Some sold their jewels and relics to provide for the evil
day they saw approaching. Some begged of their own will for dissolution.
It was worse when fresh ordinances of the Vicar-General ordered the
removal of objects of superstitious veneration. Their removal, bitter
enough to those whose religion twined itself around the image or the relic
which was taken away, was embittered yet more by the insults with which it
was accompanied. A miraculous rood at Boxley, which bowed its head and
stirred its eyes, was paraded from market to market and exhibited as a
juggle before the Court. Images of the Virgin were stripped of their
costly vestments and sent to be publicly burned at London. Latimer
forwarded to the capital the figure of Our Lady, which he had thrust out
of his cathedral church at Worcester, with rough words of scorn: "She with
her old sister of Walsingham, her younger sister of Ipswich, and their two
other sisters of Doncaster and Penrice, would make a jolly muster at
Smithfield." Fresh orders were given to fling all relics from their
reliquaries, and to level every shrine with the ground. In 1538 the bones
of St. Thomas of Canterbury were torn from the stately shrine which had
been the glory of his metropolitan church, and his name was erased from
the service-books as that of a traitor.

The introduction of the English Bible into churches gave a new opening for
the zeal of the Protestants. In spite of royal injunctions that it should
be read decently and without comment, the young zealots of the party
prided themselves on shouting it out to a circle of excited hearers during
the service of mass, and accompanied their reading with violent
expositions. Protestant maidens took the new English primer to church with
them and studied it ostentatiously during matins. Insult passed into open
violence when the Bishops' Courts were invaded and broken up by Protestant
mobs; and law and public opinion were outraged at once when priests who
favoured the new doctrines began openly to bring home wives to their
vicarages. A fiery outburst of popular discussion compensated for the
silence of the pulpits. The new Scriptures, in Henry's bitter words of
complaint, were "disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and
alehouse." The articles which dictated the belief of the English Church
roused a furious controversy. Above all, the Sacrament of the Mass, the
centre of the Catholic system of faith and worship, and which still