Vestry that is to say the vestry and its organisation, by the law of the land, and by local custom and practice as the situation demanded. This level of activity had resulted in an increasing sophistication of administration. The decisions and accounts of the vestry committee would be administered by the parish clerk, and records of parish business would be stored in a "parish chest" kept in the church and provided for security with three different locks, the individual keys to which would be held by such as the parish priest and churchwardens. Whilst the vestry was a general meeting of
What Is a Nation? and continues to be invoked. Political historian Karl Deutsch, in a quote sometimes mistakenly attributed to Renan, said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours". Benedict Anderson's 1983 work Imagined Communities, which states that a nation is an "imagined political community", argues that Renan contradicts himself when he says French people must have forgotten the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, yet does not explain what it is. In other words, Renan assumes that all his readers will remember the very massacre he says they have forgotten.