The Catholic Record Society celebrates its centenary this year. Its inaugural meeting took place in the Chapter Hall of Archbishop’s House, Westminster, on 10 June 1904 with Archbishop Bourne in the chair. The first meeting was convened by Joseph Stanislaus Hansom, who gathered together more than seventy enthusiastic founder members. The original roll was predominantly lay (fifty in total, mainly male, mainly resident in the London area) with a sprinkling of ‘old Catholics’, a few secular priests, a trio of Benedictines, a couple of Jesuits, and an Oratorian. Hansom’s successful initiative was the culmination of a venerable tradition in English Catholic historical scholarship. Benedictine and Jesuit scholars had long collected materials on the history of their respective orders.

In Ripon Liberty only one [Catholic] gentry family survived this period [the eighteenth century] (the Trappes of Nidd) and in their case the main line died out and a cadet branch from Carlton succeeded them’; this fact of mere survival both justifies and permits setting this account before the reader. Christopher Trappes (XIa), the founder of the Carlton branch, would probably have remained single, if he had not found an heiress with just sufficient income for marriage; had he remained single, the Trappes family would have died out in 1761, and this history would have remained unwritten. As it is, there survives just enough material to show something of how one recusant family contrived to retain its identity through and after the penal times.

Almost a century ago Calthrop recognized that there were important recusants in some Lincolnshire county families. Interest has been revived recently by Martin and Finnis in an article on the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby, and more specifically on Goddard Tyrwhitt, who became a martyr in 1580 (see fig. 1 for location maps). Whilst the Tyrwhitts were at the top of the gentry hierarchy, the Forsetts of Bilsby near Alford, were practically at the bottom, so presenting some social contrasts with the former family. The Forsetts were newcomers to the county sometime in the mid- to late-fifteenth century and were minor manorial lords at Bilsby in the east Lincolnshire Marsh from the time their documentation begins with John Forsett in 1482 down to about 1600.

This is the third and (barring further significant discoveries) the final part of my index, the first and second parts of which were published in Recusant History in October 1982 (nos. 1–177) and May 1998 (nos. 178–300). In Part II, for reasons of space and cost, I omitted, unless there was more to report on them, houses mentioned in my Secret Hiding-Places (1989) but not included in Part I. For reference and analysis, however, it is inconvenient to have a numbered list and a book, each including houses not in the other; and in any case there is now more to report on many of these houses. The one hundred houses in Part III (nos. 301–400) therefore include all sixty-nine of those that were mentioned, however briefly, in Hodgetts 1989 and were not included in Parts I or II. Among them is Scotney Old Castle in Kent (no. 320), which is one of only ten houses in the country where there is a surviving hide mentioned in an Elizabethan or Stuart account of a search. Forty-eight of the hundred were in Granville Squiers’ Secret Hiding-Places (1933).

Bishop Francis Hutchinson (1660–1739) has been of interest to historians of English witchcraft largely as a result of the publication in 1718 of his sceptical witchcraft text, An Historical Essay Concerning Witches and Witchcraft. However, Hutchinson was also responsible for the publication of an array of anti-Catholic writing, published both in England and Ireland. This article examines two of these books in detail, namely A Compassionate Address to … Papists (1716) and A Defence of a Compassionate Address (1718). It is argued below that these books contain the type of the anti-Catholic propaganda issued by Whigs, in the aftermath of the Hanoverian accession, as part of their campaign to build lasting political hegemony out of short-term ascendancy.

In considering the period from 1559–1603, and the attitudes within the recusant community to the acceptance or rejection of the Elizabethan Settlement, the first major event giving extensive evidence of political attitudes in the northern region is the Rising of the Northern Earls, a crisis which, as elsewhere in Elizabethan England marked the watershed for the fortunes of Catholicism during the reign. An analysis, conducted at some length, of its causes, events and consequences is, indeed, indispensable to understanding Catholic survival in Elizabethan northern England.

The Catholic population of the Thames Valley in the period 1660 to 1780 was scattered and small when compared with that of Lancashire or the North East of England. Yet, despite the community being dispersed and inhabiting an area close to the centre of government, the recusant population thrived, growing from an estimated 729 in 1676 to 1362 by 1767. The Thames Valley, for the purpose of this study is taken to include Berkshire, most of Oxfordshire and parts of South Buckinghamshire, North Surrey and Western Middlesex (see maps). The main centres of Catholicism throughout this period congregated around gentry households, such as the Stonors of Stonor Park in Oxfordshire and the Wollascots of Woolhampton in Berkshire.

This article seeks to investigate the public images of the 1569 Rising in the North, as conceived by government policy, propaganda and loyalist writers on the one hand and by Catholic theologians and sympathisers on the other. It focuses especially on texts such as proclamations, homilies, street and folk ballads, pamphlets and tracts. To date there is only one study which deals extensively with the polemical literature on the Rising. This is that by J. K. Lowers published in 1953. He concentrates on Tudor ideas of civil obedience and its representation in loyalist writing wanting to help literature students to understand contemporary texts. As a literary study his book is valuable and he makes some highly relevant points.

