The C.R.S. has in preparation a number of volumes designed to throw light on several parts of Catholic history since the Reformation. The fifty-first volume to be issued will be The Wisbech Stirs (1595-1598), edited by Miss P. Renold. This brings together related documents from a number of sources including St. Paul's Cathedral Library, the Inner Temple, Westminster Cathedral Archives, and Stonyhurst College. This volume is in the press and will be issued to members in 1958.

Recusancy was the Elizabethan term for the refusal (Lat. recusare) to attend, in one's “parish church, chapel or usual place of common prayer”, the Edwardian services of the Church of England as established by the Act of Uniformity in 1559 (1 Eliz., cap. 2). Among the penalties prescribed by this same Act was a fine of 12d., to be levied by the churchwardens for every Sunday or festival on which a person omitted attendance. These forfeitures were allocated not to the Crown but “to the use of the poor of the parish”; consequently the Exchequer rolls, being concerned only with the revenue of the Crown, bear no record of them.

William Southerne, the last martyr to suffer under James I, lived and died during a period of disunion among the English Catholics. They were divided upon several issues: one of these was die lawfulness of taking the Oath of Allegiance. This Oath, introduced by Cecil in 1606, and condemned as unlawful by Pope Paul V the following year, was still favoured by a certain (small) section of the clergy in England. Ven. William Southerne was not of their number: his refusal to take the Oath was the determining factor which brought about his condemnation.

The will of this martyr's father (John Talbot of Thorntonle Street, N.R. Yorks), to which reference has been made in a former article in this journal (Vol. II, p. 16), is printed in Surtees Soc., Vol. II; Wills and Inventories, pp. 369-371 (No. CCLXXX).