For twenty-first-century worshippers used to walking into any church, selecting an empty seat and occupying it, the complexities and nuanced arrangements of late-Georgian seating is a subject that will repay attention. Seating was certainly a subject that exercised church builders and church wardens in this period, and it had a profound impact on the arrangement of church interiors. This chapter explores the different classes of seating – appropriated, rented, visitors, free and civic – and examines how locating them within a church was addressed by architects and churchwardens. In this chapter, the word ‘pew’ refers only to seating that was other than a free bench.

Late-Georgian churchgoing

An examination of late-Georgian seating introduces a lost world of church interiors, which might be stacked with galleries resembling a theatre along with civic pews where those occupying them were the subject of conspicuous ceremonial. It also involves consideration of a number of parish officials who disappeared through the Victorian era: beadles, pew-openers and sellers of admission tickets to visitors. These were all common in urban centres, although rarer in villages. A beadle was a parish officer who might oversee the workhouse, policing and various local charities. He was a man of some authority and on Sundays would be in church to oversee behaviour, chiefly in the free seats and those occupied by the charity children. He was an impressive figure (see Fig. 0.10). In Dickens’ 1839 account, on a Sunday he would be in ‘state-coat and cocked-hat, with a large-headed staff for show in his left hand, and a small cane for use in his right. How pompously he marshals the children into their places!’ Pew-opening seems to have been an exclusively female occupation. A much-travelled ‘Merchant Taylor’ recorded his visits to ‘the numerous Churches of the Metropolis’ where he had ‘uniformly found … clean and obliging women always as pew openers, who constantly placed [him] in a seat.’ In addition to seating visitors in vacant pews, these ladies led those who rented pews to that place, opened and closed the door for them, and generally made them feel comfortable. Sometimes they received a regular wage from the parish, but elsewhere might rely on tips, perhaps sixpence. At St Mary, Somers Town, London, in the 1820s there was a head pew opener (paid £16 p.a.), five assistants, paid £8 each, and a chapel beadle, paid £30 guineas.