The vestry is the small side room in a church where the priest puts on and takes off vestments before and after a service, and where the church keeps its silver plates and cups, the registers, and other valuables. It is a working room, usually kept locked, tucked behind or beside the main part of the church. Because so much church business happened there, the word gained a second life: in England the *vestry* also came to mean the meeting of parishioners that ran parish affairs — collecting rates, looking after the poor — so in old records "the vestry decided" means a group of people, not a room. That sense is historical now and appears mainly in local history and in nineteenth-century novels. You may also hear *sacristy*, which names much the same room in Catholic churches; *vestry* has the more Anglican, more English flavour.