Little Malvern Letters II

A selection of family papers from Little Malvern Court in Worcestershire, illuminating the transformation of Catholic life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.


This second volume of Little Malvern Letters documents a period of profound changes to Catholic life in England. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, priests and their benefactors could still fear prosecution, and papist estates had to be registered and were subject to double Land Tax assessments. By 1800, some measure of toleration had been extended, and refugees from the French Revolution had been welcomed, but caution still dominated. The nineteenth century saw full legal emancipation and social acceptance.

A microcosm of these national changes, Little Malvern Court, Worcestershire, went from a secret centre for the underground practice of a proscribed religion, to the licensing of a discreet chapel, to the foundation of a parish church in the newly established Catholic diocese of Birmingham, with the family that had made it possible accepted as pillars of county society.

These family papers touch on investments in the notorious South Sea Company, matchmaking in London and Bath, and revolutionary agitation in nineteenth-century Flintshire, but seen through a less familiar Catholic lens that includes coded references to clergy, pilgrimages to Holywell, international connections to monasteries and convent schools in pre-Revolutionary France and Flanders, and pilgrimages to Rome in the age of steam.

Aileen Muriel Hodgson (1905-1997) was in turn an agricultural student, an actress (as Aileen Wood), a vicar's wife, a Catholic nun, and a historian of Worcestershire recusancy.

Michael Hodgetts, KSG (1936-2022) taught at St Thomas More Catholic School, Willenhall, and the Maryvale Institute of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. He was an editor of Recusant History (now British Catholic History) and of the publications series of the Catholic Record Society, as well as historical director of Harvington Hall, Worcestershire.