it was "the sickest passage that ever I had." The result of the mission was satisfactory: the French king took his oath to the treaty of October 2, in great state, on December 14, 1518, in presence of the English ambassadors; and we learn that on this occasion "my Lord of St. John's was dressed in black satin." On this occasion the celebrated meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was arranged, and Sir Thomas Docwra appeared there on Wolsey's staff. After Wolsey and his immediate retinue came, we are told, "five or six bishops, with the Grand Prior of Jerusalem, and several prothonotaries, in crimson and black velvet, and wearing great gold chains. Then came 100 archers of the king's guards, well mounted, with their bows bent, and their quivers at their sides." At the tournament which followed, Docwra acted as one of the judges.

At the meeting between Henry and Charles V. at Gravelines in July, 1520, Docwra accompanied the English king; and in the following year, when Wolsey presided over a conference of ambassadors at Calais, he was accompanied by the Prior of St. John's, who, with Sir Thomas Boleyn, was sent on a special mission immediately afterwards to the Emperor Charles.

These facts show the importance attached by Henry VIII. to Sir Thomas Docwra's services as a diplomatist abroad. The position which we find him occupying at home was no less honourable. It was twofold. He had his own kingdom in Clerkenwell, and did much to adorn and complete the old priory. He even acted as a viceroy there, for we find many orders issued that "Islington, Holloway, St. John Street, Cowcross, Charter-house Lane, &c. were to be searched for suspected persons by my Lord of St. John's, or such as he shall think meet for it."

He also had solemn functions of state to perform. We find him, for example, in his place in Parliament as the premier baron of the realm, in February 1515, "among the triers of a petition from Gascony"; and, on another occasion, we find him one of the eighteen peers before whom the Duke of Buckingham was tried and convicted. He seems to have been a constant guest at court on all great occasions. As an instance, the following extract from a contemporary letter may be given: "Returned in great state with big drums and trumpets to Greenwich-heard mass-then went to dinner. Had at their table an archbishop, the Duke of Norfolk, the Treasurer, the Admiral, the Viceroy of Ireland, and the Prior of St. John's. After dinner, the king armed himself cap-à-pie, and ran thirty courses, capsizing his opponents, horse and all.”

Until Wolsey's position with the king made the Grand Prior a dangerous rival, the two lived on the most friendly terms. In

November 1515, on the occasion of the great ceremony when Wolsey received the cardinal's hat, Docwra was present; as also in the following year when the Cardinal gave a banquet to the Scottish ambassadors. On all purely ceremonial occasions, also, the Prior of St. John's invariably accompanied the Cardinal. The latter was not at any time a loser by his friendship with the head of the wealthy Hospitallers. In the old MSS., giving an inventory of Wolsey's household goods, we find such entries as the following: "Changeable silk, green and yellow, given by my Lord of St. John's; "—" Sixteen window-carpets, received from my Lord of St. John's, 8th December, 16th Hen. VIII. ";-"Twelve carpets of beyond-sea making, received from my Lord of St. John's, 18th January, 18th Henry VIII.";—and "a table carpet given to my lord by the Lord of St. John's, 20th December, 20th Henry VIII."

66

The life at Clerkenwell Priory-always comfortable—was luxurious when the Prior was there. Royalty itself reserved the right of a place. Nor was the king satisfied with the right of dining himself at the Grand Prior's table: he claimed also the privilege of sending such members of his household and court as he might find it inconvenient to provide for elsewhere. As has been truly said, “It was indeed a long price which the community had to pay for the presence and countenance of the monarch, and it sometimes weighed heavily on their finances." But towards the end of Docwra's life a marked change came over his relations with the king and Wolsey. He was rarely found at court; and the extant correspondence is generally composed of demands from Wolsey for part of the property of the Order for the king's service-the style of which may be guessed from the following sentence with which one of these requisitions concludes: "I advise you to comply without excuse or delay, according to the accompanying letters from the king."

Sick at heart and ailing in body, my Lord of St. John's did not long survive his loss of favour. He died in the year 1527, and was buried "in prioratu Sancti Johannis Jerusalem," and his successor was the distinguished knight, Sir William Weston.

The new lord of St. John's received even harsher treatment than his predecessor. Stern edicts, confiscation of property, withdrawal of the charter of the Order-the restoration of which, by Queen Mary, the Prior could not foresee-all preyed on the mind of the chivalrous Hospitaller; and on the day when the crowning injury was inflicted on the English langue, Sir William Weston joined the knights who had gone before. He was buried in the chancel of the old church of St. John, in Clerkenwell.

FRANCIS DUNCAN.

TH

BISHOPS TRANSCRIPTS.

