The Burial Register is most remarkable of all. In 1563, a plague year, there were no less than 284 burials, mostly women and children, and nearly 22,000 people died in that year in London alone. Other periods of plague and consequent excessive mortality were the years 1582, 1593, 1625, and 1665. In 1625 “394 persons died in this parish, being six times the average mortality.” The Calendar of State Papers for this year contains a record of “a petition from the minister and churchwardens of Allhallows Barking, praying that some part of the cloth for mourning for the late King, distributed among the poor of divers parishes of London, may be given to this parish, one of the poorest within the city walls and sorely visited by the plague.” The plague of 1665, most disastrous of a long series, is too well known, from sundry descriptions, to need more than mere mention here. Before the earliest date in this book of burials there was placed “in the graveyard of Barking church the headless body, very indecently interred,” of Bishop Fisher, executed on the East Smithfield side of Tower Hill in 1535. Reference has already been made to Fisher in connection with his imprisonment in the Bell Tower, and the removal of his body, after it had lain for some time in this churchyard, to St. Peter’s, on Tower Green. Another victim of Henry VIII.’s wrath, Henry Howard, the poet Earl of Surrey, was, in 1547, buried beside the church after a mock trial and subsequent execution on Tower Hill. His remains, also, were removed and taken, in 1614, to Framlingham in Suffolk. Lord Thomas Grey, brother of the Duke of Suffolk and uncle of Lady Jane Grey, was “heddyd on Tower Hill, April 28, 1554, and berried at Allhallows Barking.” In Queen Mary’s luckless reign, “a plot to rob the Queen’s Exchequer was discovered and the leaders sent to the Tower.” _Machin’s Diary_ thus records the event: “On the eighth day of July, Henry Peckham and John Daneel were hanged on Tower Hill. Their bodies were cut down and headed, the heads carried to London Bridge and the bodies buried in Barkin church.” Continuing our inspection of the Burial Register, we come upon the most interesting entry of all. Under the date January 11, 1644, we read: “William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, beheaded T----.” The last word has been almost erased. We can but conjecture that the word was “Traitor,” and that some later hand scratched out all but the initial letter. But why was that letter left if every trace of so hateful a word was to be obliterated? Laud was buried in the Vicar’s vault under the altar, but his body was taken to St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1663. Laud’s body, “being accompanied to the grave with great multitudes of people, who in love, or curiosity, or remorse of conscience had gathered together, was decently interred in Allhallows Barking ... and had the honour of being buried in that church in the form provided by the Common Prayer Book after it had been long disused and almost reprobated in most of the churches in London.”