Book Description

Excerpt from The Registers of the Parish of Monks' Soham, in the County of Suffolk The first mandate for keeping registers of baptisms, marriages and burials in each parish of England was issued in 1538, by Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex, as vicar-general 3 only some eight hundred of these very early registers are said to be still extant. The mandate was repeated in more vigorous terms upon the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1558, but even' then was so irregularly observed that in 1597 it was ordained that parchment register-books should be pur chased at the expense of each parish; and at that date, too, it was required that the *churchwardens of every parish should, within a month after Easter in every year, transmit to the diocesan registry a transcript of the register of baptisms, marriages, and burials for the preceding year, to be preserved in the episcopal archives; nor was this regularly done, for the earliest transcripts at Lincoln are in 1587, and at Gloucester 1571, but few dioceses have any earlier than 1660. This is accounted for by the Civil War, well expressed in a Leicester shire entry: a.d. 1641. Know all men, that the reason why little or nothing is registered from the year 1641 until the year 1649, was the civil wars between King Charles and his Parliament, which put all into a confusion till then, and neither minister nor people could quietly stay at home for one party or the other; as we very plainly see, in an aggravated form, in our own Rector, the Revd. Thomas Rogerson. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.