“Oh, you may as well have the leaf as it is,” and without any hesitation took out his pocket-knife, cut out the leaf and gave the gentleman the two entire pages[65].

[Footnote 65:  History of Parish Registers, by Burn; Social Life as told by Parish Registers, by T.F.  Thiselton-Dyer, p. 2.]

Another scandalous case was that of the clerk who combined his ecclesiastical duties with those of the village grocer.  The pages of the parish register he found most useful for wrapping up his goods for his customers.  He was, however, no worse than the curate’s wife, who ought to have known better, and who used the leaves of the registers for making her husband’s kettle-holders.

What shall be said for the guardians of the church documents of Blythburgh, Suffolk?  The parish chest preserved in the church was at one time full of valuable documents in addition to very complete registers.  So Suckling, the historian of Suffolk, reported.  Alas! these have nearly all disappeared.  Scarcely anything remains of the earliest volume of the register which concludes with the end of the seventeenth century, and the old deeds have gone also.  How could this terrible loss have occurred?  It appears that a parish clerk, “in showing this fine old church to visitors, presented those curious in old papers and autographs with a leaf from the register, or some other document, as a memento of their visit[66].”

[Footnote 66:  Social Life as told by Parish Registers; also Standard, 8 Jan., 1880.]

Another clerk was extremely popular with the old ladies of the village, and used to cut out the parchment leaves of the registers and present them to his old lady friends for wrapping their knitting pins.  He was also the village schoolmaster, as many of his predecessors had been, but this wretch used to cover the backs of his pupil’s lesson-books with leaves of parchment taken from the parish chest.  Another clerk found the leaves of the registers very useful for “singeing a goose.”

The value of old registers for proving titles to estates and other property is of course inestimable.  Sometimes incomes of thousands of pounds depend upon a little entry in one of these old books, and it is terrible to think of the jeopardy in which they stand when they rest in the custody of a careless clerk or apathetic vicar.

The present writer owes much to the faithful care of a good clerk, who guarded well the registers of a defunct City church of London.  My father was endeavouring to prove his title to an estate in the north country, and had to obtain the certificates of the births, deaths, and marriages of the family during about a century.  One wedding could not be proved.  Report stated that it had been a runaway marriage, and that the bride and bridegroom had fled to London to be married in a City church.  My father casually heard of the name of some church where it was thought that the wedding might have taken place.  He wrote to the authorities of that church.  It had, however, ceased to exist.  The church had disappeared, but the old clerk was alive and knew where the books were.  He searched, and found the missing register, and the chain of evidence was complete and the title to the property fully established, which was confirmed after much troublesome litigation by the Court of Chancery.