‘Chronicles of many strange Occurrences’: early modern English parish registers and the memories of local communities

Abstract

English parish registers listing baptisms, marriages, and burials are commonly source mined for curiosities, but are rarely examined holistically. Building on recent work that has seen sixteenth-century registers as records of memory, this article analyses registers across the long seventeenth century (c.1580–1720) to show how the memories they contained–of individuals, communities, and the nation–were produced and understood. Registers were often local chronicles showing the continued vibrancy of the chronicling tradition. Where, however, scholars have argued that communal memories were designed to create a ‘usable past’ focussed on preserving economic rights, this article argues that such a past needs to be seen much more expansively. Parish registers existed in multiple schedules of time and hence a register as chronicle was a means not merely of fixing memories in calendrical time, but of making sense of the place of individuals and communities in the divine order of creation.