Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/170

150 picturesque pilgrimages to the shrines of St Thomas of Canterbury or Our Lady of Walsingham, for pilgrimages played no part in the reformed worship. Moreover, the shrine itself had been despoiled, the sacred bones of St. Thomas scattered to the wind, and his name erased from the new Church calendar, while the famous miracle-working image of "Our Lady" had been likewise destroyed. No longer were they required to murmur their prayers in the Latin tongue, as heretofore, for in Edward's reign they were provided with the now familiar Book of Common Prayer, they had a collection of hymns compiled by Miles Coverdale, and a great Bible translated into the English tongue was chained, by law, somewhere in every church, so that all who could might read it for themselves. The parish churches themselves, so thickly planted over the country that no land in Europe could compare with them for number—the pride of the people, the joy of past generations, glorious with offerings from rich and poor, with shrine and image—these were now robbed and confiscated to swell the Royal treasury.

Neither was this all. The famous Abbeys and smaller monasteries that had arisen throughout