Let us consider the meaning of the fines which play so large a part in the history of these times. If a man is a Roman Catholic he is on no account allowed to attend a church or assembly where any kind of service other than the Catholic is performed. That rule is never, I believe, relaxed under any circumstances. It is a rule, therefore, which can be easily used for the discovery of Catholics. Thus (23 Elizabeth) it was enacted that every person over sixteen years of age who should refrain from attending at church, chapel, or some usual place of common prayer, against the tenor of a certain statute of the first year of her Majesty’s reign, for uniformity of common prayer, and should be lawfully convicted thereof, should forfeit, for each month in which he or she should so refrain, the sum of twenty pounds of lawful money. The convictions under this statute illustrate to some extent the proportion of Roman Catholics to Protestants then existing in the country. Thus in the Middlesex Session Rolls (Middlesex County Record Society) may be found a long list of persons brought before the Middlesex magistrates charged with this offence. During the last twenty-four years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign there were 408 convictions of this offence in Middlesex alone. They were gentlemen and gentlewomen, clerks, yeomen, tradesmen, wives, widows, and spinsters. They came from many parts of Middlesex, but especially from Westminster, Clerkenwell, Tottenham, Stepney, and Holborn. A fine of twenty pounds a month—about £100 of our money—would be far beyond the means of most of the persons convicted. For instance, on one page of the Rolls there are the names of twenty-six persons all convicted of not going to church for two or three months. Of these, twelve are gentlemen, three are wives of gentlemen, five are yeomen, one is a spinster, four are clerks, and one is a cook. What happened when the fine could not be paid? The number of convictions proves, first, that there were some, but not, in proportion to the whole, many Roman Catholics left in London and the parts around; next, that they were easily detected by their absence from church; thirdly, that there was a hot search after them; and fourthly, that though we find, here and there, a person following a trade or a craft, the Catholics were for the most part gentlefolk.