308 On. some Curiosities and Statistics of Parish Registers. 



a full account of the cutting of the White Horse, which happened 

 only a few years before his birth, and which he remembers to have 

 heard about when the memory of it was yet fresh ; 2. an old woman 

 who used several cuiious local words that I do not see in Ackerman; 

 3. an old man who remembered the making, at the end of the last 

 century, of some shallow pits which would inevitably have been 

 taken some day for " Early British Habitations," had I not been 

 able to put upon record the testimony of one who " kenned the 

 bigging on't." No one of these pieces of information could possibly 

 have been recovered by my successor, had they been suffered to be 

 lost now. 



But to return to my registers. In Notes and (Queries (2, ii., 152) 

 a book is spoken of as having been discovered " in a tattered state 

 behind some old di-awers in the curate^s back kitchen." Another is 

 mentioned which was rescued from among a quantity of waste paper 

 in a cheesemonger's shop. And the parish clerk of South Ottei-ington, 

 Yorkshire, is stated to have used all the registers dating from before 

 the eighteenth century for waste paper, " a considerable portion 

 going to singe a goose." Again {Ihid, 2. iii., 321) in a parish in 

 Northamptonshire, the leaves of a register were sewed together to 

 serve as the covering of a tester bed, and in another parish the 

 clergyman used to cut them up for labels wherewith to direct the 

 pheasants that he sent away to his friends. In 1764 Bigland speaks 

 of a parish clerk who was a tailor and had used nineteen pages of 

 registers to make measures of j and in 1848 Mr. Bruce found that 

 at Lincoln the parchment transcripts were cut up by the registrar 

 for binding modem wills. Again Thoresby,in his History of Leices- 

 tershire seems to infer that he had met with similar instances of 

 destructiveness, as he says with regard to the parish of Scraptoffc, 

 " I saw here the best preserved and I believe the oldest register ia 

 the county. It has not been a plaything for young pointers. It 

 has not occupied a bacon-scratch or a bread-and-cheese cupboard. 

 It has not been scribbled on within and without, but it has been 

 treasured ever since 1538 to the honour of a succession of worthy 

 clergymen." 



At Birchingtonin Kent there is a serious charge of damage brought 



