Page:A transcript of the first volume, 1538-1636, of the parish register of Chesham in the county of Buckingham.djvu/12

 Elizabethan copy-book smallhand to have been. From 1605 to 1622, excepting two or three short intervals, the entries appear to have been made by the next vicar, Richard Woodcock; and it is probable that his successors wrote most, if not all, of the remainder. The identity of the writers can only be inferred, however, from incidental references, and from the handwriting; and it is possible that the entries of some of the later years were made by the parish clerks, who, if so, were less erratic in their spelling than was usual with their class. Some of the writing quite at the end of the period is irregular and cramped, but the book as a whole may be said to have been exceedingly well posted up, and, excepting a word here and there, it is easily legible throughout by any one who is familiar with the handwriting of the time.

None of the entries appears to have been made when the baptism, marriage or burial took place. The early registers were generally made up periodically. Cromwell's edict required that the records of each week should be entered in the register on the following Sunday, in the presence of one of the churchwardens. The custom was for the minister or the clerk to put down the particulars of the ceremony at the time in an ordinary day-book or on loose slips of paper, and for the rough draft so made to be copied into the register, at first weekly, and afterwards at longer and irregular intervals. Many mistakes and omissions occurred, no doubt, through this practice, the names of persons being not infrequently misspelt by the clerk, and the notes being sometimes lost or forgotten, and often not fully or accurately copied.

The requirement that a copy of the entries of each year should be sent to the bishop of the diocese to be preserved in the diocesan registry was complied with at Chesham-in part, at least; for a note of registration occurs yearly in the margin of the Register from 1573 or 1574 to about 1606, and transcripts of the years 1575 (October)-1576 (September), 1600 (in part), 1605 (in part), 1609-1613, 1617, 1620, 1625-1628, 1634 and 1636 are preserved in the Registry of the Archdeaconry of Buckingham at Aylesbury. Those of the intervening years are missing. The transcripts are written on long strips of parchment or paper, and they are mostly in fairly good condition. The writing is the same as that of the corresponding year in the Register, and the correctness of the record is generally attested by the signatures of the vicar and church-wardens for the time being. Some of the transcripts, however, show considerable variation from the Register. Several of the entries in the latter do not appear in the former, and vice versa. Occasionally, too, the names are not the same in both. These differences are in some years so numerous as to point either to such carelessness on the part of the transcriber as seems in the circumstances unlikelv, or to his having had before him to copy, not the Register, but the day-book or notes from which, as has been mentioned, the Register itself was made up. It would seem, therefore, that there is generally little reason to prefer the reading of one of the two records to that of the other: but it should be observed that the earliest of the transcripts, for the year 1575-1576, is contemporary, having been written at the end of the year to which it relates, whereas the entries of that year as they appear in the Register itself were copied from the original Register in 1598, twenty-two years later; so that in this case