Not every parish church could afford to have a set of stalls made, cathedral fashion, for its chancel. In many cases probably the seats were but benches or settles; and the naked, desolate {100} look of many spacious chancels is no doubt due to the removal of these seats. Desks, or as they were Latinised "deski," there must have been, at least one at each side, on which to place the anthem book, processioner and other music. We hear of a double desk at St Mary at Hill; but only the richest parishes seem to have provided desks for the choir boys as well as for the men. In poor parishes the men had not armed stalls, but merely a bench to sit on.[61] The boys sometimes had a bench; sometimes, as at Stowlangtoft, Suffolk (91), the bench was framed into the desk behind. At the back of the choirmen's seats, there might be bare wall; or it might be panelled, as at Sall, Norfolk (85), or arcaded, as at Chichester Cathedral (36). In richer examples there might be above the panelling a coved cornice, as at Stowlangtoft and Balsham, Cambridge (3). A still more sumptuous design was to erect a horizontal canopy above the stalls, as at St Peter's (89) and All Saints' (45), Hereford, and Brancepeth, John Cosin's church, Durham (93). The return stalls, facing east, would be those of the parish priest and his clerical helpers, and were often more spacious and lofty than the rest, and backed on to the screen, as at Chaddesden, Derbyshire (99), and Trunch, Norfolk (85). The workmanship of the best stalls is quite first rate. At All Saints', Hereford, the timber of the stalls is "good sound English oak, all either cleft or cut in the quarter, proving that the trees were converted into the smallest possible sizes before being sawn from either end, the very rough saw-kerfs meeting at an angle in the centre of the board."[62] The stalls frequently stand on stone plinths, pierced for ventilation; _e.g._, at Sall and Trunch (85). * * * * * {101} PART II ------ CHAPTER VII BISHOPS' THRONES In the next chapter we deal with movable chairs and thrones, descendants more or less of the "_sella curulis_" and the "_sella gestatoria_." More important still are the fixed thrones of Early Christian days. These were not of wood or ivory, but of masonry, usually marble. In shape they were just high-backed chairs of marble. Now countless numbers of such marble chairs or stalls were in use in the theatres, thermæ and amphitheatres of Pagan Rome; the thermæ of Caracalla alone possessed 600 such marble stalls. Doubtless many a bishop's throne, like those at St John Lateran, St Clement and Cosmedin, Rome, was actually taken from one of the Roman thermæ. Similar bishops' chairs, cut out of the solid rock, occur in the catacombs of Rome. The position of the fixed marble throne of an Early Christian bishop was high up in the centre of the back wall of the apse of the church.