Re: Plague

anonymous wrote:
Ian Goddard wrote:
I came across this example of what an outbreak of plague could do. This is from the parish register of Kirkburton. Kirkburton was a rural parish but, although extensive as northern parishes often were, was not on the scale of Halifax.

As the plague took hold the priest largely abandoned giving dates and names and, to a large extent, the use of Latin. The plague seems to have lasted until mid October although there are few entries between that date and the following March.

Another possible explanation is that the vicar died and his duties were
taken over by "whoever was available"

Is it possible the vicar is listed among those who died?

It's an interesting question as to who did make the entries.

In the previous March the curate Hugo Wylsone died and his burial is noted. The transcriber (Frances Collins) comments that 15 entries about this time are in the hand of some of the earliest entries thought to be of 1541 and ascribes this to the his illness & death. She doesn't, however, comment that a new hand takes up after these entries so it's not clear as to whether the entries prior to March were by the curate or by some other person (?the vicar) who resumed the writing of the register after the upset due to the loss of Wylsone. The new curate, Rychard Gregorye, only seems to have taken up office in the following year. He introduces himself in the register on 12 Sept 1559 saying that he will be writing the entries. Again there is no comment by the transcriber about the change of hand but she probably took it as self-evident.

The vicar himself certainly survived the outbreak. In July 1562 there is the entry "Henry Suthell Vecare of Kyrkburton sepult erat ix die mensis July." He had been the in office since 1506.

Collins observes that Queen Mary died on the 17th of November 1558 immediately before drawing attention to the gap. When the regular entries start again in the following March there's one transcribed in parentheses and then the next one starts "In primis". There is no indication of pagination here (in a similar circumstance earlier she notes that it's the start of a page) but I wonder if this was the start of a new book (assuming that the records weren't being kept on loose pages) and that the remainder of the previous one had been lost.

I think, however, that the general fall in standard of recording was that whoever was making the records was over-stretched. At the end of 1560 there's a totting up of entries for the year and there are only 26 for the whole year. It's also noticeable that in the period during which the burials were listed there was only one baptism recorded during a period when one would have expected several children to have been born (there were 64 baptisms in 1560); whoever was writing up the registers clearly had more in his mind than doing paperwork.

--
Ian

Hotmail is for spammers. Real mail address is igoddard
at nildram co uk
.

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