William Dowsing (1596–1668), also known as "Smasher Dowsing", was an English puritan, and was a particularly notable iconoclast at the time of the English Civil War. He was mainly active in East Anglia. Life William Dowsing was born in Laxfield, Suffolk, the son of Wollfran and Johane Dowsing of that place. In August 1643 Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester appointed Dowsing provost-marshal of the armies of the Eastern Association (Cambridgeshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Hertfordshire, Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire), responsible for supplies and administration. In December 1643 the Earl, as their captain-general, appointed him "Commissioner for the destruction of monuments of idolatry and superstition". He was to carry out a Parliamentary Ordinance of 28 August 1643 which stated that "all Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry should be removed and abolished". These were specified as "fixed altars, altar rails, chancel steps, crucifixes, crosses, images and pictures of any one of the persons of the Trinity and of the Virgin Mary, and pictures of saints or superstitious inscriptions." In May 1644 the scope of the ordinance was widened to include representations of angels (a particular obsession of Dowsing's), rood lofts, holy water stoups, and images in stone, wood and glass and on plate. Dowsing carried out his work in 1643–44 by visiting over 250 churches in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, including several of the college chapels in the University of Cambridge, removing or defacing items that he thought fitted the requirements outlined in the ordinance. John Barwick complained of"one who calls himself Iohn Dowsing, [who] by vertue of a pretended Commission goes about the Country like a Bedlam breaking glasse windowes, having battered and beaten downe all our painted glasse, not only in our Chapples, but (contrary to Order) in our publique Schooles, Colledge Halls, Libraryes, and Chambers, mistaking perhaps the liberall Arts for Saints... and having (against an Order) defaced and digged up the floors of our Chappels, many of which had lien so for two or three hundred yeares together, not regarding the dust of our founders and predecessors, who likely were buried there; compelled us by armed Souldiers to pay forty shillings a Colledge for not mending what he had spoyled and defaced, or forthwith to go to Prison" He recruited assistants, apparently among his friends and family. Where they were unable to perform the work themselves, he left instructions for the work to be carried out by others. Sometimes the