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The Demographic Impact of Irish Immigration on Birmingham Catholicism 1800-1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Judith F. Champ
Judith F. Champ*
Affiliation:
King’s College, London
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Extract

The Birmingham congregation suggests what Manchester Catholicism might have looked like if Irish immigration had been a fraction of what it was.’ This remark of John Bossy points in the direction of a different view of the impact of Irish migration on urban Catholic congregations in England from that which has become familiar. The relationship between Irish and English Catholic population growth in Birmingham before 1850 was not straightforward and led consequently to an interesting pattern of social and religious interaction. What Birmingham illustrates in the period up to 1850 is the effect of relatively modest Irish immigration into an English Catholic congregation already well advanced in prosperity and organization. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Birmingham Catholicism was not over whelmingly Irish, but the reception of the Irish had significant demographic and social effects on the congregation. These can be used to highlight and illustrate urban Catholic population structure, industrial enterprise, and quasi-parochial organization.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 25: The Churches, Ireland and the Irish , 1989 , pp. 233 - 242
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1989

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References

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5 Judith F. Champ, ‘St. Martin’s Parish, Birmingham in 1767: a study of urban Catholicism’, Recusant History, 15 (1981), pp. 342-71.

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12 Judith F. Champ, ‘Assimilation and Separation’, pp. 64-6.

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14 Ibid., Minute Book of the Birmingham Catholic Sunday School.

15 J. McCave, Catholic Education, Medieval and Modem, an address at the annual Catholic Re union, Birmingham Town Hall (1897), p. 12.

16 Edward Peach, Rules for the Catholic Library (1809).

17 Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives, MSS notes of Rev. T. Leith, p. 142.

18 Judith F. Champ, ‘Assimilation and Separation’, tables 11 & 12.

19 Ibid., table 9.

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21 i.e. 12% of Catholic population 1810-50-383.

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29 Oscott College Archives, Rev. G. Spencer, Funeral Oration on Rev. E. Peach, 12 September

30 ‘New’ families are defined as appearing in the register for the first time in a given decade. Never less than 70% of the total, it rose as high as 95% in the 1840s.

31 Cf. Lees, L. H., Exiles of Erin (London, 1979), p. 92 Google Scholar, ‘Instead of being distributed proportionately among metropolitan industries, the Irish were heavily concentrated in a few trades, in occupations which placed them amongst the lowest social and economic groups.’ (Speaking of London.)

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