In the Middle Ages, Britain was a land of wood.
The people depended on it, for warmth,
for shelter.
But to the medieval mind, wood spoke not just of earth,
but of heaven.
It was the perfect medium to show images of the divine.
This film will look at how carvers and carpenters transformed tough,
gnarly oak, into stunning objects to worship God.
In medieval times, as that soared up,
it must have been wonderful, just wonderful.
We'll see how carvers decorated places of worship,
as the church secured its grip on the nation.
We think, of course, that they were primitive, that they weren't
great artists. We've not changed greatly, their skills were enormous.
And we'll look at how the Crown displayed its divine right to rule
through creations like the Coronation Chair.
I think it has, sort of, mystic powers, still.
These great works were nearly all lost,
laid waste by a century of incredible destruction.
And yet there are still people
who battle to keep these traditions alive.
The masterpieces created by carvers and carpenters,
give a unique insight into the medieval mind itself,
in all its strangeness and incredible grandeur.
This is the story of a lost world.
A world destroyed by image-breakers and Puritans,
who wanted to return the nation to a state of godliness.
And churches and cathedrals were to be their battlegrounds.
During the Reformation of the 16th century,
Henry VIII began a "cultural revolution".
Religious imagery was stripped away -
a distraction from the Word of God.
This destruction was continued by radical Puritans
during the Civil War of the 17th century.
An incalculable amount of religious art was lost...
..as woodwork was destroyed by fire or the axe.
In some cases,
there's a real passionate venom
in the way they attacked, the Protestant reformers attacked,
these old images and you hear stories of them rejoicing
and building bonfires in the streets, of wooden saints
and dancing around them. In other cases, it's very clinical.
They would destroy the absolute minimum they needed to destroy.
So you have instances of saints that have got their faces cut off,
but the rest of them is left where they are.
It's almost as if the victors in the battle of the faiths,
want to leave the conquered lying on the field of battle,
wounded, mutilated, for everybody to see.
And these religious convulsions,
mean that British medieval woodwork can now only be viewed
in fragments,
because for every statue that survived,
tens of thousands did not.
These image-breakers caused far more damage than they knew.
In their religious frenzy, they ended a woodworking tradition
that stretched back thousands of years.
Because wood had been fashioned into images of the divine,
long before Christianity even came to Britain.
When the Roman General, Julius Caesar, arrived in Britain,
he found a land covered in great oak forests.
And the natives were ruled over by a priestly caste -
the Druid.
Druids played a very important role within the Celtic society.
They were law-givers, they were soothsayers, in many ways,
they were seen as magicians.
Their name, if you think about it as two parts - "dru" and "wid" -
that can be seen as "oak knower" or "knower of oak."
This idea that the Druids had this knowledge of the oak tree,
this wisdom of wood, that is so important for both their rituals,
but also their understanding of the world.
Little survives from these strange tree rituals practised by Druids.
But hidden away in this storeroom at Exeter Museum,
is a unique survival.
Deposited in wetlands, more than 2,500 years ago,
this wooden doll was only unearthed again in the late 19th century.
We've got a little figure, carved from a branch of an oak tree.
The wood was green, so fairly fresh.
He's got his head, covered in what seems to be a sort of resin,
then a body, missing the arms...
..there's a hole about here, where the arms would have slotted through.
And then he's got an erect phallus, so it suggests fertility, I think.
And that maybe also suggests that it's not just a wooden toy...
..that is part of the ritual world, it is part of their ritual life.
I mean, he's a very special object to me.
So yeah, I curate thousands of objects in the museum,
but to look into the eyes of a fellow
from 2,500 years ago is something very special,
to, kind of, wonder how he would've been used,
how he came to be deposited in the wetlands.
The nature gods of paganism
were gradually banished by the coming of Christianity.
In the 6th century,
the Pope in Rome despatched St Augustine to our shores,
who converted King Ethelbert to Christianity.
With this great symbolic moment,
you might think that nature worship would come to an end,
but one of the reasons people on these islands
adapted to Christianity was its links...to wood.
Wood is important, within the Christian religion,
partly because of its Old Testament heritage.
