e county families of the old
order.

The only person living who ever attended one of the Book Club's
debates, I believe, is Mr. Henry Fordham, who can just remember
attending one meeting at the Red Lion towards the end of the Club's
debating period.

Have we degenerated since the period of this stiff and vigorous
debating of our great grandfathers? Would it be possible now to bring
together forty or fifty ladies and gentlemen all eager for debating
questions of moral philosophy, and public justice? Has the age of {32}
plain living and high thinking completely deserted our local life, and
left us comparatively high living and plain thinking instead? The
conditions of life have so greatly changed that the comparison need not
be pressed home, yet these are questions which naturally arise after a
glimpse at the old Royston Book Club.

That the education of that day was very exact is afforded by the
announcement of Mr. Jeremiah Slade, the keeper of a boarding school at
Fowlmere in 1766, which reads:--"Young gentlemen genteely boarded and
instructed in the art of true and correct spelling, and of right
pronunciation; reading English with a true emphasis, writing all the
most useful hands with accuracy and freedom and elegance; arithmetic in
all its branches in the most concise manner with its application to
trade and commerce," &c., &c.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PAROCHIAL PARLIAMENT AND THE OLD POOR-LAW.

In these days, when so much is heard in favour of coming back to the
Parochial area as the unit of local government, it may be of interest
just to glance back at the condition of things when, in the last
century, the parish vestry was almost omnipotent, and controlled all
sorts of things, from a pauper's outfit, or from marrying a pauper, to
the maintenance of the fire engine, the repair of the Church, and the
wine used at the Communion! The oldest materials I have found
available for obtaining a glimpse of the Parochial Parliament at work,
both in Royston and neighbouring parishes, have been the Royston parish
books, and sundry papers and accounts which have come under my notice
belonging to neighbouring parishes.

It was customary for everyone attending a vestry to sign his name or
make his mark, a good old custom worth continuing in every parish
vestry--and it was no uncommon thing to find from a dozen to fifteen
names entered. Parish business was not in those days the dry affair it
often is in these days of