This same clerk lived on in the quiet village until the third or fourth year of the Long Parliament.  Hooker died and was buried at Borne, and many people used to visit his monument, and the clerk had many rewards for showing his grave-place, and often heard his praises sung by the visitors, and used to add his own recollections of his holiness and humility.  But evil days came; the parson of Borne was sequestered, and a Genevan minister put into his good living.  The old clerk, seeing so many clergymen driven from their homes and churches, used to say, “They have sequestered so many good men, that I doubt if my good Master Hooker had lived till now, they would have sequestered him too.”

Walton then describes the conversion of the church into a Genevan conventicle.  He wrote:  “It was not long before this intruding minister had made a party in and about the said parish that was desirous to receive the sacrament as at Geneva:  to which end, the day was appointed for a select company, and forms and stools set about the altar or communion table for them to sit and eat and drink; but when they went about this work, there was a want of some joint-stools which the minister sent the clerk to fetch, and then to fetch cushions.  When the clerk saw them begin to sit down, he began to wonder; but the minister bade him cease wondering and lock the church door:  to whom he replied, ’Pray take you 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.