In the book of Genesis, of course,
the most important event takes place when Adam and Eve eat from
the Tree of Knowledge
and that brings about the Original Sin and it's only with
the death of Christ on the next tree,
the Tree of Salvation, the crucifix, that Original Sin is wiped out.
So, trees bracket the entire Christian faith.
The very earliest forms of worship were often a kind of tree worship.
They took place in groves of trees
and, as building began, columns were built out of wood.
So when you look at a space like this one,
and you look down the rows of columns,
you can imagine them as rows of trees,
and you can imagine yourself standing
in one of those sacred groves.
This is the oldest wooden church,
not just in Britain, but the whole world.
It still has its original timber walls, dating from 1060 AD,
six years before the Norman conquest.
Since its inception, the church has evolved into a celebration
of the role of wood in Christianity.
It has an oak-covered bible,
created from the same ancient wood as the walls
and a grand 18th-Century carved eagle lectern.
And there are images of Edmund the Martyr,
the original patron saint of England,
who was killed after being bound to a tree.
The word "Greensted" means "a clearing in the forest."
There is a suggestion that it was built on a pagan temple or site.
The trees, wood, timber, would be very important,
because it is in the middle of a forest
and you would've had people worshipping here,
those who were working within the forest -
foresters, charcoal makers, etc.
It's always very quiet, it is always very peaceful
and no matter how many times I visit,
there's always something that you notice
that you didn't notice before. Maybe because of the light,
you see something in a different perspective.
Maybe it's because of the atmosphere within here,
maybe it's just the calm and peacefulness
of the churchyard outside. I know many people who come here
and all they come here for is to sit quietly and say a prayer, maybe.
And I think that sums up the place.
But for all the triumph of Christianity,
it seems as if people weren't quite ready
to abandon the ancient tree myths.
You can still find traces,
even within a great Christian place of worship.
In Sheffield Cathedral
is a collection of faces merged with foliage -
the infamous Green Man.
And they were obviously a favourite form for wood carvers.
I think you can see in the Green Man, the artists' response to nature,
because some Green Men are screaming and some are laughing
and it feels like the person who's created them,
is putting something of their own response
to being surrounded by forest or marshes or whatever,
as they would have been in those days, into the Green Man itself.
The great majority of Green Men are pretty blank.
It's almost as if they've become trees themselves.
Green Men proliferated in churches up and down Britain,
the spirit of the forest invited into Christian places of worship.
And he lives on, even in the 21st century.
Master carver, Chris Pye, is one of a dying breed of Green Man carvers,
working in traditional oak wood.
It's not really a matter of fighting the wood.
It's a matter of, sort of, dancing with it, finding a way of
working with it that the wood is cut in the way it likes to be cut.
And the strange, savage spirit of the Green Man
is displayed all around Chris's house.
Really, if you push me, I don't know why I do it.
I just feel somehow connected with myself, as a human, the wood...
and this way the Green Man and the wood are actually combined,
so that the leaves are part of the face, the wood man.
When I carve a Green Man, there's this great sort of,
sense of tradition and hierarchy.
I was taught by somebody, who was taught by somebody,
who was taught by somebody and so on, who knows, by somebody
who carved a Green Man.
And Chris uses the same tools and techniques
as those early carvers who created the first Green Men.
A very typical carving tool is probably about 140 years old,
I would think.
It's still able to be used, and it will be used for another,
you know, several generations.
On the handle, we have one, two, three, four, probably with my own...
..five names. So, there are a number of carvers who've had this tool
before me, and eventually this tool will go to another carver,
who'll put their name below mine,
so you have these ghosts of the carvers using these sort of tools,
quite present on my bench as I'm carving
and I think that's very fascinating.
While the Green Man was generally seen as being passive and benign,
he did have a more violent brother...
..the Wild Man of the Wood.
This intimidating figure was originally a bracket,
or support, on a medieval house, a warning to keep your distance!
The bracket depicts a Wild Man standing with his club,
he's standing on top of a grotesque dog-like mask,
he's, literally, under his heel and the Wild Man
is a fascinating character in medieval culture.
He's known from at least the 12th century, and probably long before,
and he is symbol of strength, of virility,
that's very clearly emphasised
by this enormous phallic club that he's holding.
He's a symbol of unreasonable urges.
