Memorials of old Derbyshire

by Unknown

ROODS, SCREENS, AND LOFTS IN DERBYSHIRE CHURCHES

By Aymer Vallance, F.S.A.

Although still comprising a considerable amount of excellent screenwork, the county of Derby has suffered grievous losses in this regard, losses for which, if fanaticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was primarily responsible, ignorance and indifference in the eighteenth century, and wilful perversity of so-called “restorers” during the “Gothic revival” of the nineteenth, have produced consequences not less disastrous.

At the beginning of the religious revolution in England, inaugurated in the reign of Henry VIII., every church and chapel in the land had its rood-screen, surmounted by a rood-loft. Above them both was the great rood, or cross, with a figure of Our Lord outstretched upon it, flanked almost invariably by statues of St. Mary and St. John. Of these ornaments the rood-loft was the latest to be developed, not becoming general previously to the fifteenth century. It had, however, been preceded in cathedral and monastic churches by the pulpitum, a thick wall with a gallery on the top of it at the west end of the quire. In churches of this class, the rood-screen would be situated parallel to the pulpitum, but further westwards, in the nave.

Fenny Bentley Church: Rood-Screen.

The pulpitum and the parish church rood-screen, although the former is usually a solid stone structure, while the latter consists of openwork, and is of wood rather than of stone, so far resemble one another that both have a central doorway, whereas the cathedral and monastic rood-screen appears to have had, as a rule, two doorways in it, one at the north and the other at the south end, with an altar (which ranked as the principal one among the altars of the nave) placed between them. It was in front of this altar, and at the foot of the great rood, that the procession, which perambulated the church before High Mass on Sundays and great feasts, having traversed the appointed route, finally drew up to make a solemn station. This done, those taking part in the procession would file off to right and left in two divisions, either of them passing through one of the doors in the rood-screen, and thence under the pulpitum into the quire for the celebration of the chief service of the day.

In illustration of the foregoing, it is of interest to recall that excavations, carried on at the end of the seventies of the nineteenth century, on the site of the Premonstratensian Abbey of Dale, revealed, at the eastern crossing, the bases of the two parallel walls of the pulpitum, about five feet apart, and pierced by a central doorway, 4 ft. 6 in. wide. A year later much of the tile pavement of the nave was unearthed, disclosing the tiles spaced and arranged in bands to mark the exact position for the procession, as before described. Further may be cited the accounts of the sale of the effects of the abbey, drawn up by order of the Royal Commissioners on its dissolution in 1538. This document is dated 24th October, in the thirtieth year of King Henry VIII.’s reign. It enumerates, beside “the seats in the Quier; a crucifyx, Mary and John; a payre of organs; ... the rode alter in the Churche,” i.e., in the nave, “and a rode there,” i.e., presumably the great rood. Another item disposed of, viz., “The partition of tymber in the body of the Churche,” most probably refers to the rood-screen in the nave; while the before-named “rode alter” would be, by analogy, the altar in the midst of the rood-screen; for such was the usual dedication. The greater number of the fittings of Dale Abbey were acquired at the sale by Francis Pole, of Radburne. It is, therefore, not without good reason that certain linen-fold panels in Radburne Church—eighteen in all—have been identified as belonging formerly to the rood-screen of the abbey church. And yet another item sold, “a grate of yren” (iron) “abowte the Founder and the tymber worke there” would include parclose screenwork such as is described hereafter.

The church of another Premonstratensian abbey also, that of Beauchief (founded between 1172 and 1176), had its altar of the Holy Cross. Evidence of the fact is extant in the shape of a deed, circa 1300, by which Sir Thomas de Chaworth, lord of Norton, made over the entire village of Greenhill, moor included, by way of endowment, to maintain a canon to celebrate mass at the altar of that name in perpetuity. I have found no other particulars of Beauchief bearing on the present subject except in the inventory, dated 2nd August, 1536, wherein occurs:—“It’m a p’ of organnes,” which same may be assumed to have stood upon the top of the pulpitum.

Neither, again, has very much that is relevant come to light concerning the vanished church of the Augustinian canons at Darley. Their abbey, in its time the largest and most important of the religious houses of Derbyshire, was suppressed in the autumn of 1538, as the result of three months’ unremitting pressure on the part of Cromwell’s agent, Thomas Thacker. This man actually wrote, at the close of the first three months, to inform his master how little effect his cajoleries and threats had had upon the abbot; and to solicit the all-powerful minister’s favour and help in securing possession of the house and goods for himself, when he should have succeeded in the design of coercing the unhappy man. It is at least some slight satisfaction to know that Thacker’s petition was disregarded as far as Darley Abbey was concerned. The abbot’s consent to the suppression at length wrung from him, no time was lost before cataloguing and selling the effects of the abbey. The inventory of the sale is dated 24th October (only two days later than the signing of the act of “surrender”), and comprises the “Great Crucyfyx” of the abbey church and “tymber about ... Seint Sythes Chapell,” meaning, obviously, the parclose screens that surrounded it.

With the foregoing may be compared the priory church of another Augustinian house, founded in 1172 at Repton. The inventory of the sale, dated likewise in October in the year 1538, specifies, besides the rood, at least six partitions of timber, or parcloses, fencing round the chapels respectively of Our Lady, St. John, St. Nicholas, and St. Thomas. The church, dismantled, as has been stated, under Henry VIII., still continued standing “most beautiful,” according to the testimony of the historian Fuller, until the reign of Queen Mary, when, in a single day, it was utterly demolished by the intruder in occupation, Gilbert Thacker. This miscreant belonged to a family deeply tainted with the guilt of sacrilege. He was, in fact, son and heir of the before-named Thomas Thacker, and becoming alarmed at the news of the rehabilitation of the religious orders, and determined to prevent such an eventuality in the case of Repton Priory, promptly acted on that resolve by destroying, as he himself expressed it, “the nest, for fear the birds should build therein again.” Excavations conducted in 1882 and two successive years on the site of the former church, discovered practically all that is ever likely, under the circumstances, to be learned from investigations on the spot. The results, embodied in two reports by Mr. W. H. St. John Hope, were published in volumes vi. and vii. of the Journal of the Derbyshire Archæological Society, from which, as comprising the whole of the available information relevant to the present subject, the following particulars have, for the most part, been extracted.

The stone pulpitum, like that at Dale, occupied the space between the two piers of the eastern crossing; but, unlike the Dale pulpitum, the Repton one was a solid structure. It measures 5 ft. 4½ in. deep from east to west, and is pierced by a central doorway 4 ft. 4½ in. wide. Its eastward front, against which backed the return stalls, measures 26 ft. 2 in., the total width of the quire. The westward façade (except for the door-jambs, which are moulded and flanked on either side by an ornamental buttress, and when uncovered in 1883 showed traces of brilliant scarlet and black colouring) was austerely plain. Its flatness was relieved, however, by the loft above being made to overhang. That this was so is deduced from the fact that had the loft-floor not projected beyond the area of the base of the pulpitum, there would have been insufficient room for anyone ascending to the top to turn round on emerging from the staircase. The latter, 3 ft. 2½ in. wide, was hollowed out of the solid in the northern half of the pulpitum, and raked upwards in a straight flight from south to north. The “pair of organs” named in the inventory, stood, it may be assumed, on the platform at the top. That the pulpitum itself must have been coeval (circa 1275–1300) with the piers and integral in structure with them, is manifest from the plinth that forms the base of pulpitum and piers alike being finished with the same hollow chamfer continuously all round it. A curious feature is that, notwithstanding there is a step leading up from the nave to the pulpitum door, on the east side there is a descent of one step again on to the floor of the quire. South of the pulpitum a screen of wood shut off the quire’s south aisle (which is ten feet wide) from the transept. Another screen, in line with the last-named one, extending 21 ft. 9 in., i.e., as far as the south wall of the transept, enclosed the spacious chapel of Our Lady, which was situated parallel to the quire, on the south side of the quire’s south aisle. The former existence of these screens is proved by holes sunk in the masonry to receive the timber work. The north transept was too ruinous to furnish any indication of its ancient screen arrangements; but there were found some signs of a screen having stood between the first pair of piers in the nave (which, exclusive of the aisles, is 22 ft. 2 in. wide). This would, of course, be the position of the rood-screen proper.

To resume, as to collegiate churches, some were provided, like cathedrals, with a solid pulpitum, others with a rood-loft only, which in their case had to do duty for pulpitum; that is to say, the ceremonial singing of the Gospel was wont, as in cathedrals and monastic churches, to take place on the top of it at High Mass on Sundays and great feasts. The knowledge of this circumstance has given rise, apparently, to the mistaken notion that the rood-loft in ordinary parochial churches was used for the same purpose, which was decidedly not the case. Nay, in some parish churches sculptured stone desks, projecting from the north wall of the chancel, near the high altar, were provided expressly, as authorities on the subject agree, for the reading of the Gospel at that spot, in contradistinction to the cathedral, monastic, and collegiate usage. The Derbyshire parish churches of Chaddesden, Crich, Etwall, Mickleover, Spondon, and Taddington are especially remarkable as being fitted with lecterns of this description.

Against the east side of a pulpitum return stalls for clergy or monks were invariably fixed; but that this arrangement was not confined exclusively to cathedral, monastic, and collegiate churches is proved by the fact that certain Derbyshire churches, which have never belonged to any of those categories, and could scarcely even be described as connected except indirectly with cells of religious houses in their neighbourhood, e.g., those at Chaddesden, Elvaston, Norbury, and Sawley, were provided with return stalls in the chancel. And again, not least extraordinary, in the out-of-the-way parish of Chelmorton, the ancient rood-screen, itself of stone, to this day still has a stone bench attached to it, and running the length of its eastern side, for clergy to occupy, backs to the screen and faces towards the altar, just as though in a cathedral quire or in that of some religious order.

Norbury Church: Stall End attached to Jamb of Rood-Screen.

Three of the before-named churches, viz., Chaddesden, Elvaston, and Norbury, present (or, rather, if the handiwork of the mediæval joiners had not been subsequently tampered with in any of them, would present) a feature highly characteristic of Derbyshire churches in the treatment of the outer ends of the return stalls that flank the passage through the rood-screen into the chancel. The Norbury specimen (see illustration), handsomely sculptured, with a panel of vine ornament, and with a projecting elbow formed of the half-length figure of an angel, is, however, in point of size the least accentuated of the three. But the pair at Chaddesden, with a series of enormous crockets climbing high up the eastward face of the muntins which form the entrance jambs, if scarcely noticeable when the screen is viewed from the nave, are very conspicuous from within the chancel; so much so, indeed, as to dominate and outscale all the rest of the screenwork to which they belong. How so strange an anomaly ever came to be introduced into an ordinary parish church is merely conjecture. The quire of the church of All Hallows, Derby—the sole collegiate foundation in the county surviving as such until the sixteenth century—must, of course, have been furnished with return stalls; but whether they exhibited the huge proportions of those at Chaddesden, or whether, if that were so, the Chaddesden stall ends were or were not deliberately imitated from those of All Hallows’, one may wonder and argue as one will, without the possibility of arriving any the nearer to positive assurance on the subject.

Chaddesden Church: Detail of Rood-Screen from the Chancel.

In default of a cathedral church within the borders of Derbyshire, the tendency would be to emphasize the dignity and importance of its greater churches. Among these the grand collegiate church of All Hallows was foremost, and as such it came to be regarded as, in some sort, the minster and mother church of all the southern part of the county. Thus it would, perhaps, be but natural that All Saints’, Derby, should supply the model for numbers of churches round about, and that its individual features should reproduce themselves even in some of the furthest corners of the shire. The love of generations of Derbyshire men for the fabric of this glorious church, and the jealous pride with which they defended its ancient privileges, are matters of history; and if it is not possible now to trace to a common original the distinguishing features of the churches of the county in general, which would, in all probability, have had their prototype in All Saints’, the ever-to-be-regretted reason is that the whole of the venerable building, with the exception of the tower at the west end, has disappeared—wantonly and wilfully destroyed in February, 1722–3. This irreparable loss was brought about solely through the guile and strategy of one unscrupulous tyrant, the then minister in charge, Rev. Michael Hutchinson, D.D., the memory of whose deed and name deserves to be handed down in undying opprobrium.

Neither plan nor any satisfactorily complete description of the mediæval church of All Hallows is extant; but this much is known, that it comprised nave and aisles and quire, with a chapel on the south, and that it contained, besides other altars, a chantry of Our Lady and one, also, of St. Nicholas. Both of these—the fact is established by a process of elimination, the south chapel having been appropriated to St. Katherine—were situated in the body of the church, and would almost certainly have been enclosed within screens such as survive in a number of Derbyshire churches to this day.

And here, before proceeding further, it is necessary to point out how largely the ground plan favoured in the churches of mediæval Derbyshire has affected and determined the conditions of their screening system. At the same time, I would add that what I am about to say does not pretend to universal application in every individual church throughout the county; for, in the nature of things, there are bound to be plenty of exceptions. Nevertheless, that the main trend of development proceeded along the lines indicated will not, I think, admit of dispute.

Now, in other districts, a church of the scale and grandeur of that, say, of Ashbourne, Bakewell, Melbourne, Norbury, or Spondon, could scarcely have failed to be enlarged, when extra chapels came to be called for, by the addition of chancel aisles. And yet in every one of these Derbyshire instances the chancel is aisleless—an anomaly, surely, remarkable enough! Nay (albeit the important churches of Chesterfield, Morley, and Norton, for example, testify to the contrary), it is noticeable in how many cases almost any other device was more welcome than that which would have involved interfering with and arcading the side walls of the chancel. An east aisle to the transept would occur more readily than the erection of a new aisle to the chancel in cruciform churches (as, for instance, at Ashbourne and Bakewell), or, in churches where there was no transept to widen nor to appropriate, the area of the nave itself (as at Fenny Bentley), or of the nave aisles (as at Elvaston and Sawley), would be encroached upon for the purpose; the wealthy corporate body or individual having as little hesitation about annexing and enclosing the amount of the parish church’s space which they wanted for their own uses, as they would about enclosing (provided it could be accomplished with impunity) the people’s common land. A typical Derbyshire parclose, then, is no mere grate within an arch, to connect the one side of it with the other, but rather a formidable barrier fencing in, on two sides, a specific portion of the body of the church, and even, may be, comprehending (as in the before-mentioned instances of Elvaston and Sawley) a column or more of the arcade itself.

Whatever may be thought of the propriety of this local caprice (for what else was it which, in a county abounding with excellent building stone, could have caused the bodies of parish churches to be thus cut up with internal partitions, instead of extending them from without by additional chapels and chancel aisles for the reception of fresh chantries?), the net result has been to enrich Derbyshire with even greater distinction in respect of its parcloses than of its rood-screens; notwithstanding the parcloses which still remain represent only a proportion of all those ascertained to have been formerly in existence, but such that have now gone, many of them, and left nothing beyond the bare record behind; or of that, no doubt, larger quantity whereof even the very memorial has perished.

Some of them have been shifted from their original positions and made up afresh, others have been cut short or otherwise maltreated and defaced; but, for all that, it is not too much to say that there is not a county in the kingdom can boast as magnificent a series of parclose screens as this one still possesses, in more or less perfect condition, in the respective churches of Ashbourne, Bakewell, Chesterfield, Elvaston, and Kirk Langley. The exquisite parclose which runs the whole length of the south transept at Chesterfield, with its vaulted cornice, rather resembles a rood-screen. The truly characteristic variety of parcloses, however, should be sought, not at Chesterfield, but at Ashbourne, Bakewell, Elvaston, and Sawley. A peculiarity common to all four is the pierced tracery panelling of the lower half of the screen. In each case, except in the Bakewell parclose, it takes the form of a horizontal band of ornament immediately beneath the rail or cill of the fenestration. Such is the feature which, as I submit, constitutes the speciality of parcloses as distinguished from rood-screens. And it is just because of its being present also in the screenwork now made up into a chancel-screen at St. Peter’s, Derby, that I am disinclined to believe that this particular screen was designed in the first place for a purpose other than that of a parclose.

Elvaston Church: Parclose Screen in the South Aisle.

