At _Winthorpe_, for example, there is no trace of a loft on the existing
screen, while some four feet or so westwards are putlog holes and
corbels for the front of the rood-loft, as well as a complete rood-loft
staircase on the north side of the chancel. _Grainsby_, _Friskney_, and
_Leverton_ are instances of similar treatment. The explanation is that
the rood-loft has been made on the same plan as that at Upper Sheringham
in Norfolk. Here a screen of the square-headed kind described, and with
good Perpendicular tracery, fills the chancel arch to about the height
of ten feet. Four or five feet westwards of this screen extends the
rood-loft, not supported apparently by the screen, but just touching it.
Two uprights support the front of the loft, with the spandrils filled on
the north side with a pelican, on the south with a dragon. The gallery,
which has an elegant open traceried front, runs across in front of the
chancel arch and is reached by a staircase in the north wall. Much the
same arrangement has been at East Budleigh. A feature of minor interest
in Sheringham is the diversity of tracery; thus in the rood-loft seven
and a half bays have the same, while three more are quite different, and
in the screen the number of differences is still more marked.
There are also some screens which show no trace on their westward face of
a rood-loft, and yet have or have had one. Of these, Worstead may stand
for an example.
Again, occasionally a screen is found, certainly old, certainly in its
original position, and yet with no signs on it or in the church of any
rood-loft at all. It is fair to suppose in these cases that there never
has been a rood-loft, but that the screen itself has carried the rood.
Such a screen was the one at _Salmonby_, now removed, and the existing
elegant Perpendicular ones at _Wickenby_ and _Scrivelsby_. At West
Tarring and Broadwater (Sussex) the low screens bristle with spikes,
probably contemporaneous, which show that there never was any upper
tracery or loft. Also we can have a rood-loft alone, without a screen, as
seems to have been the case at Avebury (Wilts). A superb example of this
kind abroad still exists in the Church of St. Etienne du Mont, Paris, of
sixteenth-century date, with two spiral staircases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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