It has not, I think, been generally realised up till now, that Francis Bird was a Catholic. Joseph Gillow includes him in his Biographical Dictionary of the English Catholics but this is a source hardly known to historians of Art and one which recusant historians are hesitant about using because Gillow is sometimes inaccurate. In this case, Gillow may have been able to check his written sources against an accurate family tradition, since Francis Bird was a distant ancestor of his through the marriage of a great-great-grandson, George Thomas Ferrers, to Mary Gillow of Hammersmith. Francis Bird was the leading sculptor whose career bridges the gap between the age of Gibbons and the age of Rysbrack. It is clear that he had a large practice and must have made free use of assistants. He appears to have had a good continental training, though its details are somewhat obscure.

The main source for Francis Bird's life is one of the manuscript notebooks of George Vertue, the eighteenth-century engraver, himself a Catholic. He recorded in these the chief events in the world of London artists from September 1722 to August 1754. Vertue's notes were not intended for publication, and his information came either at first hand or from those who knew the artists personally. He states that when Francis Bird died, he left six children, one of them being a son who was aged fifteen at his father's death. C.R.S. sources have now enabled us to identify most of the children and grandchildren. I am most grateful to Sister Francis Agnes Onslow, O.S.F., of Goodings, for allowing me to take over the relevant part of her Bird and Chapman family tree, when we found that we were working in parallel, and it is reproduced here as a first draft so that others may fill in the gaps and make the necessary corrections. I hope to give the Chapman part of the family tree in a subsequent note.

In an article entitled ‘A Note on Some Eighteenth-Century Statistics’, published in Recusant History (Vol. 10, no. 1) in January 1969, the present writer attempted to come to some conclusions about the number of priests working in England and Wales in that century.

Reference to that article would show that in 1706 Dr Betham believed that there were only about 400 priests in the whole country. It was argued that the figure was an underestimate and that the true number may have been as high as 530 or 540, and that the figures given by the Vicars Apostolic in 1773 in their reports to Rome were also too low—380 to 390 instead of 410 to 420. It appeared, if these adjustments of the figures were sound, that the decline in the number of priests working in eighteenth-century England and Wales was quite steep between 1706 and 1773, from perhaps 530 or 540 to 410 or 420; and that, if the French refugee priests working in England and Wales are excluded, there was no increase at all from 1773 until after 1803 but rather a further, if less marked decline.