sidemen to present offences under these articles at the next
visitation.[6] In it also he gave monition for the annual choice of
collectors for the poor;[7] warning for the yearly perambulation of
the parish bounds;[8] and public announcement of the six certain days
on which each year every parishioner had to attend in person or send
wain and men for the repair of highways.[9] In the parish church also
proclamation had to be made of estrays before the beasts could be
legally seized and impounded.[10] Here, too, school-masters often
taught their pupils[11]--unless, indeed, the parish possessed a
separate school-house. Here, in the vestry, the parish armor was
frequently kept, and sometimes the parish powder barrels were
deposited;[12] here too, occasionally, country parsons stored their
wool or grain.[13]

Finally, in the parish church assembled vestries for the holding of
accounts, the making of rates and the election of officers. Overseers
of the poor held their monthly meetings here. Occasionally the
neighboring justices of the peace met here to take the overseers'
accounts or to transact other business;[14] and in the church also
might be held coroners' inquests over dead bodies.[15] Last, but not
least in importance, in the churches of the market towns the
archdeacon made his visitations and held his court; and on these
occasions the sacred edifice rang with the unseemly squabbles of the
proctors, the accusations of the wardens and sidemen or of the
apparitor, and the recriminations of the accused--in short, the church
was turned for the time being into a moral police court, where all the
parish scandal was carefully gone over and ventilated.[16]

The ecclesiastical courts carried on their judicial administration of
the parish largely, of course, through the medium of the officers of