THE ALLOCATION OF PLACES

In most parishes, a lucky few, particularly members of the gentry, occupied seats that they claimed prescriptively and over which they enjoyed special rights, independent of the churchwardens. In many parishes, there were also seats that were customarily linked to particular houses, either as a result of prescriptive titles or simply because the churchwardens allowed and perpetuated less formal connections.Footnote 17 The majority of people were more clearly at the mercy of the churchwardens, whose unenviable task it was to manage the seating arrangements and to resolve the inevitable differences of opinion in such a way that the local social order was properly preserved and presented. In a minority of parishes, particularly in market towns, churchwardens organized the collection of pew rents. This system raised money for the church and appeared both rational and practicable. Parishioners could be distinguished from one another on the concrete basis of their graduated payments. Nevertheless, the local officers still had to decide upon precedence within each rent bracket, as Kevin Dillow has pointed out.Footnote 18 In most parishes, there were in any case no pew rents, and the wardens were responsible in theory for directing the majority of their neighbors to appropriate “places” or “rooms.” In practice, all but a few probably found their own way to positions that were established as theirs by custom, though not by any absolute right. Churchwardens, like historians, deal mainly with the problem cases.

In some parishes, the situation was further complicated by the fact that the churchwardens had fewer places at their disposal than there were members of the congregation. Demographic expansion during this period must have intensified the problem. In 1616, for example, the wardens of Littleport (Isle of Ely) lamented that “there are twentie have noe seates at all, nether can have because there is noe roome in the Church.”Footnote 19 Visitors to a parish might also add to the wardens’ burden by turning up at church and expecting to be seated. The wardens therefore relied upon there being a proportion of established parishioners who failed to appear on any given Sunday. The rooms of these absentees could then be distributed among those who came to church but had nowhere specific to sit. In the words of one Cheshire woman, “ytt is and hath bene a usuall thinge amongest the parishioners of Bunburie to enter into and sitt in an other mans seate upon occasion if they finde the same empty and the owners absente.” In Guilden Sutton (Cheshire) there was a bench next to the pulpit that was “estemed and used as a Common seate, for any to sitt in that would.”Footnote 20 Overall, it seems unlikely that the seating arrangements in a typical parish church ever remained exactly the same from one Sunday to the next.

It was presumably in reaction to the pressures of office and of socioeconomic change that some churchwardens drew up formal pew plans bearing the names of hundreds of their neighbors. In 1615, a plan devised in Sutton (Isle of Ely) was presented to Judge William Gager of the consistory court as the fruit of collaboration between the wardens, their vicar, and nine of the “better sort of parishioners.” Together, they submitted an “order … towcheing the decent placeinge of the parisheners,” adding that their chief hope was to promote “the peace and quiette of the Inhabitants of bothe sexes.”Footnote 21 The instinct to set society out on paper was not surprising, but it was often somewhat misguided. It suggests an awareness that the local order was supposed to be static but also a frustration with the difficulties of trying to make it so. In a number of cases, pew plans became as much a part of the problem as a workable solution. They must often have had the effect of reducing the flexibility with which seats could be allotted and thus the capacity of the churchwardens to respond to changes in the local social structure as a result of death, marriage, migration, and unstable economic fortunes. It can have been no easy matter to design and execute this response, and it is obviously important to spend some time in examining the criteria upon which thousands of difficult decisions were based. When the churchwardens deliberated over the placement of individual parishioners according to their status, what were the most important guiding principles?

Status was, of course, a complex and many-layered concept, and controversial decisions could convert a church full of Christians into a can of worms. When, in 1701, Richard Gough wrote his famous “Observations concerning the Seates in Myddle,” he pleaded at the outset, “I hope noe man will blame mee for not nameing every person according to that which hee conceives is his right and superiority in the seats in Church, because it is a thing impossible for any man to know.”Footnote 22 Throughout the seventeenth century, however, English churchwardens had to pretend that they were masters of the impossible. When they or their ecclesiastical superiors summarized the task in hand, they spoke of the need to place all parishioners according to pithily paired criteria. In Sutton, the churchwardens in 1615 were to establish the relative “qualities and worthe” of their neighbors. In Stockport (Cheshire), parishioners were placed according to their “degree and ability” or, alternatively, their “ranke and order.” Elsewhere we hear variously of “callings,” “states,” “merits,” “deserts,” “conditions,” “means,” and “estates,” in numerous combinations.Footnote 23

