the letting of the pews, the administration of the charities, the hours of the services, the charges for interments, the engagement and control of the servants, the collection and disbursement of the offertories, even the refreshment of occasional preachers were all, at times, regulated by the Vestry. And it may be said that the germ of every institution, service and system that to day makes for the comfort and security of the citizen-road making, water supply, fire protection, drainage, public lighting, police, sanitary measures-is to be found in these comprehensive records.

Besides these four principal classes are upwards of 2,000 miscellaneous volumes abounding in information of extensive, varied, and unrivalled interest. Only an imperfect idea of the range over which they extend can be gathered from a perusal of the catalogue. No useful purpose would therefore be served by particularising any of them here; but viewed as a whole, it may be doubted whether any other parish in the kingdom can lay claim to the possession of so valuable and polygenous a collection. And it would be unworthy of the traditions of the ancient City of Westminster if indifference for the safe custody and due classification of the muniments of the mother parish were allowed to continue. Westminster may, indeed, be justly regarded as the great centre of Record Depositories-the Chapter House, the Chapel of the Pyx, the Jewel House, the "Tally Court" in the Old Palace, the Muniment Room of the venerable Abbey, still only partially calendared, and the repositories but recently removed to the Law Courts and the Record Office all justify the claim.

The original Charter of Offa, King of Mercia, setting out "the rural manor" of Westminster, in 785, lies at the British Museum with the confirming document of Edgar in 985; and the Domesday Book (1086), in which Westminster ranks as a "village,” was preserved for many years at the Chapter House. The oldest document at the Town Hall is the Patent under the Great Seal of Henry III., granting to the inhabitants of Westminster, in 1256, the right to hold a weekly market on Mondays and an annual fair at "Touthull" on the eve, day, and day following St. Mary Magdalene (July 21, 22 and 23). The next in point of age is a Charter of Edward I. (1298), also bearing the Great Seal, confirming and extending the last named. Then

follow the Letters Patent of Henry VI., with the Great Seal attached, dated 3rd February, 1446-7, granting to the commonalty of Westminster the surplus water flowing from the King's conduit. The importance of this grant may be gathered from the fact that the churchwardens of 1524 make a note at the end of their accounts that "the King's Charter for the Condett at Pales gate remayneth in the custody of the Churchwardens." After being lost to sight for many years, this, with the two last named instruments, was rescued from obscurity upon the removal of the parochial records to the new municipal buildings in 1883-4, having fortunately escaped the injury to which reference has already been made. Then, in 1460, commence the long series of Churchwardens' Accounts, so that the period covered by the records enumerated in the following catalogue may be said to extend over six hundred and forty-four years. Those relating to the last four centuries will be found, as nearly as possible, in consecutive order, the breaks being indicated by the word “ missing." Completeness in the Catalogue itself is not claimed, nor is any pretension made to elaborate classification or sub-division; the design has gone but little further than the compilation of a schedule sufficiently useful for ordinary practical purposes. An index has been added to facilitate reference and, with a view to call into action and to sustain the cursory interest in these parochial antecedents, extracts and annotations have been introduced here and there in passing. From these the man of leisure inclined in that direction by his taste and talents-"whose gifted eye which grace still touched as if with second nature"-may form an estimate of the abundance and variety of material within his reach for the production of a retrospect of parochial life, character and customs. From such ample resources he may be able to re-erect, so to speak, streets and places long since lost to view, and to re-people them with those who trod the ill-kept highways. Or he may turn aside to glance at the great, the noble and the good, whose imperishable work in their day and generation is their monument, before which we pause with a feeling of respect,

"Nor deem the irrecoverable past

As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks at last,

To something nobler we attain."

Such a cicerone might invite us to accompany him to the forgotten homes of the poets-of Skelton,* of Spencer, of" Rare Ben Jonson," of Milton, of Dryden, of Prior, of the satirist Churchill, not to mention others; he might point out to us, on his way, the residences of the soldier, the scientist, the statesman, the musician, the philosopher and the philanthropist, all too numerous to be named here; he might portray to us, if only in silhouette, our forefathers actively zealous for the public weal, or illustrate from these same sources of information the manners and customs of the people during the thirty different reigns through which his research would take him; he might adduce multifarious evidence of the excesses to which men's feelings carried them during the Commonwealth; he might bring out the armour and defensive weapons from the "dark vestry," or take us to the Artillery Ground, or direct us to the battery newly erected in “Tuttle-feilds," or exhibit the subscription list for the " maimed souldiers," or produce the long roll of the " Armed Association" (as the Westminster volunteers of 1798 were first called, in testimony of the parochial patriotism), and in divers other ways show us, as if in a kaleidoscope, whence we came, if he shrank from indicating whither we are trending. He might, in short, demonstrate with Carlyle, that "in books lies the soul of the whole past time, the articulate audible voice of the past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream." These represent but a tithe of the topics which would suggest themselves to one whose inclinations and opportunities might enable him to present in a readable form the memorials of Westminster in a manner worthy of the place.

