Person DS/UK/1640 Alford; Michael (1587-1652); Jesuit Priest Alford Michael 1587-1652 Jesuit Priest Male Born 1587, London. Entered the English Province of the Society of Jesus 29 February 1607, Louvain. Ordained as a Roman Catholic priest - date unknown. Final vows in the Society of Jesus 20 November 1619. Died 11 August 1652, St Omers.

Fr Michael Alford was born in London to a recusant family, 1587. In 1596, aged 9, he was sent over by Fr John Gerard SJ to St Omers. He was there for six years and then entered the English Seminary at Valladolid, where his training for the priesthood was sponsored by the Duchess of Medina. In April 1606 he was invalided home to Douai and, in February of the following year, joined the Jesuit novitiate in Louvain. After ordination Alford was posted as chaplain to the port of Naples, where he stayed for two years ministering to English gentry and merchants who frequented the port. As penitentiary at St Peters, Rome, he continued his ministration to English Catholics for another five years (1615-1620). He then returned to Flanders to be Assistant to the new Master of Novices, Fr Gerard. After a year he was appointed first Rector of the house just established at Ghent for fathers in their third year of Probation. At the end of 1628, after more than 30 years in exile, he crossed into England as was sent to work in the district of Leicestershire. From 1634 to 1641 he was Rector of the College of the Immaculate Conception, i.e. in charge of the dozen or so men working in the counties of Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Rutland, and north Nottinghamshire, with his headquarters at Neville Holt. He supervised the establishment of a school at Stanley Grange, Derbyshire. It was during this time that Alford produced his first work, the Britannia Illustrata, which appeared in 1641. By 1644, while in hiding during the Civil War he finished the first two of his four volume Annales Ecciesiastici et Civiles Britannorum, Saxonum et Anglorum. It is likely that he conducted much of his research for the first volume of the Annales in the library of Sir Robert Cotton in Westminster before the Civil War broke out, and that the sources for his second and subsequent volumes were found at Shirburn Castle, Oxfordshire, the home of a well-known Catholic family, located conveniently for access to the library of Sir Thomas Bodley in Oxford. When parliamentary troops made the district unsafe, he could probably have lay in hiding at Shirburn with access to all the sources he needed. The third and fourth volumes occupied him from 1644 until his death in 1652, the process delayed by the war and a trip to the continent. In March 1652 he left England to prepare his Annals for the press. On reaching St Omers he was seized by a fever and died there, 11 August of the same year. Member of the English Province of the Society of Jesus The Admirable Life of St Winefride, 1635 Britannia llustrata: sive Lucii, Helenae, Constantini Patria et Fides, Antwerp, 1641 Annales Ecciesiastici et Civiles Britannorum, Saxonum et Anglorum, Liege, 1663 (possibly in rare books collection at A/412, A/413, A/414 & A/415) Caraman, P. G. “Father Michael Alford, S.J. 1587-1652.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 31, no. 123, Irish Province of the Society of Jesus, 1942, pp. 361–68, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30098072; Br Henry Foley SJ, Volume 7 Part 1, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (London: Burns and Oates, 1883) pp. 320-321 Br Henry Foley SJ, Volume 2, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (London: Burns and Oates, 1883) pp. 299-308 International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families - ISAAR(CPF) 2nd edition - ICA 2004 ISBN 2-9521932-2-3 National Council on Archives, Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997 Yes CURIA\mallen 02/02/2022 CURIA\mallen 02/02/2022 5e46cfb1-0c12-422f-bbff-184276b082d4