In the aftermath of the Great War, the English Province developed a much stronger educational apostolate through publications, newspaper articles, university lectures, and new houses in the university cities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Stellenbosch in Southern Africa. This was complemented by the opening of a boys school at Laxton in Northamptonshire followed later by a prep school at Llanarth, and later still of a Conference Centre, Spode House, at Hawkesyard. Much of the growth can be traced to the leadership given by Bede Jarrett, Provincial for four terms from 1916 to 1932, who also initiated the mission in Southern Africa. However, the Province maintained its parish commitments, and by the end of the 1950s the Province was stretched too thinly to ensure the well-running of each house. Community and parish life at Pendleton deteriorated to the point where there was no option other than closure of the priory and withdrawal from the parish.

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the Province from 1348 to 1559 showing first its resilience in the face of the Black Death with new foundations in Ireland and the establishment of the nuns’ convent at Dartford. Its resilence is then shown against theological attack in anti-fraternal literature, including writings by Wycliff, and the rise of Lollardy. The Province’s continuing value to key supporters is shown through the patronage manifest in church decoration, through lay burials and grants of confraternity, while their secure place in civic life before the Reformation is seen in relation to the guilds associated with their churches. The sudden collapse of the Province at the Henrician Reformation is then examined to identify several factors, the most important of which was the crown’s imposition of its agents as Provincials and Priors.

The book has shown how the unchanging mission of the Dominican Order has played out in the life of the English Province when stamped in the wax of different ages and cultures marked by the temperaments of particular individuals. Through a return to the primary sources, by removing the filters of an earlier hagiography or narrow regionalism, the books establishes patterns of growth and decline, and identifies the primary forces at work in those patterns. Where the early chapters show especially what was owed to lay patrons, later chapters show what was owed as well to Dominicans such as Cardinal Howard, Thomas Worthington, Dominic Aylward, Bede Jarrett and Vincent McNabb. Lay benefactors changed across the centuries. While the founding medieval benefactors were figures close to the royal courts, the patrons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were recusant nobles with little relationship to the court after the ‘Glorious Revolution’. The major lay benefactors after the mid-nineteenth century came from the newly wealthy.

Chapter 8 studies the often painful changes to the Province in the aftermath of Vatican II as traditional ministries and ways of life were greatly altered, but also what and who enabled the Province to adapt to changed cirsumstances in ways that made possible a viable future for the friars in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1 sets out the growth of the Province from 1221 to 1348, the different patterns of development in different parts of the British Isles, and what explains them. The first part of the chapter examines who supported the new foundations, how the English and Scottish kings in particular aided them, but also the role played by nobles and townsfolk. The second part of the chapter considers what lay behind this support, by looking at the friars’ life and ministry in relation to their supporters’ needs, how they met them directly, and how their religious life and training within the cloister enabled them to do this.

Chapter 3 rejects the previous characterisation by Godfrey Anstruther of the period from 1559 to 1655 as a hundred ’homeless’ years, to see how a few Englishmen joined Dominican houses on the continent and how some of these returned to work on the English mission where they frequently resided in their family homes. It notes the public apostasy of friars who lacked the support of an organised mission, and how attempts were made in the latter part of the period to put a stronger organisation in place.

Chapter 5 studies the life of the Dominican friars on the English Mission from 1661 to 1850, in London where they were at first welcome at court or attached to embassy chapels, at their family seats, or as chaplains attached to recusant families on rural estates. It shows their normally good relations with patrons, but also their insecurity for most of the period in the absence of sufficient residences with a guaranteed income where one friar could succeed another in the local mission. The friars maintained their Dominican idenity through their liturgy, their spiritual reading, their letters, and meetings. As the Industrial Revolution took hold, they were able to gain more support from ordinary lay Catholics in urban parishes, but also required to fund the construction of new churches and schools, while the lack of recuits required them to withdraw from many missions.

The history of the English Dominicans has been too little studied, in part because much documentary evidence has been lost. The present book is the first comprehensive history of the Province for a century. Its value lies not only in covering developments that have taken place since 1921, and in drawing on recent research for its account of earlier periods, but in offering a critical re-evaluation of the evidence from a fresh perspective. The book adopts an inclusive approach where earlier studies were often weakened through being limited to a particular region or individual, or by focussing more on the earliest growth of the Province than on later developments, by inattention to opponents of the friars, or by neglect of their relations to lay supporters.

Chapter 4 sets out and assesses the role played by Cardinal Howard in restoring the English Province and in organising its mission through the establishment of a priory and school at Bornhem, a nunnery at Brussels, a house in Rome, and, by a bequest in his will, a college at Louvain. It looks at how these houses functioned within the restored Province, the growing importance of the school for recruitment, and reveals the houses’ financial dependence on lay benefactors, before the friars and nuns were forced to flee in 1794 when the French occupied the Low Countries.

The Province entered a new phase of expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century after the friars accepted the mission at Woodchester in Gloucestershire, where a noviciate of strict observance was established in a purpose-built monastery through the support of Vincent Jandel, Master of the Order. The new recruits attracted to the Province enabled it to take on first new missions, and then open priories in large urban parishes at Newcastle, London, and Salford, ministering to the poor working-classes, while the friars continued to serve the poor of Leicester. This work required the funding of new churches and schools which often resulted in long-term debt and much anxiety for the friars responsible for raising funds. The period also saw the Province’s reliance on a small number of lay donors, the influence of which was seen in the construction of a large formation house at Hawkesyard in Staffordshire. The close of the period was marked by the adoption of an overseas mission on Grenada, which was at odds with the observant priory life that had attracted so many new members.