Anglican Sources

Abstract

Although some Anglican documentation with a bearing on Catholic recusancy and associated matters has appeared in print, the majority of these records remain unexplored including most of the act books of the ecclesiastical courts—‘among the more strikingly repulsive of all the relics of the past’—which perhaps have a special significance, despite their failings, for the first half of Elizabeth’s reign before the emergence of much relevant secular source-material. An indispensable guide to non-parochial archives is Dr Dorothy M. Owen’s The Records of the Established Church in England; for parish records there are W. E. Tate’s classic study, The Parish Chest (third edition, 1969) and the National Index of Parish Registers while the comprehensive Pilgrim Trust Survey of Ecclesiastical Archives, containing references to derivative and other published material, can be updated by more recent catalogues and lists of specific holdings. In addition to documentation to be looked-for almost throughout our period there are, to 1641, records relating to ecclesiastical commissions, diocesan and provincial (Canterbury and York). On sources for ecclesiastical commission business, especially in the southern province, there is much information in Roland G. Usher’s Rise and Fall of the High Commission (1913), valuably supplemented by Dr Philip Tyler’s revisionist Introduction to the 1968 reprint which calls attention to material not seen by Usher, notably the rediscovered act books of the York commission, a source for early Elizabethan Catholic survival and appertaining to parts of the country remote from its own jurisdiction (such as the distant diocese of Salisbury, whose own fragmentary act book likewise casts sidelights on other areas).