BIRLINGHAM. 47

have a small chapel here - an offshoot of the Baptists at Pershore.

The historical notes of this parish are few. Henry Joliffe, said to have been incumbent of this parish in the sixteenth century, carried the book written against Bishop Hooper by Robert Johnson, and printed it after his death, when he fled to Louvain, during the religious disquietudes in this country. In 1590 the plague carried off nearly one-fifth of the inhabitants of the parish.

Birlingham.

Has the reader ever heard of a lost parish? - that is, a place whose name and identity have vanished. Some of us have read of the great Atlanta, an island, or rather continent, supposed to have been submerged in the ocean to which it gave a name. But what about Nafford, in Worcestershire? Inquire of any Worcestershire man if he knows where Nafford is, and he will probably say it may be at the Antipodes for all he knows. Yet the present parish church of Birlingham was formerly only a chapel to Nafford, the site of whose church is more entirely unknown and more lost to living memory than that of Babylon the Great. Tradition points out a rising ground near an extensive mill, on which, it is said, the church stood, but the keenest eye cannot discover any traces, and there is now but one house in that vicinity. Habingdon in his MS. comments as follows:- "On the aspyring heygth of Bredon hyll stood Nafford's church, where St. Katherin was in former ages honored, resemblinge the montayne Sina, wheather her body was after her martyrdoom by angells miraculously translated. But Nafford lyethe nowe interred without monument, leavinge us to hope that theyre soules who have heretofore in this ruinated churche searved God have followed St. Katherin in the mon-