INTEREST IN CHURCH HISTORY
In Barton St. Peter's the Rector has provided a very full
account of the history of the church, for which all who visit it
must be extremely grateful.
It is very pleasant to find that the number are so decidedly on the increase of clergymen who take an interest in the past history of their churches, and write all they can find out about them, either in their parish magazines or in a separate pamphlet. Some of these, too, take pains with their old registers, and if only the rector, or someone in the parish whom he could trust to do the work with skill, care, and knowledge, would copy the old sixteenth and seventeenth century registers in a clear hand, the parish would be in possession of the most interesting of all local documents in a legible form, and the originals could be safely housed in a dry place, which is by no means the case with all of them at present, and no longer be subjected to the wear and tear of rough handling and the decay from damp which has been so fatal to the earliest pages of most of them.
The printing and placing more frequently in the church of a card, pointing out the salient features and giving what is known of the history of the building, would also be a boon to those visitors who know something of architecture, and would stimulate a taste for it in others, and a respect for old work, the lack of which has been the cause of so much destruction under the specious name of restoration in the earlier half of the past century. Things are much better now than they were two generations ago, but ignorance and want of means may still cause irreparable damage, which, if the above suggestion were universally carried out, would become less and less possible.
Amongst those who take the greatest interest in their churches I am especially indebted to the Rev. G. G. Walker, Rector of Somerby near Grantham, the Rev. Canon Sutton, of Brant Broughton, the Rev. F. McKenzie, of Great Hale near Sleaford, and the Rev. C. H. Laing, of Bardney, who has done such good work in the excavation of the famous abbey. The writer, too, of letters in The Spilsby and Horncastle Gazette, on town and village life in Lincolnshire, brings together much interesting information. From him I gather that as far back as 668, when Theodore was Archbishop of Canterbury, local provision was made for the village clergy who were then, of course, but few in number. His wise arrangement, that those who built a church should have the right of choosing their pastor, initiated the
