264 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
monuments generally; and the same remark applies to Parish 
Registers. It will be sufficient for our purpose to say that 
after the suppression of the religious houses, a mandate was 
issued by Thomas Cromwell, Vicar-General, in 1538, for the 
keeping of Registers of Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials. In the 
reign of Elizabeth it was ordered that every clergyman on his 
institution should sign a declaration to keep the Registers as 
required. But this not being done regularly, in 1597 it was 
ordained that parchment register books should be purchased at the 
expense of the parish, and such Registers as existed transcribed 
into them ; and it was further ordered that copies of the Registers 
were to be taken to the registrar of the diocese every year, within 
one month of Easter. Unfortunately these orders were seldom 
observed. Since then various acts have been passed relating to 
registration, but no adequate measure has been introduced for the 
preservation of the Registers themselves; and they have, to a 
considerable extent, perished from carelessness and neglect, and 
often from wilful destruction. Many are fast dropping to pieces 
from damp and age, and nothing but a speedy transcript can 
save them. These records are simply priceless; they afford the 
richest mines of information to the genealogist. Who is to 
say what will or will not be of value? What one passes over 
will be what another seeks. We mourn aloud the loss of such 
large numbers of these records, and yet as a country we neglect to 
take the necessary steps to secure what is left of them, which 
might be done at a very small cost annually, spread over a number 
of years. This, however, I have dealt with elsewhere. 
In a few parishes the Registers exist from the time they were 
first instituted, but in very many they do not go back beyond the 
middle of the seventeenth century, and in some cases they do not 
exist before the early part of the eighteenth century. The 
Bishops’ transcripts are very imperfect—in fact, merely fragments 
—pbut they sometimes supply information not in the Register 
itself. The condition of Registers varies, from the well-kept 
volumes at the churches of St. Andrew and Charles in this town 
to a few fast-decaying and half-obliterated leaves, which alone 
are left in many parishes to represent the earlier Register. 
The entries themselves vary greatly ; from the elaborate entry 
occupying the whole of one page of a large folio book of Registers, 
as at St. Thomas, Portsmouth, where, with a grand flourish of 
