Part I of this Index was published in Recusant History fifteen years ago, in October 1982. It was designed to serve two purposes: as an appendix to an earlier series of articles in Recusant History, in which I had discussed about thirty of the most important houses; and as a preliminary list of additions and corrections to Granville Squiers, Secret Hiding-Places (1933), which had been out of print since the publisher’s warehouse was bombed on the night of 29 December 1940. In 1989 my own book, also entitled Secret Hiding-Places, was published by Veritas; but, in order to allow room for necessary architectural and genealogical material, it only deals with about 180 houses, against 360 in Squiers, and of the 180 only 120 are in Squiers. Even after 1989, therefore, there remained about 240 houses where the hides had not been discussed in print since 1933, together with a number of others which had never been collected at all. Part II of the Index now lists another 123 houses (making a total of 300), of which 83 were in Squiers and 40 not. There are also further details on a few houses which were included in Part I, but these retain their original reference nos. (in square brackets) and so do not affect these statistics. Houses which were not in Index I but are in Hodgetts 1989 are not included here unless there is more to report on them, as with nos. 230, 236 and 239.

Horses by Papists are not to be ridden,
But sure the Muses horse was ne’er forbidden.
For in no rate-book was it ever found,
That Pegasus was valued at five pound.
John Dryden

These lines, written at the end of the seventeenth century, were a wry comment on the ban on the ownership of horses valued at over five pounds which was imposed upon Catholics from 1689 by the Whig ministry of William and Mary and which remained in force, in theory, until the abolition of the penal laws in 1844. Like most of the penal laws its application had all but ceased by the middle of the eighteenth century but in the period under consideration the Privy Council made considerable efforts to ensure the enforcement of the ban. It did so sometimes through a genuine fear of Jacobite uprising and subversion, on other occasions to stir up a renewed paranoia about popery (and thus encourage loyalty from all Protestants) and always to try to weaken the resolve of Catholics to retain their faith. Alexander Pope tells the story of Thomas Gage of Shirburn who had his team of Flemish coach horses seized by the authorities in 1715. Visiting London, he became so jealous of the sight of other people’s coach horses passing by that he apostatised then and there and took the Oath of Abjuration.

Fr Thomas More—the last descendant in the direct male line of St.Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England—died on 20 May 1795 in Bath. He had been the Jesuit provincial superior at the time of the suppression of the Society in 1773.

Thomas More was the eldest of the five children of Thomas and Catherine (née Giffard) of Barnborough or Bamburg Hall in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Born on 19 September 1722, he was followed by Christopher, Bridget, Catherine and Mary. Both sons became Jesuits. Bridget married twice—Peter Metcalfe and Robert Dalton and had descendants; she died in 1797. Catherine died unmarried in 1786. Mary became Sister Mary Augustine of the Austin Canonesses at Bruges and died in 1807. Their home, Barnborough Hall, had been in the family since John, the only son of St. Thomas, had acquired it by his marriage to Anne Cresacre and it remained so until the nineteenth century.

The last years of the English Conceptionist nuns, the Blue Nuns, were spent in a large corner house in Magdalen Street, Norwich, from which the cheerful abbess, Mother Bernard Green, wrote notes to their benefactress, Lady Jerningham, at Cossey. This community had for 140 years lived near the Bastille in Paris. It had seen the Duchess of Cleveland quête in its church, Mary of Modena at a profession; it had taught girls who grew up to be notable English Catholic ladies, including Lady Jerningham herself. It had suffered the deaths of too many of its small community during and after the Revolution. Like the Benedictines of Montargis and the Austins of Bruges, the refugee Blue nun community knew the charity of the Jerningham family, but unlike those two flourishing houses it died out before its benefactors did. For a brief period, 1800–1805, the Blue Nuns kept choir, taught catechism, made purses, and received visitors in Norwich.

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars has reinvigorated the debate over the nature of late mediaeval religious practice and belief, examining the ‘richness and complexity of the religious system by which men and women structured their experiences of the world, and their hopes and aspirations within and beyond it.’ Duffy questions the assumption that there was in that period a wide gulf between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion. In so doing he has not only illuminated the religious practices and beliefs of late mediaeval England but he has stimulated discussion about the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion in other periods. Duffy eschews the use of the term ‘popular religion’, which he argues carries questionable assumptions about the nature of ‘non-popular’ religion and about the gap between the two. He prefers ‘traditional religion’, on the grounds that it does greater justice to ‘the shared and inherited character of the religious beliefs and practices of the people…’ ‘Traditional religion’ while being rooted in inherited and shared beliefs was, nevertheless, capable of great flexibility and variety.