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.