Joe, thanks for those comments, and the links. I've been doing some reading in a bookshop - one essay on Victorian Catholicism in 1850 in a section on English Non-conformism (of which Catholicism was a very special case). It is clear that there was no official oppression (apart from the disadvantages shared by all non-Anglicans) at that time, and that anti-catholic feeling arose (for various reasons) from the masses, only to fade away quickly. These events happened rarely. We have a problem over here that churchgoers of any persuasion tend to learn their own history and no other. So the Congregationalists learn about the arguments about bishops and the prayer book; the Methodists learn about the case where Wesley was tried for leading prayers in a private house (a maid snitched, but he won the case, and it was one of the key ones for religious freedom); the Quakers learn about the Reading children who kept the meeting when their parents were in jail, and Penn and Meade being tried for preaching in the Strand (that was a key case for juries, as they refused to find the men guilty and were jailed themselves to make them change their verdict); the Baptists learn about Bunyan, and no-one puts the whole together. As a result people make mistakes - candles in churches in films of Jane Eyre for example, or a village parish church that remained Catholic continuously in Higgins' "The Eagle has Landed".

I have a friend who went to a convent school - have you heard the nun's story about patent leather shoes? It seems an awful shame for a tradition with Hilda and Hildegard and other educated ladies in it to come down to such stories.

Penny