No. I.
THE CATHOLIC REGISTERS OF ST. MARY OF FURNESS , ULVERSTON, LANCASHIRE. 1812-1842. CONTRIBUTED BY JOSEPH EDWARD SMITH . HISTORICAL NOTES BY JOSEPH GILLOW.
Ulverston . Ulverston is a parish in the hundred of Lonsdale , north of the Sands, Union of Ulverston, county palatine of Lancashire , 16 miles north -west is one of the manors within the Liberty of by west of Lancaster. Furness , which on the erection of the abbey in 1127 was presented by Stephen , Earl of Boulogne , afterwards King of England, to the Cistercian monks as a part of the endowment of that foundation. When the first public Catholic chapel since the Reformation was erected in Ulverston about the opening of the nineteenth century, it was dedicated to the patroness of Furness , St. Mary, and the foundation-stone was brought from the abbey . Previous to this time the Faith in this districthad been preserved through the ministration of priests sheltered in the houses of local gentry, briefly indicated by the following notices :
It
Kirkby Hall, in the parish of Kirkby Ireleth , four and a half miles south-west of Ulverston, was the seat of the ancient Catholic family of Kirkby till was seized early in the eighteenth century by the mortgagees of Col. itRoger Kirkby, who had apostatised about the time of the Oates Plot. The mansion was a low strong structure of dark red stone , in the Tudor style, and an upper room served as a chapel , the walls being covered with ancient frescoes and black-letter inscriptions still existing. A small sacristy adjoined, and an opening in the corner of the chapel now leads
to be a secret hiding-place, though it looks to what has been supposed as , ,
if it had been used a confessional (C.R.S. vi 339-40 ; Lord Burghley's Map of Lancashire , 1590 , p . 2) . There is no record preserved of the names of the priests who served this interesting pre -Reformation chapel , which is now only accessible through a hole in the ceiling of the passage below . On a cubical stone , probably part of a sundial, lying in front of the hall, long since converted into a farmstead, are the arms of the Kirkbys and Lowthers, the other two sides being inscribed with the initials of Roger Kirkby and his wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Lowther, of Lowther Castle , with the date 1639, and the initials of their four sons and eight daughters. Hampsfield Hall, a venerable mansion in East Broughton, parish of Cartmel, was for some generations after the reign of Elizabeth a seat of the staunch Catholic familyof Thornburgh (or Thornborough) , but when they ceased to reside there is not recorded . The manor eventually passed into Protestant hands, and is now a farmhouse ( C.R.S. , vi , 251-3 ) . The Thornburghs, through the families of Musgrave , Fitzwilliam , Plantagenet, and De Warren, traced their descent from William the Conqueror (Burke, Extinct Baronetage, 1838 , p . 425) . as