PARISH REGISTERS

A study of an old parish register reveals a remarkable variation in the
style and character of the handwriting. We see in the old parchment
pages numerous entries recorded in a careless scribble, and others
evidently written by the hand of a learned and careful scholar. The
rector or vicar ever since the days of Henry VIII, when in 1536
Vicar-General Thomas Cromwell ordered the keeping of registers, was
usually supposed to have recorded the entries in the register. Cromwell
derived the notion of ordering the keeping of the registers from his
observation of the records kept by the Spanish priests in the Low
Countries where he resided in his youth. Archbishop Ximenes of Toledo
instituted a system of registration in Spain in 1497, and this was
carried on by the Spanish priests in the Netherlands, and thus laid the
foundation of that system which Thomas Cromwell introduced to this
country and which has continued ever since.

But not all these entries were made by the incumbents. There is good
evidence that the parish clerks not infrequently kept the registers,
especially in later times, and from the beginning they were responsible
for the facts recorded. The entries do not seem to have been made when
the baptism, marriage, or burial took place. Cromwell's edict required
that the records of each week should be entered in the register on the
following Sunday, in the presence of the churchwardens. It seems to have
been the custom for the clerk or vicar to write down particulars of the
baptism, marriage, or burial in a private memorandum book or on loose
sheets of paper at the time of the ceremony. Afterwards these rough
notes were copied into the register book. Sometimes this was done each
week; but human nature is fallible; the clerk or his master forgot
sometimes to make the required entries in the book. Days and weeks
slipped by; note-books and scraps of paper were mislaid and lost; the
spelling of the clerk was not always his strongest point; hence
mistakes, omissions, inaccuracies were not infrequent. Sometimes the
vicar did not make up his books until a whole year had elapsed. This was
the case with the poor parson of Carshalton, who was terribly distressed
because his clerk would not furnish him with the necessary notes, and
mightily afraid lest he should incur the censure of his parishioners.
Hence we find the following note in his register, dated 10 March, 1651:

"Good reader, tread gently: