No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
As a century-long series specially concerned with recusants convicted under the 1581 and later Acts, one class of documents merits particular attention: the Recusant Rolls of the Exchequer (1592-1691). Initially, however, penalties owing to the Crown for recusancy, as for other religious offences, were recorded on the Pipe Rolls of sheriffs’ accounts amid numerous unrelated items of royal revenue and it was not until the early 1590s, following a spate of convictions prompted by the Armada-crisis of 1588 (ensuing upon the more stringent anti-recusant legislation of the previous year) that special Rolls devoted to the thousands of recusancy-cases were inaugurated. Catholics penalised on other grounds usually appeared in the Pipe Rolls and after the cessation of the Recusant Rolls as a separate series the Clerks of the Pipe long continued to receive an allowance for ‘drawing down and charging recusants’ convictions’.
1 See supra, p. 337.
2 P.R.O., E.377/1-82 (Pipe Office series), see Class List reproduced in List and Index. Soc., 82. For the imperfect, less authoritative antigraphs, or ‘counter Recusant Rolls’ (Chancellor’s series: P.R.O., E.376) see C.R.S., 57, p. li, note 186. In these pages the term ‘Recusant Roll’ is restricted to the Pipe Office series, the first four of which are printed, partly in abstract, in C.R.S., 18, 57 and 61, and those of the 1640s and ’50s microfilmed as reels 22-25 in Unpublished State Papers of the English Civil War and Interregnum (ed. M. Hawkins, 1977), pt 5. See also note 16 for various county-extracts.
3 P.R.O. series E.372. See C.R.S., 57, p. xcvi, for a recusancy-entry; p. xx and note 57 (Mass-attendance by Sir Thomas Tresham, also in Northants. R.S., 19, p. 180, where Tresham’s recusancy-penalties, chiefly as recorded in Pipe Rolls, are tabulated). Many offers of regular payments below the statutory £20 per month are calendared in C.S.P.D., 1581-90, pp. 313-32, passim, and numerous unpaid penalties, originally entered in the Pipe Rolls, were subsequently transferred to Exannual Rolls, for which see infra., pp. 377-8. The C.R.S. plans to publish, under the editorship of Mr Timothy McCann, Catholic material extracted from the Pipe Rolls by the late Dom Hugh Bowler, O.S.B., whose exhaustive Introduction to C.R.S., 57 is an indispensable guide to the Elizabethan Exchequer in relation to recusancy, and to much associated documentation, including the Recusant Rolls, going into greater detail than is feasible here.
4 See R.H., 4, p. 196, note 6a; p. 243 (Anthony and Thomas Meynell, 1652); Warwick County Records, 7, p. lxxvi, note 2 (Thomas Throckmorton, 1680).
5 See references cited in C.R.S. Monograph 1, p. 46, note 323.
6 See Dickens, A. G. and Newton, J. in Yorks. Arch. Journal, 38, pp. 526–7Google Scholar. (This and Professor Dickens’s other articles on Yorkshire recusancy were reprinted in 1982 in his Reformation Studies, pp. 158-215.)
7 E.g. George Champneys, a Bath Brownist (C.R.S., 65, p. 9; also, for Pipe Roll entries of nonconformists, C.R.S., 57, p. xxxvi).
8 To identify and eliminate as many as possible by the latter, one has to be conversant with sources, MS. and printed, for nonconformity; those used for one county are noted in C.R.S. Monograph 1, Appendix F. Valuable preliminary guidance is provided by Dr Stephens, Sources for English Local History, pp. 268-860 1981 edn. See also Keeler, M. F. (ed.), Bibliography of British History: Stuart Period (1970), pp. 180–98Google Scholar (the Old Dissent’); pp. 199-205 (Quakerism) and Watts, M., The Dissenters, 1 (1978)Google Scholar.
