ABSTRACT
In 1709, an Anglican cleric named Francis Davies was undertaking some research on the treatment of dispossessed clergymen in Glamorgan during the interregnum. Much of his work involved what we would today call oral history, but he also sought out what documents he could to confirm the picture he formed. While visiting the widow of one of the Puritan sequestrators, he found records which, he believed, gave a peculiarly damning picture of the financial maltreatment which the Anglicans had received. On a second visit, however, the woman ‘obstinately refused’ any further chance to consult these papers. Davies and his friends immediately assumed that she had been silenced by nonconformists, who were supporters of the dissenting martyrologist, Edmund Calamy.
