 Great abbeys and priories like Glastonbury, Walsingham, Bury St Edmunds, and Shaftesbury which had flourished as pilgrimage sites for many centuries, were soon reduced to ruins.However, the tradition that there was widespread mob action resulting in destruction and iconoclasm, that altars and windows were smashed, partly confuses the looting spree of the 1530s with the vandalism wrought by the Puritans in the next century against the Anglican privileges.Woodward concludes