The history of this screen has not been uneventful. It is well known to have belonged formerly to the church at Crich, and to have been ejected from thence at the devastating “restoration” which befel in 1861. Conveyed to a timber-merchant’s yard, for awhile it lay there awaiting a ruin that seemed imminent, until the late Rev. W. Hope, at that time vicar of St. Peter’s, fortunately saw it, acquired it, and set it up, repaired and remodelled, in its present position. To return, now, for a moment to the matter of Crich church. It is on record that there were two chantries founded here by William de Wakebridge in the fourteenth century. The one, receiving episcopal licence in 1357, was situated in the north aisle; the other, in 1368, at Our Lady’s altar, which may be presumed to have occupied a corresponding position in the south aisle. Both of these chantries would eventually, according to the prevailing Derbyshire custom, have been surrounded with parclose screenwork. Of the remains of that which stood in the north aisle, the heraldic painter, Bassano, and also J. Reynolds, took note when they visited Crich church, the first in 1710, the second in 1758. I do not gather, however, that either of them recorded the existence of a rood-screen there. This negative evidence on their part is too significant to be set aside, and so, commonly though it is stated that the screen at St. Peter’s, Derby, is identical with the ancient rood-screen of Crich church, I am not convinced. I can more readily suppose that the Rev. W. Hope was too thankful at having secured so authentic a relic of antiquity to spend time in prosecuting any very searching inquiry as to the precise nature of the office it might have fulfilled in days gone by; but that, seeing his own church was bare of a rood-screen, he very naturally adapted the screen which he had become possessed of to supply the deficiency, although comparative study of the design and formation of Derbyshire screens in general might have led him, as it has led me, to conclude that this one from Crich could not originally have been a rood-screen.

Neither, again, may the apparent exception, which the chancel-screen in Haddon Hall chapel affords, be adduced. For, though it is true that to-day visitors to Haddon find, beneath the fenestration cill on either half of the screen there, a band of Gothic tracery—authentic, if of a somewhat flamboyant type—which fits its position plausibly enough, the view of the chapel by George Cattermole, lithographed by S. Rayner, and published in 1839, while agreeing in every other particular with the present unchanged aspect of the place, shows no ornament here at all. The panels were still without tracery when, between 1880 and 1885, a photograph of the interior was taken, which is reproduced in the third volume of The Abbey Square Sketch Book; and the Rev. Dr. Cox possesses a coloured sketch, dated 1898, which does not differ in this regard from the earlier representations. But in either event the screen at Haddon, whether traceried or plain, is no case in point, for the simple reason that the panelling itself is blind. In order to be analogous to the parcloses at Ashbourne, Elvaston, and Sawley, it would need to be perforated.

As far as I have been able to ascertain, the following are the churches which contain the most notable parclose screens:—Ashbourne, Bakewell, Chesterfield, Darley Dale (stone), Elvaston, Fenny Bentley (moved from its place), Kirk Langley (portions made up), and Sawley (the lower parts only of two parcloses); while, if not now, there existed anciently, or there are believed to have existed, parcloses at Alkmonton hospital chapel, Ashover, Chelmorton (stone), Church Broughton, Crich, old St. Alkmund’s, and old All Hallows’ and St. Peter’s in Derby, Horsley, Longford, Longstone, Mugginton, Norbury, Radburne, Tideswell, Weston-on-Trent, and Youlgreave. But all this on the subject of parcloses is to anticipate.

Ilkeston Church: Stone Rood-Screen, from the Chancel.

The earliest surviving screenwork in Derbyshire does not date back any earlier than the beginning of the fourteenth century, and is, as might be expected, of stone. Of this material, the most imposing specimen is the rood-screen at Ilkeston, and that notwithstanding the excessive “restorations” it has had to undergo at various times, particularly in 1855—ordeals out of which it has emerged in a very different condition from that which it must originally have presented. The upper part has been scraped and renovated; the columns smoothed and repolished. And as for the lower part, one can only say that to afford any effective protection to the chancel it must have been something far more substantial than the gaunt skeleton framework it is at the present day. The screen occupies the opening from the nave into the chancel. It consists of an arcade of five arches, which, cinquefoil-cusped and having pierced quatrefoils in the spandrils, spring from cylindrical columns of grey marble, with circular moulded caps and bases. These again rise from a horizontal moulded rail, supported on similar columns; the whole standing upon a stone plinth. The mouldings and capitals of the columns (some of which only are original) have an Early English appearance, but the main part of the screen is of later style. The markedly ogival form of the doorhead betokens a fairly developed phase of Decorated. Along the top of the screen runs a simple coping ridge, which, if not the original, represents well enough the type of finish a screen of the period would have had in the days before the introduction of rood-lofts into parish churches. The doorway centres 4 ft. 2½ in., with a clear opening of 3 ft. 10 in.; the side bays having an average centring of 3 ft. 2½ in. The total height of the screen, as at present made up, is 14 ft. 6 in., a dimension greatly disproportionate to its comparatively short length of 17 ft. 4½ in. It may be explained that the photograph was taken from the chancel in order to avoid the halation of the east window, both sides of the screen being alike.

The stone rood-screen at Chelmorton, if less ancient than the foregoing by some thirty or forty years, is the more interesting, because it has been allowed to retain its original form almost untouched. The screen stands in the chancel arch (12 ft. 6 in. wide), and consists of two parts, having a clear opening of four feet between them. The northern half measures 4 ft. 3½ in. long, the southern half one inch less. The motif is that of an embattled wall, 6 ft. 6 in. high, with a pierced band of quatrefoils to the depth of twenty inches from the level of the top, and, beneath, blind panelling of trefoil-headed ogival arches. The screen wall being flat on its upper surface, might well have afforded a foundation for timber screenwork above it; for owing to the rise of the ground towards the east, the chancel floor is three steps higher than that of the nave, and consequently the screen has but a moderate elevation on its eastward side. There is, however, no sign of any mortice holes visible in it. Built into the wall of the porch is a slab of stone, sculptured with quatrefoils, which was dug up under the floor, and is conjectured to have formed part of a parclose, matching the rood-screen and screening of the south transept for a chantry chapel.

At Monks’ Dale, in Tideswell parish, was formerly a grange, with a chapel attached, supposed to have belonged to Lenton Priory. The walls of the chapel are overthrown down to the foundations. “All that remains of it above ground are the beautifully carved stones of the low ... stone screen that divided the chancel from the nave. They are of fourteenth century work”—of the date 1360, circa, according to the late Rev. Prebendary Andrew—“and exactly correspond to those ... in the chancel of Chelmorton.” This account appeared in 1877. By 1882 the aforesaid stonework had been removed to the vicarage garden at Tideswell.

Embedded in a wall in Allestree parish, near the site of the old manor house, on the road to Mackworth, is, or recently was, to be seen another fragment of worked stone, with sculptured quatrefoils, and altogether so closely resembling the before-named examples as to lead to the conclusion that it must have formed part of an ancient screen in Allestree or some neighbouring church.

Chelmorton Church:
Southern Half of Stone Rood-Screen.

Darley Dale Church:
Detail of Stone Parclose.

A rood-screen of similar design is believed to have occupied the chancel opening (13 ft. 6 in. wide) at Darley Dale church, to judge from a fragment of stone carving lying (as recorded in 1877) in the parish clerk’s garden there. In the south aisle of this church, close to the south door, stands a family pew, built out of the remains of a stone parclose and the stone frames of a couple of two-light Perpendicular windows—one having had its mullion knocked out to make the doorway, and both betraying their extraneous origin by being grooved in the usual manner for leaded glazing. That part of the enclosure which is genuine screenwork comprises two distinct, though not very incongruous, designs of the first half of the fifteenth century. Exclusive of the alien window-work, that portion of the screen running east and west measures 11 ft. 6 in. long; that portion running north and south, 3 ft. 7 in. The shorter length consists of a plain wall below a tier of cinquefoil-headed lights; the longer, of ogival panelling in eleven cusped compartments, corresponding to the same number of cinquefoil-headed lights in the upper part. A detail of it is here illustrated. The blind panelling measures 4 ft. high to the cill of the fenestration, the inclusive height of the screen being 7 ft. 6 in. It has not been ascertained whether the space enclosed by this screen represents the original position of the chantry, but more probably it was situated in some less westerly part of the building. “It was unfortunately set back,” writes the Rev. Dr. Cox, “a foot or two to give more room to the aisle in 1854, but otherwise remains as it was before the ‘restoration.’ Stone parcloses, though of fairly frequent occurrence round chantry tombs in cathedrals, are very rarely met with in parish churches.”

The stone screens, then, existing, or accountable for as known to have existed, in Derbyshire comprise those at Allestree, Chelmorton, Darley Dale, Ilkeston, and Monks’ Dale. Another one also must be included in the list, viz., the former rood-screen at Bakewell. From a description of it in 1823, while it might still be seen in situ separating the chancel from the rest of the church, it appears to have been of Decorated workmanship. Either half of it measured six feet long, exclusive of the space for the central entrance. The recorded height, 4 ft. 9 in., implies that it was the base or plinth merely, not the complete screen. At some subsequent time during the “repairs” which went on from 1841 to 1851—a sad decade of disaster for Bakewell church!—its stone screen was carried off by that notorious archæological raider, Mr. Thomas Bateman, to swell his predatory collection at Lomberdale House. The virtuoso himself being long since dead, and the contents of his museum dispersed, there is now practically no likelihood of the missing screenwork ever being traced and recovered. If it be still in existence anywhere, it should probably be sought for in the Weston Museum at Sheffield, whither most of the Derbyshire spoils from Lomberdale House are said to have found their way. If that be so, the screen ought certainly to be restored to its rightful place again at Bakewell. The loss of so venerable a monument cannot be too deeply deplored, and reflects the utmost discredit on all persons concerned in the removal of this ancient screenwork from the church to which it belonged.

The oldest actual example of timber screenwork in Derbyshire partakes of so little in common with the generality of woodwork, either in design or mode of treatment, that it is perhaps appropriate to deal with it here, in association with stone screenwork, as occupying an intermediate stage between the two several classes. I refer to the remains of the rood-screens at Kirk Langley, which, unworthily made up as they are into a box-door, placed at the west entrance, in the ill-lighted lowest storey of the tower, seem to me scarcely to have received the attention they might have claimed. Indeed, the deceptive environment of modern accretions combines with the twilight to make it extremely difficult for anyone to form a just estimate of the work or of its proper dimensions. As far as the existing remains, in their mutilated and altered condition, admit of a reconstruction of the original plan of the screen, it would appear to have consisted of two lengths of 4 ft. 6 in. each, and two doors of the same height and pattern as the other part; so that, when the whole stood intact, the fenestration must have formed a continuous arcade of trefoiled lights, their average centring 8¾ inches, each of them with an ogival crown, indenting a complete trefoil, balanced upon its apex. As the illustration shows, the treatment of this tracery work is peculiar. The component members of it—in plan square, with sides slightly concave—are set angle-wise to the front, and present a series of prominent edges without the usual fillet. Thus they have an effect of crisp and almost metallic acuteness, unfamiliar in woodwork as also it is in stone. The face of the cill below the fenestration is carved with a band of quatrefoils, having each a four-petalled flower—not a rose—in the centre. The design is of the fourteenth century, and it might possibly have been executed towards the close of Edward III.’s reign, or not later than the deposition of Richard II.

Kirk Langley Church: Detail of Former Rood-Screen in Oak, XIV. Century Work.

The remarks which follow should be understood to apply to screens which are true timberwork, alike in motif as in material. In structure and proportions, Derbyshire screens for the most part assimilate to the midland type, as exemplified at Newark and Strelley, in Nottinghamshire, or Wormleighton, in Warwickshire, and as distinguished from that of the south and west of England and Wales. That is to say, not a few of them rise to a stately height, with remarkably lofty fenestration; the latter being, in some instances, narrow even to attenuation. Thus the rood-screen at Breadsall, as far as can be judged by what remains of it, notably illustrates this peculiarity; in which regard it affords a striking parallel to the screenwork at Newark church before-mentioned.

But it is rather in parclose screens that this feature of excessive elongation is more especially in evidence. To counteract its ungainly appearance, without at the same time diminishing the extent of the aperture, resort is had in the principal screens at Chesterfield to the device of a transom to divide the fenestration about midway. This horizontal member, being feathered underneath, not only enhances the decorative character of the screenwork by the added effect of a lower tier of tracery-headed lights, but also makes for structural strength by providing a latitudinal junction from muntin to muntin.

Another point of similarity between Derbyshire rood-screens and the typical midland screens at (e.g., at Somerton, in Oxfordshire; Blore, in Staffordshire; Wormleighton, in Warwickshire; and Strelley, in Nottinghamshire), and of divergence between the former and southern examples, is that, where the design comprises vaulting, the springing of the ribs is not necessarily in line with the cord or base of the pierced tracery of the bay-heads (as is practically the rule for it to be in Kent, Devonshire, and Somerset), but at a higher level, sometimes with a discrepancy of nearly two feet between the two levels. The result of this arrangement is not altogether happy. For traceried ornament that extends below the limits of a tympanum, failing to define the springing-point, tends to make the vaulting itself look dwarfed and curtailed. For the latter to show to best advantage, the ribs should have an obvious correspondence with the sweep of the fenestration arch from spring to crown. Wherever it is otherwise, a sense of lack of homogeneity between the parts cannot but be felt.

Another feature which Derbyshire screens share in common with other midland screenwork, is the very usual inequality which the traceried fenestration-heads present on the obverse and reverse. In the south and east of England both surfaces are almost invariably carved and moulded with identical design and equal completeness; so that if I met with a detached portion of church screen tracery anywhere in Kent, for instance, I should at once know by its treatment to what part of a screen it belonged. For the back would only be smooth and unmoulded if it had been intended to fit flat against blind panelling in the lower half of a screen, and vice versâ. But Derbyshire tracery, as a rule, does not furnish such indications; and so, unless the design bore the outline of an arch, and were therefore unmistakably intended, like the Breadsall example illustrated, for the upper part of a vaulted screen, it would be next to impossible to determine its place in the composition. For even à jour tracery, meant to be looked at from either side, is usually plain and flat on one surface, as in the case of the parclose at Elvaston (see left-hand distance in the illustration), and that also at Fenny Bentley. The rood-screens at the latter church and at Ashover are both of them instances in which the upper traceries are enriched with the addition of crocketed ornament on the westward side, while they are plain and smooth on the chancel side.

In some screens, again, though the upper tracery is not indeed quite flat at the back, there is yet a marked difference between the degree of elaboration on the two surfaces. Thus in the tracery of the rood-screen at Elvaston, the western face, besides being moulded, is further embellished with crockets and finials, carved in bold relief, in some compartments handsomely fretted and deeply undercut, and altogether remarkably rich and varied in character (see illustration of detail); while the side towards the east is uniformly treated with simple moulding only. At Chaddesden the contrast between the east and west faces respectively of the upper part of the rood-screen is still greater. In this particular case a difference of treatment is necessarily entailed by the somewhat unusual plan on which the screen itself is constructed; the overhanging rood-loft (now, of course, no longer in existence) having been carried upon the naveward side by groined vaulting, and by a cove, instead of vaulting to correspond, towards the chancel. The spandrils, therefore, covered by the vaulting on the west side are exposed on the other, and present a series of solid triangles, which would have been bare and unsightly without applied ornament. All of these, then, together with the reverse of the transom in the two central bays and of the muntin between them, cut short by the entrance arch, are decorated with low relief carving entirely unlike the front. Moreover, although the muntins on either side are buttressed, the buttresses on the west terminate, as is usual in the case of vaulted screens, with boutels and caps for the springing of the groins; upon the east side, on the contrary, the buttresses continue nearly to the top, tapering off as they approach the lintel into graceful crocketed pinnacles.

