"a crysome of John Stillings"

[ElizabethHerts]

I came across this in a PR on Ancestry:

http://search.ancestry.co.uk/iexec?h...=&pid=10204608

October 21

Has anyone come across the word "crysome" before?

I'm trying to tie down the meaning. So far I have found this:
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.co...-12/1008137656

[kiterunner]

Yes, I remember coming across the term when I was transcribing some old parish registers, and I remember looking it up and finding some info which said that nobody is quite sure whether it meant a child who hadn't been christened yet or a child who had just been christened.

[ElizabethHerts]

Kate, I was getting confused over the same thing. Something I read yesterday suggested it was a baby who died without being baptised. However, the entry I gave above goes on about a christening gown.

[ElizabethHerts]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrisom


Anciently, a chrisom was the face-cloth, or piece of linen laid over a child's head when he was baptized or christened. The term has come to refer to a child who died within a month after its baptism—so called for the chrisom cloth that was used as a shroud for it.


http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chrisom
Definition of CHRISOM
: a white cloth or robe put on a person at baptism as a symbol of innocence
Origin of CHRISOM
Middle English crisom, short for crisom cloth, from crisom chrism + cloth
First Known Use: 13th century

[Janet]

Found about the same on Google books.

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A Concise Dictionary of Middle English from A.D. 1150 to 1580
By Anthony Lawson Mayhew, Walter William Skeat

http://books.google.com/books?id=Cb4...ome%22&f=false

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Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, Volume 1
edited by John Nichols

http://books.google.com/books?id=4-l...ed=0CGgQ6AEwCQ