Appendix A: the Responsa Scholarum and the Liber Primi Examinis

Appendix A: The Responsa Scholarum and the Liber Primi Examinis The Responsa Scholarum are responses to a questionnaire set to incoming students at the Venerable English College, Rome from 1598 to 1685. The Liber Primi Examinis (LPE) are abstracts of answers to a similar questionnaire at the English College, Valladolid, Spain from 1592 to 1623. There are 595 extant responsa and 309 LPE entries.1 These records represent four-fifths of the English men who studied at two Catholic seminaries: 757 students entered at Rome from 1598 to 1685, compared to 595 surviving responsa. At Valladolid, 309 entries for 356 students survive. Six individuals appear in both collections.2 Although obviously selective, these records are also diverse, and because of the high total number they are capable of quantitative analysis. As with any interrogative records, responses are conditioned by the questions’ agenda. But, equally, respondents interpreted the questions. Several scholars have used parts of the Responsa Scholarum collection for analysis of particular themes.3 My ‘Youth, religious identity and autobiography’ attempted a more comprehensive quantitative analysis, of which Chapter 2 of the present study makes use; that paper included a discussion of the responsa and LPE as sources, which is summarised here.4 The questionnaire systems at the English Colleges of Valladolid and Rome were probably the work of Robert Persons SJ.5 He was instrumental in founding the Valladolid seminary, and the Rome responsa commence in 1598, a year after Persons became Rector there. His priorities in both places would have included weeding out potential spies of the English government; assessing the educational level of candidates, for purposes of academic administration; and – particularly at Rome, where he took over after a period of internal strife – ensuring the authority of the Jesuit superiors of the College. Persons and his colleagues may also have seen new students’ accounts as a source of information about the situation in England.6 The questions addressed the candidates’ social origins, their parents’ and siblings’ religion, and their own faith: whether they had ever been ‘heretics or schismatics’, and if so how they had converted. They were also asked whether they had experienced per- secution. There was a question on the candidate’s educational history; entrants ranged from university graduates to school leavers. The final question asked for a promise to obey the college statutes, and whether the candidate intended to become a priest. This second had a basic bureaucratic function, since only those willing to be ordained could be enrolled as scholars; others who intended to study without taking orders were convictors, paying for their board.7 After 1658 at Rome, an oath was required to take Holy Orders and return to the ‘English Mission’, eliminating laymen entering only to study. John Bossy’s analysis of the answers on social origin, used in conjunction with some surviving records from Douai College, provides a picture of this aspect of the seminaries.8 Between 1598 and 1610, sons of non-gentry slightly outnumbered gentry. The 1610s to the mid-seventeenth century show a strong gentry majority; after the 199 200 Appendix A Restoration this proportion declined again (to 17% at Rome in the 1680s, although records are scanty by this date). Respondents were asked their place of birth, and their answers (unsurprisingly) indi- cate most recruitment from England’s more Catholic areas, especially Yorkshire and Lancashire, and also London.9 The remainder were spread fairly evenly across the rest of the country, although central Wales was barely represented. They were also asked their ages.10 The average age in both Rome and Valladolid was twenty, with two-thirds to three-quarters aged between eighteen and twenty- four: at Valladolid, 65.4%; at Rome, 73.5% overall, and 67.1% up to 1620. A small number (twenty-five at Rome, twelve at Valladolid) were over thirty, while 12% at Rome and 20% at Valladolid were under eighteen. However, at Rome up to 1620 there were slightly higher proportions of older respondents (7%) and younger ones (14% under eighteen). Valladolid recorded eleven respondents under sixteen, Rome four. The oldest respondent (at Rome) was forty-six (LR354); the youngest ones were fourteen (LR359, LPE14, LPE15, LPE50). The Responsa Scholarum and LPE are different types of sources. The responsa are orig- inal answers to the questionnaire: the manuscripts, in the hands of their 595 authors, survive.11 They were mostly composed in Latin, but three respondents wrote all or partly in English. At Valladolid, autograph responses do not survive. The LPE con- sists of abstracts of answers, the scribes presumably being members of the College staff. This makes LPE entries more typical of interrogative records: scribes may have prompted answers and selected material to an unknown extent, although they could only work from information