Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/515

1549.] policy of the past three years would be continued and carried further.

A violent Act was passed against images and paintings in the face of the conservative opposition in the House of Lords. No statues or figures of any kind were to remain in the parish churches except, as the statute scornfully said, 'the monumental figures of kings or nobles who had never been taken for saints;' and the Prayer-book being the only religious service necessary or tolerable—'antiphones, missals, scrayles, processionals, manuals, legends, portuyses, primers, in Latin or English, cowchers, journals, ordinals,' and similar books, were to be taken away, burnt, or otherwise destroyed.

The other business of the session was not of particular consequence. A riot Act, not unnecessarily harsh, was a natural consequence of a summer of rebellion. The peculiar feature of it was that the privy council were placed under the protection of the high treason laws. From experience of failure, the Slave Statute of the preceding session was repealed; the vagrancy Acts of Henry were restored, and labourers refusing to work were to be punished as vagabonds. The sick and aged were to be relieved in convenient cottages at the expense of their town or parish; children carried about begging were to be allotted as