In 1870, in Norfolk, I went round with the rural dean visiting the churches.  At one church the only person to receive the rural dean was the parish clerk, who was ready with the funeral pall to put over the rural dean’s horse whilst waiting outside the church.

It was this same church which, in preparation for the rural dean’s visit, had been recently and completely whitewashed throughout.  Not only the walls and pillars, but also the pews, the school forms, the pulpit, and also the altar itself, a very small four-legged deal table without any covering.  I suppose this was done by the churchwardens to conceal the dilapidated condition of everything; but they had omitted to remove the grass which was growing in the crevices of the floor paving.

Mr. Moxon (deceased), formerly rector of Hethersett, in Norfolk, told me that he had once preached for a friend in a Norfolk village church with the woman clerk holding an umbrella over his head in the pulpit throughout the sermon, because of the “dreep.”

Miss E. Lloyd, of Woodburn, Crowborough, writes: 

About the year 1833 a gentleman bought an estate in North Yorkshire, seven miles from any town, and built a house there.  The parish was small, having a population of about a hundred souls, the church old and tumbledown, reeking with damp; the rain came through the roof; the seats were worm-eaten, and centipedes, with other like vermin, roamed about them near the wall.  The vicar was non-resident, and an elderly curate-in-charge ministered to this parish and another in the neighbourhood.  The customs of the church were much the same as those described by Canon Atkinson in his Forty Years in a Moorland Parish as existing on his arrival at Danby.  There was no vestry.  The surplice (washed twice a year) was hung over the altar rails, within which the curate robed, his hat or any parcel he happened to have in his hand being put down for the time on the Holy Table.  The men sat for the most part together, the farmers and young men in the singing-loft, the labourers below, and the women in front.  The wife of the chief yeoman farmer—­an excellent and superior woman—­still kept up the habit of “making a reverence” to the altar before she entered her pew.  The surplice, which hung in the church all through the week, was apt to get very damp.  On one occasion, when a strange clergyman staying at the Hall took the service, he declined to wear it, as it was so wet.

“He wadn’t pit it on,” said the old clerk Christopher (commonly called “Kitty”) Hill.  “I reckon he was afeard o’ t’ smittle” (infection).