Eamon Duffy:
Since the end of the twelfth century it had been customary for the consecrating priest to elevate the Host high above his head immediately after the sacring for adoration by the people... In churches with elaborately carved or colored altarpieces the custom emerged of drawing a plain dark curtain across the reredos at the sacring, to throw the Host into starker prominence... In 1502 a Hull alderman left money for the construction of a mechanical device above the high altar which caused images of angels to descend on the altar at the sacring, and ascend again at the conclusion of the Pater Noster; he had seen such a device at King's Lynn.[The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy. Yale University Press, 1992]
The provision of good wax lights, and especially of torches, flaring lights made with thick plaited wicks and a mixture of resin and wax, which burned from the elevation to the Agnus Dei or the priest's communion, became one of the most common of all activities of the guilds. It was also very common for individual testators to specify that the torches burned around their corpses at their funerals should be given to the parish church, to burn around the altar at the sacring time. The provision of such lights was often indulgenced, and they may in addition have had the utilitarian function of lighting up the chancel to make the Host more visible, but they were also conceived of as forming a sort of proxy for the adoring presence of the donor close by the Sacrament at the moment of elevation. This was probably particularly true of funeral torches used as elevation lights... The notion of the torch as a proxy for the worshipping donor is certainly uppermost in the explanation offered by a group of shepherds and herdsmen of their motives in founding a guild of the Blessed Virgin at Holbeach. The guild, they explained, maintained torches at the elevation, because its members were often unable by reason of their work to be at Mass themselves. Such torches were normally held by the clerk or the altar boys in the sanctuary, and they often appear thus in carvings and pictures of the elevation. But where guilds provided large numbers of torches for Sundays and festivals - sometimes up to a dozen or more - the guild members themselves would have gathered round the altar at the moment of elevation.