He symbolises, too, the natural life force that is
running through trees
and it's particularly fascinating to remember
that a bracket like this
would've been carved from green or unseasoned timber,
so, as it were, the life force in the timber has been converted
into this wonderful figure.
Wood was crucial to the Christian faith
and, because it was so important to people in the Middle Ages,
wood was the perfect medium to teach the stories of the Bible
to even the most uneducated churchgoer.
One of the most important Biblical figures for medieval worshippers
was the Old Testament figure of Jesse,
who was always depicted at the base of a tree.
He was seen as the root of Christianity,
the start of a royal line,
that would eventually lead to the birth of Jesus Christ.
In medieval society, your bloodline was all-important
and Jesse was proof that Jesus came from noble stock.
And on the English-Welsh border,
Jesse was to take on a truly remarkable form.
This solitary figure
is just a small piece of what the carvers intended.
It was originally the base of a huge array of statues.
Attacked during the Reformation, it's still a monumental work of art
that seems to carry otherworldly, pagan resonances.
It's the recumbent figure of Jesse, who was the father of David.
It's the visual aid for Christianity,
because that piece going up there, actually continued
with figures on either side, to represent all of the forebears
of Joseph, who was the putative father, anyway, of Jesus.
And it showed all of this lineage,
and it was to fulfil the prophecy in the book of the prophet, Isaiah,
that "when the Messiah comes, he will be of the house of David,
"the stem of Jesse." So, for an illiterate population,
this was him telling them what it was all about.
And you will see this, sort of, indent here,
where there would have been a jewel
so, painted all over, one piece, astonishing piece,
and this stem that would've gone right up there
is a branch of the oak, so it must've been very difficult
to get the right piece of oak, by the craftsman
and then worked on...
..presumably just this one piece...
..brought in here and it must've taken them ages to do it,
because it's extraordinary,
the way they've managed to capture the flow of the garments.
Look at that lovely flow there.
And the fall - the way the cloth then falls over his knee.
You can see the belt, look at it here,
there's the crosspiece, just falling away and the buckle,
it's natural and I think that's what's so very clever about it.
And we think of course, that they were primitive and crude,
there's that general feeling of people,
that they weren't great artists.
We've not changed greatly. Their skills were enormous.
As the church grew in power and wealth,
it embarked on a great construction project.
This building boom was to see places of worship
in every town and village across the land.
And the demand for carpentry only increased,
as woodcarving became a trade.
As early as the 13th century,
a carpenters' guild was set up, to ensure the quality of their work.
There was a strict hierarchy in place,
with labourers at the bottom, doing all the wood preparation,
apprentices and journeymen carvers in the middle,
creating more detailed work,
but at the top, was the great figure of the Master Carpenter.
Master Carpenters were gentry.
They were highly-respected men,
who travelled widely, from commission to commission.
I think these craftsmen were highly-respected artisans.
Well-paid, comparatively, but unlike our image of 20th century artists,
the work they were doing was not self-expression to put it like that.
They were providing a product.
And there's one place these craftsmen wanted to work.
East Anglia was one of the richest areas of medieval England,
because of its thriving wool trade.
The most prosperous people in the region,
spent their money on creating and furnishing magnificent churches,
that both honoured God and their generous donors.
Woodcarvers were commissioned to transform churches
into places of wonder and awe.
And the grandest, most theatrical al of all this decoration,
was the Rood Screen.
Rood Screens separated off the main body of the church,
where the congregation was,
from the place where the action was,
from the priests who were performing the Mass,
and what you would have had was this boxed-off area,
where the sound of the chanting and singing would've floated out
into the congregation,
incense might have floated out into the congregation,
but it was not participative,
people weren't taking part in the service.
It was all going on inside this perfumed box.
This screen is one of the largest in the country -
over 50 feet long and 20 feet high.
And it was carved in the style of the Middle Ages -
the Gothic.
The Gothic conveyed the glory of God through light,
intricate decoration...
..that reached up to heaven itself!
Timber, because it is light, easy to work and very strong,
it can break the sinews of reality in architecture,
it can imitate stone forms, but do it in such a way
that it's inconceivable that they could be stone.
And so the onlooker has this "wow factor".
He sees something that looks as though it's built of stone
and yet, it's far too big. How is that structurally possible?
