“If you will have this Book last, bee sure to aire it att the fier or in the Sunne three or foure times a yeare—­els it will grow dankish and rott, therefore look to it.  It will not be amisse when you finde it dankish to wipe over the leaves with a dry woollen cloth.  This place is very much subject to dankishness, therefore I say looke to it.”

Sometimes the parsons adorned their books with their poetical effusions either in Latin or English.  Here are two examples, the first from Cherry Hinton, Cambridgeshire; the second from Ruyton, Salop:—­

        Hic puer aetatem, his Vir sponsalia noscat. 
        Hic decessorum funera quisque sciat.

        No Flatt’ry here, where to be born and die
        Of rich and poor is all the history. 
        Enough, if virtue fill’d the space between,
        Prov’d, by the ends of being, to have been.

Bishop Kennet urged his clergy to enter in their registers not only every christening, wedding, or burial, which entries have proved some of the best helps for the preserving of history, but also any notable events that may have occurred in the parish or neighbourhood, such as “storms and lightning, contagion and mortality, droughts, scarcity, plenty, longevity, robbery, murders, or the like casualties.  If such memorable things were fairly entered, your parish registers would become chronicles of many strange occurrences that would not otherwise be known and would be of great use and service for posterity to know.”

The clergy have often acted upon this suggestion.  In the registers of Cranbrook, Kent, we find a long account of the great plague that raged there in 1558, with certain moral reflections on the vice of “drunkeness which abounded here,” on the base characters of the persons in whose houses the Plague began and ended, on the vehemence of the infection in “the Inns and Suckling houses of the town, places of much disorder,” and tells how great dearth followed the Plague “with much wailing and sorrow,” and how the judgment of God seemed but to harden the people in their sin.

The Eastwell register contains copies of the Protestation of 1642, the Vow and Covenant of 1643, and the Solemn League and Covenant of the same year, all signed by sundry parishioners, and of the death of the last of the Plantagenets, Richard by name, a bricklayer by trade, in 1550, whom Richard III acknowledged to be his son on the eve of the battle of Bosworth.  At St. Oswalds, Durham, there is the record of the hanging and quartering in 1590 of “Duke, Hyll, Hogge and Holyday, iiij Semynaryes, Papysts, Tretors and Rebels for their horrible offences.”  “Burials, 1687 April 17th Georges Vilaus Lord dooke of bookingham,” is the illiterate description of the Duke who was assassinated by Felton and buried at Helmsley.  It is impossible to mention all the gleanings from parish registers; each parish tells its tale, its trades, its belief in witchcraft, its