ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



all their worldly prospects and accepted extreme poverty that they might 

 keep their consciences inviolate. 



In Bishop Moore, Norw^ich possessed not only an ecclesiastic of moderate 

 views, who in his appointments carefully avoided any countenance of the 

 extremists, but also one of great learning. He had been fellow of St. Catha- 

 rine Hall, Cambridge, and at his death his library was purchased by George I, 

 and given to the university. His daughter married Dr. Tanner, who became 

 chancellor of the diocese in 1703, archdeacon of Norfolk 172 i, and eventu- 

 ally bishop of St. Asaph.^ Dr. Jefferey, archdeacon of Norwich, and 

 Dr. Trimnell, archdeacon of Norfolk, who succeeded to the bishopric on 

 Bishop Moore's removal to Ely in 1707, were both notable men, but the most 

 vigorous and energetic man in the diocese was Dr. Humphrey Prideaux, who 

 became dean in 1702, a scholar of large and varied learning. The Restoration 

 had been followed by a period of universal laxity and corruption of morals, 

 but the change for the better that was typified by the foundation of the 

 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge in 1698, found its expres- 

 sion in the high characters of the men who filled the chief posts in the diocese 

 of Norwich at that time. 



A note among the State Papers Domestic for 1693' states that there 

 were then in the diocese, 168,760 conformists, 7,934 nonconformists, and 

 671 papists. A correspondence in the British Museum of February, 1695-6,' 

 shows that at that date Sir Robert Yallopp, Mr. Tasburgh, and others of the 

 Norfolk gentry were suspected of Jacobite plotting, and that their meetings 

 were held at the Goat Tavern, Norwich, kept by a Quaker ; they were said 

 to ' be great with the Papists,' and Sir Robert Yallopp is described as main- 

 taining Mr. Skelton, a non-juring minister, deprived for not taking the oath, 

 to minister in a private chapel near his house. These names appear again 

 among a list of the ' names of the Roman Catholics, non-jurors, and others 

 who refused to take the oaths to H.M. the late King George transmitted to 

 the late Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates of England and Wales after 

 the unnatural Rebellion in the North, 1715';* and with them several 

 members of the Howard family, and representatives of the well-known 

 recusant names of Bedingfield, Jernegan, and Waldegrave. 



Gough, in his History of the Quakers,^ says that a spirit of persecution 

 revived in Norfolk in 1698, although the Quakers then enjoyed the exemp- 

 tions of the Act of Toleration, and that some priests, stirred up, it is said, by 

 one Francis Bagg, who was formerly a Quaker, commenced hostilities by 

 a challenge to a public meeting in their parish church at West Dereham. 

 A pamphlet, called The Quaker s Challenge,^ is in existence which contains a 

 certificate to the effect that the Quakers challenged the clergy, and gives a vivid 

 picture of the course events were taking in a country parish, where feelings 

 ran high. The certificate is attested by Edward Beckham, D.D., rector of 



' The author of Nothla Monastha, published at Oxford, 1693 (and reprinted under the editorship of his 

 brother, John, vicar of Lowestoft, and precentor of St. Asaph's, in 1744), bequeathed his famous collection of 

 MSS. to the Bodleian Library, since when the records existing at Norwich have been considerably diminished. 



' Cat. S. P. Dom. 1693, p. 449. 



' Add. MS. 28941, fol. 23. Extracts of some letters from Norwich relating to papists, 25 Feb. 1695-6. 



* English Catholic Non-jurori, 171 5, by the Rev. Edgar E. Estcourt, M.A., from Original Returns in the 

 custody of the Clerk of the Peace, Norwich. 



' Op. cit. iii, 417. * B.M. 105, c. 20. 



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