Ever since Christianity became the religion of the state under Emperor Constantine and adopted a new architecture for its worship that was both public and suitably resplendent, there has existed a tension between the desire to reveal and the desire to conceal, between a corporate sense of the people of God gathered together (always stronger in the East) and an emphasis on the hierarchical structure of the Church (which predominated in the West). This tension between open and closed-in structures, between the visual and the veiled, which can be traced back to the theology undergirding the arrangement of the Jewish Temple, is nowhere exemplified more clearly than in the use of chancel screens in the churches both of this country and on the Continent. In the early basilicas the altar was framed by a ciborium and protected by cancelli, or low screens, which served as a crowd control barrier and also symbolised the sacred in the midst of the profane, heaven coming into the midst of earth. This process of demarcation developed over time into the medieval chancel screen with its accompanying rood, which clearly divided the priests’ space in the chancel, where the sacred mysteries were celebrated, from the people’s space in the nave and was a dramatic visual reminder of the atoning death of Christ which opened up the way into God’s presence.

In 2019 the Ecclesiological Society held a conference focusing on the way in which the use of screens since the Reformation evolved, then declined, and then underwent a renaissance in the High Victorian period, until their relative rarity in the twentieth century. The conference papers have been brought together in this attractive publication, Chancel Screens Since the Reformation, edited by Mark Kirby and published in 2020. After an introduction by Mark Kirby, the first two chapters give us the historical and theological context for the post-Reformation developments. Peter Doll examines the theology behind the idea of a barrier dividing sacred from community space, emphasising the fulfilment of the Jewish Temple tradition in the rood screen and the iconostasis, both like the Veil of the Temple, representing a visible threshold of the invisible. He traces this Tabernacle and Temple typology through the centuries after the Reformation until A W N Pugin in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘the last architect theologically literate enough to have been fully immersed in Patristic typology’. Even his successor in the revived Gothic tradition, John Ninian Comper, only went back for his inspiration to the early church, not to Jewish Temple worship.

Lucy Wrapson describes the nature of the rood screen as understood on the eve of the Reformation. The Perpendicular screen with crucifix and flanking figures of St Mary and St John developed in the early fifteenth century, and two English regions are particularly rich in examples, East Anglia and Devon. Screens were often painted, depicting the figures of saints as an encouragement to intercessory prayer, and sometimes showed the influence of craftsmen from the Low Countries. After the Reformation, rood screens continued to be built, and it was only after the Visitations of Edward vi that this rich craft tradition of carpentry and painting died out.

Trevor Cooper covers the period from Elizabeth i to the Civil War, when screens remained as a ‘comely partition betwixt the chancel and the church’, according to Elizabeth’s order of 1561. Some new screens were built, as at St Mary the Virgin, Croscombe, Somerset, 1616, and at Dore Abbey, Abbey Dore, Herefordshire, 1635 – both elaborate and impressive structures. By contrast, as Mark Kirby explains, only two of Christopher Wren’s fifty-one London churches have screens, St Peter Cornhill and All Hallows-the-Great, because by then the ‘auditory principle’ governed the interior layout of the church building, which had become a rectangular box with the pulpit as the main focal point. As Wren himself wrote: ‘The Romanists, indeed, may build larger churches … it is enough if they hear the Murmur of the Mass and see the elevation of the Host, but ours are to be fitted for Auditories’.

The next two essays explore the sea-change that occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century, spurred on by the writing and practice of the Roman Catholic architect A W N Pugin. In his Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts, published in Reference Pugin1851, he states: ‘If a man says he loves pointed architecture and hates screens, I do not hesitate to denounce him as a liar, for one is inseparable from the other.’ In the churches he built, he promoted the use of the rood screen (eg St Alban’s, Macclesfield and St Giles Cheadle), and his views were echoed and promoted within the Church of England by the Cambridge Camden Society, founded in 1839. Through its journal, The Ecclesiologist, the society stated that the rood screen was the essential separation of priest and people, between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant.

Although it assiduously promoted rood screens throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the society encountered considerable opposition from the Low-Church Party, and from those opposed to anything that smacked of Popery. Because of this, architects like William Butterfield returned to the use of cancelli, low stone walls often with additional railings, as at All Saints, Margaret Street, London.

Meanwhile, within the Roman Catholic Church Pugin’s ideas were being side-lined by the Ultramontane party’s desire to follow the rulings of the Council of Trent and the consequent demand for greater visibility for offices like the Quarant’ Ore within a single-space church. Andrew Derrick explores the resulting rood screen controversy, and how architects increasingly sought ways of reconciling Gothic forms with the Tridentine principle of the ‘all seeing church’. A good example is St Walburga’s, Preston, by Joseph Hansom.

Although screens continued to be installed well into the Edwardian period, both in Anglican churches (eg St Augustine’s, Kilburn) and in Roman Catholic churches (eg St Edmund of Canterbury, Old Hall Green, Herts, and Holy Rood, Watford), and indeed in Anglican cathedrals, nevertheless the theological and liturgical beliefs that underpinned their use were being overtaken by different demands in the twentieth century.

Clare Price examines these changing trends and perspectives that created a ‘perfect storm’ for chancel screens – the new insights of the Liturgical Movement and the emphasis on the community gathered for worship, which required nave altars and a ‘theatre-in-the-round’ approach to the internal ordering of the architectural space. This new emphasis on visual openness was promoted by G W O Addleshaw and Frederich Etchells in their influential book The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship, published in Reference Addleshaw and Etchells1948, and found expression in the innovative layout of St Paul’s, Bow Common, 1958, by Robert Maguire and Keith Murray, where the use of a ciborium and corona defines the sacred space without being a barrier. Those churches that have retained their screen now tend to use them as a reredos, or back-drop to the nave altar, which relegates the chancel to being a weekday chapel or simply unused space.

In the High Middle Ages the object that was most visible to the laity was not the high altar but the great rood, flanked by St Mary and St John, above the chancel screen. Changing liturgical fashions over the subsequent centuries (initiated by the Reformation) and what the writer Aymer Vallance, in his English Church Screens (Reference Vallance1936), called ‘the incontinent lech for vistas’, something alien to the medieval mind, have gradually rendered the chancel screen obsolete to modern liturgical requirements, although in the process something vital has been lost. Peter Doll ends his piece with this appeal to those charged with the internal ordering of our churches:

This excellent collection of essays, beautifully illustrated, reminds us of the tension between the visual and the veiled that has played such a vital role in the evolution of our churches, and is still such a distinctive and attractive feature of so many of them.