" The church of St. Nicholas, Yarmouth, has many
monumental stones, the brasses of which were in 1551 sent to London to
be cast into weights and measures for the use of the town. The shops
of the artists in brass in London were full of broken brass memorials
torn from tombs. Hence arose the making of palimpsest brasses, the
carvers using an old brass and on the reverse side cutting a memorial
of a more recently deceased person.
After all this iconoclasm, spoliation, and robbery it is surprising
that anything of value should have been left in our churches. But
happily some treasures escaped, and the gifts of two or three
generations added others. Thus I find from the will of a good
gentleman, Mr. Edward Ball, that after the spoliation of Barkham
Church he left the sum of five shillings for the providing of a
processional cross to be borne before the choir in that church, and I
expect that he gave us our beautiful Elizabethan chalice of the date
1561. The Church had scarcely recovered from its spoliation before
another era of devastation and robbery ensued. During the Cromwellian
period much destruction was wrought by mad zealots of the Puritan
faction. One of these men and his doings are mentioned by Dr. Berwick
in his _Querela Cantabrigiensis_:--
"One who calls himself John [it should be William] Dowsing and by
Virtue of a pretended Commission, goes about y^{e} country like a
Bedlam, breaking glasse windows, having battered and beaten downe
all our painted glasses, not only in our Chappels, but (contrary
to order) in our Publique Schools, Colledge Halls, Libraries, and
Chambers, mistaking, perhaps, y^{e} liberall Artes for Saints
(which they intend in time to pull down too) and having (against
an order) defaced and digged up y^{e} floors of our Chappels, many
of which had lien so for two or three hundred years together, not
regarding y^{e} dust of our founders and predecessors who likely
were buried there; compelled us by armed Souldiers to pay forty
shillings a Colledge for not mending what he had spoyled and
defaced, or forth with to goe to prison.
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