The Gothic aesthetic is very much bound up with creating spaces
that people are overawed by. They can't comprehend them.
They are structurally impossible, and, of course,
timber is the perfect way of creating those kinds of spaces.
On top of the Rood Screen would've sat a rood -
a cross or crucifix.
Roods were systematically taken down and destroyed
during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Indeed, until the beginning of the 20th century,
every single rood was believed to have been lost.
But in 1912, a remarkable discovery was made.
These are the remains of the only rood
to survive from the Middle Ages.
It was discovered in the walls of a church in Gloucestershire.
I think it speaks very powerfully,
about the way people valued these images
and somehow, when you're looking, from a medieval perspective,
when you're looking at an image of Christ, dead on the cross,
all of the, kind of, religious emotion that stimulates,
as you gaze upon it.
I think we can't really underestimate how deep that went.
It is an extremely beautiful piece.
There is something very particular about the quality of wood
that animates these sculptures and makes them lifelike.
There's a degree of naturalism in this, I think,
particularly in the way death is rendered,
that, I think, probably did create strong connections
with the congregation.
I do have a very strong response to it.
Not least of all, because both fragments are so incredibly fragile.
Now, part of their history was they were inured in this church wall.
They'd largely rotted, as a consequence of that,
and they're rotted from the inside out,
so in fact, what you're looking at is essentially, like two eggshells.
There isn't anything in the centre of them.
But it makes me even reluctant to handle them,
because there is something so ephemeral about them,
you feel they could just really dissolve and disappear.
Laurence Beckford is working to restore a lost Rood Screen.
These 16th century panels were originally from a Devon monastery.
They were dismantled and removed during the Reformation.
They only survived because they were reincarnated as a chimneypiece
in a local stately home.
Laurence is one of the few carvers who can bring this
sort of medieval woodwork back to life.
He is recreating what was lost in fresh oak, which will then
be stained, to fit in with the rest of the work.
And Laurence has a special affinity for rood screens.
When I started my apprenticeship,
the company I worked for did a lot of ecclesiastical work
so I was sent to the churches, historic buildings
and I was faced with medieval woodwork, medieval screens,
fantastic tracery
and, obviously, I was in awe.
I was a young chap, I saw this wonderful, wonderful carving,
full of life, full of vigour and I thought,
"I'd love to work on screens like that."
When you work on a piece of original medieval woodwork,
you have to really study the tool marks, the way the lines flow
and you start to learn how to free those carvers were.
I think many people think they were maybe at a bench
and they were being told exactly what to do.
I don't believe that.
I think they were very free,
they were allowed to express
their inner feelings
and that's what I can see in the woodwork now.
So as I work on those pieces of carving,
I almost get a feel of what they may have felt and I have to feel that,
I think, because I need to put that into my work
otherwise you will see a huge, huge difference.
Over the years of carving, it's become part of me
and I don't know what I would do if I didn't carve now.
It's really, really in me
and it's taught me a lot about life.
How, if you...
How you can achieve something from very little
from a piece of plain wood
with the commitment and focus and ideas in your head.
How you can, with some tools, you can produce some lovely works of art.
As well as roods and rood screens, medieval carvers became
masters at enriching the performance of sacraments within the church.
This 15th century baptismal font cover was designed to protect
the holy water from contamination.
Some said, even from theft by witches.
At the top is a pelican, shedding its own blood -
a symbol of Christ's sacrifice.
On the count of three, from underneath, just slowly up.
One, two, three.
It's also a great feat of medieval technology.
It retracts upwards like a telescope.
In medieval times, as that soared up,
it must have been wonderful. Just wonderful.
But this font cover is not just an incredible work of art,
it's also a miraculous survivor.
During the English Civil War,
it attracted the attention of the radical puritan William Dowsing,
who led a troop of image breakers through East Anglia.
Well, in the 1640s, William Dowsing
was appointed to destroy any religious symbols in Suffolk.
His officers came to Ufford, where the churchwardens
and other people of Ufford resisted their admission -
he could not get into the church.
So he came again later in that same year to inspect the church,
inflicted a great deal of damage but,
describing the font cover as glorious, he let it be.
The font cover is just very special to everyone in Ufford
and the children and grandchildren of people who lived here
come back to be christened here.
