Page:The Early English Organ Builders and their work.djvu/68

, caused to be made of pure gold, and beneath those in bigness which George the Salmatian Abbot made to be set up in the church of his convent, whose biggest pipe was eight and twenty foot long, and four spans in compass." According to a "Gazetteer of England and Wales," temp. Charles II, "At Wrexham is ye rarest steeple in ye 3 nations; and hath had ye fayrest organes in Europe, till ye late wars in Charles ye 1st his raigne, whose Parliament forces pulled him and them downe with other ceremoniall ornaments."

I shall now mention a few of the unrecorded organ builders who flourished in the first half of the seventeenth century. In the books of Magdalen College we find the names of, , and. The latter name, which first occurs in 1637, is very important. This builder was the grandfather of the celebrated Renatus Harris, the formidable rival of Father Smith.

Smith arrived in this country from