Why Cluny Square and St. Edmund’s Hall?

The Abbey of Cluny was founded on the 2^nd of September 909 by the Abbot Berno and Count of Auvergne, William I, who placed it under the immediate authority of Pope Sergius III. The Abbey and its constellation of dependencies soon came to exemplify the kind of religious life that was at the heart of 11th-century piety.

The Benedictine order was a keystone to the stability that European society achieved in the 11th century, and partly owing to the stricter adherence to a reformed Benedictine rule, Cluny became the acknowledged leader of western monasticism from the later 10th century. A sequence of highly competent abbots of Cluny were statesmen on an international stage. The monastery of Cluny itself became the grandest, most prestigious and best endowed monastic institution in Europe. The height of Cluniac influence was from the second half of the 10th century through the early 12th. The Hotel de Cluny (Cluny House) in Paris, dates from around 1334, and was formerly the town house of the abbots of Cluny.

Significantly, nearby Prittlewell Priory was one of the English Cluniac monasteries and owned substantial local lands; hence the name Cluny House and Cluny Square!

Abbo of Fleury was a monk, and later abbot, of the Benedictine monastery of Fleury sur Loire (the modern Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire) near Orléans, France. He spent two years in England assisting Archbishop Oswald of York in restoring the monastic system. He was also abbot and director of the school of the newly founded monastery of Ramsey in the County of Huntingdon from 986 to 987. When in England he learned of the martyrdom of St. Edmund (November 870), and wrote a passion in Latin on it. It was his life of St. Edmund (click for a modern translation) that established the cult of the great East Anglian saint and prompted the dedication of the mission station of St. Luke’s Church to him in 1953.