Conclusion

Summary

The book has shown how the unchanging mission of the Dominican Order has played out in the life of the English Province when stamped in the wax of different ages and cultures marked by the temperaments of particular individuals. Through a return to the primary sources, by removing the filters of an earlier hagiography or narrow regionalism, the books establishes patterns of growth and decline, and identifies the primary forces at work in those patterns. Where the early chapters show especially what was owed to lay patrons, later chapters show what was owed as well to Dominicans such as Cardinal Howard, Thomas Worthington, Dominic Aylward, Bede Jarrett and Vincent McNabb. Lay benefactors changed across the centuries. While the founding medieval benefactors were figures close to the royal courts, the patrons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were recusant nobles with little relationship to the court after the ‘Glorious Revolution’. The major lay benefactors after the mid-nineteenth century came from the newly wealthy.