Beneath such terms, an array of more specific criteria was brought into play. Economic wealth was certainly important and had the advantage of being more precisely measurable than many of the other factors. An impression of its practical predominance is conveyed, for example, by the placement of people from Guilden Sutton (Cheshire) “according to their Ranckes, qualities & degrees, and according to the old Rents of the messuages or tenements of the said parishoners situate in the same parish.”Footnote 24 The structure of this sentence, however, also seems to imply an awareness that “Ranckes” and “Rents” were not synonymous. In Sutton, the men wealthy enough to be taxed at lay subsidy tended to occupy places close to the front of the church. Thirty-eight such taxpayers were named on the plan of 1615, of whom twenty-six sat on the front two seats in one or other of the five blocks of benches. It should be noted, however, that this left twelve taxpayers to take up places lower down the church, including three who sat in the least prestigious of the male seats. From this position, furthermore, they looked at the backs of many neighbors who did not contribute to the subsidies and who, in most cases, must have been economically inferior.Footnote 25 Such anomalies were a regular feature of church seating systems and sometimes proved controversial. Economic disability was also a fundamental criterion in the placement of the poor, who often seem to have sat in “common” seats at the back of the nave, in the belfry, in the aisles, or in the choir. They may have shared such seats with those whose economic prospects were better but whose relative youth prevented them, for the time being, from obtaining places of their own.Footnote 26

Gender was another factor in decisions over the placement of individuals, though the finer details of its operation contain some interesting surprises. In general, men and women sat in separate blocks, as commanded by church leaders. An Oxford cordwainer told the archdeacon's court in 1617 that “he has heretofore lived in many several counties and towns … and he never knew but that the custom in all the said churches was always for men to sit there in seats by themselves apart from the women, and the women likewise by themselves.”Footnote 27 Other evidence confirms his observation and reveals that the most common arrangement saw the men seated in blocks at the front of the nave, with the women positioned behind them. In some parishes, however, the sexes sat on different sides of the nave, most often with the men to the south. Again, there were frequent anomalies. In Ely St. Mary’s, the front/back segregation was undermined by the existence of some places for women right up to the upper end of the church on the north side. A partial plan for the church at Prestbury (Cheshire) in 1628 suggests that mixed seats were quite familiar there. In some parishes, there were instances in which widows retained control of places that had belonged to their husbands. In many more, there were some seats that husbands and wives shared, though this seems to have been common only among the gentry. Even within such seats, the separation of the sexes might be sustained. In 1612, the wives of the Southworth family in Warrington (Lancashire) were said to have traditionally sat in “the heigher end” of the family pew, while their husbands gallantly occupied the lower end.Footnote 28

It was a contemporary orthodoxy that a wife derived her social status from her husband. Thus, seating plans that featured married women commonly identified them only as the wives of named husbands. In Sutton, for example, most of the male names listed in 1615 occur twice, but the words “his wife” are added in the margin alongside references to the pews occupied by women. At first, this looks like unremarkable patriarchal orthodoxy. On closer examination, however, some intriguing differences emerge, and it becomes clear that the status of a wife as understood by the churchwardens was not in fact identical to that of her husband. Edward Kyrbye, for example, occupied a spot near the back of the mens’ seats in one column and had only three male neighbors behind him. His wife, however, sat at the front of the women in another column and, on a good day, could glance over her shoulder and see sixty-four other wives. Similar discrepancies applied to many other couples. Moreover, a substantial minority of wives sat in sequences that were not the same as those occupied by their husbands. It is clear, therefore, that many a wife enjoyed or endured a social status that was not wholly dependent upon the “rank,” “quality,” or “ability” of her husband. The precise placement of individuals was not a merely mechanical, means-tested procedure.

The placement of parishioners, male and female, also took account of their positions on the life cycle. In 1639, the bishop of Chester advised the churchwardens of Guilden Sutton that, in seating their neighbors, they should ensure “that no servaunts be seated untill all housholders and Masters of Families, and parents be placed each as he deserves.” Nicholas Alldridge has shown how, in St. Michael’s, Chester, individuals could expect to move closer to the front of the church as they grew older, and the importance of age was implied when witnesses were asked by the church courts which of two rival claimants was “more ancient.” Where successive plans relating to a single parish have been examined, the same “upward drift” is evident. Children seem generally to have been seated apart, with the exception of the very young, and, in Puddletown (Dorset), a plan drawn up in 1637 reveals what Dillow calls “a hierarchy of children … parallel to, and based upon, that of adults.”Footnote 29 Frequently, there were also separate seats for maids and for bachelors. In Ely St. Mary’s, the leading men of the parish agreed in 1590 “that all bachelers and boys shall repair and sit in the chauncell where there is formes placed for them to sit upon in pain of being presented by the churchwardens for refusing to sit there.” The distinction between the married and the unmarried was important to both sexes, and in a number of parishes the significance of childbirth was recognized in the provision of a specific seat for the use of mothers who came to be “churched.”Footnote 30

