PRICELESS VOLUMES

Taranaki Daily News, 29 January 1929, Page 5

PRICELESS VOLUMES

PARISH RECORDS RESTORED. Described by the Bishop of Worcester as priceless volumes, a scries of churchwardens’ accounts, sold after, the death of an 18th century 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.

Air. A. T. Lawrence, K.C., moved an amendment to omit a proposal that a bishop should have poM’er 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 church wardens of the parish io 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 u very strong measure. The' Bishop of Worcester replied that parliament had declared that the registers belonged to the parishes, and all they wore 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 than the president of the Societj of Antiquities. He was a scion of the House ot Hagley, in Worcestershire, became Bishop of Carlisle, and borrowed the chinch•wardens’ accounts from Hagley. , But when ho 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."