book had also provided that ‘for the sauff kepinge of the same boke the parishe shalbe bonde to provide ... one sure coffer with twoo lockes and keys ...‘. The parson, vicar or curate was to have one key and the churchwardens the other. Every Sunday, the book was to be taken out and written up in the presence of one or both of the wardens, an instruction which later, and perhaps earlier, became more honoured in the breach than the observance. Since it is known from the inventory taken in 1552 that Ash had at that time a chest with two locks ‘for the Register booke’ and that this was not then a new acquisition, it is likely that the parish’s paper registers antedated by some years at least the earliest entries of which record has survived, On one point there is no room for doubt; a Burial register was opened by William Wyels. He was already rector when Cromwell first issued his Injunctions and remained so at the date of the first known entry.
   Wyels was succeeded at Ash by Thomas Maxfield 

and he, in 1575, by his son of the same name. As the younger Thomas Maxfield continued as rector for some thirty years, it would naturally have fallen to him to open the parchment registers. The Revd W.E. Buckland says that their earliest entries, to 1600, ‘appear to be in the handwriting of Thomas Maxfield, Jun., ... who copied those made during his  father s incumbency’.²  Actually, Maxfield began with two entries made in Wyel’s time, but cannot have copied all the entries from his father’s time, he may, however, have copied all that had survived.
   Maxfield junior died in September, 1605. A curious feature of the registers is the dearth of entries for the last years of his life and, indeed, for some two years and more after his death. For the years 1601 to 1607, there is a minimal number of recorded baptisms and only one marriage entry. There are normal numbers of entries in the baptismal and marriage registers for the year 1600,