Large ‘folio’ editions of the Bible have been known since the age of printing began. Gutenberg’s magnificent editio princeps and such other editions as Cardinal Ximenes’s Complutensian Polyglot amply demonstrated the early concept that the Word of God should not only be inspiring but should also be presented in a physically impressive format. In England the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible and the original Authorized Version (AV) of 1611 followed this tradition.

In her essay Blessed Nicholas Owen: Jesuit Brother and maker of hiding holes—a summary of the material on the soon-to-be saint held in the possession of the office of the Vice-Postulation, Farm Street— Margaret Waugh first identified Walter Owen, an Oxford carpenter, as the father of Nicholas Owen. Michael Hodgetts, in his article The Owens of Oxford published in this journal in October 1999, laid out all the known facts about Walter Owen and his family but stressed there was no conclusive evidence to support this identification. Although Nicholas Owen’s relationship to the printer Henry Owen, a former apprentice of Joseph Barnes (founder of Oxford University Press), suggested some connection between Nicholas and the city of Oxford— the information that Henry Owen was ‘brother to that Oven [sic] who ripped out his own bowels in the Tower, being imprisoned for the Gunpowder Treason’ comes on the authority of both the government informer William Udall, and John Gee, writing in 1624—there was still nothing concrete to link Nicholas to Walter Owen.

Among the most prominent Lincolnshire families in Tudor and Jacobean times were the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby and Twigmore. Other Lincolnshire branches of the family were seated at Scotter, Cammeringham and Stainfield. The Victoria County History of Lincolnshire says, ‘To follow various members of the Tyrwhitt family, whose names re-appear from first to last in connexion with Romanist sympathy, is to trace the history of recusancy in the county.’ But some important parts of the history of the Kettleby Tyrwhitts have been confused or overlooked by historians, and the record should be corrected. Here we shall focus on one of the sons of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby, a son who died in prison in 1580. In a further article we will identify a grandson of Sir Robert who gave John Gerard SJ much financial support from about 1598 until Gerard left England in 1606.

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.

Cardinal Manning argued that the Catholic Church had two services it should render to the world outside it; its first task was to save souls but secondly it should ‘ripen and elevate the social and political life of men . . .’ In 1890, however, he noted that none of the recent great works of charity had been initiated or promoted by Catholics. His successor Vaughan found that his main support in attempting to exercise social influence came, not from the English laity, but from the Irish (Catholic) M.P.s, fifty seven of whom had been returned to Parliament after the extension of the franchise in 1884. There were few English Catholics in Parliament and Bourne, after Vaughan, continued to rely on the Irish M.P.s. With the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921 and the departure of the Irish M.P.s, one authority argues that Catholics were left with very few representatives in the House of Commons and that ‘politically since the withdrawal of the Irish members, the Catholic influence has, on the whole, been negligible.’