The rood-screen did more than separate nave from chancel. It divided the laity from the priesthood, and the financial obligations of the one from those of the other. Its barrier nature was considerably reduced at the Reformation, and churches built during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally conceived as large halls, without physical division between nave and chancel. But never in law or in practice did this division of the church cease to exist.

The nave was always the sphere of the parishioners. They alone were responsible for its building and upkeep, and they were free, within certain limits, to do what they wished with it. How they built it and kept it in at least a reasonable state of repair has been discussed elsewhere (pp. 395–7); we are here concerned rather with the uses to which the parishioners put their part of their own church.

THE NAVE: ITS SIZE AND PLAN

Almost without exception the nave with its aisles has always been the larger of the two major divisions of the parish church. It had to be so. Attendance on Sundays and on certain feasts was obligatory, and the nave had to be capable of accommodating at least the adult population of the parish, which might have run to two or three hundred persons. Before pews were introduced people had either to stand or to kneel.