Words such as “worth,” “merits,” and “deserts” also suggest that there was a moral and religious element in decisions over the placement of individuals. The evidence, though anecdotal, is considerable. In 1585, the judges in a pew dispute heard by the High Commission found in favor of Mr. Girrie of Little St. Mary’s, Cambridge, but only after establishing that he was “a gent[leman] of good reputacon and livinge and of honest behavior and conversacon and well affected to religion.” It was also noted that he “dwelleth in the best howse in that parishe,” but it is clear in this instance that in order to belong to “the best sorte of people” it was necessary to have mastered at least the basics of orthodox godliness.Footnote 31 Richard Roberts of Chatteris (Isle of Ely) was presented to the consistory court in 1615 “for that he beinge a brawlinge and contentious fellowe, & but of a meane habilitie, doth sit perkinge in the highest seat in our Church above the best & ancientest men in our towne.” The dual importance of morality and wealth is nicely illustrated here, though Roberts was difficult to displace because “the seate he sitteth in is anciently belonginge to his house.” In Colne (Lancashire), the deponents in a case from 1636 were asked about the relationship between one group of claimants and the parish church. Several responded by saying that the men concerned had, among other things, received Holy Communion, baptized their children, and buried their dead in the church.Footnote 32 In other words, they had shown themselves to be integrated members of the spiritual community, and this strengthened their claim on the disputed seats. Witnesses might also be asked whether the parties to a dispute had attended church services as they should have done.Footnote 33

In Sutton, a comparison of the 1615 plan with a wide range of other local sources reveals just how seriously some church officers took the subject of moral and religious reputation. The vicar, the churchwardens, and the nine other men who signed or marked the plan made clear attempts to discriminate against those whose behavior they deemed unacceptable. For example, it is initially difficult to understand why Jeremy Gleadall, a prominent local man who had served previously as churchwarden, was allocated no seat at all. Similarly, the wife of William Gunton was placed some way back in the womens’ seats, despite the fact that her husband was a taxpayer and had also held church office. The officers’ rationale emerges, however, when the reputation of both individuals for religious nonconformity is recognized. In 1614–15, the churchwardens “vehemently suspected” that Gleadall was “of the heresye & scisme of the Novalistes and Puritanes, & sowe the seedes of sedition in the hartes of the kings majesties subjects.” Both he and Gunton's wife were reportedly in the habit of attending sermons given by unauthorized lay preachers in and around the village.Footnote 34

In other instances, the nonconformity noted and punished by the Sutton pew planners was moral rather than spiritual. Most conspicuously, Richard Upchurch, a gentleman, was placed in the very back seat for men on the south side of the church. Again, this seems an extraordinary decision until it is noted from other sources that Upchurch allegedly loved the alehouse, and “with drinckinge dothe often tymes distemper himselfe that he goeth rayleinge up & downe the streate in the nighte, to the great disquiet of his neighboures beinge in theire beddes, & at reste.” One wonders if the irony of his surname registered with the glovers and poulterers who were now to be his pew fellows. Upchurch was at least given somewhere to sit, unlike William Bond. This “common drunckard, swearer and blasphemer of the name of god” was awarded no place at all, though his wife sat near the front of the women.Footnote 35 It may well be that the discrepancies already noted between the places occupied by individual men and their wives are frequently accounted for by differing moral and religious reputations.

In contrast, the eleven laymen who compiled or signed the Sutton plan rewarded those—including themselves—who endeavored to live their lives as loyal members of the Church of England and of orthodox Christian society. Their moral reputations, to judge by the ecclesiastical court records, were generally good (with one exception).Footnote 36 Half of these men later made wills, and they were significantly more likely than other Sutton testators of similar rank to register charitable bequests and gifts to the church. Furthermore, they were evidently very well integrated into their local community, and several of them appeared regularly as witnesses to their neighbors’ wills in the years between 1617 and 1641.Footnote 37 On the plan of 1615, their seats were generally prominent and prestigious. Ten of the eleven occupied places right at the front. The principles applied by these men in devising the plan no doubt seemed to them unquestionably righteous, but their intervention was in a number of instances so provocative that conflict was inevitable, as we shall see.

