An altar-screen with rood, &c., is to be seen in an illustration of the
hearse of Abbot Islip in Westminster Abbey. At St. Cross, Nuremberg, a
rood with St. Mary and St. John and several angels, contained in very
fine and lofty tabernacle work, surmounts a carving of the Deposition
by Veit Stoss, which is protected by triple doors, with paintings by
Wohlgemuth, over the high altar. This may also have been the case at
Chichester, as in the years 1276 tapers are mentioned: “Supra trabem
pictam supportantem crucifixi imaginem viii ejusdem ponderis.” In the
Laudable Customs of Hereford, in the twelfth century, there is an
allusion to the beam in “Missa accenduntur xiii cerei supra trabem”; and,
on great feasts, “iv ante majus altare quinque in basinis xiij super
trabem et vij super candelabra.” Joceline de Brakelond tells us that
at Bury St. Edmunds, in the Abbey Church, there was a “Crux que erat
super magnum altare, et Mariola et Johannes, quas imagines Stigandus
archiepiscopus magno pondere auri et argenti ornaverat, et Sancto Ædmundo
dederat.” The following quotations from the Liber Niger of _Lincoln
Minster_ (about the year 1236) refer to this in all probability: “Item
in eisdem festis invenire, xvi cereos supra trabem secus altare,” &c.
“Omnes prescripti cerei exceptis cereis super candelabrum ereum et trabem
secus altare,” &c. “Item in principalibus festis debent ponere xvj cereos
parvos super trabem secus altare et illuminare et extinguere et in
depositione habere unum illorum quem voluerint.”
Then on the choir-screen top, whether of wood or stone, there was
a gallery—the rood-loft which came into general existence in the
fourteenth, although as we have seen it was mentioned in the eleventh
century, and in parish churches often the only evidence left of this
rood-loft’s existence is the stone staircase of approach.
The _names_ of the rood-loft are various: Holy Loft, Candlebeam, Pulpitum
(Englished as poulpete, &c.), Rood Soller or Soler (the latter a word
used by Chaucer, who speaks of the “Soler Hall at Cantebrige”; it is
interesting to note that there is still a _Garret_ Hostel Lane and
Bridge there). In Norfolk it was called the Perk or Perch; in France,
the Jubé; in Germany, the Letter; and in Wales, Lloft y Grog. The screen
itself has been termed the trelyse, as in Mr. Gibbon’s _Early Lincoln
Wills_ we find one R. Bradley bequeathing 3s. 4d. for “gilding of the
trelyse.” Also it was termed spur or spere, as J. H. Parker gives us in
a contract for a rood-loft at Merton College Chapel, _c._ 1486, “with
speres and lynterns for two awters.”
As there is a great difference between the solid stone screens of
cathedral, monastic, and collegiate churches, and the light wood ones of
parish churches, both in material, design, and uses, it will be well to
describe each class separately.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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