The
University of Douai was founded under the patronage of
Phillip II when Douai belonged to the
Spanish Netherlands. It was prominent, from the 1560s until the
French Revolution, as a centre for the education of
English Catholics escaping persecution in England. Connected with the University were not only the
English College, Douai, founded by
William Allen, but also the
Irish and
Scots Colleges and the
Benedictine,
Franciscan and
Jesuit houses. Throughout Europe, there were around 800 such seminaries. They prepared Jesuits for missionary work in England, with 60 migrating in the 1570s, and around 500 by 1603. The first Jesuits were
Edmund Campion and
Robert Persons. The Benedictine
priory of
St Gregory the Great was founded by
Saint John Roberts at Douai in 1605, with a handful of exiled English Benedictines who had entered various monasteries in Spain, as the first house after the Reformation to begin conventual life. The community was established within the
English Benedictine Congregation and started a college for English Catholic boys unable to find a Catholic education at home, and pursued studies at the University of Douai. The community was expelled at the time of the
French Revolution in 1793 and, after some years of wandering, finally settled at
Downside Abbey, Somerset, in 1814. Another English Benedictine community, the Priory of
St. Edmund, which had been formed in Paris in 1615 by Dom Gabriel Gifford, later Archbishop of
Rheims and primate of France, was expelled from Paris during the Revolution, and eventually took over the vacant buildings of the community of St Gregory's in 1818. Later, following
Waldeck-Rousseau's Law of Associations (1901), this community also returned to England in 1903, where it was established at
Douai Abbey, near Reading.
Douai School continued as an educational establishment for boys until 1999. In 1609 the English College published a translation of the Old Testament, which, together with the New Testament published at
Rheims 27 years earlier, was the
Douay–Rheims Bible used by Anglophone Roman Catholics almost exclusively for more than 300 years. For a time there was a
Carthusian monastery (charterhouse) in Douai, which is now the
Musée de la Chartreuse de Douai. ==Notable people==