From the Diocesan Registry.

Document No. 31.

1633.

THE VISITATION OF BISHOP FOSTER.

[ Continued from the June JOURNAL.]

In 1634 Bishop Foster sent out to the Clergy and Churchwardens of each parish a lengthy list of questions under the title of ‘ Bishop Foster’s Visitation.’ His chief aim appears to have been to see if there were any remains of Popish practices in Man.

THE balance of the Bishop Foster Visitation documents of 1634 unpublished are now so fragile and so fragmentary that it is impossible to correctly transcribe them.

A FRAGMENT.

According to one fragment concerning a parish which cannot be identified, the churchwardens

state that : ‘ Our Vicar doth teach and exhort ‘ the word of God, doth catechise the younger sort . . . is a maintainner of true religion
...
All things are reverently and distinctly done, ‘ and zealously [ . . .] without Idolatrie or ‘ vaine superstition.. . .
Neither is there any bull, stone horse ‘ or weapons maintained and kept in the pish by ‘ the Pastor as by law and right ought to bee.. . . The ten commandments are written ‘ on the church wall.
‘ There is no alsmes houses kept or scools or ‘ spittles used . .

‘ Baptisme is used in no other vessel but the font, neither is there any above sixt{een] that doth not receave the Communion, and that the young . . . doth indifferently come to bee catechised.’