9 See Essex Recusant, 1 (no. 2)-7 (no. 1) for names and other information. To this composite ‘estreat roll of recusants’ (C.R.S., 57, p. lxii, note 236) from the 1580s to the 1640s can be added two further county-files: a massive schedule of Lancashire recusants’ fines (17 Charles I) and one for Warwickshire (1655) of more than four hundred ‘Refusers and Neglecters to take the Oath of Abjuration’, with annotations as to the issuing of writs for property-seizure (both in P.R.O., E.370/106/1). Another Exchequer list (P.R.O., OBS. 1058) is a book, alphabetically arranged, of Yorkshire recusants’ names, locations, etc., but with no indications of penalties though the gap under each name may have been left for such data. It is evidently a contemporary index (Elizabethan or early seventeenth century) to records as yet untraced and contains a large number of entries—many, but not all, discoverable in Recusant Rolls.
10 E.g. Hertfordshire, Northumberland and Wales are missing from some Elizabethan Rolls (C.R.S., 57, pp. Ixix, cviii-cix and notes).
11 P.R.O., E.377/58-64; see also end of this section.
12 E.377/68-79. The first post-Restoration Roll to include Norfolk is that for 1679 (E.377/74) but it contains entries dating from 1674 (Miller, Popery and Politics in England, p. 267).
13 E.377/65-67.
14 Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Devon, Huntingdon, Staffordshire.
15 B.L., Add. MS. 20739, being returns for twenty-three counties and cities; those for another twenty-three, plus Wales, are marked desuní (wanting). For criticism of the printed version, see C.R.S. Monograph 1, p. 267. Comparison of the Wiltshire section of the original with the Wilts, portion of Recusant Roll no. 82, on which it is apparently based, shows quite a high degree of accuracy in the former.
16 Monmouth (1592-1625) in S. Wales and Monmouth R.S., 4, pp. 74-107; Durham (1636-37) in Surtees Soc., 175, pp. 137-98; Derbyshire (1592-1604) in Derbys. Arch, Journal, old series, 10, pp. 60-70 (names, and occasionally locations, only); Somerset (1592-1605) in Somerset and Dorset N. and Q., 5, pp. 112-16 (names, locations, occupations, etc.). The misleading Gloucestershire list, from the first three Rolls, printed in Trans. Bristol and Gloucs. Arch. Soc., 5, pp. 236-7, is superseded by the relevant sections of C.R.S., 18, 57 and 61, as are a list for the same period in Staffs. Hist. Coll., 1915, pp. 385-9, and for 1592 in Cumberland and Westmorland Antiq. and Arch. Soc., 8, p. 25.
17 By M. T. Martin, typescript, in Newcastle Public Library (Local Studies Library).
18 Middlesex and Norfolk in Miller, op. cit., Appendices 1 and 2; Wilts, in C.R.S. Monograph 1, App. F. For Bedfordshire (using not original Recusant Roll entries but the list in C.R.S., 6, pp. 78-79) see W. M. Wigfield’s analysis in Theology, 41, pp. 97-98. See also V.C.H., Herts., 4, p. 361.
19 E.g. Norfolk Archaeology, 8, p. 309 (reference to Quarter Sessions documents as ‘Recusant Rolls’, with no corresponding Recusant Roll entries in C.R.S., 18, 57 and 61); Gibbons, A., Ely Episcopal Records (Lincoln, 1891:Google Scholar indexing as a ‘Recusant Roll’ of part of a 1587 list of absentees from church); Lanes, and Cheshire R.S., 12, pp. 173-89, and Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs, and Cheshire, 50, pp. 231-46 (lists of recusants and non-communicants in duplicate Subsidy Rolls, 1628 and 1641). For Subsidy Rolls, see infra., pp. 382-4, 414.
20 Civitas Ebor (C.R.S., 18, pp. 41-44); Villa Novi Castri Super Tinam (C.R.S., 6, p. 297); Kingston-upon-Hull and Newcastle (supra, p. 372).
21 I.e. Southampton. Other Latinised county-names—Cornub. (Cornwall), Kane, (Kent), Wigorn (Worcs.)—involve no departure from alphabetical order.
