A HISTORY OF SURREY 



or Saunders or Saunder of Charlwood. The Sanders family was generally 

 recusant under Elizabeth ; they were connected by marriage with the 

 Copleys and with other famihes of Surrey recusants. If, as Sanders says, 

 he relied upon personal knowledge and what information he could pick 

 up among the English exiles abroad, and from the men of recusant 

 families who were being trained for the English mission at Douai, Rheims 

 and Rome, he was not likely to be in special want of information about 

 Surrey clergymen. His words are, after enumerating Church dignitaries 

 who were deprived, imprisoned or molested : — 



Nee enim dubito quin alii praeterea valde multi hanc laudem meriti sint. Sed 

 illos ego recensui quos aut ipse noveram, aut ab aliis hac dignitate motos esse 

 acceperam. Presbyteri vero Parochiales, et alii clerici qui ob retinendae Sedis Apos- 

 tolicas communionem, vel in vinculis defuncti, vel adhuc vincti, vel in exilium ire 

 coacti sunt, multo difficilius enumerari possunt. Sed tamen ne Ordo ipse si penitus 

 pratermittatur, injuriam sibi factam existimet, eos hie adjungam de quibus me audire 

 contigit.^ 



He then gives the names of nine priests who had been imprisoned, 

 and then a considerable list of priests who had been deprived of their 

 benefices. The curious point is that he gives no name which can be 

 certainly identified as that of a Surrey parish priest, he gives no names 

 of Surrey benefices, except in the case of Edmund Mervyn, the arch- 

 deacon of Surrey, who is not named among parish priests of course. In 

 addition to the archidiaconal endowment of the rectory of Farnham he 

 held the living of Sutton. Yet in fact some few Surrey clergymen were 

 deprived in the first few years of Elizabeth's reign ; the registers of Bishop 

 Home, and the Sede Vacante register before Home became Bishop of 

 Winchester, show it by institutions after deprivation. If Sanders had 

 never heard of these cases, occurring in one case in Reigate, in the close 

 neighbourhood of the property of his family, it shows either that his 

 information was extremely defective or that the deprivations could not be 

 twisted, even by a not very scrupulous partisan, into deprivations for 

 constancy to the apostolic see. A great many ignorant and unfit men 

 certainly had been put into livings during the great era of ecclesiastical 

 spoliations under Henry and Edward's reigns. Many livings were 

 vacant propter exilitatem, and the same reason, the diversion of parochial 

 endowments into the pockets of the laity, either through the alienation 

 of previous monastic appropriations or through direct annexation, must 

 have caused an inferior set of clergy to be often in possession of what was 

 no longer a decent living. Home very shortly deprived some clergy 

 whom he had himself instituted. He is more likely in the first instance 

 to have instituted some disreputable clerk, or even a sectarian zealot who 

 would be deprived for Protestant nonconformity, than a Romanist. 



To make the indications from the registers more clear it is as well 

 to note carefiilly the succession of the Bishops of Winchester, under 

 whom changes were carried through. 



Stephen Gardiner was bishop from 153 1, and, though he was im- 

 prisoned by the council under Edward, was not deprived till 1551. He 



' De Fisibirt Monarchta, lib. vii. 689. 

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