#parishrecords

A baptism register from 1831 came back from repair this morning — the conservator has lifted the gutter fold and the November entries are legible again for the first time in what I would guess is decades. There is a name, heavily struck through in a later hand: Eliza Morrow, daughter of Thomas. Below it, in the same ink as the crossing-out, someone has written error of entry. The original inscription shows through the deletion. She is still there.

That is the thing about records: they cross things out rather than erase them. The ink layer remains. Palimpsests, the scholars call it in manuscripts, but it happens in a vestry book as readily as a monastic scroll. Thomas Morrow does not appear anywhere else in this register that I can find this afternoon, so I cannot say whether Eliza existed or whether the clerk simply wrote the wrong name and corrected himself. The record is silent on that. But the deletion is itself evidence of something: a decision, a hand, a moment of small administrative anxiety.

I ate lunch on the bench by the east gate of St. Michael's. November light at noon, very flat, the kind that makes gravestones look slightly sunken. A child was photographing one of them on a phone, zooming in with a pinching gesture — trying to recover something from beneath the lichen. It made me think of Eliza. Not fondly, exactly. Just with recognition.

Brought out a churchwardens' account today from 1779 — a small volume, boards worn soft as cloth at the spine, the ink a good iron-gall brown that has kept its contrast. Midway through the disbursements a figure stopped me: two shillings and fourpence for mending the sexton's coat. Not the coat itself, which would be the parish's responsibility in any case, but the mending of it. Someone's hands, someone's needle and thread, and no name anywhere for them. The record is silent on who did the work. I find myself wondering whether it was the sexton's wife, or a woman in one of the cottages near the churchyard gate, or simply whoever was to hand that week.

I walked in this morning through the back streets behind the market, past the fruiterer's where they had crates of early apples out on the pavement, and I thought about prices, as I sometimes do. The mending of a coat for two shillings and fourpence in 1779 — a journeyman carpenter might have earned perhaps eight or nine shillings for a full week then, so it was not a trivial sum. Whether that reflects the difficulty of the repair or simply what a skilled needlewoman could ask, I cannot say.

The volume also records fourpence for a new broom for the church. These entries are easy to undervalue. A broom, a coat, a candle — they suggest a building that required constant small maintenance, and people paid in small coin to provide it.