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St. Pancras, memoranda relating to the parish
St Pancras memoranda relating to the parish Author:Samuel Palmer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. It is now nearly a thousand years since the parish of St. Pancras was founded, and yet during the whole of that lengthened period no complete history... more » of the parish has been published. Many have attempted it, but the antiquity of the parish, its vast extent, and the immense mass of material that can be collected or ought to be collected relating to it, have at first dispirited, then exhausted the patience, and ultimately led to the relinquishing of their object. Many collections have been made, but the collector, viewing the paucity of his materials, has shrunk from the task, and left the parish as it is at the present day—destitute of any local history. When an account of a parish has been published, however meagre the same may be, it furnishes stepping- stones for the successor, as dottings of dates and boundaries for subjects; but when a man has to be his own pioneer, has to lay down his own plan, classify his own materials, chronicle his various events, with ablank space only whereon to lay the whole, then the task, which otherwise might be amusing, is both intricate and perplexing. Such is the case with the local history of this parish; and were it not that many interested in the work have kindly lent a helping hand, the present attempt, like its precursors, might have passed away. The Author begs, therefore, to thank Rufus Waugh, Esq., for his advice and assistance, for many valuable local documents, and for his valuable list of the vicars of the parish, which forms a most interesting portion of the work; as also for the list of churchwardens which T. E. Gibb, Esq., the vestry clerk, has so obligingly completed to the present day. He has also to return his sincere thanks to John Bullock, Esq., of the neighbouring parish of Islington, for the numerous items of i...« less