The value of Church Notes, meaning memoranda of the epitaphs and heraldry in churches, before church architecture was understood or appreciated as it now is, has always been highly estimated by genealogists and biographers. The professional heralds deemed such evidences among their most reliable materials, at a time when they possessed the power, which they did not hesitate to exercise, to destroy or deface any display of armorial insignia assumed unduly or irregularly. Epitaphs, however apt to be flattering or even “lying” in their tributes of personal eulogy, are generally trustworthy for their statements of facts and dates, and may be ranked among the best kinds of contemporary testimony. The heralds, therefore, when riding on their visitations did not neglect their opportunities for gathering church notes, as well as notes of the armory displayed on the walls and windows of manor-houses, to contribute to their materials for the genealogies it was their business to construct. Many such notes are interspersed, with the pedigrees, in their MS. visitation-books, of which the Camden Society possesses a very interesting and excellent example in Camden's Visitation of Huntingdonshire.