[Footnote 38: cf. _The Parish Clerk's Book_, edited by Dr. J. Wickham
Legg, F.S.A., and _The Parish Clerk and his right to read the Liturgical
Epistle_, by Cuthbert Atchley, L.R.C.P., M.R.C.S. _(Alcuin Club
Tracts_, IV).]

Although it is evident that at the present time the clerk has a right to
read the epistle and one of the lessons, as well as the Psalms and
responses when they are not sung, it was perhaps necessary that his
efforts in this direction should have been curtailed. When we remember
the extraordinary blunders made by many holders of the office in the
last century, their lack of education, and strange pronunciation, we
should hardly care to hear the mutilation of Holy Scripture which must
have followed the continuance of the practice. Would it not be possible
to find men qualified to hold the office of parish clerk by education
and powers of elocution who could revive the ancient practice with
advantage to the church both to the clergyman and the people?

Complaints about the eccentricities and defective reading and singing of
clerks have come down to us from Jacobean times. There was one Thomas
Milborne, clerk of Eastham, who was guilty of several enormities;
amongst others, "for that he singeth the psalms in the church with such
a jesticulous tone and altisonant voice, viz: squeaking like a gelded
pig, which doth not only interrupt the other voices, but is altogether
dissonant and disagreeing unto any musical harmony, and he hath been
requested by the minister to leave it, but he doth obstinately persist
and continue therein." Verily Master Milborne must have been a sore
trial to his vicar, almost as great as the clerk of Buxted, Sussex, was
to his rector, who records in the parish register with a sigh of relief
his death, "whose melody warbled forth as if he had been thumped on the