[Footnote 38:  cf. The Parish Clerk’s Book, edited by Dr. J. Wickham Legg, F.S.A., and The Parish Clerk and his right to read the Liturgical Epistle, by Cuthbert Atchley, L.R.C.P., M.R.C.S. (Alcuin Club Tracts, IV).]

Although it is evident that at the present time the clerk has a right to read the epistle and one of the lessons, as well as the Psalms and responses when they are not sung, it was perhaps necessary that his efforts in this direction should have been curtailed.  When we remember the extraordinary blunders made by many holders of the office in the last century, their lack of education, and strange pronunciation, we should hardly care to hear the mutilation of Holy Scripture which must have followed the continuance of the practice.  Would it not be possible to find men qualified to hold the office of parish clerk by education and powers of elocution who could revive the ancient practice with advantage to the church both to the clergyman and the people?

Complaints about the eccentricities and defective reading and singing of clerks have come down to us from Jacobean times.  There was one Thomas Milborne, clerk of Eastham, who was guilty of several enormities; amongst others, “for that he singeth the psalms in the church with such a jesticulous tone and altisonant voice, viz:  squeaking like a gelded pig, which doth not only interrupt the other voices, but is altogether dissonant and disagreeing unto any musical harmony, and he hath been requested by the minister to leave it, but he doth obstinately persist and continue therein.”  Verily Master Milborne must have been a sore trial to his vicar, almost as great as the clerk of Buxted, Sussex, was to his rector, who records in the parish register with a sigh of relief his death, “whose melody warbled forth as if he had been thumped on the back with a stone.”

The Puritan regime was not conducive to this improvement of the status or education of the clerk or the cultivation of his musical abilities.  The Protectorate was a period of musical darkness.  The organs of the cathedrals and colleges were taken down; the choirs were dispersed, musical publications ceased, and the gradual twilight of the art, which commenced with the accession of the Stuarts, faded into darkness.  Many clerks, especially in the City of London, deserve the highest honour for having endeavoured to preserve the true taste for musical services in a dark age.  Notable amongst these was John Playford, clerk of the Temple Church in 1652.  Benjamin Payne, clerk of St. Anne’s, Blackfriars, in 1685, the author of The Parish Clerk’s Guide, wrote of Playford as “one to whose memory all parish clerks owe perpetual thanks for their furtherance in the knowledge of psalmody.”  The History of Music, by Hawkins, describes him as “an honest and friendly man, a good judge of music, with some skill in composition.  He contributed not a little to the art of printing music from letterpress types.  He is looked upon as the father of modern psalmody, and it does not appear that the practice has much improved.”  The account which Playford gives of the clerks of his day is not very satisfactory, and their sorry condition is attributed to “the late wars” and the confusion of the times.  He says: