Official action against recusancy and other religious offences involving Catholics has left numerous traces in county and municipal records, particularly those of Quarter Sessions, although for two decades near the start of our period that court was deprived of the power to convict persistent recusants. Such offenders may still, however, be found in Sessions’ records during those years, usually en route for the Assizes, perhaps having been first ordered by the Justices to confer with an Anglican divine, and Catholics continued to occupy the attention of the Bench on other grounds, both judicial and administrative, among them Mass-going and possession of popish books on the one hand, certifying their places of abode on the other. J.P.s might also find themselves serving, not always congenially, on special local commissions with widening terms of reference which by 1591 were concerned with both recusants and seminary priests; these bodies, and the religious leanings of their members, have to be taken into account in the regional study of Elizabethan Catholicism. Investigation may uncover evidence of their activities—and of non-co-operation with them—in a variety of sources: returns to the central government, commissioners’ own papers (not necessarily preserved in the county to which they appertain) and the records of parochial, county and municipal authorities revealing liaison with churchwardens and Justices of the Peace, with here a Lord-Lieutenant and elsewhere the city fathers.