HOUGH much genealogical information may be obtained from Court Rolls, Wills, and other sources, the main framework of an authentic and full pedigree must, at all events for the last three hundred years, be drawn from the registers of parishes. Court Rolls, of paramount importance in tracing the descent of property, deal chiefly with the heirs to the properties in the manor, and so practically concern only the main stem of the family, leaving its branches, the younger sons and their descendants, to be traced from other materials. Wills, again, while often throwing light upon distant ramifications, are unfortunately not composed from a genealogist's point of view, and are too often vague in detail. They do not usually mention other children or relatives than those alive at the testator's death, and of them only those to whom legacies are bequeathed; and an additional obscurity in a large number of cases overshadows the relationships of the family by reason of the use of the term "cousin," common in old wills, to mean nephews and nieces, if not other degrees of consanguinity as well, in addition to its ordinary acceptation. There is confusion enough for the genealogist in the every-day use of the word "cousin," which may indeed denote any one of four relationships to a given person, in only one of which will the surname reveal what the relationship between the parties really is; in the other three cases the surname cannot possibly tell an inquirer if the cousin in question be the child of the father's sister, or the mother's sister or brother. When to this is added the possibility that it is not cousin at all in the modern sense that is meant, one's pathway through the mazes of the family becomes very treacherous. The terms "brother-in-law" and "sister-in-law," also frequently met with in documents of the last-mentioned class, are equally indefinite, since the persons denoted may be either the spouses of a sister or a brother, or the brothers and sisters of a spouse. Often, too, the suspicion will creep in, that the testator may have confused the relationships of "step-son" and "son-in-law."

But the entries in a parish register throw a flood of light upon difficulties of this kind. An inspection of the list of marriages will

easily lead to the identification of the brother-in-law, or afford materials for assigning the cousin to the proper place in the pedigree; the entry of a baptism or burial will supply a date upon which very much may turn. Important, then, as other documents may be in such matters, the highest value must be assigned to parish registers ; and in view of the large number of missing and dilapidated registers, the copies of them sent in year by year by the parson and churchwardens to the Bishop at his visitation, called the Bishops' Transcripts, are worthy of the greatest care and attention. In 1830, of the eleven thousand parishes of England, 6,000 only possessed registers commencing prior to 1650; while in the case of 2,000 more the registers began since 1700. How many of these books have been lost, damaged, or destroyed since 1830, it is difficult to say; and it must be remembered that the calculation above is based upon the date of the first entry only, and takes no notice of the fact that a register complete from its beginning, and legible and undefaced throughout, is a very rare thing to find.

Parochial registers were established by a mandate of Thomas Cromwell in 1538; but in 1597, it being found that they were not so regularly preserved and kept as they should be, it was ordained by the Archbishop and clergy of Canterbury that they should be transcribed into parchment books, and that copies of the registers should be forwarded annually within one month of Easter to the registrars of the various dioceses' to be preserved in the Episcopal archives. This regulation was approved by Queen Elizabeth under the great seal of England, and confirmed by the 70th Ecclesiastical Canon of 1703.

This order of things existed until the confusions during the reign of Charles I., at which time parish registers were greatly neglected, and, as a natural consequence, the sending-in of transcripts to the bishop became extremely irregular. In every diocese there is a break in the series of transcripts from about 1640 to 1660, one or two parishes, perhaps, sending in their parchments a year or two later, but all ceasing, with the rarest exceptions, before 1650. Registering, indeed, went on in the parishes themselves. It was ordered in the House of Commons in 1664 that a register book should be kept in every parish, in which births, marriages, deaths, and burials were to be entered by the minister; and in 1653 it was further enacted that in every parish a person should be appointed, to be called the "Parish Register," to keep the register book and make the entries in it. These orders, of course, made no provision for transcripts, except a permissive one in the case of marriages to the effect that if the certificate

of a civil marriage before a justice of the peace should "be produced to the clerk of the peace, and request made to him to make an entry thereof; then the said clerk of the peace is hereby required to enter the same in a book of parchment to be provided for that purpose and kept among the records of the said sessions." This regulation was not in force for many years; with the Restoration this irregular system of keeping registers ceased; the duty again devolved upon the parochial clergy, and the registers since 1660 have been for the most part well kept, though the transcripts in many instances have been very irregularly sent in to the bishop.

Of the importance of the transcripts of parish registers, apart from their genealogical utility, little need be said, it is so patent to everybody. Mr. J. S. Burn, in his book on Parish Registers, gives several instances of their importance. In the Chandos case a marriage was proved by the production of the transcript of the register of Owre in Kent, from the Archbishop of Canterbury's Registry; and the Committee of Privileges, not being satisfied with the condition of the register of Maidstone in 1603, required the production of the transcript for that year, which was found to correspond; but in the claim of Charlotte Gertrude McCarthy to the Stafford peerage in 1825, the transcripts being called for, a forgery in the original Register was discovered. A woman cut out two leaves from St. Bride's register for the purpose of destroying the proof of her marriage, but as, fortunately, there was a transcript in the Bishop of London's Registry, the marriage was proved. An agricultural labourer named Angell established a claim to property valued at a million of money; but on comparing the register produced at the trial with the transcript, it was discovered that in an entry of the burial of a woman the name Margaret Ange had been altered into Marriott Angell, and on this ground the Attorney-General moved for and obtained a new trial. For many years the usefulness of the Bishops' Transcripts has been fully proved; they have been repeatedly produced to afford evidence of forgeries in or to supply the deficiencies of parish registers.

Although the churchwardens of every parish were thus ordered to send in transcripts, and many faithfully performed their duties, there were very many who neglected to do so. The Canons of 1603 were never confirmed by Parliament, and though the transmission of these duplicates was again and again ordered, and again and again referred to in the charges of the bishops, there was no legal compulsion on the part of the parochial authorities to attend to their orders; and consequently in not one diocese of England is the set of tran