Note 57 — Of the London Chimney-Sweepers.

“Reredos, dossel (retable, Fr.; postergule, Ital.),” according to Parker’s Glossary of Architecture, was “the wall or screen at the back of an altar, seat, &c.; it was usually ornamented with panelling, &c., especially behind an altar, and sometimes was enriched with a profusion of niches, buttresses, pinnacles, statues, and other decorations, which were often painted with brilliant colours.

“The open fire-hearth, frequently used in ancient domestic halls, was likewise called a reredos.

“In the description of Britain prefixed to Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles,’ we are told that formerly, before chimneys were common in mean houses, ‘each man made his fire against a reredosse in the hall, where he dined and dressed his meat.’”

The original word would appear to be dosel or rere-dosel; for Kelham, in his “Norman Dictionary,” explains the word doser or dosel to signify a hanging or canopy of silk, silver, or gold work, under which kings or great personages sit; also the back of a chair of state (the word being probably a derivative of the Latin dorsum, the back. Dos, in slang, means a bed, a “dossing crib” being a sleeping-place, and has clearly the same origin). A rere-dos or rere-dosel would thus appear to have been a screen placed behind anything. I am told, that in the old houses in the north of England, erections at the back of the fire may, to this day, occasionally be seen, with an aperture behind for the insertion of plates, and such other things as may require warming.

A correspondent says there is “a ‘reredos,’ or open fire-hearth, now to be seen in the extensive and beautiful ruins of the Abbey of St. Agatha, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The ivy now hangs over and partially conceals this reredos; but its form is tolerably perfect, and the stones are still coloured by the action of the fire, which was extinguished, I need hardly say, by the cold water thrown on such places by Henry VIII.”