And all this could be accomplished without reference to the parish registers, which, with the accounts of the Hospital or Brotherhood of St. Mary, Rouncevall, are preserved at the Vestry Room of St. Margaret's Church.† For this reason they are not mentioned in the catalogue. It may be permissible to state, however, that they com

Chaucer died at his house in the Palace Yard, near the east end of St. Margaret's Church, in 1400, sixty years before the date of the earliest book in the collection.

+ The Marriage Registers of St. Margaret's from 1538 to 1837 have been copied, and are being published, by Mr. Henry Farrar, of No. 9, Agar-street, W.C.

SO

mence with the year 1538, when the first Orders were issued by the Vicar-General, Thomas Cromwell, in the thirtieth year of Henry VIII., relating to the provision and preservation of such registers. This Order was continued by fresh injunctions in the succeeding reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth and James I. That of 1547 placed the responsibility for the custody of the registers upon the parson, vicar or curate, and the parishioners-presumably the parishioners in Vestry assembled, for the minutes of that body testify to their zeal in the discharge of the trust. In 1555 Cardinal Pole required the names of Godparents to be entered in connection with the baptisms. In 1597 Convocation directed that copies be sent to the Diocesan Registry within one month of Easter each year; and in 1603 the entries were to be tran. scribed into a parchment book. They first came under the regulation of Parliament in 1644-5, when the duty of keeping " a fair register book of velim" was imposed upon the minister. During the Commonwealth the system of registration by the clergy became irregular, that Parliament insisted upon the appointment of Registrars; but at the Restoration the duty again devolved upon the clergy, with whom, so far as it relates to baptisms, marriages solemnised in the church, and burials, it has remained ever since. In 1694, a very long Act (6 and 7 William III., cap. 6) was passed "for granting to his Majesty certain rates and duties upon marriages, births and burials, and upon bachelors and widowers, for the term of five years, for carrying on the war against France with vigour." Partly owing to the objectionable nature of the tax upon bachelors and widowers, and partly owing to an excusable unwillingness on the part of many of the clergy to act as collectors of an exaction which gave rise to many complaints, particularly among their poorer parishioners, the operation of the Act soon became extremely unpopular, so that, notwithstanding the placing of the "common informer" in terrorem and the passing of a supplementary Act two years later (9 William III., cap. 32) to prevent evasions, of the principal Act, the improvement was only partial, and Parliament again interfered in the fourth year of Queen Anne. In 1753 Lord Hardwicke's Marriage Act was passed, which imposed stringent punishments in case of negligence or wilful tampering with the entries in registers; and in 1783 a tax was again

B

levied upon every entry in the parish register, but the unpopularity of it was so great that it was repealed in 1794. From that time until 1812 no important amendment of the law was made. In that year an Act was passed "for the better regulating and preserving parish and other registers"; but the great reform was not effected until 1836 when a uniform scheme was prescribed, and stringent rules were laid down for keeping the registers in strict accordance with forms set out in schedules to the Act. From that time the value of the parish register as a record of passing events has greatly diminished. The register of births and deaths superseded, so far as legal purposes are concerned, the records of baptisms and burials, and the miscellaneous entries, frequently quaint and curious-sometimes grotesque and ludicrous-became practically prohibited. Notwithstanding the value of these registers, those dating prior to 1836 have enjoyed no greater immunity from carelessness and injury than the other parochial records which are classified in the following catalogue. All that has been said of the latter may be applied to the former; but as an enlargement thereon would be foreign to the purpose of this essay, the reader is referred to Burn's History of Parish Registers, to the Journal of the British Archæological Association for 1896,* to the entertaining pages of Mr. Thiselton Dyer's Old English Social Life, as told by the Parish Register, 1898, and to the many other writers on the subject. The temptation to linger here on so fascinating a subject must be reluctantly resisted, and these records, on whose pages are exhibited the extremes of riches and poverty, of beauty and deformity, of affection and hatred, of peace and war, must be left untouched,—

"No flattering there, where to be born and die

Of rich and poor is all the history.
Enough if virtue filled the space between

Proved by the ends of being to have been?"

The reader is now invited to make a perusal of the catalogue. If he care to do so he may find his attention engaged by the reproduction, necessarily reduced in size, of some of the ornamental title pages, on which the scrivener of the day, evidently not a stranger to leisure, applied his skill. He may also find some of the extracts, given merely *Notes on the Parish Registers of Newbury, by Walter Money, F.S.A.