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The Anglican Patronage of Monmouthshire Recusants in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Some Examples

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

John R. Guy
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Extract

In the first volume of his History of Monmouthshire, Sir Joseph Bradney admitted that ‘in Monmouthshire the principles of the old Catholic faith have never been lost to a large number of people. Many families of position in this district continued to adhere to the old doctrines.’ Thomas Richards, the most scrupulous of the historians of Welsh non-conformity, not only identified the Catholics of Wales as ‘the sons and grandsons of men who had never accepted the Protestant Reformation' but from his unrivalled knowledge of the sources for seventeenth-century religious history in the principality advanced two quite startling hypotheses. The first was that there is ‘positive proof of the silent growth of Popery during Propagation and Protectorate times’ (he pointed out that in 1676 the number of Catholics recorded in Monmouthshire was ‘within sixty-six of being equal to all other dissenters in [the county] gathered into one total’); the second, a result of his searching analysis of the so-called Compton Census, was that even the figure of 541 Roman Catholics in Monmouthshire—416 in the rural deanery of Abergavenny alone—was ‘too low’.

Type
Articles
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 452 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1980

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References

Notes

1 Bradney, J. A., History of Monmouthshire, vol. I, pt. 1 (London 1904), p. 22.Google Scholar

2 Thomas, Richards, Religious Developments in Wales 1654-1662 (London, 1923), p. 297.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 296.

4 Ibid.

5 Thomas, Richards, The Religious Census of 1676. Transactions of the Hon. Society of Cymmrodorion, Suppt. 1926 (London, 1927), p. 107.Google Scholar

6 Julian, Stonor, Six Welsh Martyrs (C.T.S., 1961), p. 11.Google Scholar

7 John, Hobson Matthews, A History of the Counter-Reformation in South-East Wales, Newport Library MS. qMOOO(282) (Cardiff, 1897), p. 219.Google Scholar

8 John, M. Cronin, ‘The Franciscan Recollect Missions—The Monmouth Residence 1687-1812,’ in St Peter's Magazine (October 1927), p. 294.Google Scholar

9 E.g. those of 1650, 1686, 1690 and 1717: Matthews, op.cit., pp. 198-200, 312-18, 327-8, 335-6.

10 Ibid., p. 318.

11 Ibid., p. 123.

12 N.L.W. Aberystwyth MS. 1626. Bradney, Monmouthshire, I, 1, p. 34. Cardiff Library, Rayer MS., p. 164.

13 Mathews, op.cit., p. 418; Richards, Census, pp. 91, 95.

14 N.L.W. MS. 1626.

15 Richards, Census, p. 91.

16 Matthews, op. cit. p. 123.

17 Bradney, Monmouthshire, I, 1, p. 34; Rayer MS. p. 164.

18 Bradney, Monmouthshire, I, 1, p. 40; I, 2, p. 319.

19 Matthews, op. cit., p. 327. Thomas Phillips of Garway, co. Hereford.

20 Rayer MS., p. 164.

21 Bradney, Monmouthshire, I, 1, pp. 205-06.

22 Parish Registers of St Maughan's.

23 This paper was read at the Twenty-Second Conference on Post-Reformation Catholic History of the Catholic Record Society, at Oxford in July 1979.