Notices of the pax are common in monastic and church inventories. In the Rites of Durham abbey we are told that they possessed “a marvelous faire booke, which had the epistles and gospels in it, the which booke had on the outside of the coveringe the picture of our Saviour Christ all of silver—which booke did serve for the paxe in the masse.” A book which an abbot of Glastonbury gave to his church there probably answered the same purpose; and other then existing examples might be referred to. “Unum textum argenteum et auratum cum crucifixo, Maria, et Johanne, splendidus emalatum.” A mediæval English pax made of wood does not now, probably, exist: but there is a curious entry in the inventory of church goods belonging to the parish of St. Peter Cheap, in the year 1431; “item iij lyttel pax breds of tre.” Many such wooden paxes are mentioned as having been burnt in the diocese of Lincoln in 1566 by the royal commissioners: “a paxe of wood” at Baston, another at Dunsbie, another at Haconbie. We have a remarkable illustration of the late use of the pax in England in one of the injunctions issued by the king’s visitors to the clergy within the deanery of Doncaster, in the first year of Edward the sixth, and printed by Burnet in his Records: “The clerk was ordered at the proper time to bring down the pax, and standing without the church door to say these words aloud to the people. This is a token of joyful peace which is betwixt God and men’s conscience, _etc._” The “church door” here means the door in the screen which in those days divided the chancel from the body of the church. As in Chaucer, where he says of the wife of Bath “Husbands at the church door had she had five.” In England before the change of religion in the fifteenth century the marriage ceremony was performed outside the chancel, sometimes at the great door of the church itself; and then all proceeded towards the sanctuary for mass and communion.