Hampshire, were found in course of being
steadily used up some years since by the
curate's wife, who made kettle-holders of them,
and who would have consumed, in good time,
all the archives if the parish clerk had not
interposed. In an Essex parish, the clerk being
applied to for a copy of an entry, and not having
pen and ink handy, said to the applicant, "You
may as well take the leaf as it is," and cut two
whole pages out of the register with his pocket-knife.
The old registers supposed in rustic
parishes to be "out of date," have been found
snipped into measures by a tailor-clerk, or used
for singeing geese, or given by another clerk as
parchment to his daughters, who were
lace-makers. In Northamptonshire, a clergyman
discovered at the house of one of his parishioners,
an old parchment register sewed together as a
covering for the tester of a bedstead. An
inhabitant of Lambeth once got a tradesman's
package in a leaf of parish register,
and found that it contained the entry of his
own baptism.

Sometimes, a clergyman was conscientious as
well as negligent. The vicar of Barkston,
Leicestershire, neglected to register at the time
the baptism of a certain Ellen Dun, put it
afterwards in the year sixteen 'eighty-nine, and
then moved it a year forward, having written
under his record, "Lord pardon me if I am
guilty of any error in registering Ellen Dun's
name." A little earlier we have this edifying
entry in the register of Melton Mowbray:
''Here is a Bill of Barton Lazars of the people
which was buried, and which was and married
above 10 years old, for because the Clark was
dead, and therefore they was not set down
according as they was. But they are all set down
sure enough one among another here in this
place." The register of St. Mary, Aldermanbury,
contains the following melancholy reason
for a break in its record: "In the year 1625,
Mr. Downing, the Curate of this Parish, his
wife, three of his children, and the Parish Clerk,
were victims to the plague, and the consequence
was that a hundred names were entered in the
Register from recollection." In recent time, a
few years ago, the parish registers of Kew,
certifying the baptism and the marriage of her
Majesty's father, and other royal births, marriages,
and deaths, were stolen, and they have
not been recovered.

The signing of every page of a transcript by
the minister and churchwardens of the year in
which it was made, has given rise to the notion
that any such minister and churchwardens have
lived throughout all the years for which they
signed. So it is that we hear of the longevity
of a Mr. Simpson, of Keame, in Leicestershire,
who was reported to have been incumbent
of the same parish for ninety-two years, and
to have had for seventy years the same
churchwardens.

The title-pages to the register books vary,
according to the taste of the original designer.
Here, is a prayer that "our sovereign queen
Elizabeth" may continue a Mother in Israel;
here, the clergyman has pointed in verse from
the earthly to the heavenly roll; or perhaps
he takes, like the pastor of Rodmarton. an
altogether earthly view of the matter, and writes
the title-page, "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—else it will
grow dankish and rott, therefore look to it. It
will not bee amisse when you finde it dankish to
wipe over the leaves with a dry wollen cloath.
This Place is very much subject to dankishness,
therefore I say looke to it."

Times have changed very much since Camden
said, "Two Christian names are rare in England,
and I only remember now his Majesty who was
named Charles James and the prince, his son,
Henry Frederic; and among private men Thomas
Maria Wingfield and Sir Thomas Posthumous
Hobby." When the multiplication of Christian
names first became a bad fashion it suggested
the French epigram on M.L. P. St. Florentin:

Here lies a little man who had a common little
    mind,
Alive he had three names, and yet he leaves not one
    behind.

Since the Bugs have become Norfolk Howards,
some question has arisen among lawyers as to a
man's right to change his Christian name. The
right to change the surname is undoubted, and
the other right is admitted now; but the old law
and custom were against it. The Christian
name could only be changed at confirmation.
Is it not so written in Coke upon Littleton?
"If a man be baptised by the name of Thomas,
and after, at his confirmation by the Bishop, he
is named John, he may purchase by the name of
his confirmation. And this doth agree with our
ancient books, where it is holden that a man
may have divers names at divers times, but not
divers Christian names."

The registers illustrate the not infrequent
practice, in days when mortality among the young
was even far greater than it now is, of assuring
the perpetuation of a father's or mother's
Christian name by giving it successively to two
or three living children. In the register of
Beby, Leicestershire, twins are entered as
baptised, one day in fifteen 'fifty-nine, John and
John Picke. Two days afterwards, "the same
John and John Picke were buried." There was
also one John Barker who had three sons each
named John Barker, and two daughters each
named Margaret Barker.

With a view to the future casting of their
horoscopes, the time of the birth, in the case of
gentlemen's children, was often registered with
astrological precision: the day, the hour, the
place of the sun, the sign of the day and of the
month, the planet of the day being recorded. In
sixteen 'fifty-one, the clergyman of Eastbourne,
Sussex, records the baptism of a son, "he being
my 26th child." In the register of Allhallows,
Bread-street, we read: "The 20th day of December,
1608, was baptised John, the sonne of John
Mylton, Scrivener." In the register of Nunney,
Somersetshire, we read of the baptism of another