of baptisms and burials from 1810 to 1812 and but eight of its eighty-nine vellum sheets were used.⁴
   The reason for the early demise of the fourth register book was the passing of George Rose’s Act of 1812, which introduced registers in new form;  Hardwieke apart, these were the first printed registers. They may be described as venerable rather than ancient. The marriage registers were overtaken in 1836, when civil registration of births, marriages and deaths was instituted and churches were issued with marriage registers in a new format. Government being less interested in christenings and burials, the other registers were unaffected. The baptismal and burial registers that Ash opened in 1813 continued in use into the present century. In some small but healthy country parishes a Rose’s Act burial register may still be found in use. A parish still using the baptismal register of similar vintage would have to be very minute.
   Any set of registers kept over long years contains discrepancies, erasures, illegibilities and such like which inevitably give rise to doubts and difficulties in interpretation. In those respects the ancient registers of Ash are no exception nor, in the face of obvious gaps and of less obvious omissions arising from human frailty, can statistics derived there from be wholly reliable.

   It is unlikely that these of the sixteenth century Ash entries which have survived are complete for the periods that they purport to cover and, as has been seen, the early seventeenth century entries are plainly deficient. There is a similar scarcity from 1639, to 1642, which may have been due to the advanced years or a prolonged illness of the then rector. For the period prior to 1600 about one hundred burials are recorded, but these include only eight for Mary’s reign and twenty-three for the last seventeen years of the century. For the next fifty years, and despite the inadequacies mentioned above, more than two hundred and thirty burials are entered. As there is no evidence to suggest any widespread pestilence in the parish, it seems inconceivable that between two and three times as many people died in Ash in the first half of the seventeenth century as in the second half of the sixteenth century.
   The registers present an overall picture of a sparsely populated agricultural parish occupied in the main by yeomen farmers, husbandmen and a substantial body of farm labourers. There were also, of course, tradesmen, either those such as blacksmiths and wheelwrights whose