This I note for the satisfaction of any that do:" though we may
doubt whether these parishioners found the information thus conveyed
highly satisfactory.

The register of Maid's Moreton, Bucks, tells how the reading-desk (a
spread eagle, gilt) was "doomed to perish as an abominable idoll;"
and how the cross on the steeple nearly (but not quite) knocked out
the brains of the Puritan who removed it. The Puritans had their
way with the registers as well as with the eagle ("the vowl," as the
old country people call it), and laymen took the place of parsons as
registrars in 1653. The books from 1653 to 1660, while this regime
lasted, "were kept exceptionally well," new brooms sweeping clean.
The books of the period contain fewer of the old Puritan Christian
names than we might have expected. We find, "REPENTE Kytchens," so
styled before the poor little thing had anything but original sin to
repent of. "FAINT NOT Kennard" is also registered, and "FREEGIFT
Mabbe."

A novelty was introduced into registers in 1678. The law required
(for purposes of protecting trade) that all the dead should be
buried in woollen winding-sheets. The price of the wool was the
obolus paid to the Charon of the Revenue. After March 25, 1667, no
person was to be "buried in any shirt, shift, or sheet other that
should be made of woole only." Thus when the children in a little
Oxfordshire village lately beheld a ghost, "dressed in a long narrow
gown of woollen, with bandages round the head and chin," it is clear
that the ghost was much more than a hundred years old, for the act
"had fallen into disuse long before it was repealed in 1814." But
this has little to do with parish registers. The addition made to
the duties of the keeper of the register in 1678 was this--he had to