Fair dreams of things golden and great,
Ye come through the Ivory Gate;
But the facts that are bleak and forlorn,
Through the portals of horn!
_CURIOSITIES OF PARISH REGISTERS_.
THERE are three classes of persons who are deeply concerned with parish
registers—namely, villains, antiquaries, and the sedulous readers,
“parish clerks and others,” of the second or “agony” column of the Times.
Villains are probably the most numerous of these three classes. The
villain of fiction dearly loves a parish register: he cuts out pages,
inserts others, intercalates remarks in a different coloured ink, and
generally manipulates the register as a Greek manages his hand at
_écarté_, or as a Hebrew dealer in Moabite bric-à-brac treats a synagogue
roll. We well remember one villain who had locked himself into the
vestry (he was disguised as an archæologist), and who was enjoying his
wicked pleasure with the register, when the vestry somehow caught fire,
the rusty key would not turn in the door, and the villain was roasted
alive, in spite of the disinterested efforts to save him made by all the
virtuous characters in the story. Let the fate of this bold, bad man be
a warning to wicked earls, baronets, and all others who attempt to
destroy the record of the marriage of a hero’s parents. Fate will be too
strong for them in the long run, though they bribe the parish clerk, or
carry off in white wax an impression of the keys of the vestry and of the
iron chest in which a register should repose.
There is another and more prosaic danger in the way of villains, if the
new bill, entitled “The Parish Registers Preservation Act,” ever becomes
law. The bill provides that every register earlier than 1837 shall be
committed to the care of the Master of the Rolls, and removed to the
Record Office. Now the common villain of fiction would feel sadly out of
place in the Register Office, where a more watchful eye than that of a
comic parish clerk would be kept on his proceedings. Villains and local
antiquaries will, therefore, use all their parliamentary influence to
oppose and delay this bill, which is certainly hard on the parish
archæologist. The men who grub in their local registers, and slowly
compile parish or county history, deserve to be encouraged rather than
depressed. Mr. Chester Waters, therefore, has suggested that copies of
registers should be made, and the comparatively legible copy left in the
parish, while the crabbed original is conveyed to the Record Office in
London. Thus the local antiquary would really have his work made more
easy for him (though it may be doubted whether he would quite enjoy that
condescension), while the villain of romance would be foiled; for it is
useless (as a novel of Mr. Christie Murray’s proves) to alter the
register in the keeping of the parish when the original document is safe
in the Record Office. But previous examples of enforced transcription
(as in 1603) do not encourage us to suppose that the copies would be very
scrupulously made. Thus, after the Reformation, the prayers for the dead
in the old registers were omitted by the copyist, who seemed to think (as
the contractor for “sandwich men” said to the poor fellows who carried
the letter H), “I don’t want you, and the public don’t want you, and
you’re no use to nobody.” Again, when Laurence Fletcher was buried in
St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in 1608, the old register described him as “a
player, the King’s servant.” But the clerk, keeping a note-book, simply
called Laurence Fletcher “a man,” and (in 1625) he also styled Mr. John
Fletcher “a man.” Now, the old register calls Mr. John Fletcher “a
poet.” To copy all the parish registers in England would be a very
serious task, and would probably be but slovenly performed. If they were
reproduced, again, by any process of photography, the old difficult court
hand would remain as hard as ever. But this is a minor objection, for
the local antiquary revels in the old court hand.