The only recorded instances known to me of the occurrence of painting or gilding on Derbyshire screenwork (with the exception of the Parwich beam referred to hereafter), are those of the rood-screens at Ashover and Norbury, and of a parclose which divided the chancel from the north chapel at Mugginton, and which had fifteen coats of arms blazoned in colours upon it. The screen itself has long since vanished, but the account of it is preserved among the Harleian manuscripts in the report of Richard St. George’s Heraldic Visitation taken in the year 1611. As a rule, the sort of ornament to be found upon screenwork (except in the case of panels decorated with figures, of which Derbyshire, unless I have been mistaken, furnishes no examples) is of so essentially abstract, and, so to speak, non-committal a character, that the enemies of screens are seldom able, with any pretence of reason, to avail themselves of the pleas put forward by iconoclasts as a matter of principle.

Elvaston Church: Detail of Rood-Screen.

A small and feathered angel is introduced in the carved work above the doorway of the rood-screen at Elvaston; and there are some exceptionally fine half-length figures of angels along the top of one of the screens at Chesterfield. The particular screen that this carving rests upon (now turned, though it is, into a parclose between the north transept and its eastern chapel) is known to have been the ancient rood-screen in Chesterfield church, and to have stood in its place until about 1843, not long subsequently to which time it was re-erected in the position it now occupies.

That this screen dates from the first half of the fifteenth century, maybe, perhaps, as early as about 1430, I infer from the character of its fenestration. The latter, consisting of a single panel of pierced tracery in each bay, is an exact counterpart of the stone window-tracery of the period. It differs from the method of timber screen construction evolved subsequently, in which the muntins run from top to bottom of the openings, and in which the effect of tracery in each several bay-head is obtained by a combined series of separate units of pierced work let into grooves sunk in the upper part of the muntins. In the Chesterfield rood-screen, on the contrary (as also in the fourteenth century rood-screen at Kirk Langley, already described), the upright shafts in each bay merely support from below the tracery above in the head, instead of holding it in position as between two sides of a frame. Neither, again, in the Chesterfield example does the spacing of the batement lights correspond with that of the three lights at the bottom. The uneven number of the latter is abnormal. It became far more usual, as timber screen-work developed, for the fenestration to be divided by a central muntin into two lights (as at Breadsall and Fenny Bentley), or (as in other parts of England) for the central muntin, remaining a constant factor, to be supplemented by one pair or more pairs of muntins, as the case might be, so that the number of lights comprised in a single bay would, in all events, work out to an even number.

And now to describe the sculptured figure work at Chesterfield in detail, beginning at the north end of it, and proceeding from left to right. First, then, is an eagle; and next, a composite beast, having the head and horns of an antelope, the snout of a boar, and a chain round the neck, clawed feet, and the body and tail of an ox. Although, therefore, the one represents St. John, it is out of the question that the other can ever have been intended for an evangelistic symbol, notwithstanding they are both accompanied by scrolls. Then succeed six demi-angels, clothed in albs, and issuant from conventional cloud-wreaths; their wings pointing downwards in an oblique direction, with the ends of the feathers crossed in saltire, every one’s over his neighbour’s. Each angel bears one or more emblems or instruments of the Passion: the first, the crown of thorns; the second, the cross; the third, the seamless coat, together with the dice; the fourth, a shield displaying the five sacred wounds; the fifth, the lance and three nails; the sixth, the scourge and hammer. That this series was originally longer is evident from the abruptly mutilated feather-tips of another angel’s wing upon the southern or right hand extremity. He would, doubtless, have held the ladder and pincers; but even thus, the usual tale of emblems would scarcely be complete without the reed and sponge, the thirty pieces of silver, or the cock that crew thrice. How many, then, altogether of the angel figures are missing it is impossible to tell. Moreover, it seems probable enough that there would also have been animals with scrolls to balance those at the opposite end. A detail of the rood-screen and of the sculpture above it, is shown in the accompanying illustration.

Chesterfield Church: Detail of Screen in the North Transept, formerly the Rood-Screen.

The date of the angel ornament appears to be somewhere between 1465 and 1480. What remains of it now measures in length 14 ft. 6 in. by one foot in height; the figures being carved out of the solid, and occupying, in ordered row, the concave space of a band sunk between two beads. That this is no rood-beam, but a superficial ornament for the breast-summer, I can vouch, for two reasons; firstly, because the timber itself is a mere board, not exceeding four inches in thickness at the top, the thickest part of it; and secondly, because at the back are unmistakable traces of mortice holes for the joists that were fixed at right angles to it to carry the rood-loft floor. I know nothing that so much resembles this admirably appropriate ornament as that in a corresponding position in the stone pulpitum at Canterbury Cathedral; and in a wooden parclose at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire. And yet I have no hesitation in pronouncing that the Chesterfield example surpasses the others in beauty and variety of design. It is, in a word, a very model of its kind.

Now that screens in churches cannot have been, by quite unanimous consent, regarded as contravening “the principles of the Protestant Reformation,” whatever is to be understood by that portentous phrase, is clear from the practice of erecting such fixtures having from time to time continued long after the demise of Derby’s benefactress, Queen Mary Tudor. Thus the chapel at Risley, erected in 1593, was furnished with a chancel-screen of curious design, comprising cherub-heads and other Renaissance details. Later on, the south aisle at the old parish church of Wilne having been prolonged eastward to form a memorial chapel to Sir John Willoughby, who died in 1602, there was set up across the archway a heavy timber screen, with gates, which bear the arms of Willoughby and Hawe. The composition as a whole affords a striking sample of the depraved taste and secular spirit of the age. Among the elaborate carved ornaments may be identified representations of Hercules with his club; a Roman lictor with fasces and axe; satyrs and centaurs; all intermingled with pompous, warlike trophies of cannons, muskets, and drums! On the back of the screen is the date of its production, 1624. Later on, a church was built at Foremark in a spurious Gothic style, and Bishop Hacket consecrated it in 1662. It contains a characteristic oak chancel-screen of massive build and lofty elevation, with four glazed openings. To the above, all of them noteworthy instances of post-Reformation screenwork in Derbyshire, must be added the screen which separates the chancel from the nave or ante-chapel in the chapel at Haddon Hall. For, though parts of its woodwork, particularly the buttressed muntins, must be assigned to an earlier date, the main portion of it unquestionably was remodelled at the close of the sixteenth or during the first half of the seventeenth century. The turned balusters, which in this case supply the place of fenestration in a Gothic screen, are, like the wainscoting which lines the chancel walls, obvious products of a later epoch.

In fact, so persistent altogether was the tradition, and so hard to kill, that even in Dr. Hutchinson’s debased structure, which took the place of the demolished All Hallows’, the new chancel was not left unwarded, but was screened by iron grates. These, though exhibiting in their design the style of the period, yet reproduced, strange to say, quite a mediæval scheme of arrangement. A grate divided the chancel from the nave, and was continued northward and southward right across the building from wall to wall. And other grates again separated the chancel from the chancel aisles. These grates, though not altogether undisturbed, for the most part remained in position until 1873, when the interior of the building, then barely a century and a half old, was “restored,” and in the process the chancel grille itself, together with other fittings hitherto spared, was taken down. Numerous details of it are figured in the Chronicles of All Saints’, issued under the joint authorship of the Rev. Dr. Cox and Mr. W. H. St. John Hope in 1881, to which volume all who may be interested in a genuinely historic specimen of eighteenth century wrought ironwork are hereby referred.

There is one peculiar variety of mediæval screen arrangement which may be said to belong to a class by itself. It is sufficiently uncommon, being confined almost exclusively to domestic chapels, of which the former infirmary chapel of Dale Abbey, and such that now serves the purpose of parish church of Dale, furnishes an interesting example. A sketch of the interior, in 1870 or thereabouts, is given on plate xvii. of the late Rev. Samuel Fox’s History of St. Matthew’s, Morley (1872).

The chapel consists of chancel, nave, and south aisle, the latter separated from the nave by a wooden partition, formerly solid; long since, however, by its panels being sawn out, converted into open screenwork. But the main point of interest is the screen which divides the nave from the chancel. Screen and partition alike are of oak, and rest on a stone plinth. The chancel screen is very quaint in its severe simplicity. It has no tracery, but the mouldings are of the fifteenth century, the approximate date assigned to it being 1480. It consists of seven rectagonal compartments, i.e., a central doorway with three openings on either side; the muntins supporting a flat ceiling of timber, which, extending back as far as the wall, divides all that portion of the chapel westward of the screen itself into two floors. The upper one of these opens, gallery wise, into the chancel. Traces of a somewhat similar arrangement exist in a ruined oratory at Godstow Nunnery, on the banks of the upper river, near Oxford; and another instance has been noted in one of the chapels at Tewkesbury Abbey church. It is paralleled also in a sort at the private chapel of Brede Place, Sussex, but the plan of an upper storey, supported by a partition screen, does not express itself there in nearly so striking and complete a manner as at Dale. Other instances known are the chapels at Berkeley Castle and Compton Wynyates respectively. It may be mentioned that at Dale, since there is no internal communication between the gallery and the ground floor, the former has to be approached by an external staircase through a door on the upper level.

And, next, to consider the subject of the rood-loft. It would, of course, be situated at a greater height than the screen; as a rule, immediately above the latter, and connected organically with it, the structural braces being boxed within a casing of coved panel-work or of vaulting, with groins and bosses in imitation of stone masonry. As originally erected, the ancient rood-screens at Ashover, Breadsall, Chaddesden, and Norbury furnished instances of groined vaulting, now perished. The only screens, to the best of my knowledge, in Derbyshire which have not lost their vaulting are the rood-screens at Fenny Bentley and the parclose of the south transept in Chesterfield church. The first-named has been a good deal restored, and the latter has not altogether escaped. Both are examples of screens in which the irregularly shaped panels between the ribs are enriched with tracery ornament, a device that enhances the overhanging vaults with a delightful suggestion of mystery lurking within their shadowy recesses. I do not think that the Chesterfield parclose was ever surmounted, in rood-loft fashion, with a parapet, although the upper part of it expands eastwards and westwards quite far enough to have provided the accommodation of an average rood-loft had it been required.

The nearest approach (except the Fenny Bentley example before quoted) to a rood-loft survives at Wingerworth, a structure in some respects unique, in Derbyshire at any rate. Of its peculiar character the photograph conveys a better idea than any verbal description. I do not think it can have been erected earlier than 1480, nor later than 1520. Perhaps midway between the two, i.e., 1500, circa, is the most correct date to assign to it.

On the left-hand side may be observed the doorway, twenty inches wide, through which, pierced in the easternmost spandril of the north arcade, a rood-stair, now consisting of seven steps, emerges on to the platform itself. The head of this aperture consists of a stone lintel, which, being cut on its under side into the form of an obtuse angle, produces, roughly, the appearance of a four-centred arch. In the south or left-hand jamb are still fastened two iron hangers for the door, now no more, which opened navewards upon the loft.

In the early sixties of the nineteenth century, there remained on the plaster of the east wall of the nave, above the ancient loft, considerable traces of colour. In vivid contrast to this painted background showed up the bare silhouettes of a large cross, and of an upright figure on either side of it; thus marking clearly the place where the great rood, with the Mary and John, had stood in former days. At the present time nothing of these interesting relics is to be seen; the interior of Wingerworth church having been freshly distempered over with a smart coat of colour wash, while two immense hatchments, with pompous black cloth surrounds, occupy the place sacred from of yore to the memorial of mankind’s Redemption. What could be more unseemly than selecting this one, of all sites in a church, for the parading of the worldly distinctions of one’s family? Whether it is too late to save the remains of the rood-painting by scraping off the distemper which hides it, I cannot say; but there can be no question whatever but that the profane hatchments ought to be taken down as quickly as possible, and placed somewhere—anywhere—else than where I saw them in March, 1907.

The painting at Wingerworth is not the only instance of its kind known to have survived in Derbyshire down to the nineteenth century. Thus at Hayfield, according to a memorandum made on the spot by one of the brothers Lysons, who visited the old church shortly before its demolition in 1815, there was to be seen “at the back of the gallery, facing the nave ... a painting of the Crucifixion, with St. John and St. Peter ... said to have been painted (in) 1775, but probably from an ancient one which had remained undisturbed at the time of the Reformation.” That this work, for the figure of St. Peter to have been substituted for that of the Blessed Virgin Mary, must have been retouched by some post-Reformation hand, may readily be believed; but, in the same connection, the question presents itself as to whether the gallery noted by the famous topographer could by any manner of means have been the ancient rood-loft at Hayfield church.

Wingerworth Church: Base of the Rood-Loft.

But to return from speculation to facts and figures. The timber extant of the rood-loft at Wingerworth reaches from side to side of the nave, a length of 15 ft. 1 in. The distance from the floor of the nave to the base of this structure (itself barely an inch above the crown of the chancel arch) is 8 ft. 8½ in.; from the nave-floor to the platform at the top of it, 11 ft. 8½ in.; giving it an elevation of exactly three feet. The width of the platform from back to front is 38 inches. In the upper surface of the breast-summer, or main beam of the westward projection, are the remains of fourteen mortice holes (averaging 4 inches in length each, with a centring of 13½ inches), sunk to receive the tenons of the upright stiles that framed the front of the loft parapet, the height of which there is no present means of gauging. The uppermost front edge is embattled. Below, in a cavetto, at intervals, are nine square pateras of Gothic leaf ornament. The receding cove beneath the breast-summer is divided by moulded ribs into eight panels, the longitudinal ribs centred at 44 inches, and being crossed by a single latitudinal rib, with carved square bosses and Gothic leaves in the angles of intersection. This panelling occupies a superficial breadth of 32 inches between the breast-summer above and the moulded timber at the base.

The back of this structure fits close against the wall, and there is not the slightest trace of any supporting screenwork ever having touched, still less been attached to, its lower edge. I am disposed to think that the arrangements at Wingerworth must have been analogous to those of Sawley church, and that the solution of the problems they both present is to be arrived at by a comparison of the existing remains of rood-loft and screenwork in these several churches, the one supplementing the details which lack in the other, for the reconstruction of the original scheme. In both cases is a round-headed arch—that at Wingerworth is not later than the beginning of the twelfth century, while that at Sawley has been pronounced, on expert authority, to have been erected still earlier, bearing as it does the evidences of pre-Norman workmanship—an arch which, were it not for the impost at the spring on either side, resembles more than anything else (with its broad, flat soffit, no splays, no orders, no mouldings) a simple aperture cut in the solid wall. The arch at Wingerworth has an opening of 6 ft. 7 in. wide, or 7 ft. at the spring, by 8 ft. 8 in. (short measure) from floor to crown; that at Sawley, 14 ft. 1 in. wide, its height in proportion.

Now although at Wingerworth there is nothing of the sort remaining, at Sawley, on the contrary, the original fittings of the chancel have, fortunately, been preserved. These, comprising return stalls, with the rood-screen behind them, stand complete within the chancel. Nor could the screen, so placed (because of the thickness of the wall, interposing a bulk of 3 ft. 2 in. between chancel and nave), possibly have formed one organic structure, with the rood-loft on the other side, in the nave. I take it that in both cases the chancel was fully and finally furnished with its stalls and screen at a time when rood-lofts had not yet become a necessity—the fittings actually are of a heavy and somewhat primitive type of Perpendicular—and that when, later on, a rood-loft did require to be provided, circumstances left no choice open but to treat it as something entirely independent of the already erected screen. For to have set it up on the top of the latter, on the chancel side of the arch, would have defeated the primary object for which the rood-loft, as an adjunct to the performance of public worship, existed. Without doubt the only place where it could adequately fulfil the requirements of a rood-loft was against the east wall of the nave, above the chancel arch. The length, then, of the rood-loft at Sawley would be the same as the width of the nave, viz., 26 ft. 3 in.

All this is no idle theory. It is confirmed by the existence, in Sawley church, of a pair of stone corbels projecting from the masonry at the east end of the nave above the chancel arch. The level of the corbel in the north-east corner is 17 ft. 1 in. above the floor; that of the opposite one in the south-east corner, 17 ft. 3 in. These would have supported the ancient rood-beam, there being ample wall-surface at the east end of the nave for the rood, as well as for the rood-loft (containing, possibly, the “payre of orgyns” named in the inventory of the sixth year of Edward VI.), to have been situated beneath, either crossing the opening of, or (as at Wingerworth) crowning the summit of, the chancel arch.

