In the civil war parish registers fell into some confusion, and when the clergy did make entries they commonly expressed their political feelings in a mixture of Latin and English. Latin, by the way, went out as Protestantism came in, but the curate of Rotherby, in Leicestershire, writes, Bellum, Bellum, Bellum, interruption! persecution! At St. Bridgets, in Chester, is the quaint entry, 1643. Here the register is defective till 1653. The tymes were such! At Hilton, in Dorset, William Snoke, minister, entered his opinion that persons whose baptism and marriage were not registered will be made uncapable of any earthly inheritance if they live. This I note for the satisfaction of any that do: though we may doubt whether these parishioners found the information thus conveyed highly satisfactory.
The register of Maids Moreton, Bucks, tells how the reading-desk (a spread eagle, gilt) was doomed to perish as an abominable idoll; and how the cross on the steeple nearly (but not quite) knocked out the brains of the Puritan who removed it. The Puritans had their way with the registers as well as with the eagle (the vowl, as the old country people call it), and laymen took the place of parsons as registrars in 1653. The books from 1653 to 1660, while this régime lasted, were kept exceptionally well, new brooms sweeping clean. The books of the period contain fewer of the old Puritan Christian names than we might have expected. We find, Repente Kytchens, so styled before the poor little thing had anything but original sin to repent of. Faint not Kennard is also registered, and Freegift Mabbe.
A novelty was introduced into registers in 1678. The law required (for purposes of protecting trade) that all the dead should be buried in woollen winding-sheets. The price of the wool was the obolus paid to the Charon of the Revenue. After March 25, 1667, no person was to be buried in any shirt, shift, or sheet other that should be made of woole only. Thus when the children in a little Oxfordshire village lately beheld a ghost, dressed in a long narrow gown of woollen, with bandages round the head and chin, it is clear that the ghost was much more than a hundred years old, for the act had fallen into disuse long before it was repealed in 1814. But this has little to do with parish registers. The addition made to the duties of the keeper of the register in 1678 was this he had to take and record the affidavit of a kinsman of the dead, to the effect that the corpse was actually buried in woollen fabric. The upper classes, however, preferred to bury in linen, and to pay the fine of 5l. When Mistress Oldfield, the famous actress, was interred in 1730, her body was arrayed in a very fine Brussels lace headdress, a holland shift with a tucker and double ruffles of the same lace, and a pair of new kid gloves.
In 1694 an empty exchequer was replenished by a tax on marriages, births, and burials, the very extortion which had been feared by the insurgents in the Pilgrimage of Grace. The tax collectors had access without payment of fee to the registers. The registration of births was discontinued when the Taxation Acts expired. An attempt to introduce the registration of births was made in 1753, but unsuccessfully. The public had the old superstitious dread of anything like a census. Moreover, the custom was denounced as French, and therefore abominable. In the same way it was thought telling to call the clôture the French gag during some recent discussions of parliamentary rules. In 1783 the parish register was again made the instrument of taxation, and threepence was charged on every entry. Thus the clergyman was placed in the invidious light of a tax collector, and as the poor were often unable or unwilling to pay the tax, the clergy had a direct inducement to retain their good-will by keeping the registers defective.
It is easy to imagine the indignation in Scotland when bang went saxpence every time a poor man had twins! Of course the Scotch rose up against this unparalleled extortion. At last, in 1812, Roses Act was passed. It is styled an Act for the better regulating and preserving registers of births, but the registration of births is altogether omitted from its provisions. By a stroke of the wildest wit the penalty of transportation for fourteen years, for making a false entry, is to be divided equally between the informer and the poor of the parish. A more casual Act has rarely been drafted.
Without entering into the modern history of parish registers, we may borrow a few of the ancient curiosities to be found therein, the blunders and the waggeries of forgotten priests, and curates, and parish clerks. In quite recent times (1832) it was thought worth while to record that Charity Morrell at her wedding had signed her name in the register with her right foot, and that the ring had been placed on the fourth toe of her left foot; for poor Charity was born without arms. Sometimes the time of a birth was recorded with much minuteness, that the astrologers might draw a more accurate horoscope. Unlucky children, with no acknowledged fathers, were entered in a variety of odd ways. In Lambeth (1685), George Speedwell is put down as a merry begot; Anne Twine is filia uniuscujusque. At Croydon, a certain William is terraefilius (1582), an autochthonous infant. Among the queer names of foundlings are Nameless, Godsend, Subpoena, and Moyses and Aaron, two children found, not in the bulrushes, but in the street.
