Rood screen

Near-synonyms: dorsal, dossal

The church at Randworth is without aisles, and consists of a chancel and nave only. The rood-screen proper, i.e., the arcade with panels below, is placed, as usual, between the piers of the chancel arch.

An ancient rood screen usually, probably always, consisted of a loft from twelve to twenty feet high, and five to ten feet broad, protected by two parapets, the one towards the chancel the other towards the nave, running its entire length, sometimes quite across the church. […] The space below the loft was filled up by carved work called the rood screen, to screen off the chancel from the nave. This rood screen [in St Edmund's Church, Southwold] is all that ruthless iconoclasts have suffered to remain.

Exhibited in the treasury of Durham Cathedral are two stone relief panels, dated 1155–60, whose damaged appearance belies their significance for our understanding of the liturgical division of space in twelfth-century cathedrals[…]. Although easily overlooked, these panels belonged to what was perhaps the single most important piece of ecclesiastical furniture in the Romanesque cathedral of Durham: the rood screen. Like all Romanesque sculpture in our museums and treasuries today, these panels have been uprooted from their original, medieval context. […] The scarcity of evidence for the decorative elaboration of rood screens in the twelfth century makes the Durham panels important vestiges of a type of ecclesiastical furniture whose origin is still obscure to us.

There are about eighty rood screens in Norfolk, which divide the chancel from the nave, most of them dating from 1450–1530, and generally made of wood and adorned with painted saints. […] Rood screens were perceived as aids to devotional meditation.

The rood-screen was normally a stone or wooden partition, solid to waist-height and then pierced with openings to allow sight of the high altar, and a doorway to permit access to the officiating ministers. A great crucifix, usually supported by a heavy beam, stretched across the top of the screen.