One of the problems left unresolved by historians who have treated of the troubled episcopate of Richard Smith concerns Smith’s claim to jurisdiction over the Catholic laity in England. Two questions have never been satisfactorily answered: What exactly was the nature of the jurisdiction that he claimed? and How did he set about trying to exercise it in practice? Anyone who has read the published histories that touch upon these questions will be aware that they aroused bitter and prolonged controversy but will have been left with no very clear idea of what Smith actually claimed the right to do and did.

This index is an appendix to my series of articles in Recusant History (1972-77) and a supplement to Granville Squiers, Secret Hiding-Places (1933). The 177 houses listed below can therefore be divided into three groups. Twenty-eight, of which twenty-two were in Squiers, have been discussed before in Recusant History and are only dealt with briefly here. Another thirty-four are houses where Squiers now needs correcting or amplifying. The remaining 115 are not in Squiers at all but contain (or contained) something definite enough to justify recording. Houses in Squiers on which there is nothing much to add have been omitted here, and so have all but seven of the places listed in Winifred Haward’s two booklets, Secret Rooms of Yorkshire (1956) and Secret Rooms of North-West England (1964). Ninety-five other houses, none of them in Squiers or Haward, have been considered and discarded, either for lack of sufficient evidence or because the ‘hides’ are inauthentic examples of no interest.

In February 1747, Bishop William Laurence York, O.S.B., coadjutor since 1741 to the Vicar-Apostolic of the Western District, wrote to Propaganda lamenting that for the past eighteen months he had been ‘a fugitive from my ordinary residence, and have as yet no fixed abode’. The bishop’s ‘ordinary residence’ was the Bell-tree house in Bath whence he had fled at the time of the ‘Forty-five after the mayor had been handed a letter ostensibly implicating Dr York in Jacobite activity and promising him the see of Carlisle if the Young Pretender proved victorious (in one of the documents here printed Bath and Wells is mentioned in the same context!). The mayor advised him to withdraw from Bath for a time, and this he did. The documents which follow and which are among the uncalendared State Papers (Domestic) in the Public Record Office, shed a little light upon the sequel.

The crisis referred to in the title of this article occurred in the General Chapter of the English Benedictine Congregation (E.B.C.) in 1717, when a certain Father Laurence Fenwick succeeded in getting himself elected quite unworthily as the President of the Congregation for the ensuing quadriennium. It is the purpose of this article to make some study of what is almost certainly the greatest crisis which the English Congregation has ever passed through, a crisis about which there is nothing in print. Whether it is possible to analyse Fenwick’s motives and find out what he was really trying to do remains to be seen, but no man could have manipulated the Chapter in the way that he did single-handed; he must have had accomplices in a scheme that was worked out in advance, and in fact a situation can be seen developing for some time of which no one is likely to have foreseen the outcome, but which was evidence of a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. There was marked unrest and discontent among certain members of the Congregation, which appears to have started soon after the Revolution of 1688. It cannot exactly be proved, but I hope to show that there is almost certainly a connection between these events, and that the root cause of the trouble in the English Benedictines was precisely the departure of James II from the throne and what this implied.

The letters from which the extracts that follow have been selected were all, with one exception, addressed to Edward Galloway, a Jesuit priest who was stationed in Norwich from c. 1759-74 and who was the superior of his Jesuit colleagues working as missionaries in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge and Essex. They form a collection known simply as ‘Galloway Letters’ in the Archives of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (AEPSJ). The letters contain much in the way of trivial matter submitted to Galloway for his information, approval or advice, and most of this has been omitted in making this selection, the primary object being to choose such letters and passages as concern those places in Suffolk at which Jesuit priests were stationed or which they used as bases at the time—Bury St Edmund’s, Coldham Hall, near Bury and Gifford’s Hall, near Stoke-by-Nayland, and also places they visited to minister to the scattered Catholics. The method adopted in presenting this selection is to give first the number of the letter in the collection preserved in the Jesuit Provincial Archives, then the passage chosen (retaining the original spelling but with some punctuation added), then editorial comment.

In a recent article in this periodical on the identity of the early seventeenth-century controversialist who wrote under the pseudonym ‘John Brereley’, I published some biographical notes on the Jesuit, Lawrence Anderton (1575-1643) who is sometimes mistakenly credited with authorship of the ‘Brereley’ books. These notes included new evidence on a hitherto very obscure phase of Anderton’s career, the five or six years after he left Cambridge in 1597 to become a Catholic and go abroad to study for the priesthood. I was able to show that he studied at the English College at Seville and returned to England, a priest but not yet a Jesuit, a few years later. The date of his return seemed to be determined by an entry in the College accounts stating that his viaticum was collected on 24 March 1603. Of his life at the College, however, I could discover nothing beyond the fact that, while there, he went by the alias Lawrence Rigby or Ribe. Since publishing my article I have come across a piece of evidence which throws a little further light on his career at the College and which also suggests that he left Seville to come on the mission a few months earlier than the date of the viaticum would seem to indicate.

Two recent articles in Recusant History have drawn attention to the Protestation Returns, and used them as evidence for the size and strength of the Catholic community in the seventeenth century, as well as for evidence for the existence or non-existence of ‘Church Papists’. The purpose of this article is to move the discussion on towards an examination of the reliability of the Protestation Returns themselves as giving an accurate picture of the size of the Catholic community, and, in particular, to examine the evidence in the case of the parish of Midhurst in West Sussex, a well-known centre of recusancy.

This bibliography, like those in previous Newsletters, has been compiled largely from a search of periodicals, especially those taken by the Institute of Historical Research. The items listed cover the period from the accession of Elizabeth I to the first Vatican Council. The publications of the Catholic Record Society, the Catholic Archives Society and the local recusant societies (Essex Recusant, Kent Recusant History, London Recusant, Northern Catholic History, North-West Catholic History, Staffordshire Catholic History and Worcestershire Recusant) have not been included.