Parish registers originated from Injunctions issued by Thomas Cromwell in 1538, but as the Injunctions were reissued or repeated on subsequent occasions with enquiries as to whether they were being obeyed, there is some doubt as to the measure of early compliance. The clergy liked the scheme no more than they liked Thomas Cromwell; not without prescience, they thought that the registers might come to be used as a basis for taxation. Some were obedient, for ten of the twenty-one parishes in the diocese of Rochester whose surviving registers antedate the reign of Elizabeth are known to have opened their original registers in 1538.
   The genesis of the parchment registers, which replaced the earlier paper registers, was a direction by the Convocation of Canterbury in 1597, later embodied in Canon 70 of 1603. The Canon required that the old registers should be transcribed into the new registers‘so 

far as the ancient books thereof can be procured’, but the further words ‘especially since the beginning of the reign of the late Queen' provided a loophole even when the ancient books could be procured. With this tacit encouragement, sixteen incumbents in the diocese started their parchment registers from 1558, the year of Elizabeth’s accession; what is more surprising is that upwards of forty registers were begun at later dates in Elizabeth’s reign. In all this, Ash is something of an oddity. The Baptismal and Marriage registers begin after 1558, but the Burial register begins in 1553, the year of Mary Tudor’s accession.¹
   It is inherently probable that all three of the original registers were in fact opened at the same time and there is some circumstantial evidence that this was done well before 1553. Cromwell’s directions for the keeping of a register