Rood Screen

A rood screen is a partition, usually built of finely carved wood or stone tracery, that separates the nave from the chancel in a Western church, and it takes its name from the large crucifix, the rood, traditionally mounted on a beam at the top of the screen, often flanked by carved figures of the Virgin Mary and Saint John standing at either side of the cross.

Unlike the fully solid Eastern iconostasis, a rood screen typically remains partially open, its lower section a solid carved dado but its upper portion often pierced with open tracery or small windows, letting the congregation retain at least a partial view through to the altar and chancel beyond even while the screen marks a clear architectural and symbolic boundary between the two spaces. A narrow stair, the rood stair, frequently gave access to a walkway or loft along the top of the screen, the rood loft, used historically for readings, for the display of relics or additional imagery, and sometimes for musicians or singers positioned above the congregation during specific parts of the liturgy. Surviving rood screens are especially well documented in English parish churches, where regional woodcarving traditions, particularly in East Anglia and the West Country, produced some of the most elaborately painted and carved examples anywhere in medieval Western Europe.

Many rood screens in England were substantially altered, stripped of their rood and loft, or removed outright during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, a period during which the large crucifix and the sharply demarcated separation between nave and chancel that the screen embodied came to be seen by reformers as inconsistent with a theology that emphasized the congregation's direct, unobstructed access to the altar and the preached word rather than a visually and physically divided liturgical space.

Royal injunctions under Edward VI specifically ordered the removal of rood lofts and images in English parish churches, and while the lower screen itself sometimes survived where the rood and loft above it did not, a great many English rood screens were destroyed entirely, so that the substantial surviving examples that remain today, concentrated especially in East Anglia and southwest England, represent a real minority of what once existed across the country before the Reformation.

Rood screens fared differently elsewhere in Europe, surviving with far less disruption in regions that remained Roman Catholic through the same period, and the form saw a modest revival of interest during the nineteenth century Gothic Revival, when some architects and church restorers reintroduced screens, in a broadly similar spirit though rarely with an actual restored rood, into newly built or renovated churches influenced by medieval precedent.