Several other factors were also taken into account by English churchwardens as they contemplated their difficult decisions. In some parishes, placement was arranged partially according to the street or township in which a person resided. The depth of a family's roots in the locality or the extent to which an individual was permanently resident were also relevant. Many parishes reserved particular seats for the churchwardens and parish clerk, while in towns the mayor and aldermen frequently had specific pews assigned to them. Deafness might also earn its victims places that were close to the pulpit.Footnote 38 Overall, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the churchwardens’ weekend job was as difficult and thankless as it was unpaid. They were to make decisions based on a wide range of potentially contradictory criteria. They could not use all of the “places” in the church, because some were prescriptively claimed and others were attached to specific properties. They had to think on their feet and make wise use of any places that were vacant because of the temporary absence of their appointed occupants. Lastly, they had to deal with the complaints of that small minority of neighbors who were ready to claim publicly that they deserved something better.

THE ACCEPTANCE AND REJECTION OF PLACES

The moment at which the churchwardens felt it necessary to intervene by directing an anxious or angry individual toward a specific place was the principal flash point of the morning. In this instant, the paradox of flux and fixity was at its most acute, and there was plentiful scope for the kind of “role conflict” discussed by sociologists.Footnote 39 Disgruntled parishioners confronted the churchwardens in a variety of ways, most of which can be studied rewardingly by concentrating on Sutton, that laboratory of “pew rage,” during the critical year of 1615. The pew plan drawn up at the start of that year did not meet with universal approval. The most obvious tactic available to those who felt aggrieved was simply to reject the places offered to them. It was reported of Thomas Higham, gentleman, “that he being appointed & placed to sit in a convenient seate in the Church by the Churchwardens doth refuse to sitt there, & doth abuse the Churchwardens in the Church, in sayeing that they are malipert fellowes and ambitiouse fellowes & have sett there handes with the vicar in this busines.” In this outburst, Higham accused the wardens, explicitly or implicitly, of several things: they had placed their own private interests above those of wider society, they had failed in their duty to define the local links in the chain of being with accuracy and honesty, and they had used their office shamefully in order to insult their social superiors. Despite these charges, the judge commanded Higham to sit where he was told until such time as he proved his case at law.Footnote 40 In other parishes, comparably troublesome parishioners declined “stoutlye & scornfully” to sit where they were told or refused to be “ordered” for their seats. Some took up their places in defiance of the wardens and simply refused to budge or sat provocatively in rows reserved for members of the opposite sex. In 1601, Robert Banks of Cottenham spurned his appointed place “but would sit in the lap of Robert Rivers.”Footnote 41 His gesture was presumably competitive rather than affectionate.

Back in Sutton, some parishioners drew explicitly on their own patriarchal or paternalistic power and refused seats on behalf of their dependents. The embattled churchwardens told the court that William Oates “will not suffer his wife to sitt in the seate where she was appointed by the Churchwardens, but saith that he will earne money for Mr Chancellor” (in other words, he was prepared to risk litigation). William Gunton, who came from a long line of troublesome spirits, went one better and drew his tenants into the tussle. He was presented “for interrupting the Churchwardens & troubling them in the Church when they were placeing some of theire neighbors in seates convenient … , and further saith that he wilbe Churchwarden for his tenantes himselfe, and so caused them to refuse to sitt where the Churchwardens had placed them.” Here, the wardens were being challenged very directly, and Gunton was asserting one hierarchy, which gave a landlord authority over his tenants, against another, which empowered local officeholders to rebuke their neighbors, however wealthy they might be. William Gunton was indeed a formidable figure, for the pew plan indicates that he was in possession of at least four houses within the village. His kinsman, Robert Gunton, made a different type of threat. When the wardens directed him toward a place in the fifth seat for men, he not only refused to occupy it but said that “rather then [than] he will sitt there, he will goe fourth of the towne.” The declaration may look to us somewhat feeble, but can be read as a direct and deliberate challenge to the wardens, whose job it was to enforce attendance at church. Gunton was threatening to depart symbolically from the hierarchical community, adding spatial insult to verbal injury.Footnote 42

