The most famous apology for freedom of the press, Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, left no echo among its contemporaries and passed without notice in its own day. But a serious and detailed discussion of this question arose a few years later following on the publication in 1652 of an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Beacon set on fire. Of particular interest to the readers of this review is the evidence this controversy gives us about Catholic publishing during the 1650s. In the narrative of the controversy which follows we shall stress how the existence of clandestine Catholic publishing in England influenced the history of freedom of the press.

Cuthbert Ttinstall, last Catholic Bishop of Durham, exercised an episcopate of close on thirty years, at a period most momentous in the history of the Church in England. Appointed in 1529 and reckoning his pontifical years from 25 March, 1530, he died, in house confinement at Lambeth Palace, 15 November, 1559, three months after his final deprivation.

A poetry commonplace book in the Huntington Library (HM 198), comprising mainly the verse of notable English authors of the early 17th century, includes twenty-nine anonymous sonnets (vol. 2, ff. 88-95), most of them dedicated to the Saints and many highly personal in content. Although of considerable intrinsic merit, they seem to have been overlooked, possibly because of the relative importance of the numerous other poems in the volume and the fact that their authorship has never been established.

The “Staffordshire Clergy” who achieved such unfortunate prominence in the disputes surrounding the Catholic Relief Acts have been alternately condemned as the irresponsible ene1nies of authority and upheld as the victims of those defenders of the Church who “have wrought incalculable mischief” by confusing “heterodoxy with immorality, a misinformed mind with a malicious will”.

Thomas Eyre, son of Rowland Eyre and Mary Teresa Widdrington, was the last of eleven generations of the Eyre family who had passed down the Hassop estate from father to son in direct succession. He was born on 29 September 1743, the only child of parents so retiring that genealogists have assumed Rowland predeceased his father (d.1749); in fact he lived until 1777 and appears to have taken considerable personal interest in the Hassop estate. Large scale maps of the manors of Hassop and Calver made for him in 1752, and a carefully written book of the Hassop evidences compiled in 1768, have survived among the muniments. The only record of his participation in public affairs in Derbyshire is the appearance of his name as one of the signatories to a Notice of an Association for prosecuting poachers, made in 1751 by the leading landowners of the county. Rowland was survived by his wife, who died in 1785.

John King, Bishop of London, died on Good Friday, 30th March, 1621: “The next day at night he was buried priuately in Paules”. Shortly afterwards, as John Chamberlain tells us in a letter to a friend, it was commonly reported among Catholics that he had died a Catholic: “Wold you thincke the papists were so impudent as to publish that the late bishop of London died a Romish Catholike, and yt goes for current among them, of wch there is no manner of ground nor shadow but that out of charitie (both before and in his sicknes) he relieued some priests that were in prison and want: but this is one of their vsuall courses wch thay haue learned of the father of lies’. And before the year was out the claim had been made and answered in print: the affair, in short, rose to such proportions that Chamberlain's question, however rhetorical in intent, seems to deserve some attempt at an answer. Was it papist impudence? or is there any reason to suppose that Bishop King did die professing himself a Catholic?

In 1773 the four English Vicars Apostolic made detailed reports on the state of their districts to the Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome. A summary of tl1ese reports was published by Maziere Brady in 1877. This summary contains statistics for the number of priests and the number of Catholics in every county in England, and is valuable as providing the earliest detailed statistical picture of the English Catholic community to come from a Catholic source. It is not surprising, therefore, that it has frequently been quarried by historians.

A previous study traced the career of Rowland Eyre the cavalier during the Civil War and Commonwealth (Recusant History, vol. 8, no. 1). The present account continues the story from the time of Charles II; the earlier history of the family will not be recapitulated.

The bibliography of the English works by Matthew Kellison, set out in the Allison and Rogers Catalogue, has been modified by information subsequently discovered, showing that the important controversial treatise which first appeared under the title The Gagge of the New Gospel should be ascribed to John Heigham.

Of the three major branches of the Yorkshire family of Constable, one, the Constables of Flamborough, was Parliamentarian and Puritan at the outbreak of the Civil War; the other two, those of Burton Constable and Everingham, were Royalist and Catholic. This article is concerned with the fortunes of the Everingham branch, who, by 1642, were owners of substantial amounts of landed property in both Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Their house at Middle Rasen in Lincolnshire, where they spent most of their time before the War, was surrounded by an estate of 3000 acres, while the Yorkshire estate consisted of 3000 acres in and around Everingham in the East Riding, 1000 acres at Drax in the West Riding, land in Holderness and a house in York.

As is well known, the Spanish Inquisition was originally established to investigate suspected cases of reversion to Judaism by baptised Spaniards, but in the century of the Reformation it naturally came to extend its jurisdiction over heretics of all kinds, native and foreign; and many English Protestants who landed on Spanish soil were dismayed to find themselves the objects of its attention. Most of them were sailors or merchants, visiting willingly or by accident those Spanish territories which fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition Court in the Canary Islands, some details of which have already been published. The records of this court survived the massive destruction of Inquisition archives in the early nineteenth century; so too did the records of the court at Toledo, which had jurisdiction over most of Central Spain, and which despite its inland position also found itself dealing with a number of Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans. In view of the general opinion that Calvinism represented a tougher line in the Reformation, it is interesting to see that all the Calvinists and Anglicans accepted reconciliation with the papacy, while most of the Lutherans resisted the pressures of the Inquisition and were condemned.

In the following essay I have tried to put into practice some ideas about the investigation of English Catholic communities outlined in a paper which I gave to the recusant history conference in 1965. These were much indebted to the school of sociologie religieuse inaugurated in France by M. Gabriel le Bras; I have tried to adapt its approach and methods for use in the different conditions of an English nonconfortning body. The assumptions made are that the congregation is a major object of study in the history of any Christian tradition; and that congregations, being secial entities, may best be studied by methods, including statistical methods, proper to the study of societies. In applying these assumptions to the history of English Catholicism I do not claim to be doing something different from what historians of the subject have usually done, but to be asking about single cells questions which have traditionally been aimed at the body as a whole. How big was it, and was it getting bigger or smaller? Who belonged to it, and why? Where did its members live? What relations had they with one another, outside religious belief and practice? With how much enthusiasm, with what particular emphases did they believe and practise? How did they get on with the community at large? I have sought here to answer some of these questions for four congregations in rural Northumberland between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century: Hesleyside alias Bellingham, Biddlestone, Thropton and Callaly. I chose this period because materials of the sort one needs were available for it; and also because it is a period of peculiar importance in the history of English Catholicism, covering the transition from its ancient to its modem phase, and providing a point of departure for enquiry in either direction. There is little significance in the communities chosen. It is incidental that the region in question should have provided most of the English support and much of the English scenery for the rebellion of 1715, or that Biddlestone should have a small niche in literary history as the original of Osbaldistone Hall in Scott’s Rob Roy. One of the characteristics of this type of investigation is that it does not much matter where one begins. Another is, however, that the value of conclusions drawn depends on. the number of cases studied. I hope to pursue some myself, but should be most happy if others were inspired to do the same. One might, in this way, reach a more intimate and comprehensive understanding of the whole English Catholic community than has so far been achieved or, I suspect, is possible for any other religious community in the country.

Information about the early years of St. Gregory's College in Seville has never been abundant. The archives of the College which passed into the custody of the Rector of St. Albans in Valladolid were only fragments of a much larger series of records. There is no “Liber Ruber” or anything comparable to the diaries of Douai, instead only scattered documents survive: account books of monthly expenses for food and necessities, minute books of faculty consultations on college discipline and student behaviour, records of land transferrals and rentals, copies of depositions connected with legal disputes, and various miscellaneous letters. It was from this variety of sources that in 1932 Canon Henson first compiled a “Tentative List of the Students of the English College, Seville”. He drew upon the college archives, Foley's Records of the English Province, Knox's Douai Diaries and other printed memoirs, particularly the volumes of the Catholic Record Society. On completion there were entries for four hundred and twenty-seven students, who covered the entire history of the college from 1591 to the suppression of the Jesuit order in the eighteenth century. Subsequently Canon Henson prepared a larger revised list which he hoped would form the basis for a volume comparable to his studies of St. Alban's in Valladolid and St. George's in Madrid. In 1955, when I visited Valladolid, Canon Henson very graciously lent the portion dealing with the first fifteen years of the college to me to assist my research into the Elizabethan Catholics in Spain, with the suggestion that I add to it any further names and information that might be found. Canon Henson died on February 1, 1961, after a lengthy illness. In 1955 this list contained ninety-six entries; at present it is increased to one hundred and forty-two. I have found reasons, however, to change some of his original identifications. It is to be hoped that by this publication other researchers will be prompted to offer further additions. I would like to acknowledge the generous hospitality of the present Rector of St. Albans, Msgr. David Greenstock, who permitted me to review the entire list in the college library's manuscripts.