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:
“Where your poor orators have always had received and enjoyed by the means of your Colleges founded by your grace’s most noble progenitor’s singular treasure, help & commodity for the education of their sons, and especially the more part of us being not otherwise able to bring up our children in good learning and to find them at grammar.... There be in danger to be cast out of some college thirty, some other forty or fifty, some other more or fewer, & the most part of them children of your poor orators, having of the said college meat, drink, cloth & lodging & were verie well brought up in learning in the common grammar scoole at the College of S. Marie Magdalen, & so went forward & attained to logicke & other faculties at the charges of the said College & likewise of other houses and little or nothing at the charge of their parents, after their admission into any of the said colleges, wh. thing hath always heretofore been a great succour unto your said poor orators.”
The petition was successful, though some schools were suppressed.
Magdalen College School, thus preserved, was intended by the
