Published by Maney Publishing (c) University of Leeds Northern History, XLIII: 1, March 2006  The University of Leeds, 2006 DOI: 10.1179/174587006X86765 CATHOLICISM, CONFORMITY AND THE COMMUNITY IN THE ELIZABETHAN DIOCESE OF DURHAM* ROSAMUND OATES University of Southampton IN 1603, THE BISHOP OF DURHAM, Tobie Matthew, surveyed his see and concluded gloomily: ‘omnia in peius’. The reason for his despair, he later told Robert Cecil, was the number of Catholic recusants in the diocese, many of whom ‘have been seduced or after their conformity revolted to papistry’. 1 By 1603, however, Matthew — who had been in Durham for nearly twenty years — knew that recusancy figures alone did not accurately reflect the extent of Catholic worship within the diocese. Ten years earlier, Tobie Matthew had argued that recusants — Catholics persuaded ‘by the ministers of the old serpent . . . not to suffer so much as one ear open to hear the word of God’, but to stay away from their parish churches — were the main threat to Protestant reform. 2 By the end of the century, however, Tobie Matthew was increasingly aware of the large number of men and women in the diocese who attended their parish church and accepted the Elizabethan regime, yet also harboured seminary priests and worshipped together as Catholics. Their conformity had successfully undermined Matthew’s drive to establish Protestant worship; it also offers the historian an illuminating insight into the development of Elizabethan Catholicism. After the Elizabethan government forbade Catholic worship, relationships with the State — as measured though religious conformity — were at the heart of the Elizabe- than Catholic experience. As such, patterns of conformity and recusancy demonstrate how English Catholicism developed after 1559, revealing changing patterns of worship, as well as Catholic relations with the State and the priesthood. The evolution of English Catholicism was not, however, a uniform process and the contrasting patterns of conformity of two Catholic communities in the Elizabethan diocese of * Many thanks to Professor G. W. Bernard and Dr Mark Stoyle for reading and commenting on an early draft of this article. 1 National Archives: Public Record Office, State Papers Domestic, SP 14/3/42; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Salisbury Manuscripts ... at Hatfield House, XV, 256. 2 Y(ork) M(inster) L(ibrary), Additional Manuscript 582, fol. 28r. For the Elizabethan authorities’ attempts to establish a Protestant church in Durham see R. Oates, ‘Tobie Matthew and the Establishment of the Godly Commonwealth in England: 1560–1603’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, York Univ. 2004), especially chapter eight.