Southend, Soberton, Sussex: Books in an early Jesuit mission-centre
- Lucy Vinten
- 18 hours ago
- 7 min read
This blogpost looks at Jesuit missionary activity in England in the eighteenth century, focussing on one small Jesuit mission station at Southend Farm in Soberton, Sussex. Combining evidence newly identified in our antiquarian book collection with documentary material from our main archive collection, it makes two suggestions. Firstly, it highlights strengthening evidence that the Jesuits were using Southend Farm as a missionary centre in the earlier seventeenth century. Secondly, that Southend Farm housed a library of books in the eighteenth century, and that there is a strong likelihood that this library had its roots in the mid seventeenth century. This blogpost also demonstrates the value of using an antiquarian book collection for historical investigation, and how this can add to archive based research.
I started this investigation when I realised that three of the books in our collection have the same annotation on their title page, all written in the same hand, which simply says ‘Southend’. This led me to explore what and where Southend was (not the Seaside resort in Essex!) and to look deeper at the Jesuit presence there.
These three books all have 'Southend' on their title pages, in the same handwriting. I particularly like the little glimpse of humour in A/852, with the word 'The' in the title of the book forming the central three letters of 'Southend'
Jesuit missionary centres were established from the early seventeenth century in remote locations in England and Wales. Jesuits evolved ways of disguising themselves and their activities, which included everything from building priest holes to drawing up complicated legal agreements which obscured yet secured Jesuit ownership or use of property. It was common practice to have a building – often a farmhouse, with a farmer living and working there, but with some rooms permanently set aside for the use of Jesuits. This might include a chamber, a parlour and a chapel and outbuildings, including stabling for a horse. Spinkhill in Derbyshire had this type of arrangement, and we know about the physical arrangements there, because an inventory (now in our archive) was drawn up in the early eighteenth century, which specified a bed chamber, dining room and parlour set aside for the Jesuit missioner.
Southend Farm in Soberton fits this pattern of Jesuit mission centre. It is remote and hard to find even now, located roughly 10 miles south-east of Winchester and about the same distance north of Portsmouth. Southend, occasionally also called Kirby’s farm, is located out of the village, near the parish boundary. It is known to have been a Jesuit base in the eighteenth century, and there are documents in the Jesuit Archive which confirm this. The earliest known Jesuit missioner was Fr Christopher Coniers SJ in the 1690s, followed by a string of 19 identified Jesuits throughout the eighteenth century. The British Jesuit Archive also contains legal documents from the seventeenth century providing a trail of ownership evidence for Southend Farm from 1613, but it is not always clear how these relate to Jesuit ownership.
Southend Farm now (left) and from a copy of a sketch of it (right) from the early twentieth century.
In the 1770s the Jesuit Missioner at Southend Farm was Fr George Bruning. He arrived there in 1771, and on 3rd November 1779 wrote several pages in a notebook about Southend. He titled it Memorandums for the use of the Gentleman Residents [i.e. Jesuit Missioners] and commented that when he first came to Southend he could never find any book of records nor written memorandums, so has left the following for the benefit of others coming after.
Left: BJA/MSB/32/164r, the first page of Fr Bruning's Memorandums
Right BJS/MSB/32/167r, Fr Bruning's list of Missioners at Southend Farms, with dates they started there.
Among the details Bruning noted was a list of preceding Jesuits at Southend, back to the start of the eighteenth century, but he believed that there had been Jesuits there earlier – his account goes on with the statement:
‘In an old part of the building (which was built in 1630 date in parlour, another on a post in the farmers passage, 1630 but underwent considerable repairs in 1723) is a Priest hole. This is mentioned as a confirmation (of what other use there can be no doubt) that Missioners have lived here from very early times.’
Bruning’s mention of the ‘farmers passage’ is a reference to the division of use of the property between the farmer and the resident Jesuits. From the seventeenth century it was common practice for Jesuit property to be put in the hands of safe trustees, since if the true ownership of such property were discovered it was liable to be confiscated by the State as being devoted to ‘superstitious uses’. The property would be let out to a layperson, often a farmer, who was sympathetic to the Jesuits, with the proviso that some of the rooms would be set aside for the use of the resident Jesuit. This meant that the presence of the Jesuits was less obvious.
Fr Bruning goes on to describe the available accommodation for the Jesuits, and there appears to have been clear demarcation between the Jesuits’ areas and the farmer’s space:
BJA/MSB/32/165v & 166r. On the left is Fr Bruning's list of the accommodation for the resident Jesuit Missioners at Southend Farm. The transcription is below.
Within
Below Kitchin, Parlour, Library-Closet & Cellars under
Above Two Chambers, Chapple & whatever is above each said appartments.
Apart Dairy red Door entry
Use in common of Wash-house or Brew house.
Without
Two stables in Farm-Yard.
Woodhouse in the Garden.