22 See C.R.S., 57, p. lv, note 202, for list of such paired counties.
23 For Glamorgan entries (1603-11), see S. Wales and Monmouth R.S., 3, pp. 58-61.
24 C.R.S., 18, p. ix; see also C.R.S., 57, p. cxiii, note 460.
25 Though a large number were indicted and convicted in Middlesex at the time of the ‘Popish Plot’ (1680) ‘in order to keep them from coming to London or the Liberties thereof or within 10 miles of the said city, according to the Statute 3 Jac., cap. 5’ (H.M.C., Lords MSS., 1678-88, p. 226; Miller, op. cit., p. 265).
26 E.g. in Pipe Roll E.372/428 the martyr James Fenn of Somerset, then a prisoner in the Marshalsea, Southwark, occurs in the Surrey/Sussex section. For him see C.R.S., 5, passim; Anstruther, 1, pp. 113-14 and works there cited.
27 C.R.S., 18, pp. 8, 11; C.R.S., 57, pp. lxxxiv, lxxxv, note 337 (also p. 3); C.R.S., 61, pp. 2-3, 130.
28 R.H., 12, pp. 207-09 and notes 44, 49, 57, 67, 75 on p. 214.
29 E.g. Thomas Somerset (Gloucs. and Monmouth): C.R.S., 18, p. 123, C.R.S., 57, pp. 31, 95; C.R.S., 61, pp. 23, 48, 148, 185: also S. Wales and Monmouth R.S., 4, p. 109.
30 P.R.O., E.377/75. Keynes, with properties in Somerset and Berkshire, occurs in the Berks, section of a Pipe Roll (E.372/427) and More, of Essex and Yorks., in Elizabethan and Jacobean Recusant Rolls; see Essex Recusant, 1, pp. 95-104; 2, pp. 109-12 (‘The Family of St Thomas More in Essex: Thomas More II’ by Mgr D. Shanahan).
31 As in the case of Nicholas Timperley., principally of Suffolk and with lands in Norfolk but added, under Res. Norff., to Lincolnshire (a county with which he had no connection) in Roll 46, as cited in Sir Ryan, G. and Redstone, L. H., Timperley of Hintlesham (1931), pp. 63–64Google Scholar (and note).
32 Some rotulets have disappeared, e.g. Middlesex, 1678 (Miller, op. cit., p. 266); however, the original existence of rotulets which later went astray can on occasion be inferred from recapitulation of their entries on subsequent Recusant Rolls (see R. Meredith in Derbys. Arch. Journal, 85, p. 79).
33 Apart from the items noted in the preceding paragraph (p, 368), see C.R.S., 6, pp. 256-77 (entries for all three Ridings of Yorkshire in the East Riding section).
34 For further detail, see C.R.S., 57, pp. lxxx-xcvi (also lvi-lvii re Exchequer-year dating and its pitfalls) and p. 166 for three successive Suffolk entries of fines paid; no other county in that Roll (1593-94) had as many. On the three recusants concerned, additional light is shed by Dr MacCulloch, D. in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 72, pp. 258–9.Google Scholar
35 For original estreats, very incomplete, on which the enrolled versions were based, see infra., p. 380, and, for Exchequer procedure in that regard, C.R.S., 57, pp. lviii-lxii.
36 Exemplified respectively in, inter alia, P.R.O., E.377/44 (Durham subsection of Ebor portion, printed in Surtees Soc., 175, pp. 137-98) and in E.377/82: Wiltes (see also C.R.S., 6, pp. 78-326, passim, for other counties recording estreated fines only).
37 P.R.O., Wiltshire portions of Rolls E.377/68 (group convicted at Devizes in the 29th year of Charles II’s reign, preceded by batches of recusants convicted in the 26th, 27th and 28th years) and E.377/73 (convictions at Winchester Assizes and Marlborough Sessions, 33 Charles II). See also C.R.S., 57, pp. xcix-xc. Similarly, during the Interregnum, a Roll of 1654 (P.R.O., E.377/60) includes refusers of the oath of abjuration whose tendering was stipulated in 1655. See also supra, pp, 338, 372.
38 As Dr John Miller makes clear (Popery and Politics…, pp. 132, 164-5, 191, Appendices 1 and 2).
39 With some corresponding documentation in P.R.O. class E.367, e.g. E.367/1081 (Richard Ferris, matching the Recusant Roll entries in C.R.S., 57, p. 125, nos 14 and 15); E.367/1082 (Francis Stonor: C.R.S., 57, p. 122); E.367/1168 (William Hunnis: ibid., p. 47); E.367/1208 (Robert Seale: ibid., p. 26) and others. The 3-volume P.R.O. Class List of ‘Particulars of Warrants, etc., for Leases: Exchequer (L.T.R.)’ gives no indication of the recusant origin of properties and gives only the lessees’ names, which can be followed-up from their mention in Recusant Roll entries.
40 P.R.O., E.377/76 (Wiltes).
41 B.L., Add. Charters and Rolls 25612 (Oct. 1623). Many further quietuses are preserved among Catholic family papers; for a few examples, see History, 50, p. 195 (also L. M. Munby, ed., Short Guides to Records, Historical Association, 1972, no. 11) and, for a photograph of such a document, C. Lines, Coughton Court and the Throckmorton Story (undated, but post-1964), p. 12. Others are mentioned in C.R.S., 56, p. xxviii, note 1, and in my forthcoming contribution to Catholic Archives, 3.
42 P.R.O., E.377/78 (Wilts, portion): note against William Moore(s) of Chilmark, one of three recusants of that name in this Roll, another of whom was Wm. Moores of Ansty, wrongly stated in C.R.S. Monograph 1, p. 326, to occur in Roll 73.
43 P.R.O., E.377/1 (Sutht.) printed in C.R.S., 18, pp. 280-1.
44 Ibid., pp. 47-48, 52: Anthony Cattericke and Arthur Ingleby (notes of their conformity added in 1638 and 1649 respectively to original entries of forfeitures of George Catterick and John Ingleby, both in Recusant Roll no. I, 1592-93).
45 P.R.O., E.377/68: conformable to the Church of England but, because of infirmity, allowed to attend some other church or chapel than that of his own parish of Calne (note on Wilts, rotulet).
46 The former perhaps of another county or of many years later, as in a reference from a Recusant Roll of 35 Eliz. (1593-94) to one of Charles I (1625-26) in C.R.S., 57, p. 155, sub John Conwey. For Memoranda Rolls, see infra., p. 377.
47 Firth and Rait, 2, pp. 455-6, 510-11 (Acts of 22 Noy. 1650and 9 April 1651); Surtees Soc., 175, p. 152, note. For Recusant Rolls of the 1650s, see p. 372, above.
48 For some vagaries of the valuation system, see Aveling in C.R.S., 56, pp. xxvii-xxviii, and his Northern Catholics, pp. 125-31; Cliffe, Yorkshire Gentry, pp. 213-15; Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, pp. 395-6, 404-07; V. Burke, ‘The Economic Consequences of Recusancy in Elizabethan Worcestershire’ in R.H., 14, pp. 71-74. A fictitious trust-deed (Jan. 1604) is printed by Mr Michael Hodgetts in Trans. Worcs. Arch. Soc., 3rd series, 1, p. 77.
49 P.R.O., E.377/68 (Wilts, portion); C.R.S. Monograph 1, Appendix F, no. 39(d).
50 E.g. for one county a Roll containing 213 names is followed by Rolls with only seven, twelve, twenty- one and nineteen; then 124 followed by eighteen and three successive totals in the thirties; then 150; then sixty (P.R.O., E.377/68-79, Wilts, portions).
