The idea for this paper came to me a dozen years ago while re-reading Will Herberg’s Protestant - Catholic - Jew, subtitled ‘An Essay in American Religious Sociology’. Mr Herberg made extensive use of survey data which, of course, are not available to the student of Elizabethan-Stuart England, but some of his most pertinent insights came from his analysis of manners of contemporary American speech. I began at that time to note and classify the ways in which Englishmen of this period described religious beliefs and attitudes. The conviction slowly formed that terminology not only flowed from religious thought and belief but in its turn influenced religious thought.

The choice of houses for this fifth article was not easy. In the first of the series I argued that the building of priest-holes took place in three stages, divided roughly by the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, the events which mark the beginning and the end of Nicholas Owen’s work. In the second, I discussed a group of hides from the early period, at Ufton, Mapledurham and Compton Wynyates. In the third and fourth I dealt with two groups of houses where there is evidence of Owen’s work: in East Anglia at Oxburgh, Braddocks and Sawston, and in Warwickshire and Worcestershire at Baddesley Clinton, Hindlip and Harvington. In the sixth (and last) article I shall deal with the most fully documented hides of the third period, namely those used by Charles II after the Battle of Worcester. But with such a wealth of material to draw on, which houses should go into the remaining article on the middle period ?

The third and fourth articles were illustrations of the work of two of the Jesuits who met at Baddesley Clinton in October 1591: John Gerard in East Anglia and Edward Oldcorne in Worcestershire. Even to complete the picture for these two priests would require another three articles. No county is richer in hiding-places than Worcestershire and the neighbouring parts of Warwickshire, and Oldcorne’s work extended much further afield, into Herefordshire and even into Wales.

Catholic educational endeavour in England during the eighteenth century depended not only on the enterprise of individuals, but also on the fluctuations of the political situation and the degree of local complaisance. Schools were often ephemeral, though one or two founded during the century proved to be permanent, and in some recusant areas, notably in south Lancashire, Durham County, York, the North Riding and London, educational activity was persistent. Catholics had no counterpart in England for the standard offered in Grammar and Public Schools, Dissenting Academies and the Universities. They had to look for this education to their colleges and schools on theContinent, and their educational activities at home were usually designed to prepare boys for these further studies. It is against this background that this article attempts to assess the educational work of the secular priest, Simon George Bordley.

The earliest and the best known of the schools in Lancashire in the eighteenth century was that of ‘Dame Alice’ Harrison at Fernihalgh. Started in the early years of the century, the school continued until she retired shortly before her death in 1760. During her last years another well-known school, one for boys, had been started by Simon Bordley. Our knowledge of this school has been greatly increased by an account book kept by him from 1759 to 1771, and preserved at St Edmund’s College, Ware.The manuscript consists of a quire of paper folded into folio sheets and is in the original paper cover.

When the Newcastle Chronicle in an editorial on ‘Irishmen in England’ in 1867 declared that ‘Tyneside is famous for itshospitality’, it was not merely voicing a random appeal for calm during the tense days of the Fenian scare. In spite of the fact that the North-East had by 1861 the fourth highest ratio of Irish to English in all England and Wales, the region had been, and continued to be, remarkably free from anti-Irish and anti-Catholic hostility. This was not because Irish immigration had been gradual: between 1841 and 1851 the Irish-born of Newcastle and County Durham—nearly all of whom were Catholic—had increased their numbers by over 200%. By the latter date, the Irish-born numbered over 25,000 and together with their English progeny comprised most of the 38,000 Catholics estimated to be in Newcastle and County Durham in 18525. In the 1830’s the Irish presence had been negligible, but by 1851 the Irish-born alone made up 5.1% of the total populationand 8% of Newcastle’s population. By 1861 a correspondent of the Nation reported of the Irish within a ten-mile radius of Newcastle that ‘except in London, Liverpool, and Manchester, there is no such Irish force to be met with in England’. Yet, despite this, only one anti-Irish riot of significance ever took place in Newcastle. This was during the No-Popery agitation of 1851 when a street preacher (by legend ‘Ranter Dick’) began a harangue in the midst of the dense population of Irish Catholics in the Newcastle slum of Sandgate. That the riotingwas never repeated nor matched elsewhere in the North-East, and that it wassoon rendered into a Geordie song more amusing than bitter, is only one of the many indications of the ephemeral nature of the No-Popery crusade in the North-East. Together with the evidence of bonhomie shown toward the Irish Catholics by, for example, Poor Law officials and city corporations, the region stands in contrast to those areas of England, Scotland and Wales where the Irish Catholics appear to have been surrounded by acrimony.

John and Henry Donne matriculated from Hart Hall, Oxford, on 23 October 1584, aged 12 and 11 respectively. Their father’s sister was married to Robert Dawson, who kept the Blue Boar, on the corner of St Aldate’s and Blue Boar Lane, as a tenant of New College; and R. C. Bald writes that ‘no doubt they visited the Blue Boar Inn from time to time to see the members of the Dawson family’. But he does not include one clue to the Dawsons’ religious sympathies, and hence to the likelihood of the Catholic Donnes being both welcome and willing guests. In 1577, William Cole, Vice-Chancellor of the University, recorded of the parish of St Aldate’s: ‘There is one Henslowe, a master of arte of nyne or tenne yeres standing, once of Newe Colledge and expeld out of that house for poperie, who lyeth nowe at the signe of the Blewe Bore at one Daston’s and never commeth to the Churche. His host is wealthie; what he is I knowe not.’