Memorials of old Derbyshire

by Unknown

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.