51 I.e. reports by constables, churchwardens, etc. See also infra., pp. 408-10, 428-30.
52 E.g. priest-harbouring, as in the case of Alice Tully of Staffs, who occurs in the second Recusant Roll as a convicted recusant owing £80 (C.R.S., 57, p. 153) and in a Quarter Sessions Roll as both a recusant and a harbourer of two ‘old priestes’ (Staffs. Hist. Coll., 1930, pp. 255-6). For further documentation and comment, see Staffs. Hist. Coll., 4th series, 9, passim.
53 Staffs. Hist. Coll., 1930, p. 336: certificate of recusant papists in the parish of Leigh, 1593, containing some who occur in Recusant Roll no. 2 with no indication of their religious beliefs. Again, valuable supplementary material will be found in Staffs. Hist. Coll., 4th series, 9.
54 C.R.S. Monograph 1, Appendix F; C.R.S., 6, p. 76 (citing B.L., Add. MS. 20739); A. Jessopp (ed.), Lives of the Norths (1890), 1, p. 311.
55 Middx., Norfolk, Beds.; see Miller, op. cit., Appendices 1 and 2; Wigfield, art. cit.
56 E.g. Alice Penicoate of Fisherton Anger, near Salisbury: a convicted recusant in P.R.O., E.377/68 (Wiltes) and presented by the Grand Jury at Hilary Sessions, 1686, as ‘a reputed Jew’ (Sessions Roll at Wilts. County Record Office, Trowbridge). Another example of a ‘recusant’ Jew—Thomas Ball, an Jewish gent.’—occurs in P.R.O., S.P. 12/118 (Nov. 1577), cited in Essex Recusant, 16, p. 45 and London Recusant, 4, p. 86.
57 E.g. Assizes’ convictions at Hereford and Winchester, recorded respectively in the Pipe Roll of 23 EIiz. and in the Recusant Roll of 30 Charles II (P.R.O., E.372/427, cited in C.R.S, 57, p. xcvi, and E.377/73, Wilts, portion: conviction of Charles Cottington of Fonthill Gifford).
58 See Surtees Soc., 175, p. 133 for such comparisons.
59 E.g. in P.R.O., E.377/31, the Sussex entries include the second Viscount Montague plus 126 recusants from Midhurst: Willaert, H., History of an Old Catholic Mission (1929) pp. 41–42Google Scholar. It cannot, however, be assumed that all convicted recusants in the vicinity of a Catholic noble or gentry household were themselves Catholics; the area may well have contained one or more conventicles whose congregations included protestant nonconformists convicted of recusancy and so entered on the Recusant Rolls. Thus, convicted recusants at Fovant, Wilts־.·, in the sphere of influence of the Catholic Lords Arundell of Wardour, included both papists and nonconformists, one of whom held conventicles in his house; see C.R.S. Monograph 1, pp. 322, 324, sub Lucas, Merryweather.
60 For a masterly study of one such recusant, convicted, discharged for conformity and subsequently reconvicted, see H. Bowler, ‘Sir Henry James… Recusant’, in Studies in London History (ed. Hollaender and Kellaway), pp. 289-313.
61 More finely gauged, however, by using not Recusant Roll dates but dates of conviction (see supra, p. 369) and then only after getting some idea of the respective numbers of popish and non-popish recusants.
62 See Magee, English Recusants, pp. 126-8; C.R.S., 53, p. 300.
63 E.g. in one county during the 1660s the number of identified protestant dissenters convicted of recusancy was more than double that of Catholics (P.R.O., E.377/82, Wiltes, and analysis in C.R.S. Monograph I, Appendix F. and Table on p. 272, where the first total in the final column should be 219, not 220). Few convictions in that decade led to fining (see next footnote) and a contemporary nonconformist referred to the then ‘dormant severe statute for £20 per mensem…’ (M. Blundell, Cavalier, 1933, p. 173), but his co-religionists were, of course, hit by other Acts, especially those comprising the ‘Clarendon Code’.
