There are elements of special pleasure in addressing this Conference on the Archives of York. Something of that pleasure arises from the fact that so many of the leading personalities of this meeting are connected in some way with the chief collection with which my address is concerned. The retiring President is not unacquainted with the Borthwick Institute, and more than once has honoured us by giving the opening lecture at our Summer Schools. His successor in office also has lectured in those Schools, and for many years has used the diocesan records there for his published work, for lectures and for research generally. Dom Aveling, since the opening of the Borthwick Institute, has been a much-valued visitor, using the riches of the collections housed there. Dr Tyler has been in a special relation there, for since he first came as an undergraduate from Oxford, it has been a pleasure to observe, and to some extent to direct and aid, his progress in research and in specialized knowledge.

The first bishop of York in Anglo-Saxon history is a shadowy figure and, to some historians, not an altogether impressive one, but a conference devoted mainly to the ecclesiastical province of York perhaps provides an opportune moment to consider afresh one or two of the more interesting aspects of his career. We might discuss first what exactly Paulinus was about in his efforts to convert Edwin of Northumbria.

Paulinus was one of the monks of Augustine of Canterbury and he was sent north with Ethelburga of Kent, who was a Christian, when she married the pagan King Edwin—in 625 according to Bede. Edwin promised to think about taking his bride’s religion, but to bring him finally to the point of accepting Christianity in 628 proved, despite all Paulinus’s powers of preaching and prophecy, to be a Herculean labour.

It has long been a truism that the chantry priest, rather than the monk, friar, or member of a large collegiate church, is the most significant figure if we wish to understand how organised religion affected the lives of most citizens of most medieval English towns. Miss Wood-Legh, in her recently published and long-awaited Perpetual Chantries in Britain, has however been the first to provide a detailed demonstration of the sustained interest taken by founders, prelates, parishioners, and corporate bodies in the effective administration and continued welfare of the perpetual chantry. Miss Wood-Legh justifiably describes her work as the ‘first detailed study in English of the chantry as an institution’ and its publication ought to lead to a long-overdue investigation of the exact social and economic, as well as religious, role of the medieval chantry. The hope expressed by Professor Hamilton Thompson almost sixty years ago, ‘that the student of chantry history may possess a more complete and compact apparatus for his work than is at present within his reach’, has been largely unfulfilled, not least in York itself.

There can be few English historians still maintaining a lively interest in their fields over half a century after the publication of a major work, but this is happily true of the Misses Madeleine and Ruth Dodds, with whom I corresponded not many months ago. Their extensive two-volume work The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Exeter Conspiracy disentangled with admirable system and discretion the huge deposit of evidence calendared (sometimes too summarily) in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. As a work of narrative history their book seems unlikely to call for major revisions, and it demands the warmest recognition from every student of Tudor history. Though its judgments are in general sober and well-grounded, its deep sympathies have possibly tended to encourage those who for various reasons wanted to idealise the Pilgrimage and overestimate its creative possibilities.

When the Commissioners came to investigate those foundations dissolved under the provisions of the Act of 1547, there were in County Durham six institutions which could be described as collegiate churches. Of these, four were constituted in the ordinary way with a dean and prebendaries; Darlington, Chester-le-Street, Lanchester, and St. Andrews, Auckland; one was a chantry college attached to Staindrop Hospital; and one (Norton, near Stockton) preserved the antique constitution of eight portionaries amongst whom the endowment was equally divided.

The continuity of English ecclesiastical history is so strong that one is always faced with the problem of when to begin. Paradoxically enough, so far as the diocese of York is concerned, 1499 seems to be a good choice to begin any examination of the Elizabethan clergy. In that year one of the last appropriations of a benefice by a monastic house took place. After this only three more similar appropriations are recorded. This concluded a process which had lasted more than two centuries and was to influence the status of the parish clergy in local society until Queen Anne’s Bounty and after. In 1710 the commissioners found that 5,597 benefices out of a total of nearly 10,000 livings in England and Wales were not worth more than £ 50 a year. A further examination revealed that of these 5,597 livings 2,122 had a yearly value of less than £30, and a further 1,200 were valued at less than £ 20 a year.

This paper will be divided into two parts: in the first—and much the shorter—part, I want to discuss the place of Catholic recusant history in general, and that of Yorkshire in particular, in the whole field of English ecclesiastical history of the years 1558 to 1791. The second—and much the longer—part will be a statistical survey of Yorkshire Catholic recusancy.

Anglican historians from the Restoration until relatively recently have tended to see the Commonwealth as a catastrophic interruption in English church history, a time when Puritan enthusiasts loosed religious anarchy upon the country; but perhaps the twenty years from 1640 to 1660 can be studied with more understanding if they are considered as the culmination of a century’s long struggle to cleanse the English church from the corruptions of Rome. Certainly in the mid-seventeenth century many York men, laymen as well as clerics, looked at the revolutionary period in this light, as the time during which they at last achieved a church purged of all superstition. Whether in fact to those who lived through it, this period did appear so revolutionary in ecclesiastical history is open to doubt, for in York, at least, the ruling oligarchy kept tight control over events and repressed licentious gatherings of the common people who here, as elsewhere, sympathised with the Baptists and the more extreme sects. The intention of this essay is to try to uncover the religious attitudes of the city’s governing class: for some of these men the break in church life came, not in 1644 with the discontinuance of the Anglican liturgy, but in 1662 when exultant Anglicans set their face against a comprehensive church, and they, the leaders of their local society, for the first time found themselves excluded from the established church.

On 5 November 1847, as the villagers of Bishopthorpe were burning Guy Fawkes in effigy, news came down from the Palace that their beloved archbishop had died. Only four days before, he had travelled into York, still hale and hearty, though in his ninety-first year, a patriarchal figure, majestic in physique and princely in appearance. No archbishop since Walter de Gray (1215-1255) had been Metropolitan of the Northern Province so long. His departure marked the end of an era. He was the last aristocratic archbishop of York. What a contrast to the archbishops who followed him! There was nothing aristocratic about Thomas Musgrave, whose father had been a Cambridge tailor, and who, before setting foot in Bishopthorpe as archbishop, had previously been there only to assist his father in measuring Vernon Harcourt for his clothes! Charles Thomas Longley came from an old family which lived on friendly terms with the Darnleys, but, though very dignified, he was no aristocrat. William Thomson, physically a magnificent figure, was the son of a tradesman, and never felt quite at home with the aristocracy, preferring the steel workers of Sheffield. With the death of Vernon Harcourt an era had, indeed, passed.