As the poorest man cannot foresee to what inheritance he may succeed,
through the instrumentality of Parochial Registers, so in their
preservation every member of the community is more or less interested;
but the Parish Register returns of 1833 show that a general feeling
seemed to exist in favour of their destruction. Scarcely one of them
pronounced the Registers in a satisfactory state. The following
sentences abound in the Blue Book: “leaves cut out,” “torn out,”
“injured by damp,” “mutilated,” “in fragments,” “destroyed by fire,”
“much torn,” “illegible,” “tattered,” “imperfect,” “early registers
lost.”
Thanks to the General Registry Act of William the Fourth, all such
records made since 1835 are now properly cared for; but those prior to
that date are still in parochial keeping, to be torn, lost, burnt,
interpolated, stolen, defaced, or rendered illegible at the good
pleasure of every wilful or heedless individual of a destructive
organisation. Some time ago Mr. Walbran, of Ripon, found part of a
Parish Register among a quantity of wastepaper in a cheesemonger’s shop.
The same gentleman has rescued the small but very interesting register
of the chapelry of Denton, in the county of Durham, from the fate which
once had nearly befallen it, by causing several literatim copies to be
printed and deposited in public libraries. Among other instances of
negligent custody, Mr. Downing Bruce, the barrister, relates, in a
recently published pamphlet, that the Registers of South Otterington,
containing several entries of the great families of Talbot, Herbert, and
Fauconberg, were formerly kept in the cottage of the parish-clerk, who
used all those preceding the eighteenth century for waste paper; a
considerable portion having been taken to “singe a goose!”
Abstraction, loss, and careless custody of registers is constantly going
on. Mr. Bruce mentions, that in 1845 he made some copious extracts from
the dilapidated books at Andover, “but on recently visiting that place
for the purpose of a supplementary search,” he says, “I found that these
books were no longer in existence, and that those which remained were
kept in the rectory-house, in a damp place under the staircase, and in a
shameful state of dilapidation.” The second case occurred at Kirkby
Malzeard, near Ripon, where the earliest register mentioned in the
parliamentary return was reported to be lost. “Having occasion to
believe that the statement was not correct,” Mr. Bruce states, “I
persevered in my inquiries, and at length fortunately discovered the
book, in a tattered state, behind some old drawers in the curate’s back
kitchen. Again, at Farlington, near Sheriff Hutton, the earliest
registers were believed and represented to be lost, until I found their
scattered leaves at the bottom of an old parish chest which I observed
in the church.”
Even as we write, an enquiry appears in the newspapers from the parish
officers of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, addressed to “collectors” and
others, after their own Registers; two among the most historically
important and interesting years of the seventeenth century are nowhere
to be found.
The avidity and dishonesty of many of these “collectors,” or
archæological cockchafers, are shocking to think of. They seem to have
passed for their own behoof a universal statute of limitations; and when
a book, an autograph, or a record is a certain number of years old, they
think it is no felony to steal it. Recently we were interested in
searching the Register for the birth of Joseph Addison; and at the altar
of the pretty little church of Milston, in Wilts, we were told that a
deceased rector had cut out the leaf which contained it, to satisfy the
earnest longings of a particular friend, “a collector”—a poet, too, who
ought to have been ashamed to instigate the larceny. It is hoped that
his executors—his name has been inserted in a burial register since—will
think fit to restore it to its proper place at their early convenience.
Mr. Bruce recommends that the whole of the Registers now deposited in
parish churches, in rectors’ coal-cellars, churchwardens’ outhouses,
curates’ back-kitchens, and goose-eating parish clerks’ cottages, should
be collected into one central fire-proof building in London.
Innocent Mr. Bruce! While the great historical records of this land are
“preserved” over tons of gunpowder in the White Tower of the Tower in
London; while the Chancery records are feeding a fine, fat, historical,
and uncommonly numerous breed of rats in the cellars of the Rolls
Chapel; while some of the most important muniments existing (including
William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book) are being dried up in the
Chapter-House of Westminster Abbey, by the united heats of a contiguous
brew-house and an adjacent wash-house; and while heaps of monastic
charters and their surrenders to Henry the Eighth, with piles of
inestimable historical treasures, are huddled together upon scaffolds in
the interior of the dilapidated Riding-School in Carlton Ride—can Mr.
Bruce or any other man of common sense, suppose that any attention
whatever will be paid by any person in power to his very modest
suggestion?