[1] The community of St. Edmund was formed in Paris in 1615 by Dom Gabriel Gifford, later Archbishop of Rheims and primate of France.

Amid the political upheavals caused by the Dreyfus affair around the turn of the 19th century, the French prime minister Waldeck-Rousseau introduced an anti-clerical Law of Associations (1901) that "severely curbed the influence of religious orders in France".

In 2005, two monks returned to Douai, France to form a community there and restore the historic links to English monasticism.

[4] The monastery and its community have traditionally maintained strong links to the Stuart dynasty and the Jacobite cause; with King James II of England buried in the monastery in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris (the community's home from the early 17th century till the French Revolution and the community's relocation to Douai in northern France), members of the House of Wittelsbach (present pretenders to the Jacobite claim) being educated at the community's former boarding school (at their present location), and the immediate past abbot, Geoffrey Scott OSB, is a member of the Jacobite Society.

Because it contains these organs, and especially because of its unique and reverberant acoustics, the Abbey Church is frequently used as a recording location by musical performers.