Origins of England’s Urban Catholicism

Abstract

Today probably the majority of practising Roman Catholics in England would identify themselves as English, even if their origins are not altogether English, but how deep are the English roots of this English Catholic community? The answer to that question is important because the self-understanding of any community depends, to some degree, on its understanding of its own history. Twenty years ago it was almost universally assumed that the English Catholic community was dwindling away at the end of the eighteenth century and only saved from extinction by the ‘second spring’— the great influx from Ireland and the flow of well-educated Anglican converts in the nineteenth century. Now it is known that Irish immigrants went where Catholics were in industry already, but detailed studies are needed of how so many English Catholics came to be in those places. In the May number of Recusant History’ I have done one such study for a place in the heart of industrial England, Walsall, within reach of Oscott, between 1720 and 1824, using evidence from a variety of local records. I now want to point tentatively to some elements in the situation there that have parallels elsewhere.The first is memories of the Civil War. After defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 Charles the Second took refuge in woodlands in and around the parish of Walsall from the Presbyterian party who dominated the borough after the war and during the Commonwealth. In 1715 and 1751 the Presbyterian Meeting House there was wrecked by a mob who in 1750 celebrated Oakapple Day, the anniversary of the Restoration of Church and Throne in 1660, by hanging and burning an effigy of King George the Second with an orange in one hand and a bunch of turnips in the other.