English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 (review)

English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558-1778. Edited by Marie B. Rowlands. [A Joint Research Project of the Catholic Record Society and Wolverhampton University. Catholic Record Society Publications (Monograph Series), Volume 5.] (London: The Catholic Record Society. 1999. Pp. xvi, 400.)

This book is a collaborative effort in which eight authors produced fourteen chapters on the same topic: the nature of the Catholic community in England from 1558 to 1778. Marie B. Rowlands, the editor, wrote seven of the chapters. Like all collaborative efforts this one is uneven. The Book is divided into three sections: "Catholics in Society," "Studies of Particular Places," and "Catholics on the Eve of the Relief Acts." Some of the chapters are informative and read well. Others, while informative, are difficult reading because of the nature of the evidence under review, i.e., census returns.

In Chapter 2 Rowlands, in discussing the legal situation of recusants in the years 1558-1625, states, "Unless the defendant appeared either voluntarily or under process and pleaded to the indictment, no conviction was possible" (p. 31). The Elizabethan statutes made provision for conviction by proclamation in the absence of the recusant. Failure to appear when cited to appear in three consecutive sessions of the court resulted in a conviction (29 Eliz. c.6 §v).

The editor thanks Michael Gandy for his contribution on London, which he produced on short notice yet made his deadline. Gandy makes a number of good observations about recusant life that are developed in the chapters after his: "Catholics were not in a ghetto and, as recusant historians frequently need reminding, Catholics of all levels were fully integrated into every aspect of ordinary life except the religious one" (p. 172). He also reminds us that the poor in Jacobean England (p. 169) were convicted for recusancy. While that is true, the recusant rolls for Jacobean Middlesex and London do not indicate that the poor ever paid a fine. In his section on the Jacobean merchant community he overstates his case: ". . . but from the 1570's there was never a whisper of Catholic influence, however slight, in either the Corporation or the great City Companies" (p. 159). Ferdinando Emerson, a cutler and a recusant, had the cutlers accept a modified oath of supremacy from one of his apprentices (Welch, History of the Cutlers, p. 67). There are other recusant cutlers who held office as well as a merchant tailor who refused to serve in the office to which he was elected because of the oaths he would have to take and a barber surgeon who lent money to his corporation.

Leo Gooch opens his chapter on the Catholics of the northeast in the seventeenth century quoting Newman's "Second Spring" sermon, in which he described English Catholics as gentry and cut off from English life. Gooch's chapter demonstrates that the Catholic community was neither cut off nor was it a remnant of the upper classes.

One of the recurring themes in this book is that in many places and over time recusants and Catholics were integrated into their society. Some known Catholics even held parish office because their presence was needed to oversee the many obligations placed on the parish authorities by statute.

This is a good solid look at the English Catholic Community and should be read by anyone interested in religious or social history. It is especially important because it challenges a number of important suppositions about the class structure of Catholicism and its alleged existence in the ghetto.

John J. LaRocca, S.J.
Xavier University

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