Images (2)

Abstract

Support for images had thus been in decline for several years before their comprehensive proscription by the Edwardian regime. The new campaign aroused controversies — ‘almost in every place is contention for images’, thought Cranmer — but again seems to have encountered only sporadic resistance. It apparently triggered the Helston riot of 1548, and provoked the southwestern rebels to require ‘images to be set up again in every church’ in 1549 — though except at Stratton, where the rood was re-erected, deposed figures seem not to have been restored. Resistance in other regions, as at High Wycombe and St Neots, was only small scale, and image restoration was absent from the programme of the Norfolk rebels.¹