The iconoclasts vented their rage in the destruction of stained glass and beautiful illuminated manuscripts, priceless tomes and costly treasures of exceeding rarity.  Parish churches were plundered everywhere.  Robbery was in the air, and clergy and churchwardens sold sacred vessels and appropriated the money for parochial purposes rather than they should be seized by the king.  Commissioners were sent to visit all the cathedral and parish churches and seize the superfluous ornaments for the king’s use.  Tithes, lands, farms, buildings belonging to the church all went the same way, until the hand of the iconoclast was stayed, as there was little left to steal or to be destroyed.  The next era of iconoclastic zeal was that of the Civil War and the Cromwellian period.  At Rochester the soldiers profaned the cathedral by using it as a stable and a tippling place, while saw-pits were made in the sacred building and carpenters plied their trade.  At Chichester the pikes of the Puritans and their wild savagery reduced the interior to a ruinous desolation.  The usual scenes of mad iconoclasm were enacted—­stained glass windows broken, altars thrown down, lead stripped from the roof, brasses and effigies defaced and broken.  A creature named “Blue Dick” was the wild leader of this savage crew of spoliators who left little but the bare walls and a mass of broken fragments strewing the pavement.  We need not record similar scenes which took place almost everywhere.

[Illustration:  House in which Bishop Hooper was imprisoned, Westgate Street, Gloucester]

The last and grievous rule of iconoclasm set in with the restorers, who worked their will upon the fabric of our cathedrals and churches and did so much to obliterate all the fragments of good architectural work which the Cromwellian soldiers and the spoliators at the time of the Reformation had left.  The memory of Wyatt and his imitators is not revered when we see the results of their work on our ecclesiastical fabrics, and we need not wonder that so much of English art has vanished.

The cathedral of Bristol suffered from other causes.  The darkest spot in the history of the city is the story of the Reform riots of 1831, sometimes called “the Bristol Revolution,” when the dregs of the population pillaged and plundered, burnt the bishop’s palace, and were guilty of the most atrocious vandalism.

[Illustration:  The “Stone House,” Rye, Sussex]

The city of Bath, once the rival of Wells—­the contention between the monks of St. Peter and the canons of St. Andrews at Wells being hot and fierce—­has many attractions.  Its minster, rebuilt by Bishop Oliver King of Wells (1495-1503), and restored in the seventeenth century, and also in modern times, is not a very interesting building, though it lacks not some striking features, and certainly contains some fine tombs and monuments of the fashionable folk who flocked to Bath in the days of its splendour.