‘That Woman that Shall Succeed Her’: Formal Pew-Renting to 1818

Arrangements of church places for participants have varied by time and place; provision of seating by the churches developed haphazardly. Anglo-Saxon illuminations show congregants seated on ‘low, rude, three-legged stools, placed dispersedly all over the church’. The stools may have been their own property rather than provided by their church. In 1287 Bishop Quivil of Exeter imposed open seating in his diocese, with the qualification that nobles, even those residing outside a parish, should be allocated the best sittings. Lesser mortals were evidently left to take whatever seats remained or to sit on whatever stools or mats they might bring for the purpose or else to stand throughout the Mass. The records of Archbishop Warham’s visitations in Kent in 1511–2 note that in one area of St Mary with St Sexburgha, Minster in Sheppey, Kent, ‘the people may make setts and pewys where they may more quietly serve God, and that it may lesse cowmber the rowme’. The poor were expressly to be provided with seats since they were deemed ‘the persons most in want of religious instruction’, but in practice, this injunction was generally ignored; the amount of seating set aside in the typical parish for visitors and the destitute was extremely small.