From Henry's divorce to Elizabeth's accession, the most striking religious changes at the Inns of Court were external. As the Reformation progressed, church and chapel were stripped of their medieval ornamentation, in form as in fabric. Despite this outward transformation, there was remarkable continuity in personnel. Change occurred more by the natural process of admission, promotion, retirement and death than by compulsion. This did not mean that there was no regulation whatsoever. Members of the Inns were among those expected to obey the law—whether renouncing the Pope, acknowledging the Supremacy or maintaining uniformity. Nevertheless it is difficult to establish the extent to which religious observance was actually practised at the Inns. Bartlett Green of the Middle Temple, who was burnt for heresy in 1556, testified that he had not heard Mass during Mary's reign. Richard Allington, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, was so engrossed in the worship of mammon that he fearfully confessed before his deathbed audience in 1561 to have ‘never wentte to churche atte tyme of commone prayere'. In 1569, several other members of the legal societies admitted they had rarely attended church since Elizabeth's accession, including Walter Norton of Gray's Inn, ‘by reason of his busines and clientes causes’. Despite the legal requirement, there is no sign of any campaign to enforce religious observance at the Inns or to coerce the legal profession as a whole.

During the Archpriest Controversy, altogether eighteen books were printed on behalf of the Appellant priests. On the other side, in defence of the Archpriest Blackwell, barely a third of this number of pamphlets appeared. The first of these anti-Appellant works to arrive in England—in the summer of 1601—was entitled The copy of a letter written to a veryworshipful Catholic gentleman in England, of grief conceived about somescandalous dissension and books set forth tending to the disgracing oneof another by such as labour in the same cause, know from its running-title as An epistle of pious grief. A small tract of fifty pages, written by ‘S.N.’, it is now so rare that only one copy is known to survive.

This work is the product of team research carried out by a group of Extramural Department students of the University of Birmingham, using locally available primary and secondary material. None of the group were professional historians, though some have pursued private research on aspects of local history, and all had been prepared by a term's lectures on the Catholic Revival in Birmingham, 1650-1850.

In a region of sparse population and little culture it is hardly surprising that organised religion has never been strong in Cumbria. During the Middle Ages the Church's main influence was via the several monastic settlements, particularly the powerful Furness Abbey, which possessed a real economic empire. The influence of the clergy was restricted when population was so dispersed and parishes so massive, and the conclusion must be that Roman Catholicism possessed only a tenuous hold at any point in its history. That the Cumbrians so easily and swiftly on the surface adopted the new Anglican Establishment of the sixteenth century did not reflect the attractions for the new faith or the coercion of authorities; it was simply that no Christian denomination was taken to heart by the native Cumbrians. By the mid-seventeenth century it has been estimated that there were about 500 Roman Catholics in the whole of Cumbria out of a population of towards 100,000. A number of prominent Cumbrians retained the old faith—the Stricklands of Sizergh (who suffered greatly for it) and most of the Howards of Corby and Naworth (who enjoyed considerable honours) and their households being the most prominent. Generally, the remaining Catholics were left alone, though in case of emergency their loyalty might be questioned.