Mending Bell Wheel, £2 10. 1702: When the Minister was chosen, 5s. 1704: For a brockhead, 1s. Wheel for little bell, 17s. 6d. 1707: Chief Rent for Cottages, 4d. 1713: Perambulation, 5s. Boards for Reading Pew, £1 15s. Church Clock and Dial, £6. 1715: For altering the King's Arms, £2 10s. 2d. 1732: Great Repairs, £59 0s. 8d. 1733: King's Arms, Tables writing, Font lid, £12 17s.10d. 1734: Rebuilding Parish Houses, £30 0s.9d. 1744: School, £6 15s. 1749: Repairing Vicarage House, £1 13s. 1750: For an Act of Parliament about Distempered Cattle, 5d. New Doors to Belfry, £3 6s."
The annual "mossing" of the Church among these payments was probably a later substitute for the original strewing of the Church-floor with rushes, which still survives as a Parochial Feast at Ripponden and other places in the West Riding, and at several places in Lancashire, Cheshire, and Westmoreland (Ambleside, Grasmere, Warcop, and Musgrave). In his Popular Antiquities, Brand gives an extract from the old accounts of his own Parish of St. Mary-at-hill, London: "1493: For 3 burdens of rushes for the new pews, 3d." It is an item commonly found in old parochial accounts. The annual "Rush-bearing" was made into a kind of religious festival. As it generally took place between the haytime and harvest, it is not at all improbable that it is from this ancient custom of Rushbearing that our own village "Feast" has come to be held on the third Sunday in July—a time which seems to have no connection, as the Feast-time of old Parishes so generally has, with the Dedication of the Parish Church, whether its Dedication to God be in the name of "All Saints" or of "St. Michael and all Angels."
The entry of 5s, to the poor "woman of Sandal, to help her on a journey to the king for a touch," recalls an entry in that same year of 1687 in the Camden Society's Diary of Bishop Cartwright, in which he speaks of "attending His Majesty [James II.] into the "closet, where he healed 350 persons." Indeed, in the first four years after his restoration, Charles II. is said to have touched for the king's evil no less than 24,000 persons, and a Form of Prayer to be used at this ceremony was printed with the Book of Common Prayer in 1684.
