By Rev. Chr. Woi-(Uworth, M.A. 161 



paper needs reconciling with his statement, lower down on the 

 same page, that the list " is supposed to have been made about the 

 year 1654, for the use of the Commissioners ... for the 

 ejecting of scandalous, ignorant, and insufficient ministers." Per- 

 haps his meaning is, that the MS. (Brit. Mus., Lansd. 459. tf. 154 

 —165) from which he prints, was a transcript or digest of work 

 done in 1645 — 50, written out for the use of those employed five 

 or ten years later under the Act of 1654, or, to speak more correctly, 

 under Cromwell's ordinance of 22nd August, 1654, which was 

 confirmed or completed by the Act of 1656. A more recent 

 historian. Dr. W. A. Shaw, expresses his conviction that MS. 

 Lansd. 459 has nothing to do with the Act or Ordinance of 1654, 

 but is simply one of the Augmentation Books for advancing the 

 propagating or preaching of the gospel in Bristol, Wilts, Wales, 

 and the Four Northern Counties, &c., under the scheme which 

 came into force on 1st March, 1650, and was extended till 1st 

 April, 1653.1 The bulk of such documents (fifty-five in number) 

 is preserved at Lambeth in MSS. 966—1021 ; cf. 902—22, 944—7 ; 

 1027, 1104.2 Noticing that the record in vol. xix. of our Magazine 

 did not cover the entire county of Wilts— it accounts mainly for 

 the southern moiety and the north-west corner — I recently ex- 

 amined the Lansdowne MS., half expecting to find that Canon 

 Jones had left a portion, intending to continue his paper, which ends 

 rather abruptly. It seems, however, that he meant to close where 

 he does, as he has printed the conclusion of the MS., which is a 

 large paper book of atlas-like dimensions and construction. But 

 he has fallen into the fatal mistake of leaving out a line here and 

 there, which he thought irrelevant, without warning his readers 

 that he had done so. He has thus unconsciously suppressed the 

 truth that the document was upon the face of it a partial record 

 which was to be supplemented in some other papers, now lost. 



' Shaw, The Chitrch under the Commonwealth, 8vo, 1900, ii., 228,247 «., 

 252. 



- Ibid, ii., 467—76. 



