Baptized in the Faith: The Register of 1564-65
The Protestant Register of Baptism, 1564-65
These are the first few pages of the "Register of children baptized in the Reformed Church of Amiens between the18th of June 1564 and the 10th of August 1565." It is one of the oldest congregational records of French Protestantism. The Calvinist minister Thomas Chesneau baptized some 170 children in a barn refitted as a Temple on the fief (estate) of a sympathetic noble family with property on the outskirts of Amiens in the interval between the First and Second Wars of Religion when Protestant worship was briefly legalized. A typical entry, the first, reads: "Sunday the 18th of June 1564 there was baptized a daughter to Jacques le Roy and Ysabeau Garet, and she was named Marie by Pierre Badde, godparent." The names of the couples and their children and the godparents were the essential starting points for my research. Who were these people who came to believe otherwise than what the Church taught and what were their lives like before and after their conversion? Many of the names in the notaries signatures from the 1580s are also on this document from 1564-65. Can we tell if they kept to their new faith or returned, amid various pressures, to the traditional Church? Ref: Departmental Archives of the Somme (A.D.Somme) I.2, currently online.