From the little volume by Mr. Chester Waters, already referred to
(‘Parish Registers in England;’ printed for the author by F. J. Roberts,
Little Britain, E.C.), we proceed to appropriate such matters of
curiosity as may interest minds neither parochial nor doggedly
antiquarian. Parish registers among the civilised peoples of antiquity
do not greatly concern us. It seems certain that many Polynesian races
have managed to record (in verse, or by some rude marks) the genealogies
of their chiefs through many hundreds of years. These oral registers are
accepted as fairly truthful by some students, yet we must remember that
Pindar supposed himself to possess knowledge of at least twenty-five
generations before his own time, and that only brought him up to the
birth of Jason. Nobody believes in Jason and Medea, and possibly the
genealogical records of Maoris and Fijians are as little trustworthy as
those of Pindaric Greece. However, to consider thus is to consider too
curiously. We only know for certain that genealogy very soon becomes
important, and, therefore, that records are early kept, in a growing
civilisation. “After Nehemiah’s return from the captivity in Babylon,
the priests at Jerusalem whose register was not found were as polluted
put from the priesthood.” Rome had her parish registers, which were kept
in the temple of Saturn. But modern parish registers were “discovered”
(like America) in 1497, when Cardinal Ximenes found it desirable to put
on record the names of the godfathers and godmothers of baptised
children. When these relations of “gossip,” or God’s kin (as the word
literally means), were not certainly known, married persons could easily
obtain divorces, by pretending previous spiritual relationship.
But it was only during the reign of Mary, (called the Bloody) that this
rule of registering godfathers and godmothers prevailed in England.
Henry VIII. introduced the custom of parish registers when in a
Protestant humour. By the way, how curiously has Madame de Flamareil (la
femme de quarante ans, in Charles de Bernard’s novel) anticipated the
verdict of Mr. Froude on Henry VIII.! ‘On accuse Henri VIII.,’ dit
Madame de Flamareil, “moi je le comprends, et je l’absous; c’était un
cœur généreux, lorsqu’il ne les aimait plus, il les tuait.’” The public
of England mistrusted, in the matter of parish registers, the generous
heart of Henry VIII. It is the fixed conviction of the public that all
novelties in administration mean new taxes. Thus the Croatian peasantry
were once on the point of revolting because they imagined that they were
to be taxed in proportion to the length of their moustaches. The English
believed, and the insurgents of the famous Pilgrimage of Grace declared,
that baptism was to be refused to all children who did not pay a
“trybette” (tribute) to the king. But Henry, or rather his minister,
Cromwell, stuck to his plan, and (September 29, 1538) issued an
injunction that a weekly register of weddings, christenings, and burials
should be kept by the curate of every parish. The cost of the book
(twopence in the case of St. Margaret’s, Westminster) was defrayed by the
parishioners. The oldest extant register books are those thus acquired
in 1597 or 1603. These volumes were of parchment, and entries were
copied into them out of the old books on paper. The copyists, as we have
seen, were indolent, and omitted characteristic points in the more
ancient records.
In the civil war parish registers fell into some confusion, and when the
clergy did make entries they commonly expressed their political feelings
in a mixture of Latin and English. Latin, by the way, went out as
Protestantism came in, but the curate of Rotherby, in Leicestershire,
writes, “Bellum, Bellum, Bellum, interruption! persecution!” At St.
Bridget’s, in Chester, is the quaint entry, “1643. Here the register is
defective till 1653. The tymes were _such_!” At Hilton, in Dorset,
William Snoke, minister, entered his opinion that persons whose baptism
and marriage were not registered “will be made uncapable of any earthly
inheritance if they live. This I note for the satisfaction of any that
do:” though we may doubt whether these parishioners found the information
thus conveyed highly satisfactory.
The register of Maid’s Moreton, Bucks, tells how the reading-desk (a
spread eagle, gilt) was “doomed to perish as an abominable idoll;” and
how the cross on the steeple nearly (but not quite) knocked out the
brains of the Puritan who removed it. The Puritans had their way with
the registers as well as with the eagle (“the vowl,” as the old country
people call it), and laymen took the place of parsons as registrars in
1653. The books from 1653 to 1660, while this _régime_ lasted, “were
kept exceptionally well,” new brooms sweeping clean. The books of the
period contain fewer of the old Puritan Christian names than we might
have expected. We find, “_Repente_ Kytchens,” so styled before the poor
little thing had anything but original sin to repent of. “_Faint not_
Kennard” is also registered, and “_Freegift_ Mabbe.”
