Many of these screens in the Devon churches have an extremely rich and deep cornice, and they often extend right across the nave and both the aisles. Perhaps the finest of these is in the famous parson Jack Russell’s church at Swymbridge. This is of the fifteenth century. From the same source we learn that Bovey Tracey has a similar screen, but it has had to be greatly restored since the Commonwealth destruction, and that Atherington has a lovely screen in the north aisle, with fan-shaped coving springing from figures of angels holding shields. The cornice is delicately carved, and there is some fine canopy work over the parapet, with niches which once held figures of the saints. This screen was originally in the chapel at Umberleigh Manor, and is perhaps the only screen in the county which has never been painted. When I visited lately the quaint little town of Totnes I saw what is most uncommon—a stone screen. This dates from 1479, and richly and beautifully carved, much after the pattern of the screen in the Lady Chapel at Exeter Cathedral.
All this fine mediæval work suffered terribly from the ultra-Protestant mania for iconoclasm which exhibited itself in the reign of Edward VI., in 1547, and again under Elizabeth in 1561. Finally, under the Parliament both in 1643 and 1644, was issued “An ordinance of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament for the utter demolishing, removing and taking away of all Monuments of superstition and idolatry.”
This Act provided specifically for the taking away of all altar rails and the levelling of the “Chancel-ground” and the removal of the Communion table from the east end, and the destruction of all stone altars, so that it is always noticeable when we find one such, either in a side chapel or in the pavement, with its five and occasionally six dedication crosses cut on the stone. Norwich has one in which a small black slab bearing the crosses is let into the large altar slab.
ICONOCLASM
All images, “representative of the persons of the Trinity or of any Angell or Saint” were to be “utterly demolished,” and all vestments “defaced”; with the quaint proviso that the order should “not extend to any image, picture or coat-of-arms set up or graven onely for a Monument of any King, Prince or Nobleman, or other dead person which hath not been commonly reputed or taken for a saint.”
FONTS.
In our English churches the most noticeable bit of mediæval work is in many cases the font, which has often escaped when all the rest of the building inside and out has been defaced by neglect or destroyed by restoration. Much destruction followed on the Reformation, and even in Elizabeth’s reign, in spite of a royal mandate to preserve the old form of baptism “at the font and not with a bason,” attacks were constantly made on the fonts, and especially on the font-covers, which makes the preservation of the Frieston font-cover with a figure of the Virgin Mary on the top very remarkable. We have in the churchwardens’ accounts in various places this contemptuous entry:—
“Item. For takynge doune ye thynge ower the funt XIIᵈ.”
Parliamentarian soldiers went to greater lengths and broke up the font itself in very many churches. The bowls were often cast out or buried in the churchyard. At Ambleston in Wales the font pedestal was only ten years ago found in use by a farmer as a cheese-press, and the bowl on another farm doing duty as a pig-trough.
Still many have escaped with the loss of their carved covers, and how great the loss is can be judged when we see the beauty of such work as the cover which we still have at Ufford in Suffolk, eighteen feet high, or the similar ones at Grantham and Fosdyke and Frieston in our own county, or at Ewelme (Oxon), and Thaxted (Essex), and again in Suffolk at Sudbury St. Gregory and Hepworth, and one at Thirsk in Yorkshire which rises to the height of twenty-one feet. Sometimes the cover takes the form of a canopy, as at Swymbridge in Devon, and more beautifully in that erected by Bishop Cosin at Durham in 1663. The Sudbury font-cover has doors in it, as we see in the Jacobean cover in Burgh-le-Marsh church, and in the beautiful modern cover at Brant Broughton, both in Lincolnshire.