Sigebert Buckley

Sigebert Buckley O.S.B. (c. 1520 – probably 1610^[1]) was a Benedictine monk in England, regarded by the English Benedictine Congregation as representing the continuity of the communities tradition through the English Reformation.

Although the English Benedictines had been dissolved by Henry VIII in the 1530s, one solitary monastery was re-established in Westminster Abbey by the Roman Catholic Queen, Mary I of England 20 years later. After only a few years, her half-sister Queen Elizabeth I dissolved this monastery again. By 1607, only one of the Westminster monks was left alive: Father Sigebert Buckley.^[2]

Buckley survived until the reign of James I, by which time a number of Englishmen had become Benedictines in the monasteries of Italy and Spain and had obtained a faculty from Pope Clement VIII (in 1602) to take part with the secular clergy and the Jesuits in the English mission. It was through the efforts of the English monks of the Cassinese or Italian Congregation (including Thomas Preston) that Buckley became instrumental in preserving monastic continuity in England.^[3] It is through Buckley that the English Benedictine Congregation lays claim to an unbroken continuity with the pre-Reformation monasticism of England.

Ampleforth College, the largest Roman Catholic boarding school in England, was opened in 1802 and is run by the Benedictine monks of Ampleforth Abbey, which traces its history through Buckley.