The Etymology of Chancel
Chancel takes its name not from the holy area itself but from the screen that bounded it. Latin cancelli (always plural) named a lattice or grille — the crossed-bar barrier that separated officials from the public in Roman courts and basilicas. In early Christian church architecture, builders adopted the same device to mark off the eastern, altar end of the building, where clergy and choir gathered, from the western nave used by the laity. The screen was the cancellus; the area behind it picked up the same name and travelled into Old French as chancel. English borrowed the word from Anglo-French in the late 13th century. The Latin cancelli has had a striking afterlife in English. The clerk who sat behind the court lattice in the early Middle Ages was a cancellārius — the officer at the bar — and that title evolved into chancellor (Lord Chancellor, Chancellor of the Exchequer). The verb cancel originally meant to draw a lattice of lines through a document, voiding it.