Fifteen years ago the present writers published a survey entitled ‘Ten Years of Recusant History’ (January issue, 1961). That article briefly described how this journal had evolved during its first ten years from a publication designed to supplement existing biographical works into ‘a periodical that would lay the foundations of a general history of Catholicism in these islands since the Reformation’.

This is a statement of aims which, from the vantage point of a quarter of a century’s experience, we see no reason to alter. While much excellent material, derived mainly from local records of all sorts, now appears in the flourishing crop of county recusant periodicals which have sprung up in our wake, the pages of Recusant History continue to offer extended space for the publication of long articles, or even series of articles, treating specific topics in full depth. We still believe that definitive studies of this sort, with full apparatus of sources and references, must form the necessary groundwork for any reliable general histories to be written in the future.

Such topics as we surveyed in 1961, for example biographies, family histories, recusant bibliography, and those wider questions concerning the status and fortunes of the whole Catholic body, have continued to be well represented in our pages during the ensuing fifteen years. But there has been growth as well as continuity. Looking back over the whole corpus of material published between 1961 and the end of 1975, we observe with pleasure that the previously under-cultivated period from 1700 onwards has received an amount of scholarly attention which fifteen years ago we did not dare to expect. Indeed, it has now been generally accepted that the boundaries of recusant history as a subject stretch onwards in time beyond those centuries when recusancy was a crime on the statute book. By a similar process the connotation of the word ‘recusant’ has been widened. It is perhaps not too much to claim that, by the expanded range of its subject matter, this journal has gone far towards validating the use of the word ‘recusancy’ as a general term covering post-Reformation English Catholicism even in its widest ramifications. It remains our aim to continue to explore and document its history and culture in all their rich variety.

There was a time when recusant history was written almost entirely from documents and architectural evidence was ignored, except by authors like Camm and Squiers. But at least it could be argued then that papers were more perishable than brick and stone, and in more urgent need of recording and preservation. Less than twenty years ago, in 1958, the theme of the first Oxford Conference on recusant history was ‘The Vanishing Archive’. Today, a much graver threat is that of the vanishing building. An exhibition held in London recently to mark European Architectural Heritage Year included records of at least twenty-five recusant houses that have been demolished, and in the last three months there have been two more cases which illustrate the urgency of the problem.

At the end of 1975, the Secretary for the Environment allowed the demolition of almost two-thirds of Brough Hall, near Catterick in Yorkshire. The central block of the house is Elizabethan and contains a priest-hole; about 1730 it was given a classical front, and forty years later two balancing wings were added by Thomas Atkinson. Now the east wing and all the centre except one pedimented bay are to be pulled down. This will mean the destruction of a panelled Elizabethan hall, of a Georgian room running the length of the first floor, of the hide, and of the Elizabethan friezes on the second floor. If, as often happens, the house must be reduced in size for economic reasons, the centre block should be preserved and the wings removed, as, for instance, at Mertoun in Berwickshire and (with the reluctant sacrifice of the chapel by William Ireland) at Houghton Hall in Yorkshire.

In the middle of the sixteenth century there were close ties between the families of Plowden, Englefield and Sandford. Since early in the century the Plowden family estate, Plowden Hall at Lydbury in Shropshire, had been in the possession of Humphrey Plowden, but at that time it appears to have been scarcely habitable. Humphrey Plowden and his wife lived in another house at Bishop’s Castle, which may have been Blunden Hall on the outskirts of the town; and it is probable that their eldest son, Edmund, who became the most celebrated lawyer of his day, was born there in 1518. When Humphrey Plowden died on 10 March 1558, Edmund succeeded to the family estate and he then began the repair and restoration of Plowden Hall. Among the Shropshire neighbours of the Plowdens were the Englefields, who owned large estates in the Isle of Up Rossall, near Shrewsbury. Plowden’s eldest sister, Margaret, had married Richard Sandford, an impoverished member of an old Shropshire family, and she and her husband were living at the Isle of Up Rossall on a small holding that formed part of the Englefield estates. Another of Plowden’s sisters, Jane, had married Richard Blunden who came from Bishop’s Castle, but he and his wife were then living at Burghfield, near Reading, in Berkshire. In 1569, Plowden bought property nearby which included the manor of Wokefield and other land at Stratfield Mortimer, Burghfield and Sulhampstead, and at some time he acquired an interest in Shiplake Court, the manor house at Shiplake which formed part of one of the Englefield manors in Oxfordshire.

The years between Donne’s marriage in December 1601 and his ordination in January 1615 were the central period in his religious development during which, though he retained Catholic habits and sympathies, he began to refer to the Church of England as his church and ultimately took Anglican orders. Over forty years ago, G. R. Elliott pointed out how Donne’s biographers have slighted these middle years, portraying them as a merely dull hiatus between the libertine brilliance of Donne’s youth and hislater eloquent piety:

But Bald and earlier biographers have generally misunderstood Donne’s middle years, on account of their acceptance of the idea, first expressed by Walton, that at the time of his marriage Donne had long since discarded his Catholicism and was either a free-thinking sceptic or a convinced adherent to Anglicanism. This has obscured the character and crucial importance of the middle period, which (like the whole of Donne’s life and work) cannot be comprehended apart from the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism that continued to polarise English religious life during the first decade of the seventeenth century.

In 1701, William Nicholls, an Anglican clergyman of Salsey in Sussex, published his English translation, ‘purged of Popish errors’, of Francis de Sales’ Introduction to a Devout Life. He prefaced it by an essay on ‘The Rise and Progress of Spiritual Books’, in which he wrote:

The iron-mining by Sir Thomas Preston of The Manor in Furness, Bart., is an interesting interlude in Restoration economic and legal history. First, it attests to the existence of iron-mining in Furness long before the eighteenth century and provides valuable insights into mining conditions and operations. Secondly, when Sir Thomas, a Catholic, attempted to dispose of his properties, including the iron-mines, to the Jesuits and the poor of Dalton parish, his cousin, Thomas Preston of Holker, Esq., initiated proceedings in the Court of Exchequer, claiming that the estates were forfeit because they had been granted for superstitious uses. In this article, the iron-mines will be examined both as lucrative producers of haematite ore and as a focal point of legal controversy.

Sir Thomas Preston, second son of Sir John, was born in 1643. By 1665 he had succeeded to the family titles and estates after the deaths of his father and brother. He married twice, his second wife being Mary, the daughter of Caryll, Viscount Molyneux of Sefton, whose marriage portion was £4,000, with £2,000 paid in 1666 and the remainder in 1667. They had three children: Francis, who died an infant in 1672; Mary, who married William, Marquis of Powis; and Anne, who married Hugh, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. Thus the 1660’s brought a happy marriage, children, and an improving financial position. The 1670’s brought the loss of his son and heir in 1672 and the sudden death of his second wife, after which Sir Thomas elected to abandon the world and enter the Society of Jesus. The two decades in his life are mirrored in the fate of his iron enterprise, which prospered in the ’sixties but then decayed rapidly.