Another tactic was to appeal to higher authority. At some point between 1615 and 1617, a rival group of twelve men sent a petition to Gager, the consistory court judge, complaining angrily about the pew plan that he had ratified. They requested a full review, respectfully informing Gager that he had been deceived by the first group of twelve. The petitioners alleged that the entire plan had nothing to do with the preservation of harmony by the “better sort,” but had instead been a personal attack upon them, designed “to rent breake and distroie the unitie peace and concord of the said parishe.” Perfectly good pews had been removed and replaced, and several men had thereby been excluded from “theire olde ancient seates.” All but one of the men who signed the plan had been promoted within the scheme of things as a result. Now, “some of the cheifest ancient houses in the towne have no seates appoynted at all.”Footnote 43 These were sorry times in Sutton.

Neither of the rival groups felt disposed to mention, in the representations they made to Gager, that the dispute had a significant religious and moral dimension.Footnote 44 The solidly orthodox and socially well-integrated character of the pew plan's supporters was in stark contrast to the more turbulent temper of their opponents. The antiplan group was in fact a curious coalescence of saints and sinners. On one side, it included Puritan non- or semiconformists, two of whom had daughters named Temperance.Footnote 45 On the other, it included a number of men with reputations for illicit sex, the singing of “filthy songes” on the Sabbath, harbouring unmarried mothers, and drunkenness. Saints and sinners alike had been demoted within the church as a result of their activities.Footnote 46 Members of this group were evidently less thoroughly integrated into local society than their enemies and were invited to witness wills with far lower frequency.Footnote 47 Seven members of the antiplan coalition later made wills of their own, and none of them left anything to the church.Footnote 48 The reticence of all the combatants on these matters seems to reflect an awareness that the appropriate verbal register when appealing to a church court judge was one that emphasized the desirability of peace, unity, and concord among Christians, rather than the ecclesiological preferences and moral failings of one's opponents. This meant, however, that Gager had to make decisions on the basis of very partial evidence. Upon receiving the petition from the second group of twelve, he promptly revoked the pew plan and ordered the wardens to return all Sutton's seats to their former state.Footnote 49 This handed victory to an unholy alliance of puritans and philanderers.

The Sutton case indicates that individuals on all social levels could feel passionately about where they sat in church.Footnote 50 Those who complained about the plan included the gentleman, Thomas Higham, and the alehousekeeper, Henry Blithe. The latter's presence might encourage us to look here for evidence of the “weapons of the weak” in action. Primarily, however, this was a battle for the front seats in the church, in which a proplan group dominated by solidly prosperous and upwardly mobile yeomen or husbandmen confronted an antiplan alliance whose big hitters were four displaced gentlemen, capable of carrying a handful of poorer men along with them.Footnote 51 During the period 1580–1640 as a whole, twenty-eight individuals from Sutton either were involved in disturbances over their placement or signed the protest petition of 1615. From a range of sources, definite status labels can be assigned in nine cases: there were four gentlemen, a yeoman, a husbandman, a chandler with his wife, and our alehousekeeper. Eleven of the remaining miscreants were clearly either yeomen or wealthy husbandman (and their wives in three cases), as indicated by records relating to property, taxation, and local officeholding.Footnote 52 The remaining eight are difficult to label, but six of them belonged to prominent and prosperous local families such as the Fosters and the Guntons. Overall, therefore, we have a group that covered the local spectrum of status but was heavily dominated by those of middling and higher rank. The statistics compiled by Kevin Dillow on the basis of a much fuller sample tell a similar story for England as a whole. According to his calculations, those presented to the ecclesiastical courts and for whom status labels are known included 31 percent gentry, 26 percent yeomen, 17 percent husbandmen, and 12 percent craftsmen.Footnote 53 It therefore seems that the individuals most likely to confront the churchwardens were those who sat toward the “upper end” of the church, closer to the chancel than to the font. This fact was noted by the churchwardens of Stoke Edith (Herefordshire) who, in 1586, drew up a pew plan in the hope of “avoiding of controversies that may happen hereafter for challenging the upper seates and kneelings (wch ys a point of mere folly and vayne glory).”Footnote 54 As far as we can tell, those who sat further back did not tend to react aggressively when directed to their places by the churchwardens. As David Dymond has noted, they were “less quarrelsome than their neighbors.”Footnote 55

Sutton was a hot spot for pew disputes, and immersion in its records can also lead to misleading conclusions about the extent of the problem within most English parishes. Leading local families had a long-established habit of vying for preeminence in church, and half of the twenty-eight individuals discussed above had the surnames Gleadall (three), Foster (three), or Gunton (eight). The Guntons had been proudly throwing their neighbors out of pews and storming from the church in outrage since the 1580s.Footnote 56 Even in such a turbulent parish, this left an overwhelming majority of people who apparently sat where they were told or who expressed their grievances without the kind of unfettered passion that might land them in the courts. In the deanery of Ely as a whole, confrontations between wardens and parishioners on the subject of seating were significantly less common. Twenty parishes produced only forty-five relevant cases between 1580 and 1640. The 1610s saw eighteen of these cases, with each of the other decades generating between one and nine. The good men and women of Sutton contrived thirteen cases all on their own, concentrated in the 1580s and 1610s. The parishes of Chatteris and Littleport saw five cases apiece, clustered in 1607–15 and 1633–34, respectively. In other words, over half of the disputes took place in a mere three parishes. Nine parishes produced between one and three cases each, and seven witnessed none at all.Footnote 57 Furthermore, this was a fenland region with a predominantly pastoral economy and, according to Susan Amussen and others, can be expected to have generated more church seating presentments than an arable area of comparable size.Footnote 58 Clearly, “pew rage” was not rife, despite the well-known economic pressures of the period, and historians—this one included—should be careful about presenting the evidence in concentrated and intoxicating form. We risk writing anti-social history.Footnote 59

INTERACTION BETWEEN PARISHIONERS

After passing through the porch, parishioners crisscrossed the nave, negotiating a path to their “places” in the church and in the universal order. As they did so, many minute interpersonal signals must have been sent out. Individuals walked up aisles and along alleys, passing “superior” and “inferior” folk as they did so, making and not making eye contact and bodily gestures as appropriate. On Sundays in Sutton in 1615, for example, the labourer Edward Kyrbye could have found his place via two main routes after entering the church through the south door, presumably accompanied by his wife. He might have parted from her immediately and made his way around the back of the church, passing among the parish's more lowly wives before walking up the north aisle, ascending the ladder of female status as he did so, and then finally taking up his place near the back of the men, in the fourth of five “shorte seates on the Northe side the churche” next to the chapel. Despite his inferior status, this was a symbolic journey upward through local society. Alternatively, he could have led his wife to her position in the best seat for women on the south side, then walked round the front of the church, passing close to the places of three gentlemen and dozens of well-established yeomen or husbandmen (including, ominously, three Guntons), before descending the male social ladder to take up his allotted place. This route took him first up and then down the local hierarchy. Sadly, historians cannot follow sociologists in observing the myriad social encounters that characterized such routine journeys, but we can learn from Erving Goffman that it was these, as much as anything else, that made the social order real by presenting individuals with opportunities to signify their acceptance or rejection of it.Footnote 60

The majority of worshippers found their seats peacefully enough and settled down to begin their devotions or to observe the goings-on around them. Once seated, the model parishioner “allwayes sufferd her neighbors to passe in & out by her quietly without any disturbance at all,” as Jocosam Chelsey of Upton Lovell (Wiltshire) put it in 1605.Footnote 61 If one's pew fellows did not arrive, however, then neighbors with no places of their own might attempt to occupy the vacant rooms. Some of the unplaced parishioners had already sought and obtained permission to sit in rooms within the special minority of pews that were held by prescription. The generosity of their holders helped to maintain the integrity of the social order, and there is ample evidence to suggest that the codes of paternalism and deference were valued by people on both sides of the equation. In the court records, we quite frequently meet individuals who owed their position within the church to the kindness of a wealthier family. A woman from Colne (Lancashire) must have been pleased when, at some date before 1632, Simon Blakey gave her leave to occupy a place in one of his seats. He explained that he could not grant her a room in “Mistris Towneleys Quire,” a still more prestigious location, “because hee did sitt therin but by leave himselfe.” Clearly, there was an intricate web of patronage in operation here. Many landlords, naturally enough, used such grants not only as a way of building a reputation for generosity but in order to make their interactive power plain to those beneath them. In 1612, for example, a woman from Warrington (Lancashire) described the occasion upon which John Southworth had reminded her quite forcefully that her current place in church was his to dispose, “and because this deponent sould apples hee the saide John saide she … should give him everie yeare an apple and aske licence to sitt there because shee should nott Claime anie righte in the same.”Footnote 62

