In this volume are printed the Marriage entries in the Registers of eleven parishes—six of which commence in the sixteenth century ; three in the seventeenth ; and the remaining two in the early years of the eighteenth.
Once more evidence is afforded of the risks to which these important records have been exposed in the past. At Great Somerford the earlier Register has been lost as the result of a fire in 1707 at the house of the Parish Clerk; presumably the volume was kept there, for a memorandum in the earliest Register at present remaining states that it "was burnt with ye house." One naturally turns to the Transcripts supposed to have been sent regularly to the Bishop, and from this source the records of twenty-eight Marriages have been obtained ; but unfortunately the transcripts for the whole period have not been found. The Register of Little Somerford begins a year later, 1708, but there is no explanation of the absence of the earlier volume.