It's difficult to describe the emotions
which the font cover creates.
It's just part and parcel of the heritage of the people of Ufford
and I think we all feel that.
It gives us a sense of pride, which is probably a great sin.
But carpenters didn't just create images of the divine for churches.
They could also conjure up visions of damnation.
These bench ends show the Seven Deadly Sins.
The sinners being swallowed by a giant fish.
Here, you can see two lovers embracing,
showing the sin of lust.
Here, a drunken lout pouring wine, to show the sin of sloth.
And here, you can even see avarice, with his little money bags.
For a largely illiterate population,
this was a visual reminder to obey God's law.
In the Middle Ages, where there is a sense of order,
there is also a corresponding sense of disorder.
So the ordered universe, God's universe,
has its exact mirror opposite -
the disorganised, the chaotic, the evil.
And it is in articulating that evil or that opposite
that the good and the ordered is reinforced.
The practice of carving bench ends
almost came to an end with the Reformation.
But it was revived in this church, St John the Baptist,
in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Here, you see the religious iconography
you might expect in a church.
But many designs are far more unexpected.
They were paid for by village parishioners,
commemorating lost loved ones.
This bench end was for a stonemason, showing his mallet and chisel.
The carver Laurence Beckford created this boat on a rocky sea
in memory of a local merchant seaman...
..and this intricate foliage scene for the rector's wife,
who died in the early '90s.
Unlike the medieval bench ends which tell Biblical stories,
this is very much a personal bench end.
And it depicts the wildlife and nature
because she was a wonderful gardener, really loved gardening.
The foliage is living, the timber is living, the foliage is living,
the design is living and you can carve twists and curls.
Here, for example, you have a turnover
and you can get lovely undulations
and a very lovely sort of suent line.
Absolutely... Carving foliage in oak is fantastic.
It's not very often and common
for the family member to commission a bench end such as this
and the merchant ship one but they obviously feel
very deeply and their partner obviously was a huge part
in their life and they believe it is worth commemorating.
And they must have immense joy when it is completed and it is fitted.
They must feel very proud of their lost one
and I think it is a fantastic recognition of that person's life.
You know, it's wonderful.
As the church grew more powerful,
so did the pride and ambition of some of its priests.
A great cathedral was never just about the glory of God.
It was also the seat of bishops who were princely figures
with great power and wealth at their disposal.
CHORAL SINGING
Much of the splendour of Exeter Cathedral is because of
the extravagant and rather proud Bishop Walter de Stapledon.
In the early 14th century, he was given the Bishopric of Exeter.
A year's revenue from the cathedral was spent on a great feast
to celebrate his enthronement.
De Stapledon created the greatest tribute of all the Middle Ages
to the role of the bishop.
A special place within the cathedral, reserved just for him,
where he would sit in splendour before his congregation.
This is the Bishop's Throne -
a 60 foot wooden canopy,
pointing like a giant finger towards God.
It was made by local craftsmen over a period of six years.
Almost hidden in this grand confection
is the apostle St Peter,
the first Bishop of Rome,
showing the Bishop's role had a direct link to Christ himself.
The throne looks splendid now because, in early 2012,
John Allan and Hugh Harrison led the restoration of this masterpiece.
The throne was covered in scaffolding,
which allowed them to explore areas even the Bishop wouldn't have seen.
There we go.
We are standing under the vault of one of the most
extraordinary pieces of medieval woodwork in Europe
and it is immensely richly carved.
It is also extremely complex in its construction
and it is really the first magnificent grand piece
of medieval woodwork to survive in England.
They carved it with such verve that you can still see the chisel marks.
In fact, one of the carvers,
he had a nick in his chisel
and you can actually see the little lines
where the wood isn't cut
because of the nick in the chisel and you think,
"He must have been not very happy
"and had to send his chisel back to the blacksmith, probably,
"the next day to get the nick taken out of it."
Well, I think everyone knows this is a great masterpiece.
It's one of the most famous objects in medieval art in England.
But somehow, when you get up to it
and you see the sheer amount of work in it
and the sheer panache of it all and the fantastic quality
and the complexity of it, it just takes your breath away, doesn't it,
that they achieved such things? Yes, it's absolutely superb.
