[30] A china punch-bowl was actually presented by Sir T. Drake to be used as a font at Woodbury, Devon.
The novelist's remarks on "restoration" are most valuable:--
"Entire destruction under the saving name has been effected on so gigantic a scale that the protection of structures, their being kept wind and weather-proof, counts as nothing in the balance. Its enormous magnitude is realized by few who have not gone personally from parish to parish through a considerable district, and compared existing churches there with records, traditions, and memories of what they formerly were. The shifting of old windows and other details irregularly spaced, and spacing them at exact distances, has been one process. The deportation of the original chancel arch to an obscure nook and the insertion of a wider new one, to throw open the view of the choir, is a practice by no means extinct. Next in turn to the re-designing of old buildings and parts of them comes the devastation caused by letting restorations by contract, with a clause in the specification requesting the builder to give a price for 'old materials,' such as the lead of the roofs, to be replaced by tiles or slates, and the oak of the pews, pulpit, altar-rails, etc., to be replaced by deal. Apart from these irregularities it has been a principle that anything later than Henry VIII is anathema and to be cast out. At Wimborne Minster fine Jacobean canopies have been removed from Tudor stalls for the offence only of being Jacobean. At a hotel in Cornwall a tea-garden was, and probably is still, ornamented with seats constructed of the carved oak from a neighbouring church--no doubt the restorer's perquisite.
"Poor places which cannot afford to pay a clerk of the works suffer much in these ecclesiastical convulsions. In one case I visited, as a youth, the careful repair of an interesting Early English window had been specified, but it was gone. The contractor, who had met me on the spot, replied genially to my gaze of concern: 'Well, now, I said to myself when I looked at the old thing, I won't stand upon a pound or two. I'll give 'em a new winder now I am about it, and make a good job of it, howsomever.' A caricature in new stone of the old window had taken its place. In the same church was an old oak rood-screen in the Perpendicular style with some gilding and colouring still remaining. Some repairs had been specified, but I beheld in its place a new screen of varnished deal. 'Well,' replied the builder, more genial than ever, 'please God, now I am about it, I'll do the thing well, cost what it will.' The old screen had been used up to boil the work-men's kettles, though 'a were not much at that.'"