In the city of Norwich, (January, 1644) the Puritan corporation appointed a committee to repair several churches, and take notices of scandalous pictures, crucifixes, and images:[390] whereupon they went to work, breaking windows, filing bells, tearing down carved work, stripping brasses off monuments, and pulling down the pulpit with its leaden cross in the green yard. Popish paintings, taken from the cathedral and other churches, were burnt in the old market-place, "a lewd wretch" (according to Bishop Hall) walking before the train with his cope trailing in the dust, and a service book in his hand, "imitating in an impious scorn the tune, and usurping the words of the litany."[391] There is further evidence of remorseless destruction in the journal of William Downings, of Stratford, a parliamentary visitor, appointed under a warrant from the Earl of Manchester, for demolishing superstitious pictures and ornaments within the county of Suffolk, in the years 1643 and 1644. But in some places the populace opposed the execution of the Parliamentary decree. At Kidderminster the Puritan churchwarden set up a ladder, which was too short to enable him to reach the crucifix on the top of the town cross; and, while he was fetching another, a mob assembled to defend what many admired only for the reason that their neighbours disliked it.[392] Baxter, then minister in the town, calls these defenders of crucifixes and images "a drunken crew," and declares that they beat and bruised two neighbours who had come to look after him and the churchwardens, and would have belaboured both in the same way, could they but have caught them.[393] If sometimes the iconoclasts were defeated, at other times they overcame their adversaries. A church near Colonel Hutchinson's house at Owthorpe, in Nottinghamshire, had a painted window with a crucifixion, the Virgin Mary and the Evangelist John. The clergyman took down the heads of the figures, and laid them by carefully in his closet, and tried to persuade his churchwardens to certify that the Parliamentary order was executed; but they took care to call on the Colonel and bring him to see the church and the minister, who was at last compelled to blot out all the paintings and break all the glass which was tainted with superstition.[394] [Sidenote: 1644, January.] [Sidenote: _Iconoclastic Crusades._] [Sidenote: 1644, January.]