Aylesford Priory
I feel that Aylesford is not well appreciated in England. People around the world wear the Brown Scapular out of devotion to Our Lady, yet many English Catholics would be quite unaware that Aylesford is the place where this devotion originated. According to the standard account, Our Lady appeared to St Simon Stock in 1251 and gave him the brown scapular as a mark of her special protection for the Carmelite order. The smaller form of the scapular has since become a very popular token of sharing in the spiritual benefits of the Carmelites. (There is information about St Simon Stock and the Brown Scapular in the St Simon Stock entry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.)The Priory was founded by Richard de Grey in 1242 when he invited a group of religious to found a house on the banks of the River Medway. They had been living as hermits on Mount Carmel but fled in the face of the increasing success of the Saracens. St Simon Stock was a major figure in the change of the Carmelite way of life to that of the mendicant friar. A tremendous and rapid increase took place in the late 13th century with the Carmelites establishing houses in London, Oxford and Cambridge and many other major towns.
On 13 December 1538, the house was received into the King's hands by the Bishop of Dover, cravenly implementing Henry VIII's policy of dissoving all the religious houses. Thomas Cromwell arranged in the following year for Sir Thomas Wyatt to receive the alienated property and the priory remained in private hands until the 20th century.
In the 1920s, the Copley-Hewitt familiy lived at Aylesford, leasing the property from the estate of the Earl of Aylesford. On 29 June 1930, a fire devastated much of the property but left some of structure of the original buildings intact. Mr Copley-Hewitt then purchased the property and set about some restoration work. When the property went on the market again in 1949, the Caremelites initiated a successful appeal to purchase the property so that the Carmelites could return. On 31 October 1949, fifty friars walked in procession through the village, kept vigil and celebrated the first Mass on All Saints Day. Fr Malachy Lynch was installed as Prior and worked tirelessly to construct the new shrine and chapels. The most precious acquisition was that of the relics of St Simon Stock which were handed over by the Archbishop of Bordeaux to the Archbishop of Southwark in 1951.
