r 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 favored 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, rhymed, 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 remained
sacred to the bulk of Englishmen, was attacked with a scurrility and
profaneness which pass belief. The