"We, wylyng such superstitious abuses and idolatries to be taken away, command you with all convenient diligence to repayre unto the said cathedral church of Chichester and there to take down that shrine and bones of that bishop called S. Richard within the same, with all the sylver, gold, juells, and ornamentes aforesaid, to be safely and surely conveighed and brought unto our Tower of London, there to be bestowed as we shall further determine at your arrival. And also that ye shall see bothe the place where the same shryne standyth to be raysed and defaced even to the very ground, and all such other images of the church as any notable superstition hath been used to be taken and conveyed away." [16] [16] Walcott, p. 34. Then in 1550 "there were letters sent to every bishop to pluck down the altars, in lieu of them to set up a table in some convenient place of the chancel within every church or chapel to serve for the ministration of the Blessed Communion." Bishop Daye replied that "he could not conform his conscience to do what he was by the said letter commanded." In explanation of his attitude towards this order he wrote that "he stycked not att the form, situation, or matter [_as stone or wood_] whereof the altar was made, but I then toke, as I now take, those things to be indifferent.... But the commandment which was given to me to take downe all altars within my diocese, and in lieu of them 'to sett up a table' implying in itselffe [_as I take it_] a playne abolyshment of the altare [_both the name and the things_] from the use and ministration of the Holy Communion, I could not with my conscience then execute." The churches were so ransacked and destroyed in this way that Bishop Harsnett [17] said he found the cathedral and the buildings about the close had been criminally neglected for years, so that they were in a decayed and almost ruinous condition. Such was the deliberate opinion which he expressed early in the seventeenth century. [17] "Records."