A novelty was introduced into registers in 1678. The law required (for
purposes of protecting trade) that all the dead should be buried in
woollen winding-sheets. The price of the wool was the obolus paid to the
Charon of the Revenue. After March 25, 1667, no person was to be “buried
in any shirt, shift, or sheet other that should be made of woole only.”
Thus when the children in a little Oxfordshire village lately beheld a
ghost, “dressed in a long narrow gown of woollen, with bandages round the
head and chin,” it is clear that the ghost was much more than a hundred
years old, for the act “had fallen into disuse long before it was
repealed in 1814.” But this has little to do with parish registers. The
addition made to the duties of the keeper of the register in 1678 was
this—he had to take and record the affidavit of a kinsman of the dead, to
the effect that the corpse was actually buried in woollen fabric. The
upper classes, however, preferred to bury in linen, and to pay the fine
of 5_l_. When Mistress Oldfield, the famous actress, was interred in
1730, her body was arrayed “in a very fine Brussels lace headdress, a
holland shift with a tucker and double ruffles of the same lace, and a
pair of new kid gloves.”
In 1694 an empty exchequer was replenished by a tax on marriages, births,
and burials, the very extortion which had been feared by the insurgents
in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The tax collectors had access without
payment of fee to the registers. The registration of births was
discontinued when the Taxation Acts expired. An attempt to introduce the
registration of births was made in 1753, but unsuccessfully. The public
had the old superstitious dread of anything like a census. Moreover, the
custom was denounced as “French,” and therefore abominable. In the same
way it was thought telling to call the _clôture_ “the French gag” during
some recent discussions of parliamentary rules. In 1783 the parish
register was again made the instrument of taxation, and threepence was
charged on every entry. Thus “the clergyman was placed in the invidious
light of a tax collector, and as the poor were often unable or unwilling
to pay the tax, the clergy had a direct inducement to retain their
good-will by keeping the registers defective.”
It is easy to imagine the indignation in Scotland when “bang went
saxpence” every time a poor man had twins! Of course the Scotch rose up
against this unparalleled extortion. At last, in 1812, “Rose’s Act” was
passed. It is styled “an Act for the better regulating and preserving
registers of births,” but the registration of births is altogether
omitted from its provisions. By a stroke of the wildest wit the penalty
of transportation for fourteen years, for making a false entry, “is to be
divided equally between the informer and the poor of the parish.” A more
casual Act has rarely been drafted.
Without entering into the modern history of parish registers, we may
borrow a few of the ancient curiosities to be found therein, the blunders
and the waggeries of forgotten priests, and curates, and parish clerks.
In quite recent times (1832) it was thought worth while to record that
Charity Morrell at her wedding had signed her name in the register with
her right foot, and that the ring had been placed on the fourth toe of
her left foot; for poor Charity was born without arms. Sometimes the
time of a birth was recorded with much minuteness, that the astrologers
might draw a more accurate horoscope. Unlucky children, with no
acknowledged fathers, were entered in a variety of odd ways. In Lambeth
(1685), George Speedwell is put down as “a merry begot;” Anne Twine is
“_filia uniuscujusque_.” At Croydon, a certain William is “terraefilius”
(1582), an autochthonous infant. Among the queer names of foundlings are
“Nameless,” “Godsend,” “Subpoena,” and “Moyses and Aaron, two children
found,” not in the bulrushes, but “in the street.”
The rule was to give the foundling for surname the name of the parish,
and from the Temple Church came no fewer than one hundred and four
foundlings named “Temple,” between 1728 and 1755. These Temples are the
plebeian _gens_ of the patrician house which claims descent from Godiva.
The use of surnames as Christian names is later than the Reformation, and
is the result of a reaction against the exclusive use of saints’ names
from the calendar. Another example of the same reaction is the use of
Old Testament names, and “Ananias and Sapphira were favourite names with
the Presbyterians.” It is only fair to add that these names are no
longer popular with Presbyterians, at any rate in the Kirk of Scotland.
