Chancel Screens since the Reformation is a valuable collection of recent research on various aspects and periods in the shifting fortunes of that most vexed and polarizing item of liturgical furnishing, the chancel screen. When explored theologically, as here by Peter Doll, it becomes evident why opinion has been so divided. This is an interesting excursus, appealing to the ‘vital principles’ of Pugin and then leaping to Israelite worship in the Tent of Meeting, the Temple, and the Great High Priest and heavenly worship. Curiously, the parallel between earthly worship in the Holy Communion and the worship of Heaven is made explicit in Charles Wheatly’s Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer (see p. 21), in 1668, during the Restoration when screens were seldom provided. Opposing practical results in terms of the provision of screens can be reached from the same theological starting point. The story of screens is never straightforward or unequivocal.
Chancel screens, with their rood loft and the rood itself, were a standard provision in the mediaeval English parish church and Lucy Wrapston, a conservator, sets the scene with a chapter on ‘Chancel Screens on the Eve of the Reformation’, citing (on p. 37) Eamon Duffy saying ‘that the most active years for rood loft building were between 1490 and 1520’, continuing as late as 1538, but everything changed under Edward VI when roods, lofts and images were attacked.
In 1550 Bishop Hooper spoke critically about the clergyman remaining in the chancel, separated from the people ‘as though the veil and the partition of the temple in the old law yet should remain in the church’ (p. 46). Despite preaching this before Edward VI, screens for the most part remained in place, which was confirmed in Elizabeth’s Royal Order of 1561, though rood lofts were to be removed and replaced by ‘a convenient crest’. From the last decade of the sixteenth century there was a growing emphasis on the ‘externals’ of worship, including ceremonial and vestments, reaching a high-water mark under Archbishop Laud from 1633, but interestingly, Trevor Cooper provides a twist by demonstrating that ‘two very similar screens could be placed in interiors representing different theologies, one Laudian, one not’ (p. 62). This book constantly shifts perspective in surprising and interesting ways.
The editor, Mark Kirby, provides a chapter on Wren’s screens, only two in 51 churches, but those were telling examples promoted by clergymen who were Patristic scholars. One, William Beveridge, author of the Synodikon of 1672, compared the chancel of a church to the Holy of Holies in the Temple. It should be reserved for the people to ‘draw near with faith’ and move from the nave into the chancel to gather for the purpose of Holy Communion. The subtle argument of the chapter concludes with the ways in which the Church of England ‘had identified itself with the Early Church from the start of the Reformation, and continued to do so in the eighteenth century’ (p. 106).
Through the eighteenth century right up to the Church Building Acts of 1818 and 1824, that identification did not result in the building of screens, as John Roberts points out, as he turns to the nineteenth century, when until the middle of the century many screens were destroyed. Everything changed with the advocacy of the screen by Pugin and the Cambridge Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society). As a Roman Catholic convert, Pugin enjoyed more influence in the church he left, than his adoptive church, and Andrew Derrick points out that the use of screens was branded ‘the Anglican tendency’ by George Wigley in his 1857 preface to a new translation of Borromeo’s Instructions on Ecclesiastical Buildings, the Catholic touchstone since the Council of Trent.
Like many other ‘externals’ of ‘Oxford Movement’ worship, screens became commonplace, even expected, furnishings of the English parish church. This was later reinforced when they became favoured forms of war memorials after the Great War. The twentieth century is admirably covered by Clare Price in ‘ “A Considerable Devotional and Artistic Asset” or an “Obstruction to Worshippers”? Changing Perspectives on Chancel Screens in the Twentieth Century’. In 1919 the Enabling Act was passed, establishing Diocesan Advisory Committees (DACs). Soon continental ideas of liturgical reform, including the openness, accessibility and visibility of the sanctuary, gained some ground in the 1930s and post-Second World War. The conservation lobby in DACs would collide with liturgical ideas in the parishes, and, of course, there was also the wish to clear the vista. The separation of the clergy in the chancel was condemned by those advocating liturgical reform, but this could mean the screen continued in use to separate the church into two worship spaces, an auditory church in the nave and a chapel for smaller services in the former chancel.
The various theological interpretations, practical, aesthetic and decorative functions, and historical significance of the screen are subtly captured in the new research presented in this remarkable book, very fittingly brought together and published by the Ecclesiological Society itself.