The rule was to give the foundling for surname the name of the parish, and from the Temple Church came no fewer than one hundred and four foundlings named Temple, between 1728 and 1755. These Temples are the plebeian gens of the patrician house which claims descent from Godiva. The use of surnames as Christian names is later than the Reformation, and is the result of a reaction against the exclusive use of saints names from the calendar. Another example of the same reaction is the use of Old Testament names, and Ananias and Sapphira were favourite names with the Presbyterians. It is only fair to add that these names are no longer popular with Presbyterians, at any rate in the Kirk of Scotland. The old Puritan argument was that you would hardly select the name of too notorious a scriptural sinner, as bearing testimony to the triumph of grace over original sin. But in America a clergyman has been known to decline to christen a child Pontius Pilate, and no wonder.
Entries of burials in ancient times often contained some biographical information about the deceased. But nothing could possibly be vaguer than this: 1615, February 28, St. Martins, Ludgate, was buried an anatomy from the College of Physicians. Man, woman, or child, sinner or saint, we know not, only that an anatomy found Christian burial in St. Martins, Ludgate. How much more full and characteristic is this, from St. Peters-in-the-East, Oxford (1568): There was buried Alyce, the wiff of a naughty fellow whose name is Matthew Manne. There is immortality for Matthew Manne, and there is, in short-hand, the tragedy of Alyce his wiff. The reader of this record knows more of Matthew than in two hundred years any one is likely to know of us who moralise over Matthew! At Kyloe, in Northumberland, the intellectual defects of Henry Watson have, like the naughtiness of Manne, secured him a measure of fame. (1696.) Henry was so great a fooll, that he never could put on his own close, nor never went a quarter of a mile off the house, as Voltaires Memnon resolved never to do, and as Pascal partly recommends.
What had Mary Woodfield done to deserve the alias which the Croydon register gives her of Queen of Hell? (1788.) Distinguished people were buried in effigy, in all the different churches with which they were connected, and each sham burial service was entered in the parish registers, a snare and stumbling-block to the historian. This curious custom is very ancient. Thus we read in the Odyssey that when Menelaus heard in Egypt of the death of Agamemnon he reared for him a cenotaph, and piled an empty barrow that the fame of the dead man might never be quenched. Probably this old usage gave rise to the claims of several Greek cities to possess the tomb of this or that ancient hero. A heroic tomb, as of Cassandra for example, several towns had to show, but which was the true grave, which were the cenotaphs? Queen Elizabeth was buried in all the London churches, and poor Cassandra had her barrow in Argos, Mycenæ, and Amyclæ.
A drynkyng for the soul of the dead, a τφος or funeral feast, was as common in England before the Reformation as in ancient Greece. James Cooke, of Sporle, in Norfolk (1528), left six shillings and eightpence to pay for this drynkyng for his soul; and the funeral feast, which long survived in the distribution of wine, wafers, and rosemary, still endures as a slight collation of wine and cake in Scotland. What a funeral could be, as late as 1731, Mr. Chester Waters proves by the bill for the burial of Andrew Card, senior bencher of Grays Inn. The deceased was brave in a superfine pinked shroud (cheap at 1l. 5s. 6d.), and there were eight large plate candle-sticks on stands round the daïs, and ninety-six buckram escutcheons. The pall-bearers wore Alamode hatbands covered with frizances, and so did the divines who were present at the melancholy but gorgeous function. A hundred men in mourning carried a hundred white wax branch lights, and the gloves of the porters in Grays Inn were ash-coloured with black points. Yet the wine cost no more than 1l. 19s. 6d.; a deal of sack, by no means intolerable.
Leaving the funerals, we find that the parish register sometimes records ancient and obsolete modes of death. Thus, martyrs are scarce now, but the register of All Saints, Derby, 1556, mentions a poor blinde woman called Joan Waste, of this parish, a martyr, burned in Windmill pit. She was condemned by Ralph Baynes, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. In 1558, at Richmond, in Yorkshire, we find Richard Snell, brnt, bur. 9 Sept. At Croydon, in 1585, Roger Shepherd probably never expected to be eaten by a lioness. Roger was not, like Wyllyam Barker, a common drunkard and blasphemer, and we cannot regard the Croydon lioness, like the Nemean lion, as a miraculous monster sent against the county of Surrey for the sins of the people. The lioness was brought into the town to be seen of such as would give money to see her. He (Roger) was sore wounded in sundry places, and was buried the 26th Aug.
