not extend
to any image, picture, or coat of arms, in glass, stone, or otherwise, set
up or graven only for a monument of any dead person not reputed for a
saint, but that all such might stand and continue.

By a subsequent ordinance, passed in May, 1644, it was prescribed that no
rood-loft or holy water fonts should be any more used in any church; and
that all organs, and the frames or cases in which they stood, in all
churches, should be taken away and utterly defaced.

Under colour of these ordinances the beauty of the cathedrals and churches
was injured to an extent hardly credible; the monuments of the dead were
defaced, and brasses torn away, in the iconoclastic fury which then raged;
the very tombs were violated; and the havoc made of church ornaments, and
destruction of the fine painted glass with which most church windows then
abounded, may in some degree be estimated from the account given by one
Dowsing, a parliamentary visitor appointed under a warrant from the Earl
of Manchester for demolishing the so called superstitious pictures and
ornaments of churches within the county of Suffolk, who kept a journal,
with the particulars of his transactions, in the years 1643 and 1644:
these were chiefly comprised in the demolition of numerous windows filled
with painted glass, in the breaking down of altar rails and organ cases,
in levelling the steps in the chancels, in removing crucifixes, in taking
down the stone crosses from the exterior of the churches, in defacing
crosses on the fonts, and in the taking up (under the pretence of their
being superstitious) of numerous sepulchral inscriptions in brass. Nor
did the churches in other parts of the country, with some exceptions,
escape from a like fanatical warfare; and, in this, many of our cathedrals
suffered most. But this was not enough: our sacred edifices were profaned
and polluted in the most irreverent and disgraceful manner; and with the
exception of the destruction which took place on the dissolution of the
monastic establishments in the previous century, more devastation was
committed at this time by the party hostile to the Anglican church than
had ever before been effected since the ravages of the ancient Danish
invaders.

But as to other alterations at this time effected. In January, 1644, an
ordinance of parliament was published for the taking away of the Book of
Common Prayer, which was forbid to be used any longer in any church,
chapel, or place of