Here's the full entry in the document (Glos. Archives, P76/CH/1/1). It was very common for churchwardens and overseers to make payments to itinerant travellers as they passed through the country. If I had to speculate, I wonder if he was a mariner, making his way over land between ports.

I look forward to looking through this. I’m only sorry that we still haven’t published the @wiltshistory.bsky.social history of Compton Chamberlayne already, but it should be published soon. I hope you’ve headed off were able to point her towards the online draft.

We were there in July, a beautiful town. The local bookshop had a good supply of VCH Herefordshire books, too. I resisted Claire’s suggestion that I offer to sign mine.

Which then also prompted me to wonder, has anybody tried to catalogue the payments to strangers and travellers in parochial records? I wonder if one could calendar the journeys of itinerants through the payments of churchwardens and overseers?

Sorry to read this Cath, must be horrible.

Working through the notes, just found that the church had a baptistry, and received oil and chrism from Heytesbury, so guessing this is no insurgency against the mother church.

I keep meaning to buy a copy.

You'll know whose notes I was relying upon. The visitor goes on to write 'sed stat ibi plumbum minus honestum loco fontium.' 'minus honestum' - of no virtue ('unadorned' in these notes), or of no use perhaps?

Also, do we see the lead font as the first attempt to exercise parochial rights there?

I was relying upon the notes of a former (medievalist) colleague. As to the font, I suspect that there never had been one, the church was a chapel attached to a collegiate church. I wonder if the lead font was their first attempts to appropriate parochial rights to the chapel (still no burial yard).

Non sunt ibi fontes ad baptizandum pueros... www.google.co.uk/books/editio... [p. 314]

Guessing pueros here means children, not boys?

I’m just searching for it now…

Is 'boys' a mistranslation for children perhaps? Was the lead font just for times when there was no alternative, eg. if a newborn was close to death? Or could girls be baptised in the lead font but not boys?

Help!

This volume - one of three that @vchgloucester.bsky.social are currently working on - focuses on the town of Cirencester, a medieval town on a Roman site.

Work is also under way towards volumes on #Cheltenham, and on #Yate and the Sodburys - to learn more and support these projects:

But the fundamental point is that the rail network is far, far more crowded than 30 years ago. In the year to March 1996, there were 761mn passenger journeys on GB's mainline railways. In the year to March this year, there were 1.73bn, almost back to the 1.75bn peak in the year to March 2019.

This surely is the stand-out statistic that needs to be known more widely.

Looks great! Congratulations.