64 B.L., Add. MS. 20739, cited in C.R.S., 6, p. 77. It is also noted in the same document that virtually no recusancy-fines had been levied for years—a statement confirmed by Treasury evidence (see C.R.S. Monograph 1, pp. 16-17)—and that for about half the counties of England no convictions could be traced. Recusancy-penalties are assumed to be the £20 lunar-monthly fine which, in theory, ‘runs on for ever after the first conviction till conformity’; there is no mention of for feitures or of the royal right to prefer these to monetary fines as permitted by 3 Jac. I, c. 4—an option taken up by Charles II in 1675 but from which certain Catholic recusants were subsequently exempted. These decisions are recorded in the Privy Council Registers (P.R.O., P.C. 2/64, p. 379; /69, pp. 322, 336) supplemented by other sources: Cal. T.B., 7, pp. 31, 833-4; C.S.P.D., 1680-81, pp. 112-13; also local records (infra., p. 420, note 73).
65 Braithwaite, W. C., The Second Period of Quakerism (2nd edn, 1961), pp. 100–01, 131Google Scholar; Plum, H. G., Restoration Puritanism (Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, U.S.A., 1943), pp. 51–53;Google Scholar Cragg, G. R., Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution (1957), p. 270 Google Scholar (note 1 to p. 57); also, for contemporary sources, C.R.S. Monograph 1, p. 26, note 175.
66 See also infra., pp. 378-9, re Exchequer records of receipts (Pells).
67 P.R.O., E.377/75 (Suffolk and Wilts, portions respectively). In Ryan and Redstone, Timperley of Hintlesham, p. 74, note 1, this Recusant Roll is wrongly numbered 57. Sir John Webb was the second baronet, of Odstock, Wilts, and Canford, Dorset; said by Narcissus Luttrell to be worth £6,000 p.a. (Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, 4, p. 703). See also C.S.P.D., 1679-80, p. 329.
68 C.R.S., 53, pp. 295-303. See also, T. S. Smith, ‘Sequestrations for Recusancy in Staffordshire in 1640’, in Staffs. Catholic History, no. 18, pp. 1-11, and the same author’s ‘Persecution of Staffs. Roman Catholics, 1625-60’, in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30, pp. 327-51 (of wider relevance than its title might suggest); also R. Meredith, ‘The Eyres of Hassop, 1470-1640’, in Derbys. Arch. Jnl., 85, pp. 79-80.
69 P.R.O., E.351; L.R. 7; also E.101.
70 Pp. 380-1. See also Surtees Soc., 175, pp. 199-202; Staffs. Catholic History, 18, p. 1; C.R.S., 53, p. 427 (Recusant Roll reference to such an account). For relevant but third-hand Lancashire material, see Trans. Hist. Soc, Lanes, and Cheshire, 50, pp. 171-80.
71 Pp. 307-437. For some light on the Southern Receivership, see Havran, Catholicsin Caroline England, pp. 92-99; also R.H., 5, pp. 246-56, passim. Examples of ‘printed forms for rent receipts and bonds’, mentioned in C.R.S., 53, p. 303, are reproduced in Hadfield, C., History of St Marie’s Mission and Church, Sheffield (Sheffield, 1889), pp. 14, 15Google Scholar, and receipts only in Blundell, Cavalier, p. 297 and L. Brooks, Faith Never Lost (Farnborough, Hants, 1982), p. 7. These documents appertain to Roland Reveil of Stannington, Yorks., William Blundell of Crosby, Lanes., and Simon Ryder of West Bromwich, Staffs., corresponding entries for all of whom occur in C.R.S., 53, pp. 343, 347, 333, respectively.
72 Ibid., pp. 426-7: terms of composition of Thomas, 2nd Viscount Fairfax of Emly (extract in English).
73 P.R.O., E.377/59-64 (1651-58).
74 See supra, pp. 338, 373 (note 9 re Warwicks. schedule).
75 See Smith, T. S., art. cit. (Jnl. of Ecclesiastical History, 30), p. 344.Google Scholar