Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/279

 removal of the Communion table from the east end, and the destruction of all stone altars, so that it is always noticeable when we find one such, either in a side chapel or in the pavement, with its five and occasionally six dedication crosses cut on the stone. Norwich has one in which a small black slab bearing the crosses is let into the large altar slab.

All images, "representative of the persons of the Trinity or of any Angell or Saint" were to be "utterly demolished," and all vestments "defaced"; with the quaint proviso that the order should "not extend to any image, picture or coat-of-arms set up or graven onely for a Monument of any King, Prince or Nobleman, or other dead person which hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a saint." FONTS. In our English churches the most noticeable bit of mediæval work is in many cases the font, which has often escaped when all the rest of the building inside and out has been defaced by neglect or destroyed by restoration. Much destruction followed on the Reformation, and even in Elizabeth's reign, in spite of a royal mandate to preserve the old form of baptism "at the font and not with a bason," attacks were constantly made on the fonts, and especially on the font-covers, which makes the preservation of the Frieston font-cover with a figure of the Virgin Mary on the top very remarkable. We have in the churchwardens' accounts in various places this contemptuous entry:—  "Item. For takynge doune ye thynge ower the funt XIId." Parliamentarian soldiers went to greater lengths and broke up the font itself in very many churches. The bowls were often cast out or buried in the churchyard. At Ambleston in Wales the font pedestal was only ten years ago found in use by a farmer as a cheese-press, and the bowl on another farm doing duty as a pig-trough. Still many have escaped with the loss of their carved covers, and how great the loss is can be judged when we see the beauty of such work as the cover which we still have at Ufford in Suffolk, eighteen feet high, or the similar ones at Grantham and Fosdyke and Frieston in our own county, or at Ewelme (Oxon), and Thaxted (Essex), and again in Suffolk at Sudbury-*