Although the English Benedictines had been dissolved by Henry VIII in the 1530s, one monastery was re-established at Westminster Abbey in 1556 under the Catholic Queen Mary I. However, this in turn was dissolved by Queen Elizabeth and by 1607 only one of the Westminster monks was left alive – Fr Sigebert Buckley.

He professed a group of English monks in France and in 1615 they took up residence in an abandoned church of St Laurence at Dieulouard, near Nancy, north-east France. The community of St Laurence was forced to flee at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1792 and after spending some years in Lancashire in northern England settled at Ampleforth in 1802. Here, Ampleforth Lodge was the residence of Fr Anselm Bolton, chaplain to nearby Gilling Castle, and he handed over the property which became the new monastery.

A year later the new monastery school, Ampleforth College, was opened. The first abbey church was completed in 1857 and pulled down one hundred years later to make way for the present church, begun in 1924 and consecrated in 1961.

Hospitality is the core work of the monastic community, offering a year-round programme of spiritual retreats, events and courses. A small number of monks also serve the local parishes and work as chaplains in the school.
In the 1990s the Bishops of Zimbabwe invited Ampleforth Abbey to establish a monastery in the country and so in 1996 the monastery of Christ the Word was founded at Macheke in Zimbabwe. Today the community provides a number of spiritual and pastoral services to the local church and to other religious communities.