Once a Catholic: Recusancy in Chorley and Leyland in Tudor and Stuart Times
On 31 October 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper to the chapel door of the University of Wittenburg. It was a document that became known as the ’95 Theses’, and was the first iteration of what would become Protestantism. Luther’s ideas struck a chord among Europeans who were tiring of the authoritarianism, hideboundness and corruption of the medieval Catholic Church. By the end of the 16 th Century, Protestantism was rivalling Catholicism across Europe. The rise of Protestantism was not, of course unchallenged, and where it became dominant, Catholicism did not disappear. In England, Lancashire became a refuge of the Catholic faith, and the old religion continued below the surface of the county throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this article I will outline the changing relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism in Tudor and Stuart England, and will focus on the survival of Catholicism in Lancashire in general, and in Chorl