England’s medieval chancel or rood screens divided the nave from the chancel, the public part of the church from that of the priest; the earthly from the divine. Rather than acting as a practical physical barrier (they did not always have central doors) they functioned more as a spiritual one, providing a frame for the theatre of the Mass. The earliest surviving parochial examples of these colourful, multivalent and multifunctional structures are thirteenth and fourteenth century in date. By the late fifteenth century, they were nigh on ubiquitous.