Neither are the above-named cases themselves without parallel. It is recorded that there was in the nave (19 ft. 10 in. wide) of the old church at Parwich (pulled down in 1872) a sort of rood-loft projection similar in construction to that at Wingerworth, and that in the course of demolition the ends of four stout, squared timbers were taken out of the masonry about two feet above the crown of the Norman chancel-arch, a low-pitched one like (although, being more richly ornamented, of later date than) the Wingerworth example itself.

Owing to the scarcity of wills, churchwardens’ accounts, and such other documents as might have thrown light on the subject, the exact date of the introduction of the rood-loft cannot, in the case of the great majority of churches in Derbyshire, be ascertained. At Elvaston church, in 1474, the first Lord Mountjoy left instructions for the carrying out of certain works, which would most likely have included the erection of a rood-loft there, though the latter is not named in the bequest. In fact, the earliest and only instance I know of in which the rood-loft was explicitly provided for, is the will of Sir Henry Vernon, of Haddon. The date of this document is 18th January, 1514, and the item in point runs: “I bequethe to the churche of Bakewell and to makying of the Rode lofte £6.” The will was proved on 5th May of the next year, 1515, not later than which date the testator’s wishes, so I assume, would be carried into execution.

I have already indicated how the general absence of aisles from the chancels of its churches drove chantry-founders in Derbyshire to occupy the space of the nave or nave aisles. But, more than that, it effectually checked the expansion of the rood-loft and screen, and confined them within the nave’s width. For wherever the eastern wall of an aisle, conterminous with the nave, is pierced by a window (instead of by an arch leading into a chapel beyond), it does not admit of either screen or loft being carried across it in continuation of the screen and loft in the nave. The only sure sign of the alternative plan having been adopted, i.e., of rood-loft having extended to the outer wall of the aisle, would be a rood-entrance in that outer wall. But such a sign I have not met with anywhere in Derbyshire. I searched for it in Chesterfield church, the plan of which, so it seemed to me, might have admitted the rood-loft being carried right across the building, including the aisles; but in vain. I cannot point to a single instance in a Derbyshire church of which it could be positively asserted that the rood-loft extended beyond the limit of the width of the nave.

The usual place for the rood-loft door and staircase in this county would appear to be either in the nave or in the inner corner of an aisle immediately adjacent to the nave. Such approaches, or traces of them, exist or are known to have existed at, among other churches, those of Ashbourne, Ashover, Aston, Bakewell, Barrow-upon-Trent, Breadsall, Chaddesden, Derby (old St. Michael’s), Kirk Langley, Monyash, Repton, Spondon, Tideswell, Wilne, North Wingfield, and Wingerworth. Nevertheless, as compared with other districts of England, Derbyshire cannot be reckoned among those counties in which rood-entrances and rood-stairs are of very common occurrence. However, where either they do survive or traces of them occur, they afford no exception to the normal dimensions of such structures. Indeed, in Derbyshire there are to be found rood-entrances as narrow as, if not even narrower than, anywhere else in the kingdom. Thus those at Chaddesden and Wingerworth measure each only eighteen inches wide.

In some cases the ascent starts abruptly at a very awkward height from the ground. For instance, at Ashover the lowest step of the rood-stair is 6 feet above the floor level; 6 ft. 3 in. at Wingerworth. Nor in either case is there any perceptible trace of the steps having descended lower towards the ground. For them to be reached, then, where they are, is a feat that could not be accomplished without the help of a ladder. In the case of Wingerworth, however, it is true that, as to whether the rood-stair originally terminated at its present distance from the floor, there is, for the following reasons, much uncertainty. The mother of one Arthur Mower, of Barlow, dying in 1574, and being buried in Wingerworth church, her son wrote down minute particulars of the site of her interment; and the old memorandum book, still extant, records how she “lyeth in the church in the north alley at the head of the alley on the north side, and her feet lieth as nigh of the north side of the grysse” (i.e., stair, from the Latin gressus) “that goeth up into the Rood-loft as may be.” Now nobody at the present day who wanted to be accurate—and the sole raison d’être of a memorandum like this is to preserve and hand down as trustworthy a record as possible—would dream of describing the feet of a body lying in the north-east corner of the north aisle as being close to the ascent of the rood-stair! To obviate the discrepancy, then, is one not forced to the conclusion that the rood-stair must have been somehow or other prolonged downwards in a northerly direction until it reached the ground at the spot indicated?

Rood-stairs, being no longer required once the lofts had been overthrown, have met with shameful neglect, often with violent maltreatment. In some cases they have been allowed to survive only through having been turned into cupboards for brooms and ladders, gas meters, or water cisterns; but, nevertheless, after full allowance is made for rood-stairs that formerly were and now have perished, there is still left a large percentage of Derbyshire churches in which no permanent stone stairs can be supposed to have existed. In such cases, unless there was a fixed wooden staircase, access must have been obtained by no better means than a ladder the whole way from floor to loft. The practical inconvenience of this proceeding, together with the narrow dimensions of rood-doors and stairs—while their builders were constructing them, it would in most cases have been just as easy to make them half a dozen or so inches wider had there been any occasion—affords corroborative evidence of the impossibility of parochial rood-lofts having been used, or designed to be used, for ceremonial purposes by the officiants at divine service.

In Derbyshire, as elsewhere, ornamental treatment, either of rood-stair entrance or of rood-door itself, is so abnormal as to call, wherever such does occur, for notice. Ashbourne church may be said to furnish an instance in point. There, in the southern transept, the south-east pier of the central tower contains a staircase, which, though constructed doubtless contemporaneously with the building of the tower itself, and, therefore, anterior to the general introduction of rood-lofts, would certainly have served to give access to the rood-loft as soon as ever that adjunct was provided at Ashbourne church. The door, then (see illustration), may not unjustly be ranked among rare examples of ornamented rood-doors. Under a moulded label, terminating on the left in a sculptured head that cannot strictly claim to be an authentic product of the period, stands this handsome oak door of late thirteenth century workmanship. It is divided vertically into two ogival-headed panels, and is enriched with wrought-iron bands and hinges, in a very fair state of preservation, although it is to be regretted that their elegant contour is partly hidden by a clumsy modern timber lining inserted into the masonry opening.

It cannot have escaped the notice of attentive observers how often the steps of rood-stairs in parish churches have been trodden into hollows, as though they had been subjected to much wear and tear. Such must, indeed, have been very constant to have left its mark thus pronouncedly upon rood-stairs, and that, too, in the comparatively short period of their use—in many cases, of not above, perhaps, a hundred years’ duration—between the date of their erection and of the Reformation changes, which sent them back again into disuse. Some other explanation, then, more convincing and more in accord with the evidence of fact than the suggestion of a mere ceremonial function in the rood-loft on special occasions, must be adduced to account for the regular employment of the rood-stair. That the lay folk, being many, rather than the officiant minister and his clerks, being few, were they who trod the stairs leading into the parochial rood-loft, is evident. The main function of the rood-loft in parish churches was to accommodate singers, musicians, and their instruments. Again, it should be borne in mind that very often (as churches, for example, like Ashover, Old Brampton, Edensor, Staveley, Tideswell, and Wingerworth attest) a sacring-bell hung in the eastern gable of the nave, or (as in cruciform churches like that of Ashbourne) in the central tower, in either event immediately above the rood-loft. Than the latter, then, there was no better position that the sacrist could be placed in; the rood-loft affording him an excellent vantage-ground from which to keep an eye upon the movements of a priest saying mass at any altar in the building, and to summon the people at the bidding of the bell when the right moment came for them to raise their eyes and worship the uplifted Host.

Ashbourne Church: Door leading to the Rood-Stair.

Incidentally, again, the rood-loft would have been resorted to as a convenient place from which to reach the rood for its veiling and unveiling. And it must have been hither, also, that those whose office it was to tend and light the beam-lights would have had frequent occasion of coming.

But these are points which open up the subject of the rood itself, and of the various devotions and customs that grew up around it in pre-Reformation days.

The great crucifix, with the flanking statues which usually accompanied it, would either rise from the rood-loft direct, being attached to the top of the parapet, or, in the case of churches which were lofty enough to admit of it and not to cramp the heads of the figures by the roof descending too closely upon them, would be carried above the level of the rood-loft upon a separate beam crossing the eastern extremity of the nave—always provided that the essential condition was to impart the utmost dignity to the rood itself, and to insure its becoming the most conspicuous object in the whole building. Specific mention of a rood having existed in mediæval days is forthcoming in the case of the three monastic churches of Dale, Darley, and Repton, already named; in the collegiate church of All Hallows, Derby; as also in the parochial churches of Ashbourne, Bakewell, Breadsall, Chesterfield, Morley, and Repton.

The figures, to wit, the Christ upon the Cross and the Mary and John beside it, were usually sculptured and coloured, or, less commonly, gilded; and sometimes even clothed also. The existence of the last-named practice is attested in respect of images in general by a long list of jewels and garments belonging to the statue of the Madonna and Child in the Bridge Chapel at Derby, and by an item of “2 cootes of ymagys of lynen cloth and 1 of sylke” at Kirk Ireton; and in respect of roods in particular, by another item which occurs in the inventory of the church goods at Ashbourne, drawn up by order in the first year of Edward VI. The entry in point runs thus: “1 holde cote,” i.e., one old coat, “for the roode.” This garment, being described as “old,” would imply, not so much that the custom of employing such things had declined, as that the particular coat in question had become worn through long using. It is more than likely, indeed, that the rood’s wardrobe had been replenished through the generosity of some devout donor with fresh and costlier clothing when required, to take the place of that which had become worn out—for it was very far from being in accord with the spirit of our mediæval ancestors to offer to the Lord and His service that which cost them nothing—but that it had been forfeit already ere this time. It must be borne in mind that the best of everything worth looting had been seized by Edward’s predecessor, and that the catalogues of ecclesiastical ornaments and utensils, drawn up officially in the boy-King’s reign, represent but the pitiful remnants, of little value, left over because they had failed to tempt the rapacity of Henry VIII. And yet, poor and insignificant as they might be, they were not to be allowed to escape further diminution at the hands of Edward VI.’s counsellors and ministers, men whose conduct exhibits a peculiarly revolting blend of avarice and puritanism. That these foregoing remarks are well-founded is illustrated by the language of the inventories themselves, wherein frequently occur such qualifying descriptions as “old,” “outworn,” “torn,” or “broken,” whereas those items are rare to which the adjective “whole” is appended for differentiating the good and complete state of such few articles as happen to be above the average mediocrity of the greater number.

The great rood, as well as all images and pictures in churches, was veiled throughout Passiontide until the latter end of Holy Week, as is exemplified by the mention, in 1466, in a list of the ornaments then belonging to All Hallows’, Derby, of a “grete clothe that coverethe the Rode.” But an item in the inventory taken of the goods of Morley church at the beginning of Edward VI.’s reign, viz., “a shete y^t hanged afor y^e Rode,” would appear to have been rather a hanging for the front of the rood-loft, in the presence of or at the foot of the rood itself. Rood-lofts, as is known from other sources, were often covered with “stayned” or painted hangings to enhance their ornamental qualities; or, on the other hand, veiled in white shrouds, like the rood, in Lent, in churches where the imagery and decoration upon the woodwork of the loft itself was too gay and garnished in appearance to be consistent with the solemnity of the penitential season. The past tense in the case of the hanging at Morley church is evidence that the ancient use, whichsoever alternative is referred to, had, by the date of the taking of the inventory, been already discontinued.

In the parish church at Bakewell was an altar of the Holy Cross, “built by the said cross,” situated, that is, near to the great rood, at the eastern end of the south aisle of the building. And in connection with this altar, in the reign of Edward III., a chantry was founded and endowed by Sir Godfrey Foljambe, ratification of the same being granted by royal letters patent in 1345. Further, the deed of confirmation by the Dean and Chapter of Lichfield is extant, wherein are set forth in detail the duties of the office of chaplain of the Holy Cross. From this document it appears that the chantry priest, though celebrating at the same altar, was to say a different votive mass on every day of the week in specified rotation, the mass on Friday being always that of the Holy Cross. Moreover, at every mass, after the Confiteor, he was to turn to the people and say, in his mother tongue: “Pray ye for the soul of Sir Godfrey Foljambe, and Anne, his wife, and his children, and brothers of the guild of the Holy Cross, and all the faithful deceased.” Again, a grant of the date 1405 exists, by which one Dom John Chepe, chaplain of the chantry of the Holy Cross in Bakewell, makes over in reversion certain landed property to the service of the said chantry for ever. Another document, of the year 1535, incidentally makes mention of “the burgage of the Holy Cross,” by which is to be understood a piece of land, probably with house property upon it, lying within the bounds of the town, and forming part of the endowments either of the chantry or the guild of that title. The last incumbent of this chantry was William Oldeffeld. On its dissolution, as the pension roll of 30th October, 1552, shows, he was allowed an annuity of £6 in lieu of his former stipend; while William Hole, chantry priest of the holy rood at Wirksworth, is known, from Cardinal Pole’s pension roll, to have been granted £5 per annum. The “rode chauntrye” at Wirksworth was founded, in his lifetime, by Sir Henry Vernon, the same whose will, as already recorded, contained a bequest for the rood-loft at Bakewell.

In Ashbourne church, until the middle of the sixteenth century (as scheduled in the chantry roll drawn up for the purposes of confiscation shortly after the accession of Edward VI.), there stood near the nave, at the foot of the rood-screen, or as near unto as might be, in the south aisle, an altar dedicated to the Holy Cross; to which was attached a chantry, founded in 1392 by the feofees of Nicholas Kniveton, for the daily celebration of the Holy Sacrifice in perpetuity. The deed of confirmation of the same by the Bishop, Dean and Chapter of Lincoln, dated 1404, is extant; as well as an indenture, dated 15th January in the seventh year of Henry VIII. on the occasion of the appointment of a new chaplain. By this document the incoming “rood-priest” covenants to take due care of, and not to waste nor alienate, the chantry goods committed to his custody; the list of which, set forth at length, comprises all the requisite ornaments for the performance of divine service (including “two chests in ye Roodequere” for the safekeeping of the aforesaid ornaments), and the domestic furniture and utensils of the chaplain’s residence as well. At the Reformation, the property and endowments were forfeited to the Crown; but it is of interest to recall how long and in what wise the memory of the institution has been kept alive by the people, for in the ancient garden of the chaplain’s house is a well, which, down to within the eighteenth century, used, by time-honoured custom, to be “dressed” or garlanded with flowers every Ascension Day after a special service in the church, and which, as lately as the last decade of the nineteenth century, was known among the oldest inhabitants of the place by the traditional name of “the rood-well.” For similar reasons a certain parcel of meadow-land in Ashbourne, being another piece of chantry property secularised, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth was named “Lampholme”; while certain tenements, as appears from the negotiations which preceded the endowing of the grammar school in 1585, were termed “candle-rents.” Again, a curious illustration of analogous tradition in another part of Derbyshire is furnished by a manuscript commonplace-book which belonged to one Roger Columbell, of Darley Hall. As he died in 1565, it cannot have been written later than in the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. The entry is to the effect that in former days the custom prevailed of paying, at Easter, on every house in a parish a duty of “1 fartheynge called a wax farthinge ... for lyght of the alter.”

I have met with no earlier recorded example of a rood-light endowment in Derbyshire than of that at Breadsall. Its charter is dated 1330, on the Sunday after the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. By this instrument one Geoffrey, “the Reve” (or steward), son of Ranulph de Breydishale, gives and concedes half an acre of land in Breadsall to the light of the Holy Cross in the church there, “in pure and perpetual alms for ever, freely, quietly, well and in peace.” The charter concludes with, “Warranty to the said light against all people,” above the signatures of the witnesses.