The distinction between occupying a place at the pleasure of its owner and doing so as of right was not invariably clear to all concerned. The situation was further complicated by the way in which deaths, marriages, and comings-of-age could alter the chains of preeminence, again in ways that did not look quite the same to everyone. Lastly, it seems that members of the gentry may have been in the habit of breezing into the church after everyone else had already settled.Footnote 63 This had the advantage of ensuring that all eyes were on them and of marking them out as people of unusual privilege. Late arrival, however, also meant that gentlemen ran the risk of arriving at church only to find that others had already occupied their pews. In such situations, the key question was who would “give place” to whom?

In most circumstances, the issue was probably resolved amicably enough, though our evidence necessarily comes from parishes in which the relationships eventually turned sour. Witnesses from Ashton on Mersey reported in 1631 that they had seen James Massie “give place” to Sir William Brereton in previous years. In Bunbury, John Reade had received permission to use the Kettle family seat on occasions when it was empty, but Margaret Kettle reported that she had “sometimes found the sayd Reades wief in the sayd seate who would rise and give place to this deponent.”Footnote 64 The records convey an impression of rank upon rank of lesser parishioners watching intently to see who would take precedence in such situations. The status labels of those called upon to give depositions in the diocese of Chester covered the full hierarchical range and included men and women of many ages from twenty-one to ninety-two years.

Sometimes, the tensions that were latent within all such encounters emerged and escalated in spectacular fashion, leaving a trail of vainglory through the records of the church courts in the form of “instance” litigation. In 1632, for example, the wives of John Martin and John Meacock of Guilden Sutton (Cheshire) were in no mood to give place to one another in a prestigious seat for women. The Martins claimed to have occupied the top “place” in the “upper end” of this seat for several decades. The Meacockes insisted that this was only because one of their own ancestors had kindly welcomed into the seat an earlier member of the Martin family, who was “otherwise destitute of a convenient place.” The current goodwife Martin therefore sat in the seat “without any right or just claime.” Each Sunday, the two wives now confronted one another over who should occupy which place. One week, John Martin claimed, he had positioned himself in the disputed seat, anxious “to prevente trowble disorder & misdemeanour.” His laudable hopes were comprehensively dashed when John Meacock entered the seat behind “and laid or tooke hould of bothe the shoulders of the said John Martin … and did violently hale and pull him downe backwards.” Meacock told a different story. He emphasized the violence used by Martin's wife against his own, which involved “treading upon her cloathes & kneeling upon her.” His own action against Martin had been in response to another attack upon his wife and had no other purpose but “to stay & hinder the said violence and to preserve the kings peace.” The fact that Martin was a churchwarden and Meacock was the village constable must have made this a particularly compelling spectacle for onlookers.Footnote 65

Such litigation was even more heavily dominated by suits involving the gentry and yeomanry than were the “office” cases referred to earlier.Footnote 66 In the instance litigation from the diocese of Chester, there is only one cause that seems to disrupt this pattern. Around 1630, Viscount Cholmondley decided, for reasons unspecified, that he would no longer allow his servant or steward, Thomas Burroughes, to occupy a place in “the highest or uppermost [seat] save one, on the South side of the middle Ile” in the church at Nantwich (Cheshire). According to Cholmondley, Burroughes was so angered by this act of displacement that he and his sons plotted revenge. Allegedly, they entered the church secretly at night, “and … did then and there with hatchetts, hammers or other Instruments or engins, violently breake the locke of the dore belonging to the said seate.” They then proceeded to pull up some of the boards, disguising the resultant hole in the floor with rushes, “thinking herby to intrap such as entred into the said seate or pew.”Footnote 67 This cunning plan came to nothing, however, for the sexton was looking on.

