Churchwardens' Accounts of St. Edmund and St. Thomas Sarum, 1443 - 70.
By Henry James Fowle Swayne. With Introduction by Amy M. Straton. (Bennett Bros., Salisbury.)—The late Mr. Swayne expended a vast amount of labour on the deciphering of the documents here printed. Mrs. Straton, his daughter, also deceased, put together an excellent summary of the records thus made accessible. It is needless to say that these documents, extending over a period of two centuries and a half, dealing as they do with a great variety of matters, are of the utmost value for the historian and the student of manners. Churchwardens' accounts nowadays, when the business of life is so subdivided, have not much in them. But in pre-Reformation days the Church was the centre of the life of the parish. The feasts, for instance, were under its manage- ment. Among the items the entries of " Dona et Legata " are especially noticeable. We have the other side of a fact that may be found in all collections of old wills, the amount and number of legacies left for ecclesiastical purposes. Pew-rents, as they may
be called, seem to be a very ancient form of contribution to the ways and means of the Church. Here is an example, which it would be easy to match with hundreds of others,—" xiid. rec. ex dono Roberti Bellor pro sedili in ecclesia sibi assignato." This was in 1474-75. In 1482-83, we find " xxd. rec. de Joh'e Bedwell pro una sede." The volume is a proof, in its way, of the continuity of the Church. Its temporal affairs went on under much the same management through the periods of change. We would express our best wishes for the success of the " Wilts Record Society," of whose publications this is the first.
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