In the Visitation Articles of Archbishop Parker, A. D. 1569, we find inquiries were to be made whether there was in each parish church a convenient pulpit well placed, a comely and decent table for the holy communion, covered decently and set in the place prescribed; and whether the altars had been taken down; also whether images and all other monuments of idolatry and superstition were destroyed and abolished; whether the rood-loft was pulled down, according to the order prescribed; and if the partition between the chancel and church was kept. The latter inquiry is explanatory of the fact why, when the rood-lofts in many churches were taken down, the screens beneath them, separating the chancel from the nave, were left undisturbed. By the injunctions of Grindal, archbishop of York, A. D. 1571, all altars were ordered to be pulled down to the ground, and the altar stones to be defaced and bestowed to some common use. Pulpits of the reign of Edward the Sixth are rare, nor are those of the reign of Elizabeth very common. The pulpit in Fordington Church, Dorsetshire, of the latter period, is of stone, the upper part worked in plain oblong panels; and a kind of escutcheon within one of these bears the date 1592; the lower part or basement of this pulpit is circular in form. The richly embroidered and costly vestments and antependia or frontals, of a period antecedent to the Reformation, were in some instances converted into coverings for the altar or communion table, or into hangings for the pulpit and reading desk. In Little Dean Church, Gloucestershire, the covering for the reading desk is formed out of an ancient sacerdotal vestment, probably a cope, of velvet, embroidered with portraits of saints. The cushion of the pulpit of East Langdon Church, near Dover, is made out of either an ancient antependium or vestment; the material consists of very thick crimson silk, embroidered with sprigs, and in the centre of the hanging are two figures supposed to represent the salutation of the Virgin, who is kneeling before a faldstool. We occasionally, though rarely, meet with ancient charity-boxes of a date anterior to the Reformation: the churches of Wickmere, Loddon, and Causton, in Norfolk, still retain such[226-*]. At the Reformation, however, they were first required to be set up in churches. The ancient poor-box in Trinity Church, Coventry, is an excellent specimen of the Elizabethan era, and the shaft which supports it is of stone, covered with arabesque scroll-work and other detail peculiar to that age; but most of the old charity-boxes are of the seventeenth century. [Illustration: Ancient Charity-box, Trinity Church, Coventry.]