‘Cobblers and Rat-Catchers’: Formal Pew-Renters

According to each of the three synoptic gospels, the scribes and Pharisees ‘love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues’. In general, the impression both early in the twentieth century and now is the same regarding formal pew-renting churches—that only those above the middle-middle class could afford to pay the sums asked for formally let sittings. Douglas Houghton—Lord Houghton of Sowerby, born in 1898—told the Lords in 1992 that pew-rents at the village church when he was a boy had been ‘beyond the purse of ordinary citizens’. What he meant by ‘ordinary citizens’ is of course unclear, but the Incorporated Free and Open Church Association in the early twentieth century described formal pew-renters as the ‘rich and selfish’ and the ‘better-to-do’.