“Where do I catch them? Why, where the old wills is.”
“And where is that?”
“Where is that? Why, there.”
The Rat-catcher points to a sort of barn that rises from the edge of the Minster Pool. It has no windows on the ground-floor. On the first-floor are six—two in the front of the building and four at the end,—twenty-seven windows less than are displayed in the front of the Registrar’s beautifully glazed house; but much of the little glass afforded to the registry is broken. To mend it upon seven thousand a-year would never do, especially when old parchment is lying about in heaps. Why pay glaziers’ charges when ancient wills and other ecclesiastical records keep out wind and weather as well as glass?—for light is a thing rather to be shunned than admitted into such places. Accordingly, as the Rat-catcher points to the shed, Mr. Wallace observes numberless ends of record rolls and bundles of engrossed testaments poked into the broken windows: in some places variegated with old rags.
Judging from the exterior, and from the contract for rat-catching, the interior of this depository of the titles of hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of property, must be an archæological Golgotha, a dark mouldy sepulchre of parchment and dust.
Lawyers say that there is not an estate in this country with an impregnable title; in other words, it is on the cards in the game of ecclesiastical and common law, for any family to be deprived of their possessions in consequence of being unable to establish a perfect title to them. How can it be otherwise when the very deeds by which they have and hold what they enjoy, are left to be eaten by rats, or to be stuffed into broken windows?
CATHEDRAL NUMBER FOUR.
AN antiquary cannot approach the city of Chester from London, even in an express railway train, without emotions more lively than that class of observers generally have credit for. Despite a sensation akin to that of being fired off in a rocket, and a pardonable fancy that the hedges are endless bands of green ribbon in eternal motion, that the houses, and cottages, and churches, and trees, and villages, as they dart past the confines of the carriage window, are huge missiles shot across fields which are subjected to a rapid dispensation of distorted perspective; yet these mighty evidences of the Present do not dull his mind to the Past. He remembers, with wonder, that two thousand years ago, it was over this identical line of country that the legions of Suetonius lagged along after they had blunted the scythes of Boadicea, routed her hordes, and driven her to suicide.
We will not say that our own fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, Mr. William Wallace, retrojected his imagination so far into the past while crossing the Chester platform with his carpet-bag, because we are led to believe, from his report to us, that his views were immediately directed to the more modern times of St. Werburgh, who founded the Abbey of Chester (once the most splendid in England); seeing that it is in the still-standing gateway of that obsolete establishment, that the objects of Mr. Wallace’s especial solicitude are now, and always have been deposited, since Henry the Eighth erected Chester into a diocese.
His hopes of success in seeking out certain facts from the testamentary records of this see, were more slender than they had been while entering upon his errand at the other three cathedrals. He had written to the bishop for that permission to search which had been by other prelates so readily granted, but which had been rendered by the respective Registrars so utterly nugatory, and had received no answer. Awkward reminiscences of the state of this Registry, as disclosed before the last Parliamentary Committee on the Ecclesiastical Courts, fell like a dark shadow over his hopes. Up to the year 1832, the gateway where the wills are kept was, upon the Deputy Registrar’s own showing, neither “fire-proof, sufficiently large, nor absolutely free from plunder.” The searching-office was a part of the gateway; and was as inadequate as other searching offices. The Chief Registrar in 1837 was a sinecurist in the seventieth year of office, and was verging towards the hundredth of his age; having received, in his time, not less than three hundred and fifty thousand pounds of the public money for doing nothing. The fees for searches and extracts were heavy, and nobody was allowed, as in most other Registries, to see how the wills were kept.