This is the third edition of a classic. It is the standard study of the parochial administration in England. When the late W.E. Tate first wrote it, in 1946, there was no such book though all agreed that such a book was very much needed. The author modestly, in his Preface, hoped that his readers would regard the work as ''the essay of a fellow student rather than as the authoritative treatise of an expert''. That he wrought better than he knew, or would claim, is evidenced by the fact that - though subsequent editions have been extensively corrected, revised and updated - his book has stood the test of seven decades of intensive use by literally every worker in the field and enjoys universal veneration as the unsurpassed, definitive work; yet it is still essentially the same book that Mr Tate wrote seventy years ago. Mr Tate''s purpose was to encourage research into local and family history by describing, explaining and illustrating the entire range of civil and ecclesiastic
