Chancel

Chancel (Lat. cancellus, 'a screen'). The chancel, choir, or eastern part of a church was often separated from the nave by a screen of lattice-work, so as to prevent general access thereto, though not to interrupt either sight or sound. As it was in this part of the church that the service was always performed previous to the Reformation, the clergy were held to have a special right to it, in return for which its repairs in general still fall on the impropriator, rector, or vicar, and not on the parish. The chief pew in the chancel belongs to the rector or impropriator, but the disposal of the seats in the church, with this exception, belongs to the ordinary, or, practically, to the churchwardens, to whom the authority of the ordinary is delegated. No monument, moreover, can be set up without the ordinary's consent. And where the freehold of the chancel vests in a lay impropriator, nevertheless the right of possession in it for public worship vests in the minister or churchwardens, so that they cannot be excluded from it, nor be charged with trespass for making a door into it from the church-yard. The term chancel is usually confined to parish churches which have no aisles around the choir, or chapels behind it or around it; and in this case the chancel and the choir have the same signification. In small churches which have no constructional chancel, the space within the altar rails is sometimes called by this name, but is more strictly styled the 'sanctuary.' But in larger churches there are sometimes chancels at the ends of the side aisles, and this whether the choir has the character of a choir in the larger sense, or of a chancel. See CHURCH.