s mind about dignitaries. He makes a passing reference
to Thomas a Becket as "the old Cocke of Canturburie," who did crow in
behalf of the see of Rome, and the "young cockerels of other sees did
imitate his demeanour." He is glad that images, shrines, and tabernacles
are removed out of churches. The stories in glass windows remain only
because of the cost of replacing them with white panes. He would like to
stop the wakes, guilds, paternities, church-ales, and brides-ales, with
all their rioting, and he thinks they could get on very well without the
feasts of apostles, evangelists, martyrs, the holy-days after Christmas,
Easter, and Whitsuntide, and those of the Virgin Mary, with the rest. "It
is a world to see," he wrote of 1552, "how ready the Catholicks are to
cast the communion tables out of their churches, which in derision they
call Oysterboards, and to set up altars whereon to say mass." And he
tells with sinful gravity this tale of a sacrilegious sow: "Upon the 23rd
of August, the high altar of Christ Church in Oxford was trimly decked up
after the popish manner and about the middest of evensong, a sow cometh
into the quire, and pulled all to the ground; for which heinous fact, it
is said she was afterwards beheaded; but to that I am not privy." Think
of the condition of Oxford when pigs went to mass! Four years after this
there was a sickness in England, of which a third part of the people did
taste, and many clergymen, who had prayed not to live after the death of
Queen Mary, had their desire, the Lord hearing their prayer, says
Harrison, "and intending thereby to give his church a breathing time."

There were four classes in England--gentlemen, citizens, yeomen, and
artificers or laborers. Besides the nobles, any one can call himself a
gentleman who can live without work and buy a coat of arms--though some
of them "bear a bigger sail than his boat is able to sustain." The
complaint of sending abroad youth to be educated is an old one; Harrison
says the sons of gentlemen went into Italy, and brought nothing home but
mere atheism, infidelity, vicious conversation, and ambitious, proud
behavior, and retained neither religion nor patriotism. Among citizens
were the merchants, of whom Harrison thought there were too many; for,
like the lawyers, they were no furtherance to the commonwealth, but
raised the price of all commodities. In former, free-trade times, sugar
was sixpence a pound, now it is two shillings sixpen