“In the same year, also, on the 12th of June, there came one Jessop, with a commission from the Earl of Manchester, to take away from gravestones all inscriptions on which he found Orate pro anima—­a wretched Commissioner not able to read or find out that which his commission enjoyned him to remove—­he took up in our Church so much brasse, as he sold to Mr. Josiah Wild for five shillings, which was afterwards (contrary to my knowledge) runn into the little bell that hangs in the Town-house.  There were taken up in the Middle Ayl twelve pieces belonging to twelve generations of the Jettours.”

The same scenes were being enacted in many parts of England.  Everywhere ignorant commissioners were rampaging about the country imitating the ignorant ferocity of this Dowsing and Jessop.  No wonder our churches were bare, pillaged, and ruinated.  Moreover, the conception of art and the taste for architecture were dead or dying, and there was no one who could replace the beautiful objects which these wretches destroyed or repair the desolation they had caused.

Another era of spoliation set in in more recent times, when the restorers came with vitiated taste and the worst ideals to reconstruct and renovate our churches which time, spoliation, and carelessness had left somewhat the worse for wear.  The Oxford Movement taught men to bestow more care upon the houses of God in the land, to promote His honour by more reverent worship, and to restore the beauty of His sanctuary.  A rector found his church in a dilapidated state and talked over the matter with the squire.  Although the building was in a sorry condition, with a cracked ceiling, hideous galleries, and high pews like cattle-pens, it had a Norman doorway, some Early English carved work in the chancel, a good Perpendicular tower, and fine Decorated windows.  These two well-meaning but ignorant men decided that a brand-new church would be a great improvement on this old tumble-down building.  An architect was called in, or a local builder; the plan of a new church was speedily drawn, and ere long the hammers and axes were let loose on the old church and every vestige of antiquity destroyed.  The old Norman font was turned out of the church, and either used as a cattle-trough or to hold a flower-pot in the rectory garden.  Some of the beautifully carved stones made an excellent rockery in the squire’s garden, and old woodwork, perchance a fourteenth-century rood-screen, encaustic tiles bearing the arms of the abbey with which in former days the church was connected, monuments and stained glass, are all carted away and destroyed, and the triumph of vandalism is complete.