But Exeter also shows that
while woodworkers could master the profound,
they could also be ridiculous.
Far away from the gaze of the congregation,
hidden under the choir stalls, are some rather daring carvings.
Monstrous mythological creatures.
An alluring mermaid.
A centaur firing an arrow.
These remarkable objects are called misericords -
places to rest during prayer.
It comes from this idea of the seat of mercy
but because the seat was actually underneath the bottom of somebody,
you couldn't really have sacred depictions there.
It's amazing, some of the scenes that survive on these misericords.
Wood, of course, was just a cheap material
and I think people were carving fabulous beasts and animals
and dragons and wyverns and all the rest of it
just cos it's fun.
And from down below to on high,
carvers would create elaborate decoration, insisting on perfection
even though no human eye would really be able to see it.
One way of beautifying your cathedral was to create a great boss
to cover over the joins where the ribs in the ceiling meet.
This amazing chunk of oak
is one of the oldest objects in our collection,
made at the very beginning of the 14th century
and it's a ceiling boss from St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire.
What we have in this swirling and complex design
are leaves curling around
and out of the leaves
springs forward the head and claws of a lion
that is grasping a bone in its jaws.
Having been removed from the vault,
we can see it in a way that no-one using the cathedral 700 years ago
could have seen it because we can see the underside of the boss.
So what we can see here is the sheer physical effort that carvers
had to put in to create something like this.
We are seeing, vividly, the marks left by the chisels.
This would have been a huge amount of work, hollowing out.
Heavy, hard work.
So there was a lot of chopping out needing to be done
before the delicate work on the outside could be completed.
Medieval woodcarvers had spent centuries using their work
to beautify churches and cathedrals.
But there was increasingly a tension between the power of the priests
and the power of the Crown.
And both claimed to derive their authority from God himself.
And some of the finest woodwork was to be used as a political weapon.
At the beginning of the 13th century,
the militaristic Edward I wanted to make a grand statement
about the elevated nature of kingship.
He created an iconic object that has been
at the centre of British life for 800 years,
last used during Elizabeth II's coronation.
Edward's Coronation Chair, which has crowned monarchs
since the Middle Ages, recently underwent restoration
in Westminster Abbey by the conservator Marie Louise Sauerberg.
'We made a studio onsite for the Coronation Chair.
'To treat it, to stabilise it,
'is basically the headline of what we are doing.
'We have had to mend the seat.
'There was a couple of fractures in it.
'Some old repairs, we redid
'so that we were sure that they were stronger than they were before.'
The chair has received a battering since its creation.
The Victorians tried to tone down its gilding
through varnishing it brown.
It was bombed by suffragettes
and, most visible of all,
the chair is covered with centuries-old graffiti.
There's something like 300 initials and names carved into the chair.
All this graffiti is mainly Westminster schoolboys
and they are mainly 18th-century inscriptions.
We have got one here -
a P Abbott who slept in the chair one night in July in 1800,
spending probably more time, well,
definitely more time than any monarch ever spent in the chair.
It is said that, if you paid a shilling,
you could scratch your name into it.
A lot of these scratches here are probably pen marks -
people taking little pieces of the chair
to have and to hold, to eat, who knows?
It could have had, sort of...
Yeah, I think it has, sort of, mystic powers still.
One of the earliest monarchs to receive his coronation on the chair
was Richard II in the late 14th century.
The moment was captured in this painting,
commissioned by Richard himself -
the first accurate likeness of an English monarch.
Richard was the first king
to insist on being the sole ruler in the kingdom,
with the nobility obeying him absolutely.
He demanded to be called Royal Majesty - a new invention -
and for his subjects to bow the knee in his presence.
But he made his greatest statements about his belief in his omnipotence
through art.
This is the Wilton Diptych.
It was a portable altar piece commissioned by Richard,
painted on Baltic oak.
It was Richard's attempt to show he was anointed to rule by God himself.
Here, you see Richard receiving the flag of England from an angel
before Jesus and Mary.
All of the angels are wearing Richard's emblem - a white hart.
And angels were to play a special role
in the signature artwork of his reign.
In 1393, Richard's master carpenter Hugh Herland
sailed 660 tons of oak down the Thames in great barges from Surrey.
