Thomas Habington of Hindlip (1560–1647), a Catholic gentleman, was the first historian of Worcestershire. Had it not been for the English Civil War, his Survey of Worcestershire would probably have been published in the 1640s. In fact it was not published until the 1890s, and then in a form and order which was very different from what he had intended. Others who worked on the history of the county (William Thomas, Bishop Charles Lyttelton, Peter Prattinton and, most importantly, T. R. Nash, whose ‘Collections’ for a history of the county appeared in 1781–2) did so on the basis of Habington’s unpublished manuscripts. In this article the genesis of the ‘Survey’ will be examined, the way in which his conception of its scope altered, his method of gathering materials, the additions he made to the work up to the time of his death in October 1647, and the relevance of his Catholicism to the Survey.

The accolade above, applied to Bishop Giffard in the 1720s, was bestowed by Edward Dicconson, then chaplain at Chillington Hall in Brewood, Staffs., the Giffards’ principal seat and hints at the combination of affection and veneration with which he was regarded by clergy and laity alike. The bishop, described by Archbishop Matthew as ‘a very old gentleman of delightful manners and deep piety’, was then about eighty years of age, having been born at Wolverhampton, probably in the opening year of the English Civil War, into a junior branch of that ancient family, referred to by Michael Greenslade as ‘perhaps the most considerable in the history of Staffordshire recusancy’. Frequently known as Joseph but increasingly as Bonaventure, the future bishop was the third of four sons of Andrew Giffard (youngest brother of Peter Giffard of Chillington) and his wife Katherine, daughter of Sir Walter Leveson, kt. of Wolverhampton, a place where the two families, also linked by earlier marriage, possessed substantial influence but which by the 1640s, as Dr Rowlands has shown, was hardly living down to its reputation as a hotbed of popery and a haven for ‘Rome’s snaky brood’, though in the following decade it was still ‘by many styled “Little Rome’”, echoing the title earlier applied to the Viscountess Montagu’s recusant establishment in Sussex.

As an undergraduate, Gladstone was enchanted by the preaching of Richard Sibthorp, but was unsure whether he could be trusted as a sound guide. So in December 1829 he wrote to his theological mentor, Edward Craig, an episcopal minister in Edinburgh, seeking an opinion. In reply, Craig described Sibthorp as a ‘very judicious man.’ Few would have dissented.

At a time of major divisions in the Protestant religious world, Sibthorp had established a reputation as a conciliator. In 1827, when the British and Foreign Bible Society was being torn apart by the Apocryphal controversy, he had been trusted by both sides to visit the Continent and report on adherence to the Society's revised rules. In the same year, he became Clerical Secretary of the Religious Tract Society, an office he held until 1836. In an inter-denominational Society, disputes over what should be published were constantly threatening to boil over and Sibthorp played no small part in ensuring that it did not suffer the convulsions that almost wrecked the B.F.B.S.

The Reverend George Dudley Ryder (1810–80), grandson of the Earl of Harrowby and son of England’s first evangelical bishop, had a promising career ahead of him in the Anglican Church. He was examined for matriculation by Newman at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1828 and soon joined the circle of Newman’s disciples: he was tutored by Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude and Robert Wilberforce, and was known as Froude’s protégé. A somewhat idle student, Ryder obtained a fourth class degree in classics in 1833 and the following January he was ordained by his father, Henry Ryder, Bishop of Lichfield. Many years later J.R. Bloxam, Newman’s curate at Littlemore, revealed that Ryder and some of his contemporaries had been refused testimonials for Holy Orders because they were known to be friends of Newman, while The Christian Observer alluded to Ryder’s advancement as an example of the abuse of Church patronage. Nevertheless Ryder’s ecclesiastical and aristocratic connections worked in his favour and he was installed as vicar of St. Werburgh, Hanbury, in Staffordshire in 1834.