Derbyshire (England) -- Antiquities; Derbyshire (England) -- History
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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