By the Rev. Geo. S. Tyack, B.A.
An interesting article of Church furniture which has scarcely received the amount of notice which it deserves, is the Church Chest, the receptacle for the registers and records of the parish, and sometimes also for the office books, vestments, and other valuables belonging to the Church. In recent years attention has frequently been directed to the interesting character of our ancient parochial documents, but the useful cases which for so many years have shielded them, more or less securely, from damage or loss, have been largely overlooked.
The present authority for the provision in every English church of a proper repository for its records is the seventieth canon, the latter part of which runs in the following words, from which it will be seen that some of its details have been suffered to become obsolete: “For the safe keeping of the said book (the register of baptisms, weddings, and burials), the churchwardens, at the charge of the parish, shall [p 162] provide one sure coffer, and three locks and keys; whereof one to remain with the minister, and the other two with the churchwardens severally; so that neither the minister without the two churchwardens, nor the churchwardens without the minister, shall at any time take that book out of the said coffer. And henceforth upon every Sabbath day immediately after morning or evening prayer, the minister and the churchwardens shall take the said parchment book out of the said coffer, and the minister in the presence of the churchwardens shall write and record in the said book the names of all persons christened, together with the names and surnames of their parents, and also the names of all persons married and buried in that parish in the week before, and the day and year of every such christening, marriage, and burial; and that done, they shall lay up the book in the coffer as before.” This Canon, made with others in 1603, was a natural sequence to the Act passed in 1538, which enjoined the due keeping of parish registers of the kind above described. It is, in fact, obvious that the canon only gave additional sanction to a practice enforced some years earlier; for Grindal, in his “Metropolitical [p 163] Visitation of the Province of York in 1571,” uses almost identical terms, requiring, amongst many other things, “That the churchwardens in every parish shall, at the costs and charges of the parish, provide ... a sure coffer with two locks and keys for keeping the register book, and a strong chest or box for the almose of the poor, with three locks and keys to the same:” the same demand was made, also by Grindal, on the province of Canterbury in 1576.
Church chests did not, however, come into use in consequence of the introduction of the regular keeping of registers. The Synod of Exeter, held in 1287, ordered that every parish should provide “a chest for the books and the vestments,” and the convenience and even necessity of some such article of furniture, doubtless led to its use in many places from yet earlier times.
We have in England several excellent examples of “hutches,” or chests, which date from the thirteenth, or even from the close of the twelfth century. Some there are for which a much earlier date has been claimed. These latter are rough coffers formed usually of a single log of wood, hollowed out, and fitted with a massive [p 164] lid, the whole being bound with iron bands.
Chests of this kind may be seen at Newdigate,
Surrey, at Hales Owen, Shropshire, and elsewhere; and on the strength of the rudeness of the carpentry displayed, it has been asserted that they are of Norman, or even of Saxon, workmanship. Roughness of design and work are scarcely, however, in themselves sufficient evidence of great antiquity; many local causes, especially in small country places, may have led the priests and people to be content with a very rude article of home manufacture, at a time when far more elaborate ones were procurable in return for a little more enterprise or considerably more money. The date of these rough coffers must therefore be considered doubtful.
Of Early English chests, we have examples at Clymping, Sussex, at Saltwood and Graveney, Kent, at Earl Stonham, Suffolk, at Stoke D’Abernon, Surrey, and at Newport, Essex. The Decorated Period is represented by chests at Brancepeth, Durham, at Huttoft and Haconby, Lincolnshire, at Faversham and Withersham, Kent, and at S. Mary Magdalene’s, Oxford. The workmanship of the Perpendicular Period has numerous illustrations among our church [p 165] chests, such as those at S. Michael’s, Coventry, S. Mary’s, Cambridge, the Chapter House of Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford, and others at Frettenham, Norfolk, at Guestling, Sussex, at Harty Chapel, Kent, at Southwold, Suffolk, and at Stonham Aspel, Suffolk.
CHEST AT SALTWOOD, KENT.