The Parish Clerk | Page 5

The parish
clerk was usually their leader, and was a welcome visitor in farm or
cottage or at the manor when he conducted his companions to sing the
Christmas carols.
The barrel-organ sealed the fate of the village orchestra. The old fiddles
were wanted no more, and were hung up in the cottages as relics of the
"good old times." For a time the clerk preserved his dignity and
continued to take his part in the music, turning the handle of the organ.
Then the harmonium came, played by the school-mistress or some

other village performer. No wonder the clerk was indignant. His
musical autocracy had been overthrown. At one church--Swanscombe,
Kent--when, in 1854, the change had taken place, and a kind lady, Miss
F----, had consented to play the new harmonium, the clerk, village
cobbler and leader of parish orchestra, gave out the hymn in his
accustomed fashion, and then, with consummate scorn, bellowed out,
"Now, then, Miss F----, strike up!"
It would have been a far wiser policy to have reformed the old village
orchestra, to have taught the rustic musicians to play better, than to
have silenced them for ever and substituted the "grinstun" instrument.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE CHOIR]
Archbishop Tait once said that there is no one who does not look back
with a kind of shame to the sort of sermons which were preached, the
sort of clergymen who preached them, the sort of building in which
they preached them, and the sort of psalmody with which the service
was ushered in. The late Mr. Beresford Hope thus describes the kind of
service that went on in the time of George IV in a market town of
Surrey not far from London. It was a handsome Gothic church, the
chancel being cut off from the nave by a solid partition covered with
verses and strange paintings, among which Moses and Aaron show in
peculiar uncouthness. The aisles were filled with family pews or private
boxes, raised aloft, and approached by private doors and staircases.
These were owned by the magnates of the place, who were wont to
bow their recognitions across the nave. There was a decrepit west
gallery for the band, and the ground floor was crammed with cranky
pews of every shape. A Carolean pulpit stood against a pillar, with
reading-desk and clerk's box underneath. The ante-Communion Service
was read from the desk, separated from the liturgy and sermon by such
renderings of Tate and Brady as the unruly gang of volunteers with
fiddles and wind instruments in the gallery pleased to contribute. The
clerk, a wizened old fellow in a brown wig, repeated the responses in a
nasal twang, and with a substitution of w for v so constant as not even
to spare the Beliefs; while the local rendering of briefs, citations, and
excommunications included announcements by this worthy, after the

Nicene Creed, of meetings at the town inn of the executors of a
deceased duke. Two hopeful cubs of the clerk sprawled behind him in
the desk, and the back-handers occasionally intended to reduce them to
order were apt to resound against the impassive boards. During the
sermon this zealous servant of the sanctuary would take up his broom
and sweep out the middle alley, in order to save himself the fatigue of a
weekday visit. Soon, however, the clerk and his broom followed Moses
and Aaron, the fiddles and the bassoons into the land of shadows.
No sketch of bygone times, in which the clerk flourished in all his glory,
would be complete without some reference to the important person who
occupied the second tier in the "three-decker," and decked in gown and
bands delivered somnolent sermons from its upper storey. Curious
stories are often told of the careless parsons of former days, of their
irreverence, their love of sport, their neglect of their parishes, their
quaint and irreverent manners; but such characters, about whom these
stories were told, were exceptional. By far the greater number lived
well and did their duty and passed away, and left no memories behind
except in the tender recollections of a few simple-minded folk. There
were few local newspapers in those days to tell their virtues, to print
their sermons or their speeches at the opening of bazaars or
flower-shows. They did their duty and passed away and were forgotten;
while the parsons, like the wretch Chowne of the Maid of Sker, live on
in anecdote, and grave folk shake their heads and think that the times
must have been very bad, and the clergy a disgrace to their cloth. As
with the clerk, so with his master; the evil that men do lives after them,
the good is forgotten. There has been a vast amount of exaggeration in
the accounts that have come down