PRICELESS VOLUMES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 558, 10 January 1929, Page 11

PRICELESS VOLUMES

PARISH RECORDS RESTORED CHURCH ROMANCE Described by the Bishop o£ Worcester as priceless volumes, a series of churchwardens’ accounts, sold after the death of an 18th centry bishop, have just been, bought back by- the Diocese of Worcester. This was revealed at the Church Assembly at Church House, Westminster, recently, when the Parochial Registers and Records Measure was presented by the Bishop of Worcester for revision. Mr. A. T. Lawrence. K.C., moved an amendment to omit a proposal that a bishop should have power to order the recovery of register books of baptisms, marriages or burials which had passed into the possession of persons other than the minister or churchwardens of the parish to which the register belonged. He said that in some cases incumbents were careless of registers as well as of plate, and he had read of a case in which an incumbent had burned the registers because he thought it hardly worth while encumbering the church with them. To give the right to a bishop to requisition the books in such cases was a very strong measure. The Bishop of Worcester replied that Parliament had declared that the registers belonged to the parishes, and all they were asking Parliament to do now was to reaffirm that fact. Churchwardens’ accounts had recently been restored to a parish in his diocese. The loss of those priceless volumes was due to an eminent bishop of the 18th century who was no less a person that the president of the Society of Antiquities. He was a scion of the House of Hagley, in Worcestershire, became Bishop of Carlisle, and borrowed the churchwardens’ accounts from Hagley. But when he died the churchwardens’ accounts were among his effects and were sold. “And we bought them back the other day,” added the Bishop of Worcester. The rector of Hagley, Worcestershire, expressed great surprise when told by a “Daily Chronicle” representative of the documents which had been recovered. “I have Been here five years,” he said, “and did not even know that any documents were missing.”