Cowhouse adjoining.
Reek-house in Reek-yard [Rick-yard]
Little Stable in the Close.
From a book history point of view, what immediately jumps out from this list is the ‘Library-closet’ on the ground floor. In the eighteenth century a closet was a marginal yet private architectural space where small scale social activities could happen, as well as a place where valuable books, papers and artefacts were stored. It was somewhere to meet and converse with one or two others, and to read and write, more like a study than what we would think of as a closet. Fr Bruning lists the library-closet as one of three rooms on the ground floor, with three more above. It seems probable that the three rooms on each floor would take up the same amount of space, so the kitchen, parlour and library-closet would take up the same space as two chambers and the chapel. This suggests that the library-closet was, at least, more substantial than a cupboard, and thus could accommodate a reasonable number of books.
Southend’s library-closet was listed in Fr Bruning's Memorandum in the late eighteenth century. The three surviving books with Southend inscriptions were printed in the early seventeenth century, in 1606, 1607 and 1623. By the time Fr Bruning was writing they were already over 160 years old. Fr Bruning gives evidence – the priest hole mentioned above – that he thought the Jesuits had been at Southend since the earlier part of the seventeenth century, and it is possible that the Jesuit books had been there with them since the earlier seventeenth century. These three books are certainly old enough to have been part of that library since then. There is one further piece of evidence which points to the same thing – one of the books, A/829, has a second inscription on the title page, the name ‘John Bright’.
We know little about John Bright except that he and his wife, Jane, lived at Southend Farm in the mid seventeenth century. George Bruning investigated the identity of the founder of the mission at Southend, and concluded:
‘I can now assert that Jane Cotton, postea [i.e. later] Jane Bright is the person to be remembered as such [i.e. as the founder] and of course of her father and sister to be included’.
Jane Bright was the daughter of John Cotton, who is first recorded at the property in 1613. He left it to Jane in 1638 and in 1660 she is mentioned in a legal document as Jane, wife of John Bright [MSB/32/5]. We don’t know when John Bright died, but he was outlived by Jane, who had left Southend Farm to her sister Barbara by the 1690s. The Jesuit Archive contains a series of legal documents relating to this family and Southend farm throughout the seventeenth century, and the implication is that the Cottons/Brights were holding the property on behalf of the Jesuits, sheltering them and allowing them to minister in the vicinity. Living alongside the Jesuits, the Cottons/Brights provided cover for them. It is a reasonable assumption that they were a Catholic family.
This supposition is supported by the nature of the book with John Bright’s name in, The image of bothe churches. It is a conspicuously Catholic book, and thus not one to own lightly, since owning Catholic books was banned throughout the seventeenth century, and the consequences for doing so were severe. And the fact that he owned this book suggests that he was interested in the theological debates taking place between Catholics and Protestants in the 1620s. Living alongside each other, it seems likely that books were lent and borrowed between the lay family and the resident Jesuit fathers.
The Jesuits used books to bolster and support the Catholic community they ministered to. They possessed them for their own reading purposes, but also to lend out and circulate among their flock - books were a core part of their mission. Given this relationship with books, it is unsurprising that the Jesuits even at small remote Southend Farm had a room devoted to storing their books, and that their book collection was relatively porous – a book owned by John Bright could end up in Jesuit ownership, and doubtless books flowed in the other direction too, out of their ownership. The Jesuits had a close relationship with the owners and other occupiers of Southend Farm, and perhaps we are seeing this reflected in the intermingled book ownership. These three books with the 'Southend' inscription and the one which also has John Bright's name in it suggest not only that there was a small library at Southend in the mid seventeenth century, but also suggests ways it was used to further the Jesuit mission.
Our collections at the British Jesuit Archives predominantly consist of archival material, with an antiquarian book collection alongside. These two collections complement each other, and one of the objects of this blogpost is to demonstrate that the books themselves can be used as part of archival research. The Antiquarian Book Provenance Project, investigating former owners of the books in our collection, feeds into what we know about past Jesuit activity, connections and intellectual pursuits. For more information about the Project, click on the link below
Sources used in this blogpost:
BJA/MSB/32/5, BJA/MSB/32/164, BJA/MSB/32/165, BJA/MSB/32/166, BJA/MSB/32/167, BJA/AccNo/2023/10
Bobker, Danielle, The Closet: The eighteenth-century architecture of intimacy. Princeton University Press 2020
Holt SJ, T.G. ‘Southend: a Hampshire Mission and Farm’, South Western Catholic History No 5, 1987. Pages 33-44
Reekes, D. M., 'Old Hall Green and Southend Mission', Catholic Ancestor Vol 5 No 2. June 1994. Pages 51-54
Reekes, D. M., 'Francis Warrington Dawson, from Soberton to Charleston by way of New Orleans', Catholic Ancestor Vol 9 No 3. November 2002. Pages 127-131
Comments