The handwriting of the parish registers is a combination of the old set law-hand and the personal handwritings mentioned in the second chapter. Original entries (_i.e._, entries made at the time of performing the religious ceremony) are seldom met with before the middle of James I.’s reign, by which time the Latin language had fallen into disuse. The Commonwealth Government passed an Act of Parliament appointing paid registrars to every village (1653). These were often illiterate men, whose only accomplishments consisted of being able to read and write, and whose zeal and discretion alone regulated the keeping of the register books. This duty was often but ill-performed, especially when age and infirmity overtook the registrar, who continued in office until death relieved him of his duties. No second registrar seemed in any case to have been appointed, nor did the Act of Parliament provide for such a contingency, and the work of keeping the registers devolved again upon the clergyman and his assistant clerk. For several years after the Restoration of 1660 the registers were irregularly kept, and very erratic. The old race of educated clerks was gone. Formerly, when the registers first began, clerkships may have been filled by men educated in the monasteries, who, when turned adrift, were glad to employ themselves as priests’ chaplains or private tutors as a means of livelihood. Until the last century very few small schools of any kind existed for the poorer classes, except those provided by charitable bequests. These were few and far between, and could be of little benefit to the masses of the people. No wonder, then, that the ill-paid clergy were obliged to be content with very uneducated men to serve in the capacity of clerk. The registers of the latter part of the seventeenth century are indited in every variety of illegibly bad writing. The chief difficulty of reading the old registers lies in the immense variety of forms a name was capable of passing through, owing to the laxity of English spelling and pronunciation. The people only knew their own surnames by oral tradition, and were entirely dependent upon the parish clerk, who wrote down the name as it sounded to him, and as sounds have a different effect on different persons, the commonest names often appeared in very strange and unrecognisable disguises before they finally crystallized into their modern forms. Eeles, Yeeles, became Wells. It is not unusual to find items of miscellaneous information jotted down at random by the clergyman among the entries of births, marriages, and deaths. Heavy falls of snow, disastrous floods, periods of drought, storms of any kind, were all events of great local importance in country places, and would remain for a long time as traditional landmarks in their annals. Alas! such items are rare, and are now rendered impossible in the printed columns of the modern register books.