In 1590, the register of St. Oswalds, Durham, informs us that Duke, Hyll, Hogge, and Holiday were hanged and burned for there horrible offences. The arm of one of these horrible offenders was preserved at St. Omer as the relic of a martyr, a most precious treasure, in 1686. But no one knew whether the arm belonged originally to Holiday, Hyll, Duke, or Hogge. The coals, when these unfortunate men were burned, cost sixpence; the other items in the account of the abominable execution are, perhaps, too repulsive to be quoted.
According to some critics of the British government, we do not treat the Egyptians well. But our conduct towards the Fellahs has certainly improved since this entry was made in the register of St. Nicholas, Durham (1592, August 8th): Simson, Arington, Featherston, Fenwick, and Lancaster, were hanged for being Egyptians. They were, in fact, gypsies, or had been consorting with gypsies, and they suffered under 5 Eliz. c. 20. In 1783 this statute was abolished, and was even considered a law of excessive severity. For even a hundred years ago the puling cant of sickly humanitarianism was making itself heard to the injury of our sturdy old English legislation. To be killed by a poet is now an unusual fate, but the St. Leonards, Shoreditch, register (1598) mentions how Gabriel Spencer, being slayne, was buried. Gabriel was slayne by Rare Ben Jonson, in Hoxton Fields.
The burning of witches is, naturally, not an uncommon item in parish registers, and is set forth in a bold, business-like manner. On August 21 (1650) fifteen women and one man were executed for the imaginary crime of witchcraft. A grave, for a witch, sixpence, is an item in the municipal accounts. And the grave was a cheap haven for the poor woman who had been committed to the tender mercies of a Scotch witch-trier. Cetewayos medicine-men, who smelt out witches, were only some two centuries in the rear of our civilisation. Three hundred years ago Bishop Jewell, preaching before Elizabeth, was quite of the mind of Cetewayo and Saul, as to the wickedness of suffering a witch to live. As late as 1691, the register of Holy Island, Northumberland, mentions William Cleugh, bewitched to death, and the superstition is almost as powerful as ever among the rural people. Between July 13 and July 24 (1699) the widow Comon, in Essex, was thrice swum for a witch. She was not drowned, but survived her immersion for only five months. A singular homicide is recorded at Newington Butts, 1689. John Arris and Derwick Farlin in one grave, being both Dutch soldiers; one killed the other drinking brandy. But who slew the slayer? The register is silent; but often eating a shoulder of mutton or a peck of hasty pudding at a time caused the death of James Parsons, at Teddington, in Middlesex, 1743. Parsons had resisted the effects of shoulders of mutton and hasty pudding till the age of thirty-six.
And so the registers run on. Sometimes they tell of the death of a glutton, sometimes of a Grace wyfe (grosse femme). Now the bell tolls for the decease of a duke, now of a dog-whipper. Lutenists and Saltpetremen the skeleton of the old German allegory whispers to each and twitches him by the sleeve. Ellis Thompson, insipiens, leaves Chester-le-Street, where he had gabbled and scrabbled on the doors, and follows William, foole to my Lady Jerningham, and Edward Errington, the Townes Fooll (Newcastle-on-Tyne) down the way to dusty death. Edward Errington died of the pest, and another idiot took his place and office, for Newcastle had her regular town fools before she acquired her singularly advanced modern representatives. The aquavity man dies (in Cripplegate), and the dumb-man who was a fortune-teller (Stepney, 1628), and the Kings Falkner, and Mr. Gregory Isham, who combined the professions, not frequently united, of attorney and husbandman, in Barwell, Leicestershire (1655). The lame chimney-sweeper, and the King of the gypsies, and Alexander Willis, qui calographiam docuit, the linguist, and the Tom o Bedlam, the comfit-maker, and the panyer-man, and the tack-maker, and the suicide, they all found death; or, if they sought him, the churchyard where they were hurled into a grave was interdicted, and purified, after a fortnight, with frankincense and sweet perfumes, and herbs.
Sometimes people died wholesale of pestilence, and the Longborough register mentions a fresh way of death, the swat called New Acquaintance, alias Stoupe Knave, and know thy master. Another malady was the posting swet, that posted from towne to towne through England. The plague of 1591 was imported in bales of cloth from the Levant, just as British commerce still patriotically tries to introduce cholera in cargoes of Egyptian rags. The register of Malpas, in Cheshire (Aug. 24, 1625), has this strange story of the plague: