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The following reminiscences are supplied by the Rev. W. Frederick Green, and are worthy of record: 

I well remember the parish clerk of Woburn, in Bedfordshire, more than sixty years ago.  His name was Joe Brewer—­a bald-headed, short, stumpy man, who wore black knee-breeches, grey stockings, and shoes.  He was also the town crier.  He always gave out the hymns from the front of the west gallery.  “Let us sing to the praise and glory of God, hymn—­” Once I heard him call out instead, “O yes!  O yes!  O yes!  This is to give notice,” and then, recollecting he was in church, with a loud “O crikey!” he began “Let us sing,” etc.

Collections in church were made by him in a china soup plate from each pew.  Ours was a large square family pew.  One Sunday my brother put into the plate a new coin (I think a florin), which Brewer had never seen before, and which he thought was a token or medal, and thinking my brother was playing a trick upon him, said in a loud voice, “Now, Master Charles, none of them larks here.”

I have also seen him at afternoon service (there was no evening service in those days), when it unexpectedly came on too dark for the clergyman to see his MS. in the pulpit, go to the altar—­an ordinary table with drawers—­throw up the cloth, open a drawer, take out two candles and a box of matches, go up the pulpit stairs, fix them in the candlesticks, and light them.

During the winter months part of his duty was to tend the fire during service in the Duke of Bedford’s large curtained, carpeted pew in the chancel.

When I was a boy I was staying in Northamptonshire, and went one Sunday morning into a village church for service (I think it was Fotheringhay).  There was a three-decker, and the clerk from his desk led the singing of the congregation, which he faced.  There was no musical instrument of any kind.  The hymn, which of course was from Tate and Brady, was the metrical version of Psalm xlii.  The clerk gave out the Psalm, then read the first line to the congregation, then sang it solo, and then the congregation sang it altogether; and so on line after line for the whole eleven verses.

More attention must have been paid in those days to the requirement of the ninety-first Canon, that the clerk should be known, if may be, “for his competent skill in singing.”

In 1873 I was curate-in-charge of an out-of-the-way Norfolk village.  On my first Sunday I had an early celebration at 8 a.m.  I arrived in church about 7.45, and to my amazement saw five old men sitting round the stove in the nave with their hats on, smoking their pipes.  I expostulated with them quite gently, but they left the church before service and never came again.  I discovered afterwards that they had been regular communicants, and that my predecessor always distributed the offertory to the poor present immediately after the service.  When these men in the course of my remonstrance found that I was not going to continue the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants.