Wrought iron has been used as a decorative element in architecture from the eleventh century to the twentieth. At first a device to strengthen and embellish doors, wrought iron was soon adopted for free-standing screens and railings, examples of which can still be seen in churches and cathedrals. At the end of the seventeenth century iron screens, gates and railings became a fashionable element of country and town houses, resulting in the most creative period of decorative ironwork. The cheaper technique of cast iron led to a subsequent decline in wrought iron, although the latter underwent a...

Although misericords were originally installed on the hidden undersides of church folding seats to provide comfort to those standing for long periods of prayer, the have gradually become more ornately carved and decorated. Now they, along with the benches installed in parish churches in the later middle ages, are the objects of a large proportion of the surviving medieval woodcarving in Britain. The subject matter of these carvings is not merely concerned with religion and religious symbolism. This book outlines the history of church seating, considers the status of the craftsmen and the...

The Reformation transformed England forever. From peasants in the lanes and fields to the court of Henry VIII, no life was left untouched as the Roman Catholic Church was replaced as the centre of the nation's religious life. Emerging from a dense mesh of European ecclesiastical and political controversy and Tudor dynastic ambition, the English Reformation ended with the Pope supplanted as the head of the national church, the great monasteries -owners of much of the country's land-disbanded and destroyed, the Latin Mass replaced by vernacular services and the colourful wall paintings of...