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A charterhouse (French : chartreuse; German : Kartause; Italian : certosa; Portuguese : cartuxa; Spanish : cartuja) is a monastery of Carthusian monks. The English word is derived by phono-semantic matching from the French word chartreuse [1] and it is therefore sometimes misunderstood to indicate that the houses were created by charter, a grant of legal rights by a high authority.
The actual namesake is instead the first monastery of the order, the Grande Chartreuse, which St Bruno of Cologne established in a valley of the Chartreuse Mountains in 1084. [2]
The London Charterhouse was the first English site to which this English version of the word was applied.
