Pew-renting is of interest to social historians of religion and to social historians generally, for it opens windows on to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century communal nature of British public religious practice and of social status in communities, as well as the economies of churches and Nonconformist chapels. With social change, the practice largely disappeared from churches (and Nonconformist chapels) in the early twentieth century and, as a result of much liturgical change and reordering of church and chapel buildings, it has left little physical evidence. However, in the centuries after the Reformation, when church attendance was a communal activity, and society was hierarchical, people were very conscious of their, and especially other people’s, place in society and, consequently, the position of their seat in their place of worship. All parishioners had a common law right to a seat in their parish church and churchwardens’ duties included seating parishioners ‘according to their rank and station’, as the leading ecclesiastical lawyer and dean of the Court of Arches Sir John Nicholl, opined in 1825. In villages this was often achieved by ‘appropriating’ pews to particular properties, as described, for example, by Richard Gough in his History of Myddle in 1700. Alternatively, the bishop’s chancellor, in his consistory court, might grant a petition for a faculty for a particular seat in a church. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century towns pew-renting was ubiquitous. It was a means by which parish vestries supplemented funds raised by church rates for maintaining the church building (and, in Dissenting chapels, also paying the minister). Churchwardens customarily allocated seats to parishioners and their households in return for an annual rent, depending on their position in the parish’s hierarchy, or what they were willing to pay. The best and highest priced seats were in the galleries, as in the circle in a theatre, with a good view and within earshot of the reading desk and pulpit, with their ‘households’ occupying the seats behind. Free seats were reserved for poor parishioners on the nave floor often in the centre of the church, as in the pit in a theatre. Chancels, into which the minister and congregation moved, at the invitation to confession, for the monthly or quarterly celebration of holy communion, were usually empty, for people to kneel, during the continuation of the liturgy. Sometimes local acts of parliament providing for extensions to churches or the installation of galleries or re-pewing, authorised rents to be charged for the new pews, to provide security for loans or annuities to fund the work. Evidence for these practices survives in parish archives including occasional seating plans, vestry minute books and pew-rent books.

It is these that Bennett has mined in forty-six local authority record offices, Lambeth Palace Library, the National Archives at Kew and various on-line sources. To demonstrate the ubiquity of the practice, he has taken as case studies the historic county of Kent and parishes within the 1951 boundaries of the city of Bristol. These illustrate the extent of the practice in 209 Kentish and fifty-seven Bristol parishes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has also explored the extensive eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature on the practice. The resulting book claims to be ‘a comprehensive study of the history of pew-renting in the Church of England, the first since the nineteenth century’. As such it should assist us to reimagine the lost world of the social ordering of communities and communal church attendance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and to understand why the practice gradually disappeared in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Unfortunately, the book tends to concentrate on the quaintness and curiosity of pew-renting practice for twenty-first century eyes, and focuses on the alleged ‘controversy’ the practice provoked, and churchwardens’ alleged ‘deception and bending – and – sometimes outright breaking – of the applicable law’. The chapter headings reinforce this impression –‘“That woman that shall succeed her”: formal pew-renting to 1818’; ‘“Free from Tractarian error”: formal pew-renting churches after 1818’; ‘“Drive-a-good-bargain”: the mechanics of formal pew-renting since 1818’; ‘“Cobblers and rat-catchers”: formal pew-renters’; ‘“Pew-opener’s muscle”: informal pew-renting and pew-openers’; ‘“The morphine velvet, Lavender-kid-glove school of theology”: private pew-letting’; ‘“To hinder such abominations”: supporters and opponents’; and ‘“Seats we so seldom use”: formal pew-renting’s demise’. The reader is left with the impression of churchwardens and parish officers as shady characters. But the practice was ubiquitous in British religious life: in Nonconformity, and even Roman Catholicism as well as in the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. It was an important element in contemporary liturgical practice and in the spatial arrangements and design of churches and chapels, as well as church and chapel finances.

It was brought into disrepute by campaigns from the 1830s by the Cambridge Camden Society (later the Ecclesiological Society), which aimed, on aesthetic grounds, to remove box pews and galleries from churches and reinstate a supposed medieval appearance and liturgical layout. Additionally, anxieties were aroused by claims in the report of the 1851 Census of Church Attendance that the urban poor, for whom a grateful parliament in 1818 had provided £1 million for grants to build new churches in poor districts, were deterred from attending the churches by not being able to afford rents. Grants to build new churches required vestries to allocate a proportion of pews for rent, to supplement the incumbent’s stipend. However, a significant proportion of pews were required to be free. Further, the gradual success of the Nonconformist campaign against parish vestries levying compulsory church rates led vestries to replace lost income for maintaining churches by charging rents for pews. Dr Bennett shows numerous Kentish villages’ pew-rent books begin as church rates began to be opposed in villages. Unfortunately new voluntary pew-rents failed to achieve adequate levels of income to sustain the upkeep of churches. Gradually pew-renting was abandoned. and replaced by ‘collections’ taken during services, ‘free-will offering schemes’ and, to spread the burden in the wider community than the congregation, introducing ‘bazaars’, ‘fetes’ and ‘sales of work’ so familiar to twentieth-century church- and chapelgoers.

Bennett’s extensive research in archival sources has brought to light much new evidence about pew-renting, and its demise. However, his narrow focus on the mechanics of pew-renting and reliance on the evidence of hostile later nineteenth-century campaigning literature detracts from an understanding of how the practice, found in all denominations, reflected the nature and values of the society that created it. It expressed contemporary liturgical practice, and shaped the design and spatial arrangement of places of worship, and helped to meet congregations’ economic needs. While Bennett cites Christopher Marsh’s seminal articles on church seating,Footnote ¹ he does not apply their insights to subsequent centuries. There is another story to be told about pew-renting.Footnote ²