The English Catholic Church confronted in the Irish a manner of men utterly remote from its own experience. Its priests ministered to a devout gentry; they had now to serve a pious proletariat. The faith in England had survived in the country; the Irish flocked to the towns. English congregations were small, and mostly worshipped in manor chapels; the Irish multitudes would require cathedrals. The English Catholic squire resembled his heretical neighbours both in their virtues and their vices; and his exclusion from English public life had preserved in him the insular prejudice of a simpler age. Class, culture and a uniquely quietist traditional piety shut him off from the Irish poor, and created the distinctions which a common creed might alone hope to overcome.

In the seventeenth century the question of allegiance divided the English Catholics as effectively as birth control in the twentieth. It might be of interest, therefore, to attempt a statistical breakdown of the opinions of English Benedictines on James I’s Oath of Allegiance, since by the 1630’s the monks were numerically a force to be reckoned with. Such an attempt has not been made before. Moreover, some primary documents imply that the Benedictines as a body were in favour of the Oath. But since much of the evidence on the oath was mere hearsay, party accusations or deliberately misleading, it needs to be tested carefully.

Plowden Hall, probably the house portrayed in the once widely-read novel John Inglesant by J. H. Shorthouse, is about four miles distant from the small town of Bishop's Castle in Shropshire. The family papers are still at the Hall, but the letters upon which this account is based were found at Archbishop's House, Westminster. They were written between 1747 and 1763 by three successive chaplains to the Plowden family. Very few such letters appear to have survived, and they provide invaluable and vivid details about the daily lives of priests on the English Mission. The letters were written to local Jesuit superiors of the Residence of S. Winifrid at Holywell in Flintshire. Until 1761 the Superior was Fr. John Williams, and after that Fr. Thomas Daniel or Watson.

Many of the sixteenth century Protestant reformers denied the rôle and authority of the Roman Church as a mediating instrument between Christ and believers. There was specific theological objection to the legitimacy of a sacrament of holy orders with a divinely empowered hierarchy. In consequence, much of the Catholic reaction and reform was designed to re-establish and emphasise both dogmatically and practically true authority within the Church. Seminaries therefore, as planned by the Tridentine decree of 15 July 1563, belonged to an ecclesiological context. They were seedbeds, giving protection from hostile and indifferent society, where men were set apart to sink roots in the rich soil of clerical life, and only then to emeige to feed the Church.