In the last fifteen years of research into the history of Catholics in England it has become possible to discover much about their numbers and organisation, their political ideas and relations with the government, and their social and financial status. What still tends to be elusive is the nature and quality of their spiritual life. What follows is an attempt to see how far and under what conditions Catholics of Staffordshire in the eighteenth century carried out their religious duties.

This paper is based primarily on the Prefect of Studies Book which records the names of the staff and the students of the English College at Douai between the years 1750 and 1794. But before dealing with this period it is necessary to sketch in the background by giving a short account of the history of the College during the first half of the eighteenth century.

Lord Ripon’s reception into the Catholic Church early in September 1874 caused a minor sensation in the world of politics and a howl of no-popery protest in the non-Catholic press. Ripon’s conversion took London society and even his closest friends by surprise. Victorians had long accustomed themselves to the steady drift of ritualists and Puseyites to Rome, but were puzzled when this wealthy nobleman, evangelical Anglican, ex-Christian-Socialist friend of F. D. Maurice, and Grand Master of the English Freemasons, was received into the Catholic Church on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin on September 8, 1874.