Note 384 — Chapter XV
Reading edition
“There is much secret communication among the king’s subjects, and many of them in the shires of Cornwall and Devonshire be in great fear and mistrust what the King’s Highness and his council should mean, to give in commandment to the parsons and vicars of every parish, that they should make a book wherein is to be specified the names of as many as be wedded and buried and christened. Their mistrust is, that some charges more than hath been in times past shall grow to them by this occasion of registering.”—Sir Piers Edgecombe to Cromwell: State Papers, Vol. I. p. 612.