Again, in a list of “serges” (wax candles; in French, cierges) “holden up” (maintained) by the bounty of individuals or by the several craft guilds connected with the church and parish of All Hallows, Derby, it is recorded that, in 1484, five such lights had been provided to burn before the rood. For it was not unusual for lay folk to band themselves into a confraternity under the style of the Holy Cross, among the chief duties undertaken by them being that of keeping up the requisite light or lights to burn before the rood in their parish church. Among their privileges, as in the above case of the chantry in Bakewell church, would be that of being specially remembered whenever the chaplain offered the Holy Sacrifice. Chesterfield had its guild of the Holy Cross, for whose sodality meetings and offices was set apart, with the same dedication, the east chapel of the north transept—the very chapel now enclosed by the ancient rood-screen. There was a guild of the rood at Repton also, towards whose funds, in the year 1520, one William Bothe, of Barrow, bequeathed 10s. in his will.

The mediæval custom of burning lights before the rood, and other images, too, was—if one may so express it—a definite and perfectly natural reflex of the life and conditions of the time. Previously to the closing decade of the fifteenth century, the vast continent of America still remained the dreamland Atlantis it had been to Brendan and Meldune; the Queens Consort of Spain decked themselves in the gorgeous bravery of their jewels, and the questing dove fretted unavailingly against restraining bars, until at length one devoted woman, King Ferdinand’s wife, Isabella (the same were parents of our Catherine of Aragon, and grandparents of our own Mary Tudor), offering up her jewels in pawn, found the wherewithal to equip and send forth the great navigator on his momentous voyage. Nor even then could it be otherwise than that several generations must pass away before any practical result of Columbus’s discovery could affect the great mass of the European population, and before cane-sugar could supersede the old-fashioned use of honey for sweetening purposes. Meanwhile, in Derbyshire, as elsewhere, the ancient traditions lingered long; and year by year, when the warm weather came on, the bee-keeper of the Peak would carry his skeps, or wheel them in a hand-barrow (choosing, if he were a prudent man, the night hours for the transit), out on to the moors. And there, amid the wild thyme and heather, he would set the bees down, and leave them all the summer through to gather in their store as long as the flowers were in bloom, bringing them back again into shelter at the first approach of winter. The honey, then an indispensable commodity in every household, would be carefully strained and separated from the comb; helping to pay landlord’s rent in kind, while the wax would go in tithes and free-will offerings to the service of the church. Such, then, since the devotional practices of our pre-Reformation forefathers were not aloof from their social and domestic life, but intimately interwoven and bound up with it, not out of joint nor harmony, but dovetailing and accordant the one with the other; such is the economic connection between votive candle-burning and the industry of bee-culture.

The large share of importance attached to bees, and the widespread extent of the habit of bee-keeping in former times, has left its mark upon the face of the country in many a popular place-name and field-name, whose significance is not perhaps generally appreciated by others than students of folklore and archæology. Mr. Sydney Oldall Addy, in his learned work on Hallamshire, entitled The Hall of Waltheof (1893), enumerates the following instances in Derbyshire:—Honey Spots, a field of two acres between Hope and Pindale; Bean Yard, at Ashover; Pointon Cross, at Hucklow; Poynton Wood, just outside Dore; and several fields bearing the name of Pitcher Croft in the immediate neighbourhood; and he shows how every one of the words, or roots of words, italicised, in some way or another preserves a directly etymological allusion to the bees or beehives having been kept from of old in the locality so named. If Beeley, Beelow, and Beeholme are doubtful instances in point, as being capable of another interpretation, it is perhaps not wholly unfeasible that the received derivation of Bentley from Benets’ lag, or meadow, may have to be amended to bee-field.

But be that as it may, the olden system, in the tangible form of payments reckoned in honey and wax (itself a computation dating from at least as far back as the Domesday Book, in which two Derbyshire manors, those of Darley and Parwich, to wit, are valued at so much current coin of the realm and so many sextaries of honey apiece), endured without a break all through the catastrophe of the Reformation, and afterwards almost down to our own times. Thus, in the parish of Hope, part of the small tithes pertaining to the vicar were paid in honey and wax. As far back as 1254, tithes of honey formed part of the emolument of the Vicar of Tideswell. In fact, in the Peak district generally, it was customary for every tenth swarm of bees to be claimed by the parson of the parish, a right which continued to be acknowledged until nearly as late as the middle of the eighteenth century. Thus in 1743, the then Vicar of Castleton records in his journal the receipt of a swarm of bees by way of tithe. Elsewhere, though actual payment in kind had become obsolete, a small fixed duty, payable to the parson in money, long survived. In some parishes, in addition to the ordinary tithes, Easter dues upon various kinds of stock and produce were chargeable, under which head the assessment of bee-keepers was fixed at 2d. per head. In the parish of Twyford, as the Terrier shows, the like sum was claimed “for every hive of bees in lieu of tithe-honey and wax”—a claim which did not cease to be recognised until the nineteenth century, when, in a general re-adjustment and commutation, it was abolished. So the last lingering tradition of the old order was changed, and finally perished.

And here is the place to speak of the fate of the rood and of its accessory loft. Now, although the destruction of rood-lofts, screens and roods, in so far as they were involved in the destruction of the monasteries themselves, may be said to have begun under Henry VIII. in 1536, being followed, two years after, i.e., in 1538, by the order for the demolition of all roods and images alleged to be abused by superstitious devotions and offerings—the diversion of the latter into the hands of the King and his myrmidons being, of course, the real motive of the attack—the general and systematic destruction of roods did not take place until Edward VI. came to the throne, nor that of rood-lofts until nearly the end of the third year of Queen Elizabeth. The precise date of the order is 10th October, 1561. It decreed that rood-lofts should be taken down in every church and chapel in the land. It is essential, however, to note that at the same time that rood-lofts were abolished, the partition of the chancel—such was the term then used for the rood-screen—was expressly and emphatically ordered to be maintained. It is a noteworthy fact, also, that in the set of articles put forth for Archbishop Parker’s first metropolitical visitation (that of 1560–1), which included the county of Derbyshire as part of the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, no reference whatever is made either to roods or rood-lofts. Meanwhile, however, the order of 1561 was promulgated, and Parker then entered upon the campaign in earnest. His visitation articles of 1563 contain the inquiry: “Whether your rood-lofts be pulled down according to order prescribed, and if the partition between the chancel and church [i.e., nave] be kept?” The same question would naturally go the round of the southern province, within which, as is well known, Derbyshire lies. In 1565, then, when Bentham made a visitation of the county, among the instructions issued for the occasion is found the following:—“That you do take down your rood-lofts unto the lower beams, and do set a comely crest or vault upon it, according to the Queen’s Majesty’s Injunctions set forth for the same.” This shows that Derbyshire enjoyed no exemption from the general order already mentioned. Two years later, i.e., in 1567, Parker, in his metropolitical visitation, reiterated his previous order of 1563; evidence as to the standard that was required throughout the country. Nor did his successor, Edmund Grindall, fail to follow his example. In the new archbishop’s articles to be inquired of within the province of Canterbury in the metropolitical visitation of 1576, the question is asked: “Whether your rood-lofts be taken down and altered, so that the upper parts thereof with the soller or loft be quite taken down unto the cross beam” (this, of course, means not the rood-beam but the transverse beam or breast-summer), “and that the said beam have some convenient crest put upon the same?” Later on, when, in 1584, Overton visited the Lichfield diocese, he inquired, among other points: “Whether your rood-lofts be clean defaced and taken away?” It is unnecessary to pursue this phase of the subject any further; but it is scarcely to be wondered at if, from such persistent and accumulated hostility on the part of the authorities, as I have retailed, no Derbyshire rood-loft has survived to this day in its complete and original state.

According to an inventory of the year 1527, there were in All Hallows church, Derby, a “pair” of great organs, and another small “pair” beside. Further entries, occurring both under the dates 1569–70 and 1582–3, mention the existence of the leaden weights “which lay upon the organs” to compress the bellows. Whence it has been inferred that because the almost invariable place for the organ in pre-Reformation times was the rood-loft, therefore the latter structure was still standing in the church down to 1583. But surely the evidence on the point is negative, and far too slight to warrant any such conclusion! For the documents which speak of the organs are altogether silent as to their whereabouts in the building; and even though they may have been situated originally on the top of the rood-loft in All Saints, in the face of the notorious fact that rood-lofts throughout the country had been condemned twelve years previously, the bare mention of an organ outliving the general wrecking of the rood-loft (which, indeed, it was fully entitled to do, from the legal point of view) cannot be taken for proof of the law in force against rood-lofts having been disregarded in this or in any individual instance, unless there be produced some more direct and explicit testimony to the contrary.

If Dr. Pegge is to be credited, the rood-loft was still standing in Chesterfield church in 1783. At Staveley, it is recorded to have stood until 1790. At Hayfield, until about 1815, it remained entire, according to the Lysons; and according to the same authority’s manuscript notes at the British Museum, though the fact is not recorded in their published history of the county, the rood-loft still survived at Taddington in or about the year 1812. Possibly, also, at Tideswell the rood-loft, although transferred to the west end of the church, remained until as lately as about 1820. Beside these, there are no authenticated instances of the survival of the ancient rood-loft in Derbyshire after the date of the general destruction.

This measure was as arbitrary as also it proved, within no great space of time after, to have been shortsighted. It was arbitrary because, considering the circumstances at the date of the decree being issued, it was uncalled for and unwarrantable, once roods themselves had ceased to be. For the ruin of roods accomplished under King Edward had been so immense, that their restoration in the short space of Mary’s reign could not but be partial; and already Elizabeth’s puritan friends, acting upon her injunctions of 1559 against “monuments of superstition,” had hastened to destroy as many images as were found standing at the date of her accession—and that, one may be sure, with the greater energy and thoroughness, since the Queen herself was really suspected at first of being unsound in this very matter of the crucifix. The order of 1561 was unreasonable, therefore, because every one of those customs, such as the burning of lights before the rood, or hanging up festal branches and garlands about it, clothing it with holiday robes or Lenten wrappings, the ceremonial stations at its feet, accompanied by sprinkling with holy water or by censings—these and, in fine, whatsoever other observances in olden days had had the rood for centre and object, were necessarily quashed and rendered no longer practicable thenceforward, the rood itself having been abolished. That the order was shortsighted, too, is patent from the fact that in consequence of it there sprang up a fresh crop of difficulties, which have never been satisfactorily settled nor disposed of to this day. I refer, of course, to the question of organs and choristers, and of the most convenient and suitable positions for them relatively to occupy in a church. The rood itself had indeed vanished, but with it not all the functions and uses of the rood-loft. That the latter had, from a practical point of view, enormous advantages, is a fact which, lost sight of at the time amid the frenzy of bigotry, which insisted on its being condemned to destruction, very quickly began to be appreciated after that the ancient rood-loft was no more.

It is a highly instructive object-lesson, and one not unprofitable eke for our own times, to note what ensued; nor can I, with the facts of the case before me, impugn the logic of the extreme reformers, who were so ill-content with the disappearance of the rood-loft that they never ceased to agitate for the prohibition of church organs as well. This, then, happened. The opponents of instrumental music in divine service were not allowed to have their will; and yet the retention of an organ after the organ-platform, the rood-loft, to wit, had been done away with, was very quickly found to be unworkable, unless some other provision were made for it and for the singers, whose voices the organ was meant to accompany. The removal of the rood-loft at the east end of the nave, therefore, was inevitably followed, sooner or later, by the erection of a gallery at the opposite end of the nave. In some instances, indeed, portions of the old rood-loft were actually re-erected, being incorporated in a new organ-gallery at the west end of the church. Thus, at Parwich, when, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the old west gallery came to be taken down, the main beam of it was found to have a carefully chamfered edge and to have been enriched with painting and gilding, thus proving beyond all question that it must have formed one of the timbers of the ancient rood-loft, if not the original rood-beam itself.

Scarcely more than fifty years had elapsed since the demolition of rood-lofts had been ordained before a gallery was erected at the west end of All Hallows, Derby, and, what is more remarkable, in 1636 another, upon which the term, not void of significance, “loft” actually occurred in the inscription to commemorate the donor’s name and benefaction. Nor was this the only example on record. Another inscribed “loft” was erected at the west end of Heanor church in 1633, and another at Osmaston in 1747, while several more, though not explicitly so inscribed, were, as contemporary evidence proves, referred to at the time as “lofts.” Of these, the gallery at Ashover (1722), at Bakewell (1751), and at Stanley (1765) are examples. At Marston-on-Dove, in 1712, the parish agreed to erect a “loft,” as the recorded proposal for the scheme shows, “for ye schoolmaster of Hilton and his scholars and ye singers to sitt in.” At Hayfield, as shown in a plan of the seating accommodation and scale of charges for the same, under the date 1741, “every singer upon ye organ loft” paid the modest sum of 4d. a year by way of pew-rent. Again, at Hayfield a new “loft” was set up at the west end of the building in 1746.

If the Osmaston example carries the tradition of the “loft” forward as far as 1747, on the other hand the Heanor example affords a most valuable link with the remoter past by carrying back the tradition to the period of the pre-Reformation rood-loft. Standing until within living memory, it bore the inscription: “This loft was built at ye sole cost of John Clarke, of Codnor, gent., in the year 1633, who dyed An^o. Dnⁱ. 1641, et Anno Ætatis 88”; on the face of it a dry and prosaic statement of fact, but yet to all who can read between the lines, how eloquent a tale of the times does it unfold, for this man, who at eighty set up a singers’ gallery or loft in his parish church, would be a child of about eight years of age at the date when the royal decree went forth for the general destruction of rood-lofts.

If the coincidence is the more striking in the case of galleries erected at the east end of the nave, exactly on the site of the ancient rood-loft, as at Chesterfield and the neighbouring village of Old Brampton, at Eyam, Mellor, and Tideswell, it must be admitted that the west end of the nave was the more usually selected position. Western galleries are known to have been in use in the nineteenth century in the following churches, amongst others: Allestree, Ashbourne, Beighton, Brailsford, All Saints’ new church in Derby, Duffield, Eckington, Etwall, Killamarsh, Kirk Ireton, Long Eaton, Mackworth, Marston Montgomery, Matlock, Morley, Mugginton, North Wingfield, Parwich (old church), Smalley, Spondon, Stanley, Taddington, Tickenhall (old church), Wilne, and Wingerworth. Although at the last-named the base of the rood-loft remains, the destruction of the parapet had made it unsafe for use, and necessitated the erection of the newer gallery. The above list might be very much extended, but there is no need to multiply instances.

The renewal of the west gallery at Tideswell church in 1824, and the erection of that at Sawley in 1838, or that at Beeston as late as 1840 (only, however, to be restored away again in 1871), brings the tradition of building organ-galleries down almost to the middle of the nineteenth century. Some, indeed, among those named in the above list continued in position as late as the seventies of the nineteenth century, that at Ashbourne even until 1882.

Between the earliest recorded instance of a gallery being built, in 1614, to the latest, in 1840, represents a lively stream of tradition, uninterrupted for just 220 years, until the influence of the Tractarian movement set the tide flowing in the contrary direction, and eventually succeeded in compassing the doom of the old-fashioned organ-gallery altogether. The responsibility rests not with Puritans, but with the opposite party in the Church of England; and it is a sad, if edifying, commentary on the fallibility of human judgment that, at the very time when Holman Hunt was painting his mystical pre-Raphaelite picture of “Christ wounded in the House of His Friends,” the Tractarians—they, of all people!—were busy, from one end of England to the other, obliterating the last historic vestiges of the ancient rood-loft in our churches. If only these well-meaning men (and many others like them, down to the present time) had been content to restore literally rather than ostensibly; if, instead of introducing surpliced choirs into parochial churches where such a thing had never been known before in the whole course of their history; if, instead of dragging down the organ from its antique gallery where they found it into the main body of the building, and thereby displacing table-tombs and other memorials of the faithful departed; shutting out the glorious light of windows (as at Ashover), hiding their exquisite tracery, or, worse, positively thrusting out windows and overthrowing walls, and erecting externally (as at Ashover, Bolsover, Langwith, Littleover, Mackworth, South Normanton, and Spondon) counterfeit Gothic organ-chambers to accommodate this huge and vehement obstruction; if, instead of perpetrating all these innovations and disfigurements, they had simply been content to follow loyally the precedent of their forefathers, and had relegated organs and singers together to a gallery situated in the ancient place for them, viz., over the entrance to the chancel, how much heart-burning and division might have been avoided; how many a venerable church fabric, now irretrievably ruined in contour and proportions, might have been saved from injury, and have retained both in the original form in which they had come down to modern days, intact!