respondents chose to give. Six Valladolid entrants also went to Rome and left responsa. At Valladolid, the ‘first examination’ was made during the candidate’s probation, in private. He was later re-examined to make sure his story was consistent, and his answers recorded in the LPE.12 We have less information on the composition of responsa – there are no records of oral examinations, so perhaps they were entirely a written exercise. Kenny deduced that the questionnaire was set soon after arrival, but before formal enrolment; but we know little else.13 Communication between respondents, and influence from the staff, is, however, certainly possible. There is a decrease in the amount of detail given in responsa: by the 1650s, answers were rarely long or so comprehensive. In 1658, the questionnaire at Rome was changed – covering the same topics, but with more detail in some areas. Some impli- cations of this change are referred to in this study.14 The larger number of precise enquiries seems to expect yes/no answers, and these were generally what was given. Parents’ religion could be told in one word, and conversion histories in five.15 This facilitates quantification in some areas, but means later entries do not repay textual analysis so well. There is a reduction in quantity: from 1668, two years are without responsa, and from 1671 only about half the entrants recorded in the Liber Ruber left responsa. After 1685, the practice seems to have fallen into disuse. Quantitative analysis necessitates categorisation, which is necessarily interpreta- tion. I have tried to follow respondents’ own definitions, and to use all information, however partial, without deploying too much guesswork in clarifying it. My quantification depends on positive selection: I have counted those who describe themselves as converts, and included as ‘non-converts’ all respondents who did not record a conversion. In examining juvenile conversions, I have counted those whose conversions can be dated to before the age of twenty-one. Most other converts were demonstrably over twenty-one at their conversion, but the ages of some are unknown. In subdivid- ing juvenile converts’ ages, if a precise age is not given, it is recorded as unknown. Appendix A 201 Occasionally, where it can be narrowed down deductively, I have allocated the high- est possible age category: for example, if a convert does not state his age at conversion but was seventeen on entering, he is recorded in the fourteen-to-seventeen group. Figures from the Responsa Scholarum and LPE are derived from my databases of entries, made using the editions cited above, and are not given further references. Individual entries are identified by number. Notes Introduction 1. TNA SP12/235/8; RSJ:1 pp.355–6n. 2. H. Berry and E. Foyster assess the historiography in their The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), Introduction, pp.1–17. Recent work includes: Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (eds.), Gender and Early Modern Constructions of Childhood (Farnham, 2011); A.J. Fletcher, Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914 (New Haven & London, 2008); E. Foyster and J. Marten (general eds.), A Cultural History of Childhood and Family (6 vols., New York, 2010); A. Classen (ed.), Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: The Results of a Paradigm Shift in the History of Mentality (Berlin, 2005); A. Shell, ‘Furor Juvenilis: Post-Reformation English Catholicism and exemplary youthful behaviour’ in E. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp.185–206; M. Bunge (ed.), The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI, 2001). 3. P. Aries , trans. J. Cape (1962), Centuries of Childhood (Paris, 1960); L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London, 1977); C. Heywood, ‘Cen- turies of childhood: An anniversary – and an epitaph?’ in Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 3:3 (2010) 341–65. 4. L.A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge, 1983) galvanized the revisionary project; cf Fletcher, Growing Up in England. See L.J. Wilkinson (ed.), A Cultural History of Childhood and the Family in theMiddleAges(Oxford, 2010), especially Wilkinson, ‘Introduction’ pp.1–19; A. Classen, ‘Introduction’ to Classen, Childhood, pp.1–67; B. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford, 1993); N. Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London, 2001); S. Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London, 1990). 5. G. Levi and J. Schmitt (eds.), trans. C. Naish, A History of Young People in the West (2 vols., Cambridge, MA and London, 1997); K. Eisenbichler (ed.), The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650 (Toronto, 2002); P.J.P. Goldberg and F. Riddy (eds.), Youth in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2004); P. Griffiths, Youth and Author- ity: Formative Experiences in England 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996); I.K.

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