English Convent

This guide to the English Convent in Bruges begins with a slab of Carrara marble in the altar, a gift from Winifred, Countess of Nithsdale, in gratitude for her husband's escape from the Tower of London in seventeen sixteen. It follows the exiled English Catholic nuns who first fled to Bruges nearly a century earlier, the marquess who funded the church itself in seventeen thirty-nine, and the dowries and gifts that kept the convent alive through centuries of upheaval, including a second exile during the French Revolution. Listen for how money quietly built almost everything you see around you.