To date there is only one study which deals extensively with the polemical literature on the Rising. This is that by J. K. Lowers published in 1953. He concentrates on Tudor ideas of civil obedience and its representation in loyalist writing wanting to help literature students to understand contemporary texts. As a literary study his book is valuable and he makes some highly relevant points.

With the accession of James VI of Scotland to England’s throne as James I, many English Catholics began hoping that the vexing question of religion would soon be resolved in a manner not unfavourable to their faith. James, after all, was the son of the Catholic Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and it seemed not impossible that he would convert to the Catholic faith. The diplomatic contact with Spain that would eventually produce the Treaty of 1604 was already in process and religious toleration was one element in the discussion. But the more significant grounds for Catholics’ hope came most certainly from the position on the English religious question enunciated by the King himself. As his reign began, James seemed to be demonstrating a more favourable attitude towards Catholics than towards Puritans. His Basilikon Down declared the Church of Rome and the Church of England ‘agree in the grounds’, while his first speech to Parliament in March 1604 characterized Catholicism as ‘a religion, falsely called Catholik, but trewly Papist’, while defining the Puritans, as ‘a sect rather than a Religion’.

The Highland policies of the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) have been much discussed. In light of subsequent efforts of Royal Bounty catechists directed to areas where ‘Popery and Ignorance do mostly prevail’, it is worth considering how questions of education and faith were regarded within the Catholic Highlands of Scotland. The geographical scope of what Archbishop Mario Conti, chairman of the Scottish Catholic Heritage Commission, has described as a ‘broad swathe’ from east to west can be seen in the Historic Catholic Sites brochure which accompanies this issue of Recusant History. ‘Popery’ was routinely linked with ignorance by Established Church ministers who sent reports, but these same reports emphasised ‘the number of small schools, which apparently were established, and the existence of women catechists, trained by the clergy as their own fore-runners, in early eighteenth-century Scotland.’

While there was considerable interest in education in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (it is unnecessary to remind ourselves that it was not compulsory) there can be little doubt that it had suffered much as the result of the changes brought about by the Reformation. The religious houses of men and women where boys and girls had received some schooling were swept away and the new grammar schools only partially filled the void. The universities too had been through a period of upheaval. By the end of the sixteenth century the State had laid it down that every schoolmaster had to have a licence to teach and that no children might be sent abroad for their education. The curriculum in the schools was narrow; despite proposals, which had little effect, to make education more practical, the choice of subjects was still largely dictated by theological considerations and Latin, Greek and Hebrew were predominant in the grammar schools. The State, of course, did little or nothing to help although some sequestrated revenues were allotted to education during the Commonwealth period.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the high levels of growth of Liverpool’s trade and shipping, which had commenced in the 1660s, continued to the extent that Liverpool became Britain’s second largest port after London, certainly by the end of the 1780s, by which date local merchants were trading to a lesser or greater extent with all parts of the known world with which they could legitimately trade. It was during the half century after 1750 that Liverpool came to dominate the British slave trade. Catholics participated in the mercantile and maritime activities of the port of Liverpool in the second half of the eighteenth century in a variety of capacities, for example as merchants engaged in overseas trade, brokers, shipbuilders, shipowners, seamen, including ships’ captains, owners of businesses concerned with the ancillary shipping trades such as coopering and ropemaking and practitioners of the processing of imported goods such as tobacco.

John Stanford, missioner with the Hunlokes at Wingerworth in Derbyshire from 1692 to 1737, is nowadays remembered for one event. ‘In a huff and a pett’, the received story goes, he—being unable in 1725 properly to account as administrator for the Common Fund of the secular clergy of the Midland District—handed it over to his vicar apostolic, John Talbot Stonor.

To those familiar with the traditions of clergy fund independence, this peevish act must appear self-evident treachery. However—just how soundly based is the story?

With a rich history of over four centuries behind it, St. Alban’s English College in Valladolid possesses bibliographical and documentary sources of an exceptional wealth. The present paper reports on the constitution of a team of researchers in the University of Valladolid permanently devoted to the study of such documentary holdings. Extensive reference is made, more particularly, to the preparation of a critical edition of one of the manuscripts kept in the College Archive: ‘A Sketch of the Ancient British History . . . ’, an ecclesiastical history of early Britain written by former College rector Philip Mark Perry (1720–1774).

Catechisms in the vernacular for the Catholic community in England appeared surprisingly early after the break with Rome, and were published continuously from the 1560s by English and continental presses, although many have not survived. Catechetical material is also often found within books dealing primarily with apologetical, educational, devotional and liturgical subjects. From the beginning, there seems to have been types of catechism written for particular groups such as teachers, children or the illiterate. Laurence Vaux, who taught English exiles’ children in Louvain in the 1560s, published the first extant catechism for the simple and unlearned in 1568, and with the publisher John Fowler’s encouragement, his later catechisms carried illustrations ‘for those not yet able to read’. Vaux’s catechisms were followed by popular European catechisms translated into English by the Jesuits.