That which follows consists of additional particulars concerning the present subject, arranged, in alphabetical order, under the names of the various localities.

Alkmonton.—At this place, a township of Longford, was a hospital dedicated under the invocation of St. Leonard. Lord Mountjoy endowed it by will in 1474, at the same time directing that a quire and parclose screen should be erected in the chapel attached to the hospital. The institution was suppressed at the Reformation, and no remains whatever of the chapel and its screenwork survive.

Allestree.—The church was entirely rebuilt in 1866–7. The length of the ancient rood-loft, assuming that it did not exceed the width of the nave, would have been 19 ft. 3 in., the dimensions of the old church. For stone screenwork, supposed to have belonged to Allestree church, see supra.

Ashbourne.—The eastern aisle of the north transept is screened off from the rest of the transept and from the chancel, to form the Cockayne chapel. The screen, which runs from north to south, is divided by a column into two sections. The northern section is 14 ft. 3 in. long, and comprises eight compartments, including the entrance; the southern section is 14 ft. 8½ in. long, and comprises nine compartments. The section of the parclose which runs from west to east is 19 ft. long, and comprises eleven and a half compartments, including the gates, which open into the chancel. The total height of the screen is 8 ft. 10 in., the compartments varying in centring from 1 ft. 6 in. to 1 ft. 10½ in. The tracery in the heads (rectagonal in formation) measures 13½ in. deep at the deepest. The openings in the north to south section are 65 in. high, the lower part 3 ft. high; the openings in the west to east section 68 in. high, the lower part 33 in. high. Immediately below the rail, which is embattled, runs a horizontal panel of pierced quatrefoil tracery to the depth of 8½ inches. The screen is surmounted by a moulded cornice, with a cavetto, occupied at intervals by square pateras. The muntins are buttressed. The whole is of Perpendicular design of about the middle of the fifteenth century. Each compartment of the openings is protected by an iron stanchion and saddlebar; the stanchions being obviously modern, with cast-iron fleur-de-lys finials. The door which opens into the stair in the south-east pier of the central tower is 1 ft. 7 in. wide by 5 ft 9 in. high to the crown of its two centred arch. There is no sign of the door which opened into the rood-loft, but the stair leads to a passage which runs round all four sides of the tower at the crossing.

Ashover Church: Rood-Screen.

Ashover.—The rood-screen stands in the hollow order of the chancel arch, so that its westward face does not project beyond the level of the east wall of the nave. The screen stands 10 ft. 3 in. high by 13 ft. 7 in. long. It consists of six bays, of which the two midmost comprise the doorway, with an opening of 3 ft. 8 in. and a height of 6 ft. 11 in. to the crown of the depressed arch. The bays have an average centring of 27½ inches, the fenestration being 5 ft. 5 in. high from the cill to the crown of the arch, with tracery in the head to the depth of 20½ inches, that is, 11 inches lower than the level of the spring of the former vaulting. The cill is ornamented with flamboyant geometrical tracery. The solid part from the top of the cill to the ground is 3 ft. 6 in. high, with blind tracery to the depth of 8¾ inches in the head. The screen is without gates, and is surmounted by an embattled cresting, beneath which is a band of pierced quatrefoil ornament. Neither of these can be in its original position, the screen having formerly been vaulted, although the whole of the groining ribs, as well as the springing-caps and the bases, are now wanting. The carved lintel over the doorway is crested along the top, the spandrils being filled with Tudor roses. These, together with the four-centred arches of the bays, point to a late phase of Perpendicular. The coat of arms of Babington, impaling Fitzherbert, in the middle, being only fastened on where the vaulting ought to be, affords in itself no criterion as to the date; although the general style of the screen is entirely consistent with the tradition that it was the gift of Thomas Babington, who died in 1518. This screen originally was enriched with painting and gilding, the last traces of which were egregiously removed in 1843. This was the date, also, of the destruction of the remains of the handsomely carved parclose-screenwork which surrounded the Babington chantry in the easternmost bay of the south aisle. The parclose had a door opening into the nave and another into the aisle; and the coats of arms now attached to the rood-screen used to be respectively over these two doorways. The Babington chantry was founded in 1511, in which year the rood-screen and rood-loft are believed to have been erected. The rood-stair was blocked up at the “restoration” of 1843, but has since been reopened. What remains of it consists of six stone steps, starting in the south-east corner of the north aisle, and emerging through the easternmost spandril of the north arcade into the nave at a height of 10 ft. 10 in. from the floor. The rood-door opened naveward, two iron hangers still remaining in the south jamb of the doorway, which is 18½ in. wide by 5 ft. 8½ in. high. The door-head consists of a horizontal lintel. The rood-loft itself cannot have extended beyond the width of the nave, a length of 20 feet. The rope of the sacring-bell in the gable immediately above the loft is shown in the photograph.

Bakewell.—A spiral staircase in the wall adjoining the north-east pier of the central tower stood practically undisturbed until the rebuilding of the piers in 1841. It was entered from the south-east corner of the north transept, and would in all probability have served for the rood-stair when the rood-loft came to be introduced. The oak parclose which shuts off the east aisle of the south transept to form the Vernon chapel, is divided by the columns of the arcade into three sections. Each of these is 11 ft. 7 in. long by 8 ft. 5½ in. high (exclusive of the modern cornice), and consists of eight rectagonal compartments centring from 1 ft. 4¾ in. to 1 ft. 5½ in. The openings are 4 ft. 3½ in. high, with Early Perpendicular tracery in the heads to the depth of 1 ft. 0½ in. The cill of each compartment shows traces of having been guarded by two stanchions, no longer existing. The lower part of the screen is 4 feet high. The rail is carved with a wave pattern, with a trefoiled circle in each trough and swell, and a band of quatrefoils runs along the base. The upper half of the panels below the rail is perforated with a pattern like a square-headed traceried window of the period. The greater muntins have shafts, with polygonal bases. The screen is left, in midland fashion, unfinished at the back. The two midmost compartments of the southernmost section form the doors.

Belper.—In 1821 the chancel of St. John Baptist chapel was separated from the nave “by a plain screen composed of small arches and round columns of wood.” The screen itself eventually disappeared, but long afterwards the marks remained in the walls showing where it had been fixed.

Bolsover.—A new organ-chamber, built in 1878, was eloquently described as having “dwarfed the old chancel and spoilt the north aspect of the church.” The ruin which the “restoration” of the above year began, an accidental fire in 1897 completed.

Brackenfield.—The rood-screen from the old, ruined chapel, built in 1520–30, now stands in the modern church. It has suffered much, not only from exposure to the weather in the interval between the dismantling of the chapel and the transfer of the screen itself to its present position at the west end of the new building, but also from excessive repair (see illustration). The screen measures 16 ft. 9 in. long by 7 ft. 7 in. high. It is rectagonal in construction, and consists of a central bay divided into two lights above the lintel of the doorway; on either hand of the latter being two bays of three lights each. The head of all the lights is occupied to the depth of 10½ in. by tracery of Decorated design, coarsely executed, with heavy cusps and crockets. The openings of the bays are 4 ft. 5½ in. high; the bays centring from 3 ft. to 3 ft. 2½ in. The lesser muntins are arrested by the cill, the panels beneath which are wanting. The cornice and principal muntins are rudely moulded. The door has a clear opening of 3 ft. 1 in., and is 5 ft. 8 in. high to the crown of the four-centred arch of the lintel. One of the spandrils of the latter is carved with the arms of Willoughby and Beck impaled. From a drawing which is hung up, ad captandum vulgus, inside the building, it appears that a project is on foot to adapt this ancient screen to the chancel entrance of the modern church. And, as though the unfortunate screen had not suffered cruelly enough already, the scheme involves its further dismemberment by cutting out the doorway in the centre, and mounting it on the top of a fresh doorway as a scaffold for a novel and Christless cross. It is earnestly to be hoped that those in power will not have the money nor the unwisdom to inflict this last unwarrantable indignity on the venerable screen of Brackenfield chapel.

Brackenfield: Detail of Oak Rood-Screen from Dismantled Chapel.

Breadsall.—In 1826 the rood-screen is known to have been standing in its original place, defining the boundary of nave and chancel. It was then much dilapidated, “the centre portions of the ornamental work thereof being entirely gone.” It is not quite clear whether by the parts referred to as missing, the entrance gates or the traceried fenestration-heads are meant. At any rate, a drawing made thirty years later, and published in the Anastatic Drawing Society’s volume for 1856, howsoever inaccurate in detail, shows what had then become of the remains of the rood-screen. Though much of the delicate feathering is omitted from the pierced tracery ornament, the main outline unmistakably identifies it as having been made up into communion rails. And it is doubtless to this circumstance that the beautiful details of the rood-screen, when once taken down from its proper position, owe their preservation. Such as they were represented in 1856, they remained at least as late as 1877, when the church itself was “restored.” The removal, about the year 1360, of the chancel arch, the structural demarcation between nave and chancel, had rendered a rood-screen æsthetically indispensable. And so, when this prominent ornament was broken up—some time between 1830 and 1840, more probably at the former date—it left a blank so unsightly that at the “restoration” of 1877 a misdirected attempt to remedy the defect was made by the insertion of a paltry, sham-Gothic arch. At the same time the ancient levels of the building were falsified by the improper raising of the chancel floor. In 1877, “many parts of the base” of the ancient screen could “be detected in the pews of the body of the church.” Subsequently, all these fragments were collected, and, together with those portions of the screen that had been turned into communion rails, carefully stored up with a view to ultimate reconstruction. Meanwhile, however, a few strips of screen-tracery were ill-advisedly worked up into a cornice round the brim of the present pulpit, a situation for which, as anybody can see, they are in no wise suited. The restoration of the screen itself was contemplated as far back as 1877, but thirty years were destined to elapse before it could be realised. The project had long been dear to the heart of Mr. F. Walker Cox, though he did not live to see it fulfilled; and so, when he died in 1905, it was decided to restore the rood-screen as a suitable memorial to him. The work was completed by the end of July, 1907. In this case there were certain well-determined data to serve as guides for the proposed reconstruction. The width of the nave, 23 feet, had only to be divided by the unit of the bays (the remaining tracery of which demonstrated that the average centring was rather less than 2 ft. 6 in.) to show that there should be ten bays in all; while the tread of the topmost step of the rood-stair, which pierces the arcade wall and opens southwards into the nave at a height of 13 ft. 0½ in. above the floor level, indicates the proper height of the ancient rood-loft floor. Each bay is divided into two lights by a central muntin. The tracery resembles Decorated design more than Perpendicular, but certain very late details in the spandril of the ancient gates, the design of which otherwise corresponds, preclude the work from being dated earlier than the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Of the twenty pieces of tracery in the fenestration-heads, ten are original and untouched, five are old ones repaired, while five had to be supplied altogether new; the necessary carved work being ably done by Mr. H. W. Whitaker, son of the rector. There are two variations in the tracery pattern which runs along the west side of the rail. The heads of the rectagonal panels are filled with tracery to the depth of 6¾ inches.

Breadsall Church: Detail of Rood-Screen in Process of Restoration.

Breadsall Church: Showing the Remains of the Rood-Screen in 1856.

Chaddesden.—The church was “restored” in 1859, when, I presume, it was that the rood-screen came to be surmounted by an embattled cornice. At the recent “restoration,” by Mr. Bodley, the battlements were removed, and the upper part of the screen finished more in accordance with the original design, with vaulting, on the western front The authentic portion of the screen is 9 ft. 11 in. high by 15 ft. 9 in. long. It consists of eight bays, of which the two central ones go to form the entrance, having an opening of 3 ft. 3½ in., the bays centring at 1 ft. 11½ in. The openings are 5 ft. 7½ in. high, with tracery in the heads to a depth of 3 feet, i.e., 21 inches lower than the level of the springing. The entrance has a semi-circular arch, cusped on the under side. The bottom part of the screen is 4 ft. 3½ in. high, with blind tracery in the panel heads to the depth of 12½ inches. On the west side the principal muntins are buttressed, the buttresses square in plan, with moulded bases; out of the top of the buttresses rise boutel shafts, with polygonal and embattled caps, from which the groined vaulting springs. The rood-screen stands at the entrance of the chancel, and the rood-loft must have extended only from side to side of the nave. The rood-stair entrance, now stopped and bricked up, is in the north-east corner of the south aisle. The doorway is 18 in. wide by 6 ft. 7 in. high from the floor to the crown of the arch, or obtuse angle, which is cut in the underside of the lintel. The exit from the stair on to the loft, though blocked, is traceable in the wall in the easternmost spandril of the south arcade of the nave.

Chesterfield.—The rood-loft is recorded to have been extant as late as the year 1783. There is not the slightest trace of a rood-stair entrance visible. In 1841, Sir Stephen Glynne found the nave galleried completely round, including the eastern part of it. “The gallery,” he says, “at the eastern extremity contains the organ.... In the gallery beneath the organ is incorporated a portion of wood screenwork of rather elegant character,” all which goes to show that the rood-screen stood at the western crossing, the arch there having a clear opening of 14 ft. 2½ in. In 1843, the “restoration” of the church was begun; and the building having first been thoroughly swept of its fittings, Mr. Gilbert Scott (afterwards knighted) was then called in to do the garnishing. “I found,” he writes in his Recollections, “the rood-screen to have been pulled down and sold; but we protested, and it was recovered.” In a footnote he adds, “There is no such screen now in Chesterfield church.” In this, as happily the event proved, the architect was mistaken, but his remark would seem to imply that Sir Gilbert Scott himself is not to be held responsible for the rood-screen being improperly re-erected in its present position between the north transept and its eastern chapel. The screen is 14 ft. 6 in. long, and consists of five bays, centring 2 ft. 10½ in., of which the middle bay, having a clear opening of 2 ft. 5¼ in., comprises the doorway. It is fitted with doors, but they are not original. Indeed, the screen as a whole has been much renovated. The total height of it as it stands is 13 ft. 3½ in. down to the floor. The fenestration openings are 7 ft. 3 in. high, and the pierced tracery in the head extends to a depth of 21½ inches, and contains an embattled transom, which makes a horizontal line right across the screen from side to side. At a distance of 1 ft. 11 in. below the base of the tracery a second transom intersects the screen, not, however, continuously, on account of the doorway in the middle. The bays, though fashioned in rectagonal compartments, exhibit a pronouncedly arched formation, which suggests that they should be vaulted. At the same time the spandrils are traceried and cusped, a feature inconsistent with vaulting, and such, therefore, that I am inclined to attribute to the meddling hand of the “restorer.” It only remains to add that the principal muntins are buttressed on the westward front, and that the tracery has the usual midland characteristic of a flat surface at the back.

Chesterfield Church: Part of Parclose Screen in South Transept.

More complete than the above-named is the imposing parclose which stands in the south transept, and, extending throughout the entire length of the transept, divides it for the two chantry chapels to eastwards. These chapels were dedicated to Our Lady and St George respectively, while against the westward face of the screen stood the altar of St Michael on the left, and that of St Mary Magdalene on the right. The screen consists of ten bays, four-centred; the third bay from either end forming a doorway to lead into the corresponding chapel beyond it. The bays vary in centring from 3 ft 4½ in. to 4 ft. 1 in. The upper part of the screen expands eastwards and westwards with groined vaults (partly renovated, the interspaces traceried on the west side but plain on the east) into a wide platform of from 5 to 6 feet from front to back, and such that was apparently never finished with a loft. The elevation of the whole (exclusive of a stone plinth of 4½ inches) is 15 feet in height. The fenestration is strikingly lofty, the distance from the cill to the summit of the opening being 8 ft. 6 in., with tracery in the head to the depth of 26 inches. The base of this tracery descends 10 inches below the level of the caps and the springing of the vaults. The tracery itself is of handsome Perpendicular design, and is enriched with tall, crocketed pinnacles running up through the midst of the batement lights. The opening is sub-divided horizontally, at a distance of 49 inches from the crown of the arch, by a transom cusped and feathered on its under side. The solid part of the screen is 4 ft. 7 in. high. The rail is carved with a waving tracery pattern; the blind panelling is traceried in the head, and has a band of quatrefoil ornament along the bottom. The principal muntins are faced with clustered shafts. The more northern of the two doorways, with Tudor roses in the spandrils and cinquefoil cusping on the under side, is original, but the other doorway is an unsatisfactory piece of patch work.

