n its abuse.]

[Sidenote: Bishop Shaxton's inventory.]

[Sidenote: The wonder-working roods.]

[Sidenote: The rood of Boxley.]

[Sidenote: The rood of Dovercourt.]

Every monastery, every parish church, had in those days its special
relics, its special images, its special something, to attract the
interest of the people. The reverence for the remains of noble and pious
men, the dresses which they had worn, or the bodies in which their
spirits had lived, was in itself a natural and pious emotion; but it had
been petrified into a dogma; and like every other imaginative feeling
which is submitted to that bad process, it had become a falsehood, a
mere superstition, a substitute for piety, not a stimulus to it, and a
perpetual occasion of fraud. The people brought offerings to the shrines
where it was supposed that the relics were of greatest potency. The
clergy, to secure the offerings, invented the relics, and invented the
stories of the wonders which had been worked by them. The greatest
exposure of these things took place at the visitation of the religious
houses. In the meantime, Bishop Shaxton's unsavoury inventory of what
passed under the name of relics in the diocese of Salisbury, will
furnish an adequate notion of these objects of popular veneration. There
"be set forth and commended unto the ignorant people," he said, "as I
myself of certain which be already come to my hands, have perfect
knowledge, stinking boots, mucky combes, ragged rochettes, rotten
girdles, pyl'd purses, great bullocks' horns, locks of hair, and filthy
rags, gobbetts of wood, under the name of parcels of the holy cross, and
such pelfry beyond estimation."[107] Besides matters of this kind, there
were images of the Virgin or of the Saints; above all, roods or
crucifixes, of especial potency, the virtues of which had begun to grow
uncertain, however, to sceptical Protestants; and from doubt to denial,
and from denial to passionate hatred, there were but a few brief steps.
The most famous of the roods was that of Boxley in Kent, which used to
smile and bow, or frown and shake its head, as its worshippers were
generous or closehanded. The fortunes and misfortunes of this image I
shall by and bye have to relate. There was another, however, at
Dovercourt, in Suffolk, of scarcely inferior fame. This image was of
such power that the door of the church in which it stood was open at all
hours to all comers, and no human hand could close it. Doverco