The commissioners dealt severely with the colleges. Many of the fellows who had opposed the Reformation fled forthwith; others they ejected and replaced by rigid Calvinists. "All things," the Roman Catholics thought, "were turned topsy turvy." The disciplinary injunctions and acts of the commissioners were wholly admirable. Unfortunately their fanaticism in other directions was of the deplorably iconoclastic sort. The ancient libraries were rifled; many MSS., guilty of no other superstition than red letters in their titles, were condemned to the fire. "Treatises on scholastical divinity were let loose from their chains and given away or sold to mechanics for servile uses, whilst those wherein angles or mathematical diagrams appeared were destroyed because accounted Popish or diabolical or both." The works of the schoolmen were carried about the city "by certain rude young men" on biers and finally burnt in the market-place, a proceeding which they styled the funeral of Scotus and Scotists. Some of the books from monasteries were sold at this time to grocers and soapsellers, and some by shiploads to bookbinders abroad, "to the wondering of foreign nations," says Bale. From wall and window, the order had gone forth giving sanction to the popular movement, every picture, every image commemorating saint or prophet or apostle was to be extirpated. Painted glass, as at New College, survives to show that the order was imperfectly obeyed. But everywhere the statues crashed from their niches, rood and rood-loft were laid low and the sun-light stared in white and stainless on the whitened aisles. At Magdalen the high altar and various images and paintings were destroyed, the organ burnt and the vestments sold. At Christ Church the dean and chapter decided that all altars, statues, images, tabernacles, missals and other matters of superstition and idolatry should be removed out of the Cathedral; and the other colleges and churches followed this example. The magnificent reredos in the chapel of All Souls', of which the present work is a conjectural restoration, was smashed; most of the stained glass there was broken, and the altars were removed together with "the thing they call an organ." The Edwardine commissioners proposed to abolish the grammar schools founded in connection with the colleges. The city, however, immediately petitioned the King on behalf of the schools: