Percy Scholes, in The Oxford Companion to Music 1938/1941, gave a detailed and fascinating description of the 700-year old profession of `Parish Clerk'. The title applied to unordained but salaried officials of the Church, `lower than the priest but higher than the sexton'. His duties included `that of making or leading the responses in the service, pronouncing a loud `Amen' at the end of every prayer and of the sermon, and giving out the metrical psalm and when on great occasions there was an anthem, that also'. (Compare the debased non-conformist practice of leaving all this to the minister.)
William Riley, in his Parochial Music Corrected (1762) blamed what he regarded as the decline in Church music on the practice by which some congregations were enabled to appoint their own Parish Clerks, regardless of the wishes of the clergy or patron. With the introduction of metrical psalm-singing, the duties of the clerk came to include the choice of psalms and hymns; and it became possible for him, and through him for the congregation, to adopt styles of singing and accompaniment very different from those of earlier traditions.
Nevertheless the institution must often have been popular, as an epitaph* (quoted by Percy Scholes in OCM ) suggests:
- The Vocal Powers here let us mark
- Of PHILIP, our late Parish Clerk;
- In Church none ever heard a Layman,
- With a clearer Voice say Amen.
- Who now with Hallelujah's Sound
- Like Him can make the Roof rebound?
- The Choirs lament his Choral Tones,
- The Town - so soon Here lie his Bones.
- Sleep undisturb'd within thy peaceful shrine
- Till Angels wake thee with such notes as thine.
[ * Memorial of PHILIP ROE (died 1815) in Bakewell Church, Derbyshire; quoted in The Oxford Companion to Music (3rd edn 1941 &c.) ]
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(The Rejoice & Sing Enchiridion:edited by David Goodall; last amended 7/7/01)