other sources. The lost eleven days caused a great furore at the time; they also led to the choice of the rather curious date from which the fiscal year is still computed.
   A note was made in the register in 1706 that ‘There was then an Act of Parliament that required ye Registry of all Births’; an analogous entry in the Burial registry referred to ‘the Registry of all that Dyd’. The note in the Baptismal register is immediately followed by an entry recording that a female child of ‘George Millums labourer of ye burrow of Holiwell & Albinah his wife’ was ‘borne May 2. & Dy’d unbaptiz ‘d’.  The little girl can have had but few hours of life, for she was buried on the day following her birth; her modest claim on history must rest on the fact that she is the only unchristened child to appear in the Ash Baptismal register. A few months later, the practice of entering the date of birth when a child was christened was largely 

discontinued and was not regularly resumed for more than eighty years.
   In 1769 and the following year, during the incumbency of John Pery junior, something went badly wrong with the keeping of the register and in most cases only the child’s Christian name was entered. One entry is even less informative; it reads:
      ‘Child from Ridley Parish’.
   The fears of the clergy of Thomas Cromwell’s time again came to roost in 1783. On 1 October of that year, the then rector, the Revd Thomas Lambard, noted in the Baptismal register that a tax of 3d in the entry of christenings had been imposed and, in the Burial register, that there was a similar tax on burials. There were exemptions, likewise noted; in the case of baptisms, the tax was not payable if, at the time, the parents were in receipt of parish relief.⁸