The old Puritan argument was that you would hardly select the name of too
notorious a scriptural sinner, “as bearing testimony to the triumph of
grace over original sin.” But in America a clergyman has been known to
decline to christen a child “Pontius Pilate,” and no wonder.
Entries of burials in ancient times often contained some biographical
information about the deceased. But nothing could possibly be vaguer
than this: “1615, February 28, St. Martin’s, Ludgate, was buried an
anatomy from the College of Physicians.” Man, woman, or child, sinner or
saint, we know not, only that “an anatomy” found Christian burial in St.
Martin’s, Ludgate. How much more full and characteristic is this, from
St. Peter’s-in-the-East, Oxford (1568): ‘There was buried Alyce, the wiff
of a naughty fellow whose name is Matthew Manne.’ There is immortality
for Matthew Manne, and there is, in short-hand, the tragedy of “Alyce his
wiff.” The reader of this record knows more of Matthew than in two
hundred years any one is likely to know of us who moralise over Matthew!
At Kyloe, in Northumberland, the intellectual defects of Henry Watson
have, like the naughtiness of Manne, secured him a measure of fame.
(1696.) “Henry was so great a fooll, that he never could put on his own
close, nor never went a quarter of a mile off the house,” as Voltaire’s
Memnon resolved never to do, and as Pascal partly recommends.
What had Mary Woodfield done to deserve the alias which the Croydon
register gives her of “Queen of Hell”? (1788.) Distinguished people were
buried in effigy, in all the different churches with which they were
connected, and each sham burial service was entered in the parish
registers, a snare and stumbling-block to the historian. This curious
custom is very ancient. Thus we read in the Odyssey that when Menelaus
heard in Egypt of the death of Agamemnon he reared for him a cenotaph,
and piled an empty barrow “that the fame of the dead man might never be
quenched.” Probably this old usage gave rise to the claims of several
Greek cities to possess the tomb of this or that ancient hero. A heroic
tomb, as of Cassandra for example, several towns had to show, but which
was the true grave, which were the cenotaphs? Queen Elizabeth was buried
in all the London churches, and poor Cassandra had her barrow in Argos,
Mycenæ, and Amyclæ.
“A drynkyng for the soul” of the dead, a τάφος or funeral feast, was as
common in England before the Reformation as in ancient Greece. James
Cooke, of Sporle, in Norfolk (1528), left six shillings and eightpence to
pay for this “drynkyng for his soul;” and the funeral feast, which long
survived in the distribution of wine, wafers, and rosemary, still endures
as a slight collation of wine and cake in Scotland. What a funeral could
be, as late as 1731, Mr. Chester Waters proves by the bill for the burial
of Andrew Card, senior bencher of Gray’s Inn. The deceased was brave in
a “superfine pinked shroud” (cheap at 1_l_. 5_s_. 6_d_.), and there were
eight large plate candle-sticks on stands round the daïs, and ninety-six
buckram escutcheons. The pall-bearers wore Alamode hatbands covered with
frizances, and so did the divines who were present at the melancholy but
gorgeous function. A hundred men in mourning carried a hundred white wax
branch lights, and the gloves of the porters in Gray’s Inn were
ash-coloured with black points. Yet the wine cost no more than 1_l_.
19_s_. 6_d_.; a “deal of sack,” by no means “intolerable.”
Leaving the funerals, we find that the parish register sometimes records
ancient and obsolete modes of death. Thus, martyrs are scarce now, but
the register of All Saints’, Derby, 1556, mentions “a poor blinde woman
called Joan Waste, of this parish, a martyr, burned in Windmill pit.”
She was condemned by Ralph Baynes, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. In
1558, at Richmond, in Yorkshire, we find “Richard Snell, b’rnt, bur. 9
Sept.” At Croydon, in 1585, Roger Shepherd probably never expected to be
eaten by a lioness. Roger was not, like Wyllyam Barker, “a common
drunkard and blasphemer,” and we cannot regard the Croydon lioness, like
the Nemean lion, as a miraculous monster sent against the county of
Surrey for the sins of the people. The lioness “was brought into the
town to be seen of such as would give money to see her. He” (Roger) “was
sore wounded in sundry places, and was buried the 26th Aug.”
In 1590, the register of St. Oswald’s, Durham, informs us that “Duke,
Hyll, Hogge, and Holiday” were hanged and burned for “there horrible
offences.” The arm of one of these horrible offenders was preserved at
St. Omer as the relic of a martyr, “a most precious treasure,” in 1686.
But no one knew whether the arm belonged originally to Holiday, Hyll,
Duke, or Hogge. The coals, when these unfortunate men were burned, cost
sixpence; the other items in the account of the abominable execution are,
perhaps, too repulsive to be quoted.
According to some critics of the British government, we do not treat the
Egyptians well. But our conduct towards the Fellahs has certainly
improved since this entry was made in the register of St. Nicholas,
Durham (1592, August 8th): ‘Simson, Arington, Featherston, Fenwick, and
Lancaster, _were hanged for being Egyptians_.’ They were, in fact,
gypsies, or had been consorting with gypsies, and they suffered under 5
Eliz. c. 20. In 1783 this statute was abolished, and was even considered
“a law of excessive severity.” For even a hundred years ago “the puling
cant of sickly humanitarianism” was making itself heard to the injury of
our sturdy old English legislation. To be killed by a poet is now an
unusual fate, but the St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, register (1598) mentions
how “Gabriel Spencer, being slayne, was buried.” Gabriel was “slayne” by
Rare Ben Jonson, in Hoxton Fields.
The burning of witches is, naturally, not an uncommon item in parish
registers, and is set forth in a bold, business-like manner. On August
21 (1650) fifteen women and one man were executed for the imaginary crime
of witchcraft. “A grave, for a witch, sixpence,” is an item in the
municipal accounts. And the grave was a cheap haven for the poor woman
who had been committed to the tender mercies of a Scotch witch-trier.
Cetewayo’s medicine-men, who “smelt out” witches, were only some two
centuries in the rear of our civilisation. Three hundred years ago
Bishop Jewell, preaching before Elizabeth, was quite of the mind of
Cetewayo and Saul, as to the wickedness of suffering a witch to live. As
late as 1691, the register of Holy Island, Northumberland, mentions
“William Cleugh, bewitched to death,” and the superstition is almost as
powerful as ever among the rural people. Between July 13 and July 24
(1699) the widow Comon, in Essex, was thrice swum for a witch. She was
not drowned, but survived her immersion for only five months. A singular
homicide is recorded at Newington Butts, 1689. “John Arris and Derwick
Farlin in one grave, being both Dutch soldiers; one killed the other
drinking brandy.” But who slew the slayer? The register is silent; but
“often eating a shoulder of mutton or a peck of hasty pudding at a time
caused the death of James Parsons,” at Teddington, in Middlesex, 1743.
Parsons had resisted the effects of shoulders of mutton and hasty pudding
till the age of thirty-six.
And so the registers run on. Sometimes they tell of the death of a
glutton, sometimes of a _Grace wyfe_ (grosse femme). Now the bell tolls
for the decease of a duke, now of a “dog-whipper.” “Lutenists” and
“Saltpetremen”—the skeleton of the old German allegory whispers to each
and twitches him by the sleeve. “Ellis Thompson, _insipiens_,” leaves
Chester-le-Street, where he had gabbled and scrabbled on the doors, and
follows “William, foole to my Lady Jerningham,” and “Edward Errington,
the Towne’s Fooll” (Newcastle-on-Tyne) down the way to dusty death.
