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