If the Reformation is not part of this story, then neither is a conclusion which is mainly concerned with events occurring after 1547. Yet it is not possible to become so intimately involved and acquainted with the Deanery testators without considering the destruction of the artefacts which, through their efforts, had embellished the parish churches. Nothing is known of the immediate fate of the books, plate and vestments which their pennies and shillings had provided. The destruction of the glazing, the murals and the memorials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries makes terrible reading. The sheer neglect of the eighteenth century appals, as does the omnipotence of nineteenth-century vicars, a reminder that material commemoration does not endure and that the testators are remembered today through their wills.

Imagery enjoyed a reprieve during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, although criticism of it was not stifled, and during this period parish churches accepted an extraordinary variety of bequests. The imagery which the orthodox revered and the unorthodox attacked were statues standing within their tabernacles, statues in niches over doorways, in window embrasures, on the Holy Rood, on stalls, pews and fonts, carved on porches or decorating corner buttresses. Images were found illumined in books and stitched on vestments and banners, engraved on plate; they were painted on glass, stained on plaster, worked and wrought on all furnishings within the church, and carved on much of the fabric without.Images brought Christian teaching within the visual sphere of the common man or woman. They were, after all, the medium through which the illiterate approached their Saviour and the company of Heaven.

Contemporary churchwardens’ accounts and inventories leave an impression of saturation having been reached by the 1530s; and it was then that the debate on images was staged between Thomas More and William Tyndale, establishing the fundamental positions of the protagonists. More defended visual aids as an appropriate language to reflect spiritual truth:

In good faith to say the truth these heretics rather trifle than reason in this matter.