‘Seats We So Seldom Use’: Formal Pew-Renting’s Demise

At about the turn of the twentieth century, virtually every commentator was correctly predicting that formal pew-renting was declining in Church of England churches. In 1898 Mr. Edmund Boulnois, a member of the Commons, stated that ‘as everybody knows, the system of paying pew rents is gradually disappearing in this country, and it is a vanishing quantity’—although contrary to Mr. Boulnois’s belief, not everyone knew this—three decades later in 1928 a lady at St Gabriel, Warwick Square, Westminster, which still rented at least a few sittings at that time, a lady was ‘anxious to know if she would eventually be able to secure seats at St Gabriel’s’. At least one pew-rent opponent claimed that in late Victorian times pew-rents brought in ‘less and less’ each year. In 1905, a barrister noted that evidently no more than two years previously, most newly consecrated churches did not formally rent sittings, and the law frowned on the practice anyway: ‘letting of seats outside the law was practised in several churches of new parishes in London to the knowledge of the bishop and other ecclesiastical authorities, though in the greater number of new parish churches in South London there was no letting of seats.’ And in the words of the vicar of St James, Upper Edmonton, in 1906, the ‘system of pew rents here will die a natural death before long’ which he considered preferable to ‘trying to kill it suddenly’.