28 BERROW AND BIRTSMORTON.

though very plainly, by Messrs. W. and A. Hornby, the then lords of the manor. The only other alteration to the body of the church of late years has been a glazed screen of carved oak, in keeping with the architectural character of the church, to shut out the belfry. The church aecom-modation is 300, of which seventy-five are free. Rev. C. F. Sculthorpe is the vicar.

Beoley estate was formerly chargeable with £40 a year to support a "mass house," or residence and chapel for a Catholic priest. This sum of £40, I am told, is still paid to the priest of the Romanist chapel at Redditch, which superseded that of Beoley. Thomas White, alias Woodhop, who was born at Beoley, became a Benedictine monk, and spent several years with the Sheldons here, until he retired to Douay in the time of the civil wars, and died there of the plague in 1654. He was the author of a Latin MS. of " The Obits and Characters of many eminent Benedictines." In 1791, Thomas Parker, of Heath Green, Beoley, was one of those who in this county subscribed certificates of having set apart rooms for Catholic worship.

Among the antiquities of the parish are the relics of a square trenched camp at the top of the hill, about 400 yards from the Rycknield Street. The plateau in the centre is about sixty yards square, and the entrance appears to have been on the north side of it. There are some curious old names here : Sling Lane, Skilts Park, Shire Stone, Pot End, Eagle Street Way (corruption of Icknield Street), Feblis Lake, Bemnils Kemp Flat, Portway, Temnent, Jacob's Well, Olderhanger, Oldbarrow, Hob's Croft, Torment Hill, The Tranters, Phasom, Hobrough, Dagnel End, Great and Little Storage, &c. Superstition still lingers in the parish, and even -the poor old gentleman who yet flourishes as beadle, sexton, and parish pigsticker, firmly believes in the ghost of a murderer having reappeared after a fifty years' compulsory residence at the bottom of the Red Sea, where the unhappy spirit had been fixed by a conclave of the clergy.