The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, among them Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Henry Spelman, met ‘every Friday weekly in the Term … to confer upon some Questions in that Faculty’. An innocent pursuit, it might be thought, yet in 1614 ‘we had notice that his Majesty took a little Mislike of our Society … [so] we forebare to meet again’. The feelings that ran so high from Wycliffe’s time to the reign of Elizabeth, ‘leaving naught to be seene of admirable Edifices, but like to the Ruines of Troy, Tyrus and Thebes, lumpes of Walls and heapes of stones’, were still raw enough to disturb authority, as Cotton found to his cost. It was a theme that dominated the work of our late Fellow Margaret Aston (1932–2014), from Thomas Arundel (Aston Reference Aston1967) to this, her posthumous masterpiece.

Planned as a sequel to England’s Iconoclasts (Aston Reference Aston1988), over the next thirty years it came to have a larger focus, too great to qualify as a second volume. It has become the last volume of a trilogy that began with Lollards and Reformers (Aston Reference Aston1984), a summary of all the complexities of belief, politics and emotions through which society and religion moved from a visual to an aural foundation, from a system typified by image to one dominated by the word, preached or read. Conversely, while England’s Iconoclasts dealt with theory (theology, dogma and legal enactments) derived from scripture, Broken Idols records the results, the destruction and transfer of things from religious to secular use, a scriptural revival under the Stuarts and a second iconoclasm during the Civil War. Royal supremacy diversely affected the cults of St Thomas of Canterbury (too close to another Thomas, whose Utopians had no images in their churches) and St George (an accidental patriotic symbol). The fate of bells (too easily turned into cannon), organs (a switchback) and symbols of the Trinity (from the Daniel ‘Ancient of Days’ to the triangular ‘tetragrammaton’), all turned on the interpretation of the Second Commandment, and the degree of worship involved. These issues fill the first two parts.

The third part describes two special cases, before summarising the long ‘word against image’ debate. Stained-glass windows, being two-dimensional (and practically necessary), sometimes escaped where statuary was smashed. They also moved; glass from Rewley Abbey furnished Henry viii’s bowling alley at Hampton Court. No one can tell how much was destroyed; the miracle is that so much survived. The cross, or crucifix, was different. The rood, a central feature in so many churches, was an early target for iconoclasts. The three men hanged in 1532 for destroying the rood at Dovercourt, Essex, began an almost total purge. Was the cross alone, without Christ, different? Queen Elizabeth’s maintenance of it in the Chapel Royal was divisive, even among loyal clergy. But crosses, like windows, were useful, as the centre for markets; bases were left even when the shaft was destroyed. The cross at Derwen, Denbigh, too high to read or reach, survives. The Catholic William Blundell, finding a hoard of Anglo-Saxon coins with the sign of the cross, publicised it with an engraving, also advertising the place as a Catholic burial ground. The cross was crucial: to some the essence of Christianity, to others ‘the crosse aereall’, sketched with thumb on forehead, was blasphemy. That some of the Eleanor crosses survive is, like medieval glass, a miracle.

‘Paint me a voice, make a sound visible if you can’, wrote Sir Edward Dering, MP and antiquary, in 1641. Margaret, Lady Hoby, ‘being verie emptie’, resolved to eat ‘that I may be the fitter to heare’. The voice from the pulpit was superior to any visual counterpart, although at Holdenby, Northampton, and Puddletown, Dorset, scripture words were painted on church walls. The statue of St Margaret found in the 1960s at Fingringhoe, Essex, had been turned face to wall ‘against the day’ (a recurrent phrase) when it would be needed again. ‘Mr Brokelsbie … bought all such superstisious monuments and made theim awaie’ at Scotter, Lincs, where a pond dredged in about 1676 revealed ‘three or four score little pretty images … delicately cutt of alabaster’.

Individual acts of deliberate iconoclasm, such as Henry Sherfield’s glass-breaking at Salisbury in 1630, were often undertaken under cover of darkness; the psychology of the breakers, superficially simple, is often more complex. Aesthetic sense of age or beauty was rare, neither defence against idolatry nor pretext for preservation. Even to Laud, new building or glass made a place of worship seemly rather than beautiful. In 1643 Evelyn ‘saw the furious and zelous people demolish that stately Crosse in Cheapeside … with no little regrett’; to others it was ‘The Downefall of Dagon’; Hollar engraved the scene.

Elsewhere in Europe, religious revolution, if episodic, was short and sharp. The English Reformation lasted over a century, doctrinal issues turning political; like the Black Death, it affected rich and poor alike. Its cost in works of art is immeasurable, but it transformed the English language. It now has its history, amply documented by wide reading, of ‘Buildings of England’ as well as contemporary and modern historical texts, a lifetime’s work well spent.