Many rood screens in England were substantially altered, stripped of their rood and loft, or removed outright during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, a period during which the large crucifix and the sharply demarcated separation between nave and chancel that the screen embodied came to be seen by reformers as inconsistent with a theology that emphasized the congregation's direct, unobstructed access to the altar and the preached word rather than a visually and physically divided liturgical space.
Royal injunctions under Edward VI specifically ordered the removal of rood lofts and images in English parish churches, and while the lower screen itself sometimes survived where the rood and loft above it did not, a great many English rood screens were destroyed entirely, so that the substantial surviving examples that remain today, concentrated especially in East Anglia and southwest England, represent a real minority of what once existed across the country before the Reformation.
Rood screens fared differently elsewhere in Europe, surviving with far less disruption in regions that remained Roman Catholic through the same period, and the form saw a modest revival of interest during the nineteenth century Gothic Revival, when some architects and church restorers reintroduced screens, in a broadly similar spirit though rarely with an actual restored rood, into newly built or renovated churches influenced by medieval precedent.