This wood was to be used to remodel Richard's palace at Westminster.
The result has been called
the greatest work of art of the Middle Ages.
A magnificent freestanding roof decorated with angels.
The span of that roof is over 60 feet
and there simply weren't oak timbers that could span that space.
What Hugh Herland did instead
was created a kind of joisting structure
that allowed the roof to be covered in two stages.
It is a structure called a hammer beam.
Once it had been created in this form and ornamented with angels,
the English public was clearly dazzled by it.
Each of the principal trusses of the roof is carved
with a figure of an angel holding the Royal Arms.
And, symbolically, there are 13 trusses,
which is the number of Christ and his apostles.
Here in this wonderful architectural metaphor,
the heavenly court of Christ hovers in appreciation
and protection over its earthly counterpart, the court of Richard II.
The increasing ambitions of the monarchs inevitably led
to battles with the other power in the land - the Church.
The uneasy relationship between the two
unravelled in the 16th century under the reign of King Henry VIII.
Henry saw the wealth and influence of the Catholic Church in Rome
as an obstruction to his own power.
He was the first monarch to declare that he should be
the head of the Church of England.
And this schism is all revealed in one remarkable object.
In the 1530s, Henry commissioned this oak rood screen
as a gift for the chapel at King's College.
In a break with tradition,
it was carved in the continental Renaissance style.
It's less a religious object
than an unashamed attempt to project the power of the monarch.
It contains not just the initials of Henry VIII, Henricus Rex,
it also has the name of his wife Anne Boleyn, Regina Anne.
And it is covered with images of military might rather than saints.
This was one of the last rood screens to be erected in Britain.
The effect of the union of Henry and Anne
unleashed the turmoil of the Reformation
and the many wonders created by woodworkers over the centuries
were now about to be destroyed.
The religious revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries
finally brought an end to the golden age of religious oak carving
and oak was now looking very old-fashioned as carvers
turned to other woods as Britain's cultural horizons expanded.
Grinling Gibbons,
the greatest carver ever to work in these islands,
rejected oak for the far suppler limewood in the 17th century.
And in the 18th century,
craftsmen like Thomas Chippendale used mahogany from the West Indies.
But at the turn of the 20th century,
one man was to revive the lost art of oak carving.
Robert Thompson was a craftsman who was obsessed with the Middle Ages.
Based in the tiny Yorkshire village of Kilburn,
he wanted to turn the clock back to before the Reformation,
bringing fine oak carving back into churches.
But Robert also introduced a delightful twist
that would capture people's imaginations.
He was to become famous in Britain and across the world
as the Mouseman of Kilburn.
The Thompson family business is still thriving and keeps faith
with Robert's vision of handcrafted medieval-style workmanship.
But always at its centre is the legendary figure of the mouse.
Great-grandfather was working
with a fellow craftsman
and they were working on a local church and the craftsman
happened to mention he thought they were both as poor as church mice
and, of course, a church mouse is working away
with his chisel-like teeth
and nobody knows he's there so he thought how nice it would be
to carve a mouse on this particular piece he was working on.
So ever since that day,
each piece that we produce here at Kilburn
has had a mouse carved on it.
Each mouse is carved by the craftsmen who makes the piece of furniture
so each one is identifiable.
So, we've got 25 craftsmen so, basically,
we have 25 different styles of mice.
So we can each identify each other's work.
We are in a world of mass production
and, unfortunately, things have moved on at such a great rate of knots.
There is still room for a small family business
still using traditional craft skills.
We are not mass production, we are hands-on.
There is no substitute for a pair of those, at the end of the day.
The wonders of the Middle Ages
can still be glimpsed in our churches and museums.
Such was the violence of the destruction
in the 16th and 17th centuries,
it can only ever be a small taste of this lost world.
But one final object shows that this type of religious art
still holds a ghostly presence.
In the 16th century, this church was attacked by Protestant reformers.
Its lavishly decorated rood screen was whitewashed
and painted over with passages from the Bible.
Yet, over the centuries, something remarkable happened.
The faces of Jesus and the saints began to bleed through again.
It shows that, just beneath the surface,
maybe more treasures of the Middle Ages
are waiting to be resurrected.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd