This place is very much subject to
dankishness, therefore I say looke to it."
Sometimes the parsons adorned their books with their poetical
effusions either in Latin or English. Here are two examples, the first
from Cherry Hinton, Cambridgeshire; the second from Ruyton, Salop:--
Hic puer aetatem, his Vir sponsalia noscat.
Hic decessorum funera quisque sciat.
No Flatt'ry here, where to be born and die
Of rich and poor is all the history.
Enough, if virtue fill'd the space between,
Prov'd, by the ends of being, to have been.
Bishop Kennet urged his clergy to enter in their registers not only
every christening, wedding, or burial, which entries have proved some
of the best helps for the preserving of history, but also any notable
events that may have occurred in the parish or neighbourhood, such as
"storms and lightning, contagion and mortality, droughts, scarcity,
plenty, longevity, robbery, murders, or the like casualties. If such
memorable things were fairly entered, your parish registers would
become chronicles of many strange occurrences that would not otherwise
be known and would be of great use and service for posterity to know."
The clergy have often acted upon this suggestion. In the registers of
Cranbrook, Kent, we find a long account of the great plague that raged
there in 1558, with certain moral reflections on the vice of
"drunkeness which abounded here," on the base characters of the
persons in whose houses the Plague began and ended, on the vehemence
of the infection in "the Inns and Suckling houses of the town, places
of much disorder," and tells how great dearth followed the Plague
"with much wailing and sorrow," and how the judgment of God seemed but
to harden the people in their sin.
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