Excerpt from The Marriage, Baptismal, and Burial: Registers of the Collegiate Church or Abbey of St. Peter, Westminster In the seventh and eighth volumes of Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, published by Messrs. Nichols and Son in 1841 and 1843, were printed certain extracts from the Registers of Westminster Abbey, from a MS. in the College of Arms, with annotations by the late Sir Charles G. Young, Garter. These extracts will be found on pages 162-174, 243-248, and 355-377 of vol. vii., and 1-21 of vol. viii., of that work. They proved a great boon to historians, biographers and genealogists, and have ever since been accepted as standard authority. A conviction that the series was imperfect, and the entries often erroneous, induced the present Editor to collate his copy with the original, and the result was so startling that it was felt that the knowledge obtained ought not to be confined to himself. In a word, it was found that the errors, both of omission and commission, were so numerous and so serious as to render the Collectanea version untrustworthy and practically worthless. In some instances, also, the identifications by the annotator of persons named in the text were found to be incorrect. It would be impossible to point out all the discrepancies revealed by a careful examination of the original Registers, and they can be ascertained only by a comparison of the two versions: some of the more flagrant errors, however, are referred to in the notes in the present volume. The late Mr. John Gough Nichols was so profoundly sensible of the injury unwittingly done to the literary world by the Collectanea version that he at once proposed to print the corrected one at his own expense, but this arrangement came to an end by reason of his untimely death. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.