I've found a book on English Catholicism between the Elizabethan Settlement and the Second Vatican Council. It's a fascinating story, which out to be more widely known, much more fascinating than old nun's tales of persecution. In brief, there was no complete break in Catholic practice in England. There were monks and nuns back in the country in the 17th century, and priests could live openly very soon after Tudor times. There were Catholic schools. There were, of course, problems. Both sides during the Reformation had martyrs, though it looks as though the Protestants were killed for their beliefs, and the Catholics were killed because it was believed that they presented a political threat. Both Catholics and Dissenters suffered together from one set of laws, but the Catholics had the additional burden of recusancy fines. These were not exacted from the great families at Court (like the Howards, Fadac), or the poor, but the gentry class who were farmed over many years as a source of income. Anti-Catholicism was an undercurrent which occurred in all classes, with occasional outbursts such as Titus Oates' Papist Plot (One man, rejected as a priest by both the Anglicans and the Catholics, managed to cause appalling results.) The Church was run by the gentry, with lay appointments of priests, and one odd result of the eventual Emancipation was that they were able to go on longer doing this than might otherwise have happened. During the eighteenth century the artisan class became more dominant in the church and built chapels away from the great houses and foreign Embassies which had provided Masses since Tudor times. These chapels would have been hard to tell from Dissenting chapels, having little decoration, no statues or votive candles, no incense or devotion to saints. Prayers could have been in English. This would not be out of a wish to hide, but because of the mood of the time, and started an ad hoc parochial system. With the return of the hierarchy, all this was fitted back into a normal framework. Anti-Catholic laws were not consistently applied, varying in place and time. There were mutual misunderstandings: Catholics' attempts to be discreet led to a belief that they were carrying out dark and secret practices; Rome was, on several occasions, misled into believing that England was ready for re-conversion by over-eager converts, and sometimes its responses were ill-timed and led to increased Anti-Catholic feelings. Most Catholics managed to be loyal both to Rome and to England, but they still had doubts of the papal organisation, perhaps sharing the general perception of Rome's connection with England's enemies. Their numbers remained about 30,000 to 40,000, until the Irish started to arrive, when numbers rapidly rose to millions. The Irish were poor, and visible, another problem, and there is still a distance between Irish Catholics, the old families, and the much publicised new converts. One of the points in the book is that where there poor Catholics, Masses held in back rooms, and rooms above inns are not because of being in hiding, but because of poverty. This is only a summary, but its well worth finding out this history: I wish there had been more personal detail, but it was a thin book. I do find that the facts are often much more interesting than the myths, though another of the books points was that the stories of martyrdoms, part of the myths, was what served to hold the community in faith. There were very few periods when a mnemonic song such as this would have been useful.

Changing the subject rather, apart from being how the truth behind an old hagiography is more interesting than the imagined tale.

This is an old nun's tale, almost in two ways. Miss Squires who told me the first version, was the sort of woman who would have been a nun if she could. She ran a small private school, and as someone who knew her told me, if she didn't teach me to read (which she didn't), she would certainly have taught me the saints' days. She was a devoted High Anglican, and took her pupils to church on church festivals. The church was St Mary and St Eanswythe's at Folkestone, and St Eanswythe is the nun with the story. What Miss Squires told us was how the saint had made water run uphill for the nuns at her convent, and how the miracle was still working. Naturally I was curious about this. There was a pond supposedly fed by this water, but it was a very dank and gloomy spot. I wanted to go and investigate, but was too young to do so. I still remember my seven-year-old logic (flawed, because of only knowing Congregationalist history). I knew that people in the Bible had done miracles, and I knew that Eanswythe had lived much closer to Bible times than I did, so I supposed that she might have done a miracle. I was very dubious about it still working, but if it was, I really wanted to see it. When I grew old enough to walk around the town by myself, I made a beeline for the pond, but sadly it had been turned into a garden with a rectangular fishpond in the middle. No water was flowing in or out, and there was a dead newt floating upside down in it. I was deeply disappointed. But Miss Squires hadn't told us enough. She hadn't told us that the source of the water wasn't in the valley below, but a few miles away at the foot of the local hills, and that the water had flowed along a ditch along the contours of the land, close by the end of her school's garden. What had happened back then in Saxon times was that Eanswythe, a princess, had persuaded her father to set up a convent for her to be abbess of (at 18 or so!), and then had found that her nuns were spending too long fetching water. She went, said the story, to the spring, dipped her crozier in the water, and it followed her back to the convent. Part way along the journey she crossed a small valley, and the water followed her down one side, across the stream at the bottom, and up the other side, without the water mixing. And the water did indeed continue to flow, though not until my childhood. It was the Town Ditch, providing water until the beginning of this century, when the local water works provided piped water. As to the valley crossing, on another of my trips, I saw what I took for a mill leat projecting out from the side of that small valley and pouring water into the stream at the bottom. It was what was left from that continuously maintained aqueduct. No miracle, but engineering. And by a Saxon (or Jutish) teenage girl. (She died from nursing victims of plague in her twenties.) Now that's a nun's tale worth the telling.

Penny