Catholics, property, and the experience of the penal laws in eighteenth-century England: Evidence from the Vincent Eyre Manuscripts

Abstract

This article seeks to nuance our understanding of how the penal laws against Roman Catholics were interpreted in eighteenth-century England and how English Catholics of the era experienced their status as a penalised minority. Using evidence from Ushaw Library’s Vincent Eyre Mansucripts, it examines how propertied Catholics navigated proscriptions against owning and selling property. Although much scholarship has emphasised the flexibility that the statutes afforded Catholics, this article focuses not on the enforcement of these laws but on the pressure they exerted on Catholics’ daily consciousness. Vincent Eyre, a Derbyshire conveyancer, trained under Catholic conveyancers in London and worked as agent for the tenth Duke of Norfolk in Sheffield. His manuscripts, which consist principally of legal opinions and briefs on conveyancing cases, testify to the pervasive uncertainty under which Catholics laboured as they sought to assert a ‘good title’ to property, protect their faith from legal discovery, and assert their standing as subjects despite laws that disabled them from full belonging to the nation. This article builds on recent work that charts Catholics’ affective experiences in eighteenth-century Britain as their dynamic contributions in the period are increasingly recognized.