302 On s^me Curiosities and Statistics of Parish Registers. 



afterwards ! " Nothing of this sort do I fiod at Cherhill, England 

 has suffered many a convulsion, both in Church and State. Dr. 

 Sacheyerell preached, and was imprisoned, and came out of prison, 

 a hero, and a martyr — in the eyes of his own party at any rate : 

 the Bill of Rights and the Test and Corporation Act was passed : 

 the Treaty of Utrecht was signed. But the good folk at Cherhill 

 cared for none of these things. The prospects of "turmuts'' or 

 " wuts," to-year, — such was their measure of public interests : 

 and the domestic fortunes of Cleare, Betsey, or Dan'l, the staple of 

 gossip on Sunday mornings at the corner of the village road. I 

 was talking a few winters ago to a class of fourteen young men, 

 all of whom were well instructed in the three Rs, some of them 

 remarkably so, and I found that not one of the fourteen had ever 

 heard of the Times newspaper, and only one of Stonehenge, which 

 is distant from our village about eighteen miles as the crow flies ! 

 One is therefore quite prepared to find that the ancestors of these 

 lads were not suflBciently interested in current events to break out 

 irrepressibly in such entries as I have given a specimen of above, 

 and as we find in many places where fragments of the history of the 

 Empire have been interspersed among the " homely annals of the 

 poor," and the progress of the Reformation has been recorded al- 

 ternately with the churchwardens' payments for the destruction of 

 polecats and sparrows, and their charges for washing the parish 

 surplice. 



But notwithstanding the absence of any entries such as these, I 

 found a good many things in the Cherhill registers which appeared 

 to me worthy of being brought under the notice of the Society, and 

 this they accordingly were in a paper which I read at our annual 

 meeting, at Swindon, in 1873. And my attention being thus called 

 to the subject, I pursued my enquiries somewhat further. And after 

 examining the registers of a good many other parishes and obtaining 

 transcripts and extracts from a good many more, I jotted down 

 a few memoranda on the subject which I read at the annual 

 meeting at Devizes the following year. It is the substance of these 

 two papers, with some further additions, that will be found in the 

 following pages. 



