-a-brac, and the clerical titles are empty without the proper authority to validate them. Thus the observation that Anglo-Catholicism is like an ecclesiastical dude ranch: “All hat and no cattle.”
While it is easy to ridicule papal pretenders, mock monks, and renegade bishops, it prompts one to re-examine one’s own priorities—being suspicious of excessive display in religion and always searching for inner honesty, and authenticity of authority and action.
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The featured image, uploaded by Philip Pankhurst, is a photograph of the monastery built by Joseph Leycester Lyne (Father Ignatius) in Capel y Ffin. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The Carte de visite of Ignatius of Llanthony is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.