Page:The Early English Organ Builders and their work.djvu/71

 were sold to private persons, who preserved them; some were totally, and others but partially destroyed; some were taken away by the clergy in order to prevent their being destroyed, and some few were suffered to remain.

The puritanical spirit which doomed organs to destruction had long been gaining ground. Old Weever, in his "Funeral Monuments," says:

"'Toward the latter end of the reign of Henry VIII, and throughout the whole reign of Edward VI, and in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth, certain persons, of every county, were put in authority to pull down, and cast out of all churches, roods, graven-images, shrines with their relics, to which the ignorant people came flocking in adoration, or anything else which tended to idolatry and superstition.'"

The organ did not escape at this early period, and the destruction of the "organs" of Worcester Cathedral, by Dean Barlow, in 1550, is on record.

On August 18, 1589, it was agreed at a parish meeting of St. Chad's, Shrewsbury: