taking of inventories of church goods to prevent their spoliation. In so doing, the Council may never have been wholly altruistic and their final gambit was to order appropriation to the Crown of all the objects of value that churches no longer needed.
   The third commission for the taking of inventories, issued in May 1552, recited that under previous commissions church goods and ornaments had been committed for safe keeping to churchwardens and other fit parishioners, but that the King had been informed that some of such goods had been embezzled or removed, contrary to his expressed commands and manifestly in contempt of his honour, it went on to appoint special commissioners to redress and reform those unlawful proceedings and who were, amongst other things, to prepare a further inventory, compare it with the previous inventories and ascertain on oath by whose default articles found lacking had been ‘removed, embezzled,

aliened or diminished’. Those who stubbornly refused to answer the commissioners’ questions or to obey their orders were to be imprisoned.
   Wyels, still less the churchwardens, cannot have welcomed this further commission, since a number of the church goods of Ash had been purloined subsequently to the taking of an inventory three years before. Fortunately, perhaps, they were in good company; there had been thefts at Hartley, where much had gone including a silver chalice, and at Kingsdown and Longfield. More legitimately, Hartley had parted, by sale, with a ‘candlestikke of latten’, Kingsdown with a bell and Longfield with a pair of candlesticks and a pyx. Fawkham and Ridley had lost nothing, but Ridley had very little to lose.
   Some comfort may also have come from the identities