Page:A transcript of the first volume, 1538-1636, of the parish register of Chesham in the county of Buckingham.djvu/9



It is remarkable that a practice so obviously useful, both politically and socially, as public registration of births, deaths and marriages, should ever have been suffered to die out in any organized community in which it had once been established. Yet, though such registration was more or less observed in some form by most of the civilized nations of antiquity, nothing of the kind seems to have existed in Europe during the middle ages. The monastic records, which have sometimes been spoken of as analogous, were of a private rather than a public character, and related mostly to members of the respective orders, to their benefactors, tenants and servants, and to matters connected with their estates.

Modern systems of registration date only from 1497. In that year, Ximenes, Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, introduced baptismal registers in his diocese in order to remedy a social evil which was then prevalent. A child and its godparents being all regarded as spiritually related to one another within the prohibited degrees, a custom had arisen among married couples of easy morals of alleging the discovery of a previously unsuspected relationship of this kind as an excuse for separating, and contracting new ties. The want of records made it very difficult to disprove these allegations, and divorces had become scandalously frequent. The Archbishop, therefore, issued an ordinance requiring a register to be kept in every parish of the names of the infants there baptized and of their sponsors. The ecclesiastical influence of Ximenes was second to that of the Pope only; and the example set in the diocese of Toledo was speedily followed elsewhere, so that baptismal registration soon became common on the continent.

Thomas Cromwell, Vicar-General to King Henry VIII., appears to have noticed, while residing in the Low Countries in early life, the registers that had been introduced there by the Spanish priests. When he came into office as the King's chief minister, and deputy-head of the English Church, he saw how useful similar registers would be in this country, though for purposes other than that which had mainly actuated Ximenes. Cromwell saw, too, that records of births alone would be incomplete, and that any scheme of national registration ought to include also marriages and burials. The result was that on September 5th, 1538, he issued an edict imposing upon the parochial clergy, under penalty of a fine for neglect, the duty of keeping parish registers in a form which remained without much alteration for three hundred years.

Less than 800 of our extant registers begin in the year 1538.Here and there is to be found one that dates back somewhat earlier, perhaps through anticipation of Cromwell's injunction, B