ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



the Lords of the Council urged the justices to discover if possible the 

 ' massing priests ' who were going about the country disguised as serving- 

 men and artificers.* They were taking about with them consecrated 

 superaltars for the performance of mass ; but we do not hear of many 

 of them being caught, which implies much popular sympathy. In 1591 

 a special commission was needed in Surrey, composed of the Lord 

 Lieutenant, the bishop, the dean, archdeacon and chancellor of Win- 

 chester, Lord Lumley, Sir William More, his son George More and some 

 half dozen others, justices and gentry, to inquire after and arrest seminary 

 priests and Jesuits, who are reported to be in numbers in the realm,'' 

 striving not only to seduce people from their religion, but to renounce 

 their allegiance and to adhere to the King of Spain and the pope. That 

 this result was not always brought about was very much to the credit of 

 the persistently persecuted recusants. The bearing upon the state of 

 religious feeling in the county of the incessant exhortations to inquiry 

 and arrest is that the sympathy for the ' massing priests ' must have been 

 pretty widely spread to enable them at all to elude the zeal of the 

 justices. Leigh Place, Leith Hill Place, Smallfield Place and some other 

 old Surrey houses contain or contained 'priests' holes.' But the steady 

 pressure of laws which ruined the land-owning recusants, the complete 

 control of the pulpits, the circulation of the Geneva Bible with Calvin- 

 istic comments, and above all the identification of conformity and patriot- 

 ism, worked in Surrey as all over England. Within the lifetime of 

 men who remembered the reluctant supersession of the mass by the 

 Communion Office in Surrey parish churches, the Communion Office 

 itself, celebrated as Elizabeth's Prayer Book directed, came to be con- 

 sidered superstitious by a Puritan generation. 



Puritan nonconformity began to appear in Elizabeth's reign. In 

 1572 John Field and Thomas Wilcox, ministers, tried to organize 

 Presbyterianism at Wandsworth.' In 1586 John Udal, a Puritan 

 lecturer at Kingston, was accused of holding conventicles. He was tried 

 in 1 590 at Croydon Assizes on a charge of attacking the queen's authority, 

 and condemned to death. He was spared at Whitgift's intercession, and 

 was pardoned in 1592, but died almost immediately afterwards.* 



The more eccentric manifestations of religious opinion early mani- 

 fested themselves in some parts of Surrey. Sectaries were ordered to 

 be apprehended in 1560. In 1561 information was laid before the 

 justices of the ' divylish devices ' of sectaries about Wonersh and Duns- 

 fold, weavers probably, for these were cloth weaving villages, and perhaps 

 foreigners or companions of foreigners. The name of David Orch, who 



'■ Loseley MSS. v. 15. The Council to the Justices, 5 Sept. 1578. 



2 Ibid. 23 Nov. 34 Eliz. 



' Collier, vi. 1 9, quoting Bancroft's Dangerous Positions. 



* He was not vicar of Kingston, as the Diet, of 'Nat. Biography says. Stephen Chatfield was in- 

 stituted in 1 5 74. and died as vicar in 1598 (Reg. Home, 1 00a, & Bilson, 7 a) . For his trial see State Trials, 

 1271, and Strype's Whitgift, 314. For his pardon see Acts of the Privy Council, 21 May, 1592. His 

 attack was not really on the queen's authority, but on the bishops'. It is abusive, and intolerant of all 

 opinions but rigid Calvinism. 



27 