With regard to the third screen, Sir Gilbert Scott, in the above-quoted Recollections, wrote: “There existed in the church, as I found it, a curious and beautiful family pew and chapel, enclosed by screenwork, to the west of one of the piers of the central tower. This was called the Foljambe chapel, and was a beautiful work of Henry VIII.’s time. What to do with it I did not know. It was right in the way of the arrangements, and could not but have been removed. I at last determined to use its screenwork to form a reredos.” Such is the “restorer’s” frank and ingenuous confession of his wanton abuse of a grand, historical monument. The remains of this chantry parclose (its openwork still disfigured by metal panels painted with the Ten Commandments, according to the fashion of the day, circa 1843–5) were forced to migrate once more in 1898, and now (March, 1907) stand against the west wall of the south transept. The screenwork is rectagonal in plan. As at present made up it is just under 22 feet long, and consists of six compartments, centring from 3 ft. 6½ in. to 3 ft. 8 in., of three lights each. The openings are 3 ft. 7 in. high, with stem-like tracery in the head to the depth of 9½ inches. The upper part is coved, projecting 35 inches from back to front. The total height from the top of the cresting to the ground just exceeds eight feet. The solid part below the openings has apparently been cut down, since it is only 2 ft. 11 in. high. The rail is carved with a band of quatrefoils and trefoils in the alternate swell and trough of a wave line, and the blind panelling is traceried in the head to the depth of 5 inches. The cornice is elaborately carved with a grape and vine pattern on a wave basis, with shields introduced; the band itself, however, absurdly turned upside down. It displays the following seven distinct coats of arms, which appear by themselves and in various combinations of impalement:—

Ashton	A mullet.
Breton	A chevron between three escallops.
Bussex	Barry of six (represented as seven).
Foljambe	A bend between six escallops.
Leeke	On a saltire (not represented, as it ought to be, engrailed), nine annulets.
Loudham	On a bend, five cross crosslets.
Nevile	A saltire ermine.

That the screens now standing do not represent the full complement of screenwork with which Chesterfield Church was enriched when the shock of the Reformation fell upon it, is attested by additional fragments of tracery, one of them let into the underpart of a communion table in the south-east chapel, and more in a low rail about the site of the former high altar.

Church Broughton.—In 1820, portions of the parcloses that used to shut off the chantries or side altars at the end of the aisles still existed; but in 1845–6 the church was “repaired,” with the usual result that the screens were dismembered. Considerable remains, however, of the oak tracery are embodied in a modern reredos behind the altar.

Crich.—The screen which is now in St. Peter’s, Derby, and which was originally in Crich church, is constructed on a rectagonal principle, that is to say, it was never vaulted. It consists of six compartments, each having an average opening of 13 inches and an average centring of 1 ft. 5 in. The height of the fenestration from the cill to the top of the opening is 58 inches, the head being occupied to the depth of 12½ inches by pierced tracery of Perpendicular design, with an embattled transom intersecting it in a straight line from side to side. The screen itself is divided into two halves, each 4 ft. 4 in. long, and each having, immediately below the cill, a pierced panel of cusped tracery of trellis-like design, 3 ft. 10 in. long by 6¾ in. high. For the rest, seeing that the screen has been made up for its present position, to give the dimensions of its total height and length would only be to mislead.

Denby.—“A rudely carved screen between nave and chancel”—such was the description given of it in 1825—was swept away in the atrocious “restoration” of 1838.

Derby.—It is piteous to recall with what reckless devastation the mediæval churches of the borough of Derby have been visited. The fate of All Hallows’ has been already told. Another of the ancient churches of the place, St. Alkmund’s, was destroyed in 1844. Its former rood-loft, to judge from the ground plan of the building, must have extended across the width of the nave only. It has been related by those who knew the old church, that the tower, together with the westernmost bay of either aisle of the nave, were divided by screening from the remainder of the building. What these screens were like records do not state, but it is probable enough that they may have been made out of the remains of the rood-screen or parclose screenwork. St. Michael’s Church, totally demolished in 1856–7, contained a carved screen of Perpendicular workmanship. The rood-entrance and staircase led up to the loft from the south aisle. At St. Peter’s tradition tells that a parclose formerly separated the eastern portion of the north aisle from the body of the church; and remnants of wooden screen work were discovered under the flooring of the pews at the re-pewing in 1859. The screen which now occupies the place of the original rood-screen, belonging, as it did, to Crich church, has been already described under that head.

Doveridge.—In 1877 it was observed that three pieces of carving known to have come from hence, and suspected to have belonged to the former screen here, were affixed to the chest in Sudbury church. These pieces comprised the centrepiece on the front of the chest, and the ornaments on the two sides of it.

Elvaston.—The drastic “restoration” of 1904, for all the unstinting munificence of the vicar, Rev. C. Prodgers, who entrusted the work to no less eminent an architect than Mr. Bodley, has swept away a number of landmarks, the removal of which the antiquary must record only with pain and sorrow. Beside the lengthening of the chancel by eleven feet eastwards, and the abolition of the east window, a proceeding alien to the traditions of an English parish church, the rood-screen itself has been shifted and tampered with in a manner far from conservative. Previously to the “restoration” the screen consisted of eight bays (the two midmost bays comprising the doorway), and stood in the recess of the chancel arch, into which space it exactly fitted. In the course of the “restoration” the screen (found to have been patched with common deal in many places, and the whole of it thickly coated with brown paint) was taken to Cambridge to be pickled, and to have the decayed and the deal portions replaced in oak. Thus far, good. But returning renovated and lengthened by a fresh, narrow bay of blind panelling at each end, so as to ruin its proportions, the rood-screen, now too long for its former site, was erected anew in a more westerly position against the east wall of the nave. It was, moreover, provided with elaborate metal gates, which are too high to give a satisfactory effect, inasmuch as they break the horizontal line of the wooden rail to right and left. Another flagrant offence is that the carved ornaments, integrally joined (as at Chaddesden) to the east side of the entrance jambs of the screen to form the ends of the return stalls, have been detached from their proper place and egregiously misappropriated for the ends of new sedilia. Their sides are richly panelled with Perpendicular tracery, in the top of which is a human face, with the hair and beard treated like Gothic leafage. The upper extremities of these stall-ends represent cherubim, below which are large carved crockets, models for boldness of outline and vigorous crispness of execution. The occurrence on the elbows respectively of a lion and an antelope, chained and collared, both of them seated on their haunches, confines the production of the work within determinate historical limits. The lion has been described as “chained,” but after examining it in search of the chain, I came to the conclusion that the latter is merely a wavy lock of the lion’s mane. As to whether there is a chain or not will probably always remain a moot question, like the heads of the famous lions over the gate of Mycenæ. Assuming, then, that this particular lion is chainless, it would stand either for the lion of England or the white lion of the house of March; while the antelope, gorged and chained, is the familiar cognisance of the de Bohuns. These two together would be the heraldic supporters of Edward IV. (1466–1483), and therefore bear out the presumption that the rood-loft and screen were erected in his time by bequest of Lord Mountjoy. This nobleman’s will, dated 1474, directs that the parish church and chancel of Our Lady at Elvaston should be “made up and finished completely” at the cost of his estate. The “chancel” referred to can hardly be other than the enclosed chapel, now occupied by the Earl of Harrington’s family pew, in the south aisle. As long as the stall ends remained in their original situation attached to the rood-screen, the heraldry they display afforded a valuable clue to the date of its execution. But their dislocation and perversion amounts to the falsification of a historical document. For who that in years to come shall see them as at present made up into sham sedilia, will ever be able to identify them for what they truly are? The harm, done, however, is happily not irremediable, for the stall ends can yet be restored to their rightful place. To do so without delay is no more than an act of justice due to the past and the present, as also to future generations. The dimensions of the Elvaston rood-screen (exclusive of the modern accretions) are: height, 10 ft. 7 in., and length, 16 ft. 4 in. The bays centre at two feet, the doorway having a clear opening of 3 ft. 8 in., with a height of 8 ft. 3 in. from the floor level to the crown of the door-head arch. The latter is segmental, and on the under side feathered with rose-tipped cusps. The shield in the middle is modern, and so also (though doubtless a reproduction of the old) is much of the encrusted ornament which surmounts the door-head. The pattern of it is one of inter-twisted stems, branching into crockets on the upper side. The fenestration on either side of the doorway has a clear opening of 5 ft. 8½ in. high, with tracery (forming the outline of an ogival arch) and encrusted ornament in the heads to the depth of 35½ inches. An embattled transom runs through the head of the side bays, but is arrested in the two bays of the doorway. Beneath the fenestration the solid part of the screen is 4 ft. 3 in. high; each bay with tracery in the head to the depth of 11½ inches. The whole screen is a magnificent specimen of Perpendicular design. The parclose in the south aisle encloses the easternmost bay of the nave arcade. It measures 17 feet long from east to west, and then, turning at a right angle, with a length of 14 feet from north to south, joins the south wall of the aisle. Its height, exclusive of the stone platform on which it is mounted, is 8 ft. 10½ in. It has a doorway of 2 ft. 1½ in. wide on the north, and one of 1 ft. 11½ in. on the west. The bays or compartments vary from 18½ inches to 21 inches wide. The height of the fenestration is 54½ inches, with tracery in the heads to the depth of 25½ inches. The lower part of the screen is 46 inches high, and it is pierced, parclose fashion, by a band of pierced tracery, forming long panels 9½ inches high. For the rest, this parclose is similar in design to the rood-screen, only that the main shafts of the parclose are more handsomely treated with buttresses and tall, graceful gables, terminating in crocketed pinnacles. The cavetto of the lintel contains square Gothic pateras. Neither screen shows any trace of colour. No rood-entrance nor stair remains, but from the plan of the building it is evident that the former rood-loft could not have exceeded in length the width of the nave.

Elvaston Church: Rood-Screen (restored).

Fenny Bentley.—There is no structural division between nave and chancel, and the rood-screen has been repeatedly shifted backwards and forwards, but it is now standing approximately in its original position. Injured, but surviving the many dangers and vicissitudes through which it had to pass, it remained without repair until about 1848–50, when it underwent complete “restoration” (the vaulting being practically all renewed), and that very creditably done for the time. The screen is 18 ft 2 in. long by 9 ft. 4½ in. high. It consists of eight bays (centring 2 ft. 3¼ in.), whereof the two midmost go to make the doorway, which is 6 ft. 0¼ in. high to the crown of its four-centred arch, with a clear opening of 4 ft. 1½ in., protected by gates. The fenestration openings are four-centred, and measure 5 feet high from crown to cill, with tracery in the heads to the depth of 1 ft. 8¾ in., nine inches below the level of the vault-springing. The door-lintel has the left-hand spandril carved with a fox and a goose in his mouth; the right-hand spandril with a Gothic flower, not a rose. The lower part of the screen is 3 ft. high, the rail being ornamented with geometrical tracery. The ridiculous travesty of metal stanchions and saddle-bars, carried out in wood, ought to be got rid of as soon as possible. They may not deceive at the present day, but the danger is that the longer they are allowed to remain, the more they will tone down until they have acquired that specious air of antiquity which may enable them to pass for genuine, until some expert will detect the fraud, and perhaps be provoked on their account to call in question the authenticity of the whole screen into which they have become thus unwarrantably intruders. There is no vaulting at the top of the screen on the eastern side. The loft floor measures 57 inches from front to back, exclusive of the modern cresting on the front. There is no sign of any entrance to the rood-loft, but the stair was probably on the north side, in the wall which has now been rebuilt and converted into an arcade. The rood-screen exhibits a fully-matured phase of Perpendicular. It has been variously dated from 1460 to 1500. One local tradition declared it to have been erected by Thomas Beresford (of Agincourt fame) as a thank-offering after the Wars of the Roses. At any rate, it must have been already in situ before 1512, when a chantry was founded by James Beresford, LL.D., and there being no aisle nor chapel to contain the altar, a parclose screen was erected round it in the south-east corner of the nave. The enclosure had its own flooring of encaustic tiles. Locally called “the cage,” it stood in its original place untouched until 1877, when, in the same year of his appointment to the rectory of Fenny Bentley, Rev. E. J. Hayton, with the proverbial officiousness of a new broom, nimbly cleared it aside. The only possible justification for this disturbance of a historic landmark is that it enables the beautiful rood-screen to be seen to greater advantage than it could have been while the other screen stood in front of it. The exact place where the parclose abutted on to the rood-screen is defined by a missing moulding and a light mark in the wood of the lower part of the bay immediately to the south of the entrance gates (see illustration). Subsequently the displaced parclose, incorporated with much new work, was set up, in one continuous length, between the modern north aisle of the nave and the modern north chapel. It now measures 14 ft. 8 in. long by 6 ft. 8 in. high, and consists of thirteen rectagonal compartments, with two different patterns of tracery in the head; eight of one pattern and five of the other.

Hathersage.—A small piece of carved oak tracery of Perpendicular style, being part of a screen originally in this church, was to be seen subsequently among the objects in the Lomberdale House Museum.

Hault Hucknall.—In 1875 there were kept in the vestry two fragments of oak tracery of Perpendicular design; placed, one upside down, with their two lower edges contiguous, so that the arched forms were made to appear like circles. They are thus depicted in the first volume of Cox’s Derbyshire Churches. Beside these, in the eighties of the nineteenth century, there were in the church tower several more pieces of tracery and at least one long beam; all of them portions, presumably, of former screenwork.

Hope.—The rood-screen, including its gates, complete, is surmised to have remained standing through all the disasters of the civil wars—at least until the closing days of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate—because of an incidental reference under the date 1658. In a list of the parochial Easter dues discharged in that year, occurs the item of a sum received from young people “at the chancell gate.” This might, however, have meant no more than the spot in the alley where chancel and nave converge, since the common spelling of the word “gate” of the present day was “yate” until the eighteenth century, the original sense of “gate” being rather the equivalent of gangway, path, or thoroughfare. At any rate, all that was left of the screen by 1881 was the oak beam of the plinth or base, showing that there had been at that point one step ascending from the nave into the chancel. This historical relic, however, was not respected, for in 1881–2, the vicar, Rev. Henry Buckston, following the example of Dr. Hutchinson, the bane of All Hallows’, in obstinate defiance of remonstrances, subjected the old chancel to the most drastic and unnecessary treatment.

Horsley.—In or about the year 1825 it was noted by Rev. R. R. Rawlins that “a screen of rudely ornamented open-work surrounded a portion of the north aisle.”

Kirk Langley.—There were originally three screens in this church, namely, the rood-screen and two parcloses. All three of them have been so repeatedly altered and mixed up that it is difficult to follow their history with certain accuracy. The year of darkest tragedy in the annals of the fabric was 1839, when a devastating “restoration” ravaged the ancient wood-fittings. Hitherto the parclose-screen of the Meynell chantry, standing at the eastern extremity of the north aisle, and extending as far as the centre of the first arch, had remained; but it was then removed, and certain portions of it made into a reredos. These fragments, and whatever else could be found belonging to the same parclose, were diligently gathered together by Rev. Frank Meynell, and are now incorporated in a new parclose encompassing the first bay of the north aisle. The cornice, much repaired, contains a handsome border, 4¾ inches deep, of vine and grape ornament upon a wave basis; and there are, in all, fourteen of the old panels, carefully patched together and mounted on canvas backing to strengthen them. They comprise seven (or, to count one slight variant as additional, eight) distinct patterns of late Perpendicular in point of date, but such that so far from being jaded or commonplace, give the lie to the “correct” view of the decadence of later mediæval art, and testify to the inexhaustible vitality and resourcefulness of Gothic fancy to the end. The other parclose stood between the south aisle and the south chapel, screening the Twyford chantry. In 1710 Bassano noted the screen, with the arms of Twyford over its entrance doorway. By 1879 this parclose had been demolished, and parts of it made up with the rood-screen, which yet stood in situ, presenting an incongruous blend of Perpendicular and earlier woodwork. Even this, however, has since given place to a brand-new screen, and whatever still remains of the ancient screenwork is now embodied in the box-door in the west tower, as above described. The abolished rood-loft must have been approached from the south, for, although there are no longer any traces to be seen of it, in 1879 it was noted that “the squint from the Twyford quire is within the doorway of the old stairs leading to the rood-loft.”

