“We, wylyng such superstitious abuses and idolatries to be taken away, command you with all convenient diligence to repayre unto the said cathedral church of Chichester and there to take down that shrine and bones of that bishop called S. Richard within the same, with all the sylver, gold, juells, and ornamentes aforesaid, to be safely and surely conveighed and brought unto our Tower of London, there to be bestowed as we shall further determine at your arrival.  And also that ye shall see bothe the place where the same shryne standyth to be raysed and defaced even to the very ground, and all such other images of the church as any notable superstition hath been used to be taken and conveyed away.” [16]

  [16] Walcott, p. 34.

Then in 1550

“there were letters sent to every bishop to pluck down the altars, in lieu of them to set up a table in some convenient place of the chancel within every church or chapel to serve for the ministration of the Blessed Communion.”

Bishop Daye replied that

     “he could not conform his conscience to do what he was by
     the said letter commanded.”

In explanation of his attitude towards this order he wrote that

“he stycked not att the form, situation, or matter [as stone or wood] whereof the altar was made, but I then toke, as I now take, those things to be indifferent....  But the commandment which was given to me to take downe all altars within my diocese, and in lieu of them ‘to sett up a table’ implying in itselffe [as I take it] a playne abolyshment of the altare [both the name and the things] from the use and ministration of the Holy Communion, I could not with my conscience then execute.”

The churches were so ransacked and destroyed in this way that Bishop Harsnett [17] said he found the cathedral and the buildings about the close had been criminally neglected for years, so that they were in a decayed and almost ruinous condition.  Such was the deliberate opinion which he expressed early in the seventeenth century.

  [17] “Records.”

During the first half of the sixteenth century a stone parapet, or screen wall (taken away in 1829), was built up in front of the triforium arcade.  It rose to a height of about four feet six inches, and was continued throughout the whole length of the church.  It has been supposed that it was intended to render this gallery available as a place from which some of the congregation might observe the great ceremonials.  So we see that after the close of the fifteenth century little but decline is to be recorded.  Since Sherburne’s day no care had been taken of the fabric; and except that an organ was introduced above the Arundel screen, no new schemes were devised, no new building done.  It should be remembered, however, that the Reformation did not at once destroy all the beauties of mediaeval art that the cathedral contained.  Certain things, such as shrines, altars, chantries, and chapels, were removed, dismantled, or totally wrecked.  It was with the coming of the Parliamentary army to the city that wholesale pillage and destruction began.