This meant even more mistakes were made, adding to confusion and meaning the reliability is to some degree questionable.
Only civil marriages were accepted from 1653 to 1657, this means that only a few would have been recorded in the parish records. But as the period ran from 1645 to 1660, when the monarchy was reinstated, the registers may be incorrect and deficient. This may mean only a small percentage of the marriages which took place were actually recorded, making in short this period unreliable.
However the deficiency of the parish records does show that the problems at that time affected such things as marriage, and because of that it is still useful.
They were always hand-written so legibility was sometimes bad and when the information was copied out mistakes could have been made. Abbreviations would have often been used and also at the beginning they would have been written in Latin, which may be unknown to us, making reading it problematic.
Some parish records may have been badly handled therefore damaging them, this may mean some information is impossible to retrieve.
Parish records are very useful with careful studying. They can give information on, for instance, when there was an outbreak of disease. You could get this information from the burial register, as a lot of people would have died at a particular time, you would have to substantiate this with further sources such as death certificates.
By looking carefully you could tell if women were pregnant when they married, as the baptism would be less than nine months after the marriage. However this type of event may bring around inaccurate information as the parents would lie to cover this fact up, so distorting the records. You had to register the birth either the first or second Sunday after the birth.
On the Baptism records the date, name of the child and parents would be included sometimes adding their address and fathers occupation or status, all of this information had to be include after 1813, so it would give a large range of information.