Arising out of the comprehensive penal code outlined above were much Privy Council business and considerable work for the conciliar and Common Law courts, the courts of the Established Church and other enforcement-agencies. This section is concerned particularly with two classes of documentation (nearly all of it in the Public Record Office): the Registers, minutes and papers reflecting the Privy Council’s part in the treatment of Catholics and Catholicism, and the records of relevant proceedings in the principal secular law-courts—part only of a network whose other components will be discussed in due course and which is merely sketched in the next few lines.

Documents relating to Catholics comprise both material issuing from the administrative side of the Chancery and reports, certificates, etc., received by it, as well as information registered in it for record-purposes. The first group, embracing grants of recusants’ forfeitures, pardons and various commissions concerning papists and priests, stems chiefly from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the second runs from the mid-seventeenth century into the eighteenth and the third (Chancery-enrolments of Catholics’ deeds and, especially, wills) is predominantly Hanoverian.

As a century-long series specially concerned with recusants convicted under the 1581 and later Acts, one class of documents merits particular attention: the Recusant Rolls of the Exchequer (1592-1691). Initially, however, penalties owing to the Crown for recusancy, as for other religious offences, were recorded on the Pipe Rolls of sheriffs’ accounts amid numerous unrelated items of royal revenue and it was not until the early 1590s, following a spate of convictions prompted by the Armada-crisis of 1588 (ensuing upon the more stringent anti-recusant legislation of the previous year) that special Rolls devoted to the thousands of recusancy-cases were inaugurated. Catholics penalised on other grounds usually appeared in the Pipe Rolls and after the cessation of the Recusant Rolls as a separate series the Clerks of the Pipe long continued to receive an allowance for ‘drawing down and charging recusants’ convictions’.

Ancillary to the Pipe and Recusant Rolls, whose data they both amplify and modify, are two series of Exchequer Memoranda: those of the Lord Treasurer’s and of the King’s (or Queen’s) Remembrancers. These record multifarious financial matters of concern to the Crown, of which recusancy-penalties were but one category; Catholics mulcted on other grounds also occur in these documents, cross-referenced with various Exchequer records—some of them prior to the 1581 recusancy legislation—and continue to appear in them long after the Recusant Rolls come to an end. However, it is via cross-references from the latter that the bulk of Catholic material in the Memoranda Rolls is to be found—particularly in the L.T.R. series, the Communia sections of which contain important records, or Recorda, giving details of recusancy-convictions, seizures and settlements, total or partial, and the grounds for discharges (e.g. payment, conformity, erroneous assessment, legal flaws) as well as much personal information. The significance of these and related documents in building-up ‘Exchequer Dossiers’ of individuals has been expertly demonstrated in two articles by the late Dom Hugh Bowler and more recently they have been drawn on to illuminate Elizabethan and seventeenth-century Catholicism in the West Midlands. To a certain extent derivative from the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer’s series are the Memoranda Rolls, just mentioned, of the King’s (or Queen’s) Remembrancer, which shed some light on recusancy cases—particularly ones initiated by Common Informers in the 1580s—though usually to a lesser degree than the former series.

The State Papers (Domestic) at the P.R.O. are not an organic archive but a ‘voluminous conglomeration’ chiefly associated with the Secretaries of State: mainly letters, papers, etc., received by them. This huge collection, much of it calendared in a hundred volumes to the start of Anne’s reign, plus four of ‘Home Office papers’ for the beginning of George III’s, contains an abundance of essential source-material for the study of Catholicism in England from Elizabeth I’s reign onwards, so vast and varied that it is almost impossible to classify. It includes statements by spies and informers, petitions from papists, intercepted Catholic correspondence, prison and other lists, reports and queries from various officials, evidences of conformity (not necessarily the last word), details of travel-passes issued, for example, to Catholics anxious to go abroad during the ‘Popish Plot’ crisis, and of awards of recusancy-penalties to grantees; numerical and financial data; papers relating to Assizes, Sessions and ecclesiastical administration; tantalising items of unknown origin and relevance.

Official action against recusancy and other religious offences involving Catholics has left numerous traces in county and municipal records, particularly those of Quarter Sessions, although for two decades near the start of our period that court was deprived of the power to convict persistent recusants. Such offenders may still, however, be found in Sessions’ records during those years, usually en route for the Assizes, perhaps having been first ordered by the Justices to confer with an Anglican divine, and Catholics continued to occupy the attention of the Bench on other grounds, both judicial and administrative, among them Mass-going and possession of popish books on the one hand, certifying their places of abode on the other. J.P.s might also find themselves serving, not always congenially, on special local commissions with widening terms of reference which by 1591 were concerned with both recusants and seminary priests; these bodies, and the religious leanings of their members, have to be taken into account in the regional study of Elizabethan Catholicism. Investigation may uncover evidence of their activities—and of non-co-operation with them—in a variety of sources: returns to the central government, commissioners’ own papers (not necessarily preserved in the county to which they appertain) and the records of parochial, county and municipal authorities revealing liaison with churchwardens and Justices of the Peace, with here a Lord-Lieutenant and elsewhere the city fathers.

Although some Anglican documentation with a bearing on Catholic recusancy and associated matters has appeared in print, the majority of these records remain unexplored including most of the act books of the ecclesiastical courts—‘among the more strikingly repulsive of all the relics of the past’—which perhaps have a special significance, despite their failings, for the first half of Elizabeth’s reign before the emergence of much relevant secular source-material. An indispensable guide to non-parochial archives is Dr Dorothy M. Owen’s The Records of the Established Church in England; for parish records there are W. E. Tate’s classic study, The Parish Chest (third edition, 1969) and the National Index of Parish Registers while the comprehensive Pilgrim Trust Survey of Ecclesiastical Archives, containing references to derivative and other published material, can be updated by more recent catalogues and lists of specific holdings. In addition to documentation to be looked-for almost throughout our period there are, to 1641, records relating to ecclesiastical commissions, diocesan and provincial (Canterbury and York). On sources for ecclesiastical commission business, especially in the southern province, there is much information in Roland G. Usher’s Rise and Fall of the High Commission (1913), valuably supplemented by Dr Philip Tyler’s revisionist Introduction to the 1968 reprint which calls attention to material not seen by Usher, notably the rediscovered act books of the York commission, a source for early Elizabethan Catholic survival and appertaining to parts of the country remote from its own jurisdiction (such as the distant diocese of Salisbury, whose own fragmentary act book likewise casts sidelights on other areas).