P. R. Newman and the Durham Protestations

Extract

P. R. Newman has done a useful service in tabulating the returns in the Durham Protestations (Recusant History [October 1979], pp. 148-52). Unfortunately, he has omitted the sixty-eight names of persons refusing to sign in the parish of Lanchester, a parish which on the showing of the Protestation itself had an 18% recusancy among its adult males. The inclusion of these would raise Mr Newman's figure of 452 men refusing the Protestation (excluding known non-Catholics) to 520, and the percentage in the county to just under 3.2. An even more accurate percentage might be obtained if the affirmative signatures from Bishop Auckland, a parish which failed to list the refusers, were subtracted from the total. If that were done, the percentage would rise to just over 3.2. Also it may be reasonably assumed that the percentage would be higher still if the whole adult population were taken into account. For, as the lists of prosecutions and more general indications suggest, women were more faithful and persevering adherents of the old religion than men. However, the two-to-one ratio which might be inferred from an examination of the presentments to the Sessions and the church courts probably overstates the true proportion. For this two reasons may be adduced. First, in the early Elizabethan years, when many were uncertain as to where they stood, numerous waverers allowed or perhaps encouraged their wives to take a stand for Catholicism while they themselves made at least an outward show of conformity when that was deemed necessary for the preservation of their families and possessions. Secondly, churchwardens, when pressed for presentments, apparently found that to name widows and spinsters along with vagrants gave rise to less local trouble than the naming of their fellows. Even so, though the proportion of women recusants may have been rather less than the prosecutions suggest, there can be little doubt that they outnumbered men sufficiently for one to speculate that the Catholic adult population may well have been of the order of 3.5%.