every time Timofey turned his horses. He
said this was a very dear implement, for
iron had to be used in its construction. It
cost even, as much as two roubles, or about six
shillings.

       CURIOSITIES OF PARISH
              BOOK-KEEPING.

PARISH registers as they used to be, were
much livelier records than the dry entries of
baptisms, marriages, and burials, now bearing the
name. This assertion, Burn's History of them
shall enable us here to prove. In the oldest
books of the Old Testament we find registers of
births, marriages, and deaths. Registers were
kept in Athens and Rome. Parish registers
were kept in France, as early as the year thirteen
hundred and eight. In Spain, Cardinal Ximenes,
in fourteen 'ninety-seven, ordered them to be
kept in every parish, as a check to the frequency
of divorce on the plea of spiritual affinity. It
was not until the sixteenth century, that the
general keeping of parish registers as written
documents, began. To put beans in a bag, a
white bean for every girl, and a black bean for
every boy baptised, and to count them at the
end of the year, had before then—even in
Florence, the head-quarters of civilisation—
been the registry in use.

The keeping of parish registers in England
was one of the many wholesome ideas put in
force in Henry the Eighth's day by that Thomas
Cromwell whom Shakespeare's Wolsey charged
to "fling away ambition," and in whose remarkable
career there was honestly worked out the
counsel which the fallen cardinal is made by the
poet to give him:

                                 Be just, and fear not.
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's, and Truth's.

The date of Cromwell's injunction to the
clergy, that a book or register be kept by every
parson, vicar, or curate, for every church, and
that every Sunday the clergyman enter therein
particulars of the previous week's christenings,
weddings, and burials, is the year fifteen 'thirty-eight.
In the churchwardens' accounts of that
year for the parish of St. Margaret's, Westminster,
we read: "Paid for a Book to registre
in the names of Buryals, Weddings, and Christenings,
2d." The proposal had been before the
public for some time, and had formed one of the
grievances set forth two years earlier in a
Yorkshire rebellion. It had then been given
out "that the king designed to get all the gold
of England into his hands, under colour of
recoining it; that he would seize all unmarked
cattle and all the ornaments of parish churches,
and they should be forced to pay for christenings,
marriages, and burials (orders having been
given for keeping Registers thereof), and for
licences to eat white bread." From the west
coast also, Sir Piers Edgcumbe wrote to Cromwell
that "in sundry places within the shires of
Cornwall and Devon there is among the king's
subjects great fear and mistrust what the
King's Highness and his Council should mean,
to give in commandment to the parsons and
vicars of every parish that they should make a
book, and surely to be kept" for registry of
births, marriages, and deaths. "Their mistrust
is that some charges, more than hath been in
times past, shall grow to them by this occasion
of registering these things; wherein if it shall
please the King's Majesty to put them out of
doubt, in my poor mind shall increase much
hearty love." The dissolution of the monasteries
made Cromwell's suggestion the more necessary,
for now there were no longer the monks
busy as self-appointed registrars of all kinds of
events, public and private, in Chartularies,
Leiger Books, Obituaries, Registers, and
Chronicles.

In fifteen 'thirty-six, when the requirement
to keep parish registers was first discussed,
the general dissolution of the monasteries was
in progress. The same fear that bred
opposition to the parish registers, excited hostility
to the Census of 1801. So observes MR. CHARLES
KNIGHT in his admirably comprehensive Popular
History of England, from which no topic that
concerns the history of the English people—not
even this question of the origin of parish registers
—has been omitted; that book of Mr. Knight's
being, let us say here by the way, the best
history extant not only for, but also of, the people.
The keeping of the parish register being a duty
misliked by many, was so commonly neglected,
that, in King Edward's reign, a fine of three-and-fourpence
to the poor-box was ordained to be the
penalty of each omission of that most useful and
necessary act. In Queen Elizabeth's reign, the
injunction was repeated, with the penalty half
payable to the poor-box and half towards church
repair.

Of about eleven thousand parish registers now
in existence, there are eight hundred which
begin in fifteen hundred and thirty-eight; forty
of these contain entries prior to that date;
four thousand have their first entries within
the sixteenth century. As to the early dates,
many of the registers (kept sometimes by
negligent incumbents) are defective by reason of
gaps, omissions, and other acts of carelessness.
For example, the clergyman of Tunstall, in Kent,
was annoyed by the number of persons with a
particular name—Pottman—among his
parishioners. In one year he christened three
Pottmans by the name of Mary, and soon
afterwards, in fifteen 'sixty-seven, the disgusted
pastor coolly writes in the register, "From
henceforward I omitt the Pottmans." In another parish,
a clerk who was a grocer took waste paper for
the wrappings of his groceries, out of the parish
register, and so established some considerable
gaps; other registers had leaves torn out by
parliamentary soldiers during the civil wars;
the register of Torporley, in Cheshire, explains
that a breach of five years "Implied by reason
of the great wars obliterating Memorials, wasting
fortunes, and slaughtering persons of all
sorts." The early registers of Christchurch,