"A papist"

[Blue70]

A lot of Catholics only ever went through the C of E marriage service. Long after marriages in RC churches were first registered Catholics continued to use C of E churches to marry. They would baptise their children though as RC. This was a common practice amongst Liverpool's Catholics.


Blue

[Blue70]

Perhaps it was cheaper and easier to get married at a C of E church. At a Catholic church you would have to obtain a 'certificate' (instead of banns) and then pay both the priest and the registrar. At a C of E church three readings of the banns would suffice plus the vicar acted as the registrar.

Catholic couples marrying elsewhere was considered to be such a problem that the church introduced a new marriage law in 1908 making only marriages at Catholic churches valid. It is after this date that the practice of adding the information about subsequent marriages to the baptism entries were introduced. When the marriage parties applied for their baptism details the priest was meant to add the new information but some of them were more efficient than others. The absence of marriage information doesn't mean any particular child didn't marry.


Blue

[hurworth]

I may be mistaken about the Petre vault.   The burials were recorded in the Ingatestone parish register, but perhaps the vault is at Ingatestone Hall.

[Joney]

Thanks, hurworth. I've never yet succeeded in getting to see Ingatestone Hall. I have dim memories of a TV program about it many years ago.

Hi Blue, I agree that by the nineteenth century there are quite a few Catholics married in C of E churches with no Catholic ceremony and I have always suspected it's because it's cheaper. However, in the 1700s, when there are fines for not attending the parish church,  a lot of Catholics turn up enough to avoid the fines, but still attend a Catholic mass when they can get there.  They may have had to travel quite some distance to do so. Attending a C of E service was declared to be sinful by the Catholic hierarchy  but I think we can all understand  why this was  disregarded by some Catholics. As a marriage ceremony is a once-only event, a Catholic service could take place on the quiet at some point when the priest was available. The public wedding could follow later
Probably worth noting that there was no relaxation of any of the penal laws until the 'Papists'Act' of 1778 and then things only changed gradually. I think Byron introduced one of the later acts.






tandards of the time

[Joney]

Accidentally lost some of my text above when revising what I'd written - Sorry !
I intended to add that the Council of Trent of 1545  (part of the Catholic internal church reformation in response to the Protestant reformation) ruled that you had to have a priest present for a valid Catholic marriage, so the 1908 ruling was only really re-stating what was already supposed to be the case - because it hadn't been fully understood and implemented/accepted.

The original teaching of the very early church -hazy on dates here - was that the man and woman married each other and so didn't need a priest present to do this. However, once we reach medieval times, the church gets involved to regularise things. It became apparent that without independent witnesses, sometimes one of a couple married in this way would claim no marriage took place and it was all a figment of the other's imagination. That left an ecclesiatical and legal problem which was sorted out by ruling that there had to be a witness or the marriage wasn't valid. The priest, who would ensure a proper form of words was used  was the ideal witness.

[clayton bradley]

For anyone who wants more details, there are a number of articles in back copies of the Catholic Ancestor and Rebecca Probert has written on this topic.
I was pleased to see Ingatestone mentioned as my ancestor, Abraham Broadley, was a carter at Dunkenhalgh Hall over the period when Lady Catherine married Lord Petre and was widowed. The accounts at Lancashire Archives gave me his life story. I'm grateful to the Petres for depositing these accounts, cb

[hurworth]

Thank you Clayton.

I would like to be able to read Volume 6 of Essex Recusant
https://books.google.co.nz/books/about/Essex_Recusant.html?id=tXIKAQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

It says it was digitised in 2010, but I need to work out how I would get a digital copy.  This volume has an article about Essex Catholic graves.

I was delighted to discover about 20 editions of Catholic Ancestor on the shelf at our library recently.

[sallyyorks]

That's what I thought, Joney. In particular, in earlier, more dangerous (for Catholic) times, I imagine that they showed their face at the CofE church because you wouldn't want to be spotted as a dissenter, would you?

But to maintain their Catholic faith they must also have been involved in Catholic ceremonies ----

I am not sure that Catholics would have been seen as "odd" or as having "strange religious views" (as a previous poster suggests). Some parts of England had quite high recusancy rates and the C of E is technically a Catholic church, though reformed.
The early threat to the state did not come from the everyday ordinary Catholics but from the landed gentry/wealthy Catholics. This was because they had the means to conspire (treason) with a Catholic enemy, like Spain for example.

I think everyday English Catholics just kept a low profile and probably saw themselves as related to the "new" C of E and understood that if they behaved as a loyal citizen, and most were, and did not make a big fuss about it, they would be left alone. Many might have seen the C of E service/rights as a good second best or at least good enough as a compromise. Adaptable, if you like.

I have three entirely separate branches of Catholics, from Yorkshire, Lancashire and Warwickshire. They all seem to intermarry on and off with C of E. They mostly seem to be buried C of E. Some have Catholic notations in the register, some don't. Some baptisms I cannot find at all. The Warwickshire bunch convert to C of E at around 1870. The children are all baptised C of E on the same day, around the time of this conversion. The others remained Catholic