Part 27 (1/2)
The following reminiscences are supplied by the Rev. W. Frederick Green, and are worthy of record:
I well remember the parish clerk of Woburn, in Bedfords.h.i.+re, more than sixty years ago. His name was Joe Brewer--a bald-headed, short, stumpy man, who wore black knee-breeches, grey stockings, and shoes. He was also the town crier. He always gave out the hymns from the front of the west gallery. ”Let us sing to the praise and glory of G.o.d, hymn--” Once I heard him call out instead, ”O yes! O yes! O yes! This is to give notice,” and then, recollecting he was in church, with a loud ”O crikey!” he began ”Let us sing,” etc.
Collections in church were made by him in a china soup plate from each pew. Ours was a large square family pew. One Sunday my brother put into the plate a new coin (I think a florin), which Brewer had never seen before, and which he thought was a token or medal, and thinking my brother was playing a trick upon him, said in a loud voice, ”Now, Master Charles, none of them larks here.”
I have also seen him at afternoon service (there was no evening service in those days), when it unexpectedly came on too dark for the clergyman to see his MS. in the pulpit, go to the altar--an ordinary table with drawers--throw up the cloth, open a drawer, take out two candles and a box of matches, go up the pulpit stairs, fix them in the candlesticks, and light them.
During the winter months part of his duty was to tend the fire during service in the Duke of Bedford's large curtained, carpeted pew in the chancel.
When I was a boy I was staying in Northamptons.h.i.+re, and went one Sunday morning into a village church for service (I think it was Fotheringhay).
There was a three-decker, and the clerk from his desk led the singing of the congregation, which he faced. There was no musical instrument of any kind. The hymn, which of course was from Tate and Brady, was the metrical version of Psalm xlii. The clerk gave out the Psalm, then read the first line to the congregation, then sang it solo, and then the congregation sang it altogether; and so on line after line for the whole eleven verses.
More attention must have been paid in those days to the requirement of the ninety-first Canon, that the clerk should be known, if may be, ”for his competent skill in singing.”
In 1873 I was curate-in-charge of an out-of-the-way Norfolk village. On my first Sunday I had an early celebration at 8 a.m. I arrived in church about 7.45, and to my amazement saw five old men sitting round the stove in the nave with their hats on, smoking their pipes. I expostulated with them quite gently, but they left the church before service and never came again. I discovered afterwards that they had been regular communicants, and that my predecessor always distributed the offertory to the poor present immediately after the service. When these men in the course of my remonstrance found that I was not going to continue the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants.
In 1870, in Norfolk, I went round with the rural dean visiting the churches. At one church the only person to receive the rural dean was the parish clerk, who was ready with the funeral pall to put over the rural dean's horse whilst waiting outside the church.
It was this same church which, in preparation for the rural dean's visit, had been recently and completely whitewashed throughout. Not only the walls and pillars, but also the pews, the school forms, the pulpit, and also the altar itself, a very small four-legged deal table without any covering. I suppose this was done by the churchwardens to conceal the dilapidated condition of everything; but they had omitted to remove the gra.s.s which was growing in the crevices of the floor paving.
Mr. Moxon (deceased), formerly rector of Hethersett, in Norfolk, told me that he had once preached for a friend in a Norfolk village church with the woman clerk holding an umbrella over his head in the pulpit throughout the sermon, because of the ”dreep.”
Miss E. Lloyd, of Woodburn, Crowborough, writes:
About the year 1833 a gentleman bought an estate in North Yorks.h.i.+re, seven miles from any town, and built a house there. The parish was small, having a population of about a hundred souls, the church old and tumbledown, reeking with damp; the rain came through the roof; the seats were worm-eaten, and centipedes, with other like vermin, roamed about them near the wall. The vicar was non-resident, and an elderly curate-in-charge ministered to this parish and another in the neighbourhood. The customs of the church were much the same as those described by Canon Atkinson in his _Forty Years in a Moorland Parish_ as existing on his arrival at Danby. There was no vestry. The surplice (washed twice a year) was hung over the altar rails, within which the curate robed, his hat or any parcel he happened to have in his hand being put down for the time on the Holy Table. The men sat for the most part together, the farmers and young men in the singing-loft, the labourers below, and the women in front. The wife of the chief yeoman farmer--an excellent and superior woman--still kept up the habit of ”making a reverence” to the altar before she entered her pew. The surplice, which hung in the church all through the week, was apt to get very damp. On one occasion, when a strange clergyman staying at the Hall took the service, he declined to wear it, as it was so wet.
”He wadn't pit it on,” said the old clerk Christopher (commonly called ”Kitty”) Hill. ”I reckon he was afeard o' t' smittle” (infection).
The same clergyman, when he went up to the altar for the Communion Service, knelt down, as his habit was, at the north end for private prayer whilst the congregation were singing a metrical Psalm (Old or New Version). On looking up he saw that Kitty Hill had followed him within the rails and was kneeling at the opposite end of the Holy Table staring at him with round eyes full of amazement at this unusual act of devotion. Both the curate and the clerk spoke the broadest Yorks.h.i.+re.
Psalm x.x.xii. 4 was thus rendered by Kitty: ”Ma-maasture is like t' doong i' summer.” He was an old man and quite bald, and used to sit in his desk with a blue-spotted pocket-handkerchief spread over his head, occasionally drawing down a corner of it for use, and then pulling it straight again. If the squire happened to come late to church--a thing which did not often happen--the curate would pause in his reading and apologise: ”Good morning, Mr. ----. I am sorry, sir, that I began the service. I thought you were not coming this morning.” One sentence of the sermon preached on the death of King William IV long remained in the memory of some of his young hearers: ”Behold the King in all his pomp and glory, soodenly toombled from his high elevation, and mingled wi'
the doost!”
In 1845 a new church was built on the old site, a new curate came, Kitty Hill died, and was succeeded in his office by his widow, who did all that she could do of the clerk's work, and showed remarkable taste in decorating the church at Christmas. No clerk was needed for the responses, as the congregation joined heartily in the service, and there was a much better attendance than there is now. She died in the early fifties.
Amongst other varied readings of the Psalms that of an old parish clerk at Hartlepool may be given. He had been a sailor, and used to render Psalm civ. 26 as ”There go the s.h.i.+ps, and there is that lieutenant whom Thou hast made to take his pastime therein.”
The late Dr. Gatty, in his record of _A Life at One Living_, mentions that at Ecclesfield, as in many other places, the office of parish clerk was hereditary. The last holder of the office, who used to sit in his desk clad in a black bombazine gown, was a publican by trade, a decent, honest man, who during the fifty-one years he was clerk was only twice absent from service. He died in 1868, and the offices of clerk and s.e.xton were then united and held by one person.
The register books of Weybridge, Surrey, were kept for a great part of the eighteenth century by the parish clerks, the son succeeding his father in office for three or four generations.
Now probably the clerks are no more clerks but vergers; and as a Yorks.h.i.+reman remarked, ”_Verging_ is a very honourable profession.”