page_title: Rood
section_title: Charlton-on-Otmoor Garland
hierarchical_section_title: Rood / Representative examples / United Kingdom / Charlton-on-Otmoor Garland
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration of foliage-covered garland used in place of a rood cross on top of late-15th-century roodscreen (c.1490) in Charlton on Otmoor church, Oxfordshire. The garland used to be carried in procession around the parish. It is still redecorated twice a year, on May Day and September 19, the village patronal festival.
context_page_description: A rood or rood cross, sometimes known as a triumphal cross, is a cross or crucifix, especially the large crucifix set above the entrance to the chancel of a medieval church.
  Alternatively, it is a large sculpture or painting of the crucifixion of Jesus.
context_section_description: A unique rood exists at St Mary's parish church, Charlton-on-Otmoor, near Oxford, England, where a large wooden cross, solidly covered in greenery stands on the early 16th-century rood screen (said by Sherwood and Pevsner to be the finest in Oxfordshire). The cross is redecorated twice a year, on 1 May and 19 September (the patronal festival, calculated according to the Julian Calendar), when children from the local primary school, carrying small crosses decorated with flowers, bring a long, flower-decorated, rope-like garland. The cross is dressed or redecorated with locally obtained box foliage. The rope-like garland is hung across the rood screen during the "May Garland Service".
  An engraving from 1823 shows the dressed rood cross as a more open, foliage-covered framework, similar to certain types of corn dolly, with a smaller attendant figure of similar appearance. Folklorists have commented on the garland crosses' resemblance to human figures, and noted that they replaced statues of St Mary and Saint James the Great which had stood on the rood screen until they were destroyed during the Reformation. Until the 1850s, the larger garland cross was carried in a May Day procession, accompanied by morris dancers, to the former Benedictine Studley priory (as the statue of St Mary had been, until the Reformation). Meanwhile, the women of the village used to carry the smaller garland cross through Charlton, though it seems that this ceased some time between 1823 and 1840, when an illustration in J.H. Parker's A Glossary of Terms Used in Grecian, Roman, Italian, and Gothic Architecture shows only one garland cross, centrally positioned on the rood screen.
caption: The single garland in the rood loft at Charlton-on-Otmoor, illustrated by J.H. Parker in 1840.
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