This Act provided specifically for the taking away of all altar rails and the levelling of the “Chancel-ground” and the removal of the Communion table from the east end, and the destruction of all stone altars, so that it is always noticeable when we find one such, either in a side chapel or in the pavement, with its five and occasionally six dedication crosses cut on the stone. Norwich has one in which a small black slab bearing the crosses is let into the large altar slab. [Sidenote: ICONOCLASM] All images, “representative of the persons of the Trinity or of any Angell or Saint” were to be “utterly demolished,” and all vestments “defaced”; with the quaint proviso that the order should “not extend to any image, picture or coat-of-arms set up or graven onely for a Monument of any King, Prince or Nobleman, or other dead person _which hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a saint_.” FONTS. In our English churches the most noticeable bit of mediæval work is in many cases the font, which has often escaped when all the rest of the building inside and out has been defaced by neglect or destroyed by restoration. Much destruction followed on the Reformation, and even in Elizabeth’s reign, in spite of a royal mandate to preserve the old form of baptism “at the font and not with a bason,” attacks were constantly made on the fonts, and especially on the font-covers, which makes the preservation of the _Frieston_ font-cover with a figure of the Virgin Mary on the top very remarkable. We have in the churchwardens’ accounts in various places this contemptuous entry:— “Item. For takynge doune _ye thynge ower the funt_ XIIᵈ.” Parliamentarian soldiers went to greater lengths and broke up the font itself in very many churches. The bowls were often cast out or buried in the churchyard. At _Ambleston_ in Wales the font pedestal was only ten years ago found in use by a farmer as a cheese-press, and the bowl on another farm doing duty as a pig-trough. Still many have escaped with the loss of their carved covers, and how great the loss is can be judged when we see the beauty of such work as the cover which we still have at Ufford in Suffolk, eighteen feet high, or the similar ones at _Grantham_ and _Fosdyke_ and _Frieston_ in our own county, or at _Ewelme_ (Oxon), and _Thaxted_ (Essex), and again in Suffolk at _Sudbury St. Gregory_ and _Hepworth_, and one at _Thirsk_ in Yorkshire which rises to the height of twenty-one feet. Sometimes the cover takes the form of a canopy, as at _Swymbridge_ in Devon, and more beautifully in that erected by Bishop Cosin at _Durham_ in 1663. The _Sudbury_ font-cover has doors in it, as we see in the Jacobean cover in _Burgh-le-Marsh_ church, and in the beautiful modern cover at _Brant Broughton_, both in Lincolnshire. [Sidenote: FONTS, SAXON AND NORMAN]