Kirk Langley Church: Details from Parcloses of North and South Aisles.

Long Eaton.—“Within the chancel (now used as a vestry),” writes Rev. Dr. Cox in 1879, “is a piece of old oak carving, which was found, in 1868, used as a joist under the floor. It looks as if it had been part of the cornice of the rood-screen, and is carved with three four-leaved flowers and two heads. Its date is circa 1460.” This carving was probably displaced and abused in the manner described, in 1731, when the church is known to have undergone re-pewing and other “repairs.” The ancient rood-loft extended from side to side of the nave, which is 20 ft. 6 in. wide—or rather it should be, if the whole building had not been tampered with and falsified in 1868.

Longford.—The eastern extremity of both the aisles was formerly partitioned off by carved oak parcloses to form chantry chapels, but in 1826 both these screens were demolished. “From the east wall of the nave, close to the north side of the chancel archway, projects” a stone corbel, which must have had some connection with the ancient rood arrangements, as a support either for the loft or the rood-beam.

Longstone.—“The east end of the south aisle is” [1877] “shut off by an old oak screen, so as to form a family pew. It has a finely carved cornice, and on the north side has the arms of Eyre impaling Stafford ... and over the door which forms the west entrance to the screen is the well-known crest of the Eyre family—an armed leg.”

Mackworth.—Some old oak carving, portions, apparently, of ancient screenwork, were made up into the wainscot at the back of a seat within the porch. The ancient rood-loft may be assumed not to have exceeded the width of the nave, i.e., 21 ft. 3 in.

Melbourne.—At the general restoration of the church in 1859–60, the rood-screen was so unsparingly treated as to make it difficult to tell what its original design could have been. It is 13 ft. 9 in. long, and stands at the entrance of the chancel in the eastern crossing. A drawing, published in the Anastatic Drawing Society’s volume for 1862, represents the church in the process of “restoration.” The screen, as there depicted, though it cannot have been even then in its original condition (having lost its vaulting, gates, and solid part at the bottom), differs considerably from the screen in its present state. It dated from the Perpendicular period, and consisted (as in fact it does still) of three bays, the middle one, for the entrance, being the largest. But the three main arches, which once constituted its most prominent feature, have since been replaced by obtuse chevrons, the ungainly massiveness of which is barely relieved by the ill-designed tracery underneath, or by a recent attempt to amend the bungling “restoration” of thirty years previously. It was in 1890, or thereabouts, that this unavailing re-restoration took place. The fact is that nothing can be done with Sir Gilbert Scott’s clumsy framework. To overlay it with applied ornament is only to emphasise its defects. There is but one satisfactory remedy, and that is to remove it altogether, and to replace it by something else fashioned on the beautiful flowing lines of the old Gothic design. The upper part contains eight pierced ornaments, 21½ inches in height from the crown of the two-centred arch to the base of the tracery, and 15 inches in width. Beyond these there is practically nothing of the original work left in the whole screen, which not only gives a very poor idea of what the majestic structure of the fifteenth century must have been, but also is in every way unworthy of the grandeur of its surroundings.

Mickleover.—Rev. R. R. Rawlins, in 1825, described the entrance from the nave as being “through a wooden arch,” near to which were the remains of a piscina. Whether this wooden arch represents the ancient rood-screen or not, it is impossible to tell. At any rate, the piscina shows that an altar must anciently have stood against the front of the screen.

Monyash.—Previously to the “restoration” of 1886–8, in the east wall of the north transept, at a height of about twelve feet from the ground, there projected a wide stone, which had served as the step of the doorway that led on to the top of the rood-loft. The outline of the doorway itself could be traced until the unhappy changes at the above date caused it to disappear.

Morley.—This is one of the few Derbyshire instances of which the plan might have admitted the ancient rood-loft being carried beyond the width of the nave across the aisles to the outer walls of the church. At any rate a piscina at the south-east corner of each aisle shows that there must have been an altar at the end of both aisles, and would also seem to imply that the aisles themselves were partitioned from the eastern chapels beyond by screens in a line with the chancel screen. As to the latter, the tradition in the parish in the time of Rev. S. Fox, who died in 1870, was that the screen, “rather handsome but decayed,” had stood in its place until within rather less than 50 or 60 years of the above date, i.e., until as late, perhaps, as 1820, when, not being thought well of by those in power at the time, it was taken down and “sold to a farmer in the village for a guinea or so to serve for a hen-roost or some such agricultural purpose.” However, according to another account, the rood-screen disappeared when the church was “repaired and beautified” in or about the year 1800.

Mugginton.—In addition to the parclose before-mentioned, “a good oak screen of Perpendicular tracery,” it is written in Cox’s Churches of Derbyshire, in 1877, “in fair preservation, with a door in the centre, divides the” south “aisle from the chapel. Originally this screen has been continued across the nave, so as to divide it from the chancel. Part of the base of this screen can still be seen in the supports of the pews; and a band of well-carved foliage round the pulpit has probably formed part of the cornice.” It is believed that this screen was broken up at the time of the ruthless “renovation,” circa 1845.

Norbury.—The rood-screen had been fine, but was much mutilated in 1840, according to Sir Stephen Glynne. This screen has since been cheaply and very badly “restored.” It was originally vaulted, but is now made up in a new framework of rectagonal form. The original portions consist of the misused fenestration tracery. These number eight complete, and, over the doorway, two incomplete pierced ornaments, 29 inches deep, and averaging 19 inches wide. Upon some of them are traces of scarlet colour. They are of Perpendicular workmanship, and are all plain and smooth at the back. On the east side of the bottom part of the screen are eight of the original panel-heads of blind tracery, 14¼ inches wide by 10½ inches deep. There is no sign of the rood-stair. There being no chancel arch, there must have been ample space for the display of the rood on a beam across the chancel opening above the rood-loft, which would have extended across the width of the nave, 19 ft. 6 in. The eastern part of the chancel is panelled with oak, which might have come from the former rood-loft. Along the top of this wainscot runs what looks like a breast-summer, consisting of mouldings and a pierced band of vine ornament, to the length altogether of somewhat over 25 feet. The eastern end of the north aisle was formerly screened by a carved oak parclose, which, however, disappeared in 1841.

Ockbrook.—The screen having been brought hither from Wigston Hospital, Leicester, is not to be reckoned among the screens of Derbyshire.

Osmaston, a chapelry of Brailsford.—In 1834 it was noted that a small, plain screen of wood stood between nave and chancel. The entire fabric, however, was swept away in 1844–5, and rebuilt from the ground.

Radbourne.—A parclose, dating from the fifteenth century, if not earlier, formerly screened in the eastern portion of the north aisle.

Repton.—In the parish church, “traces of the stairway to the rood-loft across the chancel arch can still” (it was written in 1876) “be seen in the north-east angle of the south aisle, and it is probable that it was ... removed” in 1792, when the whole church underwent the ordeal of “beautifying” in accordance with the degraded taste of the period. It is, however, only just to the “restorers” of that date to mention that they did abolish the cumbrous blank walls which they found obstructing the openings between the aisles and the corresponding eastern chapels—walls that had, at some previous era of barbarism, been erected, there can be little doubt, in place of the original carved wood parcloses. It is on record that remains of ecclesiastical screenwork, with armorial devices, had become dispersed about the place, and, falling into private hands, were worked up into panelling for a dining-room, the wainscot of a summer-house, and other such-like profane uses.

Sandiacre.—“Up to 1855” (the quotation is from Cox’s Churches of Derbyshire), “there were some parts of the old rood-screen still remaining across the chancel arch of Decorated date. Some of this tracery has been used up in the reading-desk, and the pulpit has been made to correspond.” The length of the vanished rood-loft cannot have exceeded the width of the nave, namely, 22 ft. 9 in.

Sawley.—The oak rood-screen extends from side to side of the chancel, 18 ft. 5 in. Its height is 9 ft. 7 in. The heavy lintel is embattled and moulded. The doorway is a plain, rectagonal opening of 3 ft. 5½ in. wide, and without gates. On either side of it are five rectagonal compartments or lights, separated by muntins, and opening 51½ inches high, centred from 1 ft. 3 in. to 1 ft. 5½ in., with early Perpendicular tracery in the heads to the depth of 11 inches, smooth on the eastward surface. The solid part at the bottom consists of a deep, moulded rail and, below, rectagonal panelling without tracery. The westward face of each of the doorway jambs is buttressed, the buttress having a square base. The joinery as a whole is so very coarse and rude as to suggest the product of a rural workshop. The eastern portion of each aisle was formerly screened from the rest of the church by parcloses, which stood intact until 1838. The base of that section of the southern parclose which ran from east to west between the aisle and the nave, was removed on the plea of expediency not long ago by the present rector, who broke it up and caused the soundest parts of it to be turned into music desks for the choir boys in the chancel. The only portions, therefore, that now remain are the lower halves of the western section of either parclose running from north to south. That in the north aisle (which enclosed the chantry of Our Lady) extends over a length of 16 ft. 1½ in., with an interval of 2 ft. 8½ in. for the entrance. It consists of five compartments, and stands 4 ft. 3½ in. high, the buttressed muntins sawn off to the level of the fenestration cill. Below the rail is a horizontal panel of pierced tracery, 7 inches deep; and, below, panels with blind tracery in the heads to the depth of 7½ inches. What is left of the parclose in the south aisle extends over a length of 12 ft. 11 in., with an interval of 2 ft. 7¼ in. for the entrance. It consists of eight rectagonal compartments, and stands 4 ft. 3 in. high, the buttressed muntins being likewise cut off to the level of the cill. Both these parcloses are Perpendicular, and exhibit a much more refined standard of execution than does the rood-screen.

Smalley.—The mediæval church was destroyed in 1722, but in 1855, on the removal of the gallery in the modern building, there was discovered an ancient beam “enriched with deep, hollow chamfers,” in which pateras of Gothic leafage and other ornaments “were carved at intervals of about eighteen inches.” It was apparently of about the date 1460. This may have been only an unusually elaborate roof-principal; but, on the other hand, it might have been the old rood-beam or one of the timbers from the rood-loft or screen.

Spondon.—The rood-loft must have been of the same extent as the nave’s width, 23 ft. 2 in. A disastrous “beautifying” process in 1826–7, besides other irreparable damage, bodily removed the fifteenth century oak rood-screen which stood across the chancel arch opening of 15 ft. 2½ in. At the same time the steps of the rood-stair were cut away to make room for the flue-pipe of a stove. The entrance remains in the south-east corner of the north aisle. The doorway is 2 feet wide, and measures 6 ft. 10 in. in height to the apex of the depressed ogee of the door-head.

Staveley.—In 1710, Francis Bassano noted at the east end of the nave, above a family pew, “a large molding, being (the) upper beam of ye rood-loft, and on (the) wood is cut ye paternal coat armour of Frecheville (azure, a bend between six escallops, argent) held by an angel on his breast.” Further details are contained in a letter, dated October, 1816, which states that “the rood-loft at Staveley, which remained pretty entire since the Reformation, was taken down about twenty-five years ago”—which would have been circa 1790—“to let more light into the church.”

Sudbury.—Two fragments of carving, from the former rood-screen, were described in 1877 as having then been recently affixed to the church chest.

Tideswell.—In 1845, Sir Stephen Glynne noted that “between the nave and chancel is a good wood screen of Perpendicular character.” It was “repaired” in 1882–3, the chisellings in the responds of the chancel arch furnishing the outline of the original form of the vanished upper portion. The lower part has been declared to be almost as ancient as the church itself; but for the rest, it has been so much altered and renovated that it is doubtful whether the gates or any considerable portion of the upper half of the screen as now existing is really authentic. The slender build of the screen has led to the supposition that it cannot have been designed at the outset to carry a rood-loft. That such, however, was added subsequently is clear from the existence of the rood-stair, which, though since removed, was standing in 1824. Its site was the western side of the north corner of the chancel arch. It must have been a structure unusually conspicuous compared with others built for the same purpose. It was of stone, and occupied a space six feet square. The entrance was from the south, and gave access to a small newel staircase, the doorway measuring about 4 ft. 2 in. in height by 22 inches in width. Some remains of it, lying in the vicarage garden, were identified by the late Rev. Prebendary Andrew, and described by him in the fifth volume of the Journal of the Derbyshire Archæological Society (published in 1883). What the ancient rood-loft was like is not recorded. In the year 1724 a faculty was obtained by one Samuel Eccles to take down an old loft (whether the mediæval rood-loft or not it is impossible to tell) then existing over the chancel, and to transfer it to the tower for the use and advantage of the singers; and at the same time to erect a loft for his own use over the entry into the chancel. The transported loft is believed to have occupied its western position until about 1820, when it was removed altogether, a new gallery being erected in its room. Beside the rood-screen itself, wooden parcloses must have divided the chantry chapels in the transepts from the nave and from the rest of the church. At any rate a quantity of pieces of ancient wood-carving were to be seen loose about the church in 1824, and “cart loads” of them are said to have been removed in 1825 on the occasion of the re-pewing of the building. A subsequent vicar, Rev. Prebendary Andrew (1864–1900), set to work to restore as much as he could. Some pieces of woodwork he rescued from various misuses within the church, others from private possession in the parish. A length of carving that had been cut in two and turned into bookstands, as well as two fragments of screenwork, open tracery of great delicacy and beauty, he set up in the Lady Chapel; while a third piece of tracery-work he placed in the middle compartment of the communion table. “The parclose of the De Bower chapel has recently”—it was written in 1877—“been restored in exactly the same position that it previously occupied.”

Weston-on-Trent.—Rev. Dr. Cox in 1879 remarked on “the north aisle being screened off by a parclose from the rest of the church.” The length of the ancient rood-loft must have been the same as the width of the nave, 18 ft. 5 in.

Wilne.—The rood-screen which occupies the chancel arch is of simple Perpendicular workmanship. It is 18 ft. 4 in. long by 7 ft. 9 in. high. There are ten bays, five on either side, arched. The lintel is plain, without any kind of ornamentation applied, and there are no gates. A small stone staircase, now walled up, to southwards of the chancel arch, commemorates the entrance into the ancient rood-loft.

Youlgreave.—The churchwardens’ accounts, though not dating back earlier than the beginning of the sixteenth century, contain some interesting particulars about the rood-screen. In 1604, “the chancel gates were boarded over,” and later in the same year occurs an item “for making the partition betwixt the church and the chancell.” In 1661, a small sum was paid “for 3 hinges for ye chancell gates,” which is evidence that the rood-screen, howsoever sadly disfigured, with its doors, was yet in existence at the above date. “There is now”—it was written in 1877—“no screen across the chancel arch, though it is in contemplation to replace one, modelled on the mutilated remains of the lower part of the old one, of Perpendicular design, which were removed at the time of the ‘restoration’ (of 1869–73, by Mr. R. Norman Shaw), but have been carefully preserved.” At about the end of the eighteenth century, the fine old parclose erected round the eastern part of the south aisle was removed.

Finally, I desire, as in duty bound, to acknowledge my obligations to the Rev. Dr. Cox, whose monumental work on The Churches of Derbyshire has been of inestimable service to me; to various writers, from whom I have borrowed, in The Reliquary and in the Journal of the Derbyshire Archæological Society; to Rev. W. W. M. Kennedy for important particulars concerning diocesan visitations; to Arthur Cox, Esq., of Spondon Hall, for valuable introductions; and, lastly, to all those clergy who have kindly allowed me to take photographs and measurements in the churches committed to their charge.