Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The revival of plainchant in the Roman Catholic Church in England was to some extent a function of an easing political situation. For much of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, Catholics in England subsisted under an exacting penal code, outlawing the practice of their faith and undermining their economic and social position at large. With the accession of James II in 1685, however, there came a brief period of remission and a consequent flourishing of Catholic life. The Catholic press, by this time long underground, published openly for the first time, and worship likewise became public. Such freedom as had been granted Catholics under James II was not maintained under the rule of William and Mary, and from 1689 Catholicism once again came under the restrictions of a penal code. By the 1720s, however, there came a less stringent application of the penal laws, and before long Catholics were attending their services more openly and publishing religious works in complete disregard of the law. By 1778, when George III and his parliament dismantled the most extreme elements of the penal code, the laws themselves had already lost their meaning and were all but moribund in practice.