“When they had thus demolished the chief monuments, at length the very gravestones and marbles on the floor did not escape their sacrilegious hands. For where there was anything on them of sculptures or inscriptions in brass, these they force and tear off. “Having thus done their work on the floor below, they are now at leisure to look up at the windows above. “Now the windows of this church were very fair, being adorned and beautified with several historical passages out of Scripture and ecclesiastical story; such were those in the body of the church, in the aisles, in the New Building, and elsewhere. But the cloister windows were most famed of all, for their great art and pleasing variety. One side of the quadrangle containing the history of the Old Testament; another, that of the New; a third, the founding and founders of the church; a fourth, all the kings of England downwards from the first Saxon king. All which notwithstanding were most shamefully broken and destroyed. Yea, to encourage them the more in this trade of breaking and battering windows down, Cromwell himself (as ’twas reported) espying a little crucifix in a window aloft, which none perhaps before had scarce observed, gets a ladder and breaks it down zealously with his own hand. “Thus, in a short time, a fair and goodly structure was quite stript of all its ornamental beauty, and made a ruthful spectacle, a very chaos of desolation and confusion, nothing scarce remaining but only bare walls, broken seats and shattr’d windows on every side.”--(P.) The old story of neglect--“scarce any cathedral in England is more neglected,” wrote Browne Willis in 1742--is told of Peterborough in the Eighteenth Century; but in 1764-1791 Dean Tarrant collected all the fragments of stained glass and inserted them in the two central windows of the apse. They deal chiefly with scenes in the life of St. Peter. The late history of the Cathedral is only that of repairs, restorations, and gifts. We enter the Minster Precincts by the western gateway, built by Abbot Benedict, in the Norman style, in the Twelfth Century. It was altered at the end of the Fourteenth Century. The approach is monastic in the extreme. The room over the gate was once the Chapel of St. Nicholas. After passing through this gate, on the left hand we see all that remains of the Chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury (Fourteenth Century). The various gateways, doors, arcades, and remains of ancient buildings harmonize well with the venerable and elegant Cathedral.