Rood Screens
by Richard Hayman, Shire Books, 64pp, £7.99
Rood screens? Surely you can’t write a whole book about them – and, if you do, surely it would be unbearably boring? But in fact, Richard Hayman can write a book about them – not least because he is an expert in these matters, having also written Church Bench Ends and Misericords. And, no, rood screens aren’t boring – even if you aren’t an obsessive church-crawler.
The screens – which divide chancel from nave, and were originally topped with a rood, the Anglo-Saxon word for a cross, with the crucified Christ flanked by Mary and John the Evangelist – are crucial to the layout of a church, to English church history and to the aesthetic understanding of our most important buildings, our parish churches. And Hayman, in his gentle, easy-going, unacademic prose, is the perfect rood-screen guide.
