tice survived of
not very strictly confining the notices to the concerns of the Church.

An aged lady, Mrs. Gill, who is now eighty-four years of age, remembers
that between the years 1825 and 1835, in a parish church near Welbeck
Abbey, the clerk used to announce the date of the Duke of Rutland's
rent-day. Another correspondent states that after service the clerk used
to take his stand on one of the high flat tombstones and announce sales
by auction, the straying of cattle, etc., and Sir Walter Scott wrote
that at Hexham cattle-dealers used to carry their business letters to
the church, "when after service the clerk was accustomed to read them
aloud and answer them according to circumstances."

Mr. Beresford Hope recollected that in a Surrey town church the notices
given out by the clerk included the announcement of the meetings at the
principal inn of the town of the executors of a deceased duke.

In the days of that extraordinary free-and-easy go-as-you-please style
of service which prevailed at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of
the nineteenth century, the most extraordinary announcements were
frequently made by the clerk, and very numerous stories are told of the
laxity of the times and the quaintness of the remarks of the clerk.

An old Shropshire clerk gave out on Easter Day the following
extraordinary notice:

"Last Friday was Good Friday, but we've forgotten un; so next Friday
will be."

Another clerk gave out a strange notice on Quinquagesima Sunday with
regard to the due observance of Ash Wednesday. He said: "There will be
no service on Wednesday--'coss why? Mester be going hunting, and so
beeze I!" with triumphant emphasis. He is not the only sporting clerk of
whom history speaks, and in the biographies of some worthies of the
profession we hope to mention the achievements of a clerkly tailor who
denied himself every luxury of life in order to save enough money to buy
and keep a horse in order that he might follow the hounds "like a
gentleman."

Sporting parsons have furnished quite a crop of stories with regard to
strange notices given out by their clerks. Some of them are well known
and have often been repeated; but perhaps it is well that they should
not be omitted here.

About the year 1850 a clerk gave out in his rector's hearing this
notice: "There'll be no service next Sunday, as the rector's going out
grouse-shooting."

A Devonshire hunting parson went to help a neighbouring clergy