It is really too great a task to follow the history of Salisbury through the centuries to the present time; nor, indeed, since the city and the cathedral are from our present point of view but incidents along the Exeter Road, would it be desirable to dwell very long on their story, which, as may have been judged from what has already been said, is an exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms carried out in Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell-hounds of the Marian Persecution still stain the records of the Church; nor, although the very reading of them turn brain and body sick, and make even the architectural enthusiast almost turn away in disgust from that lovely cathedral, may God grant that they ever be forgotten, as in the England of to-day they would almost seem to be. Hellish ferocity, damnable frauds, how they smirch those sculptured stones and cry insistently for remembrance! Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop in the time of Henry the Eighth, was alive to it all, and cleared away the false relics; the ‘stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochetts, rotten girdles, pyled purses, great bullocks’ horns, locks of hair, filthy rags, and gobbets of wood,’ which he found here; but, with less courage than others, he recanted in Mary’s reign. Sherfield, Recorder of Salisbury, was another reformer, but he lived in less dangerous times for such men. It was in 1629 that he smashed the stained-glass window, representing the Creation, in St. Edmund’s Church. In other times he would assuredly have been burnt for this act; as it was, he was summoned before the Star Chamber. He pleaded that the window did not contain a true history of the Creation, and objected that God was represented as ‘a little old man in a long blue coat,’ which he held was ‘an indignity offered to Almighty God.’ He was committed to the Fleet Prison for this, fined £500, and required to apologise to the Bishop of Salisbury. Fortunate Mr. Sherfield! [Sidenote: _MURDER OF THE HARTGILLS_]