the keys, and lock me out: I will never more come into
this church; for men will say my Master Hooker was a good man and a
great scholar; and I am sure it was not used to be thus in his days':
and report says this old man went presently home and died; I do not say
died immediately, but within a few days after. But let us leave this
grateful clerk in his quiet grave."

Another faithful clerk was William Hobbes, who served in the church and
parish of St. Andrew, Plymouth. Walker, in his _Sufferings of the
Clergy_, records the sad story of his death. During the troubles of the
Civil War period, when presumably there was no clergyman to perform the
last rites of the Church on the body of a parishioner, the good clerk
himself undertook the office, and buried a corpse, using the service for
the Burial of the Dead contained in the Book of Common Prayer. The
Puritans were enraged, and threatened to throw him into the same grave
if he came there again with his "Mass-book" to bury any body: which
"worked so much upon his Spirits, that partly with Fear and partly with
Grief, he Died soon after." He died in 1643, and the accounts of the
church show that the balance of his salary was paid to his widow.

Many such faithful clerks have devoted their years of active life to the
service of God in His sanctuary, both in ancient and modern times; and
it will be our pleasurable duty to record some of the biographies of
these earnest servants of the Church, whose services are too often
disregarded.

I have mentioned the continuity of the clerk's office, unbroken by
either Reformation changes or by the confusion of the Puritan regime. We
will now endeavour to sketch the appearance of the mediaeval clerk, and
the numerous duties which fell to his lot.

Chaucer's gallery of ancient portraits contains a very life-like
presentment of a mediaeval clerk in the person of "Jolly Absolon," a
somewhat frivolous specimen of his class, who figures largely in _The
Miller's Tale_.

"Now was ther of that churche a parish clerk
The which that was y-cleped[6] Absolon.
Curl'd was his hair, and as the gold it shone,
And strutted[7] as a fanne large and broad;
Full straight and even lay his folly shode.[8]
His rode[9] was red, his eyen grey as goose,
With Paule's windows carven on his shoes.[10]
In hosen red he went full febishly.[11]
Y-clad he was full small and properly,
All in a kirtle of a light wag