In considering the period from 1559–1603, and the attitudes within the recusant community to the acceptance or rejection of the Elizabethan Settlement, the first major event giving extensive evidence of political attitudes in the northern region is the Rising of the Northern Earls, a crisis which, as elsewhere in Elizabethan England marked the watershed for the fortunes of Catholicism during the reign. An analysis, conducted at some length, of its causes, events and consequences is, indeed, indispensable to understanding Catholic survival in Elizabethan northern England.
A study of the persistence of Catholic practices and traditions in the old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland highlights the great concern felt by Bishop Robinson of Carlisle (1598–1616) in regard to popish practices in his diocese at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of that of James I. The incidence of such persistence in the Carlisle diocese, however, was slight in comparison with that of the Chester diocese in which lay the market town of Kendal in Westmorland. Here the continuance of Catholic practices was typified, not only by the persistent use of sites of old wayside crosses in funeral processions, but echoed in the townspeople’s equal determination to keep the long-established custom of the performance in their town of the Corpus Christi Play.
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