Edward Errington died “of the pest,” and another idiot took his place and
office, for Newcastle had her regular town fools before she acquired her
singularly advanced modern representatives. The “aquavity man” dies (in
Cripplegate), and the “dumb-man who was a fortune-teller” (Stepney,
1628), and the “King’s Falkner,” and Mr. Gregory Isham, who combined the
professions, not frequently united, of “attorney and husbandman,” in
Barwell, Leicestershire (1655). “The lame chimney-sweeper,” and the
“King of the gypsies,” and Alexander Willis, “qui calographiam docuit,”
the linguist, and the Tom o’ Bedlam, the comfit-maker, and the
panyer-man, and the tack-maker, and the suicide, they all found death;
or, if they sought him, the churchyard where they were “hurled into a
grave” was interdicted, and purified, after a fortnight, with
“frankincense and sweet perfumes, and herbs.”
Sometimes people died wholesale of pestilence, and the Longborough
register mentions a fresh way of death, “the swat called New
Acquaintance, alias Stoupe Knave, and know thy master.” Another malady
was ‘the posting swet, that posted from towne to towne through England.’
The plague of 1591 was imported in bales of cloth from the Levant, just
as British commerce still patriotically tries to introduce cholera in
cargoes of Egyptian rags. The register of Malpas, in Cheshire (Aug. 24,
1625), has this strange story of the plague:—
“Richard Dawson being sicke of the plague, and perceiving he must die at
yt time, arose out of his bed, and made his grave, and caused his nefew,
John Dawson, to cast strawe into the grave which was not farre from the
house, and went and lay’d him down in the say’d grave, and caused clothes
to be lay’d uppon and so dep’ted out of this world; this he did because
he was a strong man, and heavier than his said nefew and another wench
were able to bury.”
And John Dawson died, and Rose Smyth, the “wench” already spoken of,
died, the last of the household.
Old customs survive in the parish registers. Scolding wives were ducked,
and in Kingston-on-Thames, 1572, the register tells how the sexton’s wife
“was sett on a new cukking-stoole, and brought to Temes brydge, and there
had three duckings over head and eres, because she was a common scold and
fighter.” The cucking-stool, a very elaborate engine of the law, cost
1_l_. 3_s_. 4_d_. Men were ducked for beating their wives, and if that
custom were revived the profession of cucking-stool maker would become
busy and lucrative. Penances of a graver sort are on record in the
registers. Margaret Sherioux, in Croydon (1597), was ordered to stand
three market days in the town, and three Sundays in the church, in a
white sheet. The sin imputed to her was a dreadful one. “She stood one
Saturday, and one Sunday, and died the next.” Innocent or guilty, this
world was no longer a fit abiding-place for Margaret Sherioux.
Occasionally the keeper of the register entered any event which seemed
out of the common. Thus the register of St. Nicholas, Durham (1568), has
this contribution to natural history:—
“A certaine Italian brought into the cittie of Durham a very greate
strange and monstrous serpent, in length sixteen feet, in quantitie and
dimentions greater than a greate horse, which was taken and killed by
special policie, in Ethiopia within the Turkas dominions. But before it
was killed, it had devoured (as is credibly thought) more than 1,000
persons, and destroyed a great country.”
This must have been a descendant of the monster that would have eaten
Andromeda, and was slain by Perseus in the country of the blameless
Ethiopians. Collections of money are recorded occasionally, as in 1680,
when no less than one pound eight shillings was contributed “for
redemption of Christians (taken by ye Turkish pyrates) out of Turkish
slavery.” Two hundred years ago the Turk was pretty “unspeakable” still.
Of all blundering Dogberries, the most confused kept (in 1670) the parish
register at Melton Mowbray:—
“Here [he writes] is a bill of Burton Lazareth’s people, which was
buried, and which was and maried above 10 years old, for because the
clarke was dead, and therefore they was not set down according as they
was, but they all set down sure enough one among another here in this
place.”
“They all set down sure enough,” nor does it matter much now to know whom
they married, and how long they lived in Melton Mowbray. The following
entry sufficed for the great Villiers that expired “in the worst inn’s
worst room,”—“Kirkby Moorside, Yorkshire, 1687. Georges vilaris Lord
dooke of Bookingham, bur. 17. April.”
“So much for Buckingham!”
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