In the diocese of Chester as a whole, most years in the period 1580–1640 saw fewer than five interpersonal seating disputes, but the 1630s produced between five and twenty such cases each year. This increase reflected a general rise in the total number of instance cases heard but was also the consequence of the Laudian quest for uniformity. Many parishes were ordered to alter their seats so that none was higher or grander than others. The gentry and yeomanry of Cheshire did not welcome this intrusion and often took their frustrations out on one another in the church courts. In 1635, 11 percent of the 144 instance cases heard in the diocese related to church seating.Footnote 68

IMAGINING CONGREGATIONAL ATTITUDES

By the time divine service actually commenced, individual parishioners had been presented with a whole range of opportunities for expressing their attitudes to the hierarchical order as it was locally defined. During the service itself, their duties were to stay in place, behaving with suitable reverence, sitting, kneeling, and standing as appropriate. The hierarchical principles that had already been asserted in the seating arrangements were further reinforced by numerous liturgical and homiletic messages. Congregations prayed for delivery from pride, vanity, and envy. They prayed for the preservation of the monarch, at the pinnacle of the earthly hierarchy. They prayed for help in fulfilling their responsibilities to care for the needy in their midst. Parishioners were left in no doubt that God loved concord and amity.Footnote 69

If we imagine a typically turbulent Sunday in Sutton during the spring of 1615, which of the church's official homilies might the curate, John Pamplyn, have chosen as “most meete for the time”?Footnote 70 His short list would surely have included the texts dealing with “Christian love and charity,” “obedience,” “strife and contention,” and “the right use of the church.” Several of the men whose places were closest to Pamplyn's pulpit were currently at loggerheads and urgently needed advice on all of these matters. Depending on the homily chosen, Pamplyn might have spoken of God's requirement that individuals learn to love all men, even their enemies. He perhaps commanded the congregation to cherish and respect God's beautiful order, in which all individuals had both a place for themselves and duties toward others. He might have spoken against the “most detestable vice” of contention, especially where it involved disagreement on religious issues. “And whereof commeth this contention, strife and variance, but of pride and vaine glory?” According to the homilies, “it is better to give place meekely, then to win the victorie with the breach of charitie.” The curate might, finally, have urged his hearers to eschew rash and covetous speeches when they gathered together in church, “before the Lord.” In each homily, parishioners would also have been assured that God loved those who did his bidding and planned to punish those who did not. Examples of proper, patient conduct were readily available in the life of Christ.Footnote 71

How might the less privileged parishioners of Sutton have reacted to these instructions? Of course, we cannot answer the question with any certainty, but we must surely be prepared to speculate. Would those in the community's lower ranks have interpreted the homilies as a transparent “public transcript,” designed by the dominant social elite in order to maintain their hold on power? Scott's model seems to encourage us to adopt this position. Would they have shared one social historian's view that these texts were “quite deliberate and barefaced efforts to shape the social consciousness of inferiors in a form consistent with the definition of the situation espoused by their superiors,” rather than honourable attempts by respected churchmen to communicate theological truth to all?Footnote 72 We might imagine the people of Sutton entertaining dark and resistant thoughts, reviewing the alternative “hidden transcript” and mentally sharpening their “weapons of the weak,” but maintaining all the while a superficially subservient outward face. If those beneath the level of the yeomanry were indeed not taken in by the public transcript, then their general acquiescence in the matter of seating placements can perhaps be understood in terms of their feelings of relative powerlessness and disillusionment.

This line of interpretation, however, can only take us so far if our goal is to understand how most people felt and thought in the early modern age. It is tempting but unwise to endow the majority of our ancestors with a modern capacity for the cynical interpretation of cosmological propositions and social ideals. This capacity is heavily dependent on a range of characteristics—including an acute awareness of alternatives and a belief in democratic principles—that they can hardly have possessed.Footnote 73 Of course, people must often have grumbled about their life chances, and early modern popular culture was full of irreverence and jocularity, some of it expressed in church. More dangerously, there were also those who, in times of social and political tension, let fly with bitter comments regarding the conduct of gentlemen. This evidence, however, may not reflect the existence of an insubordinate “hidden transcript” that characterized the generally unspoken everyday attitudes of the population at large. If J. C. Scott's model is truly helpful in understanding majority attitudes in early modern England, then we might expect to find rather more evidence to imply that the “weapons of the weak” were used in relation to church seating. The Sunday services were, after all, absolutely vital to the making and enforcement of hierarchy. If most people felt secretly and seriously resistant, then this was surely one of the moments at which the sharp points of their dissatisfaction would, in regular episodes of irrepressible anger, have protruded through the heavy material of the “public transcript.” Instead, one parson went so far as to complain about “the common fault of the meaker sort of People who are too prone to performe civill and outward respects, upon the comming of greater Persons into the Church.”Footnote 74 If this was merely a mask, then it was one worn with surprising readiness.

Early modern people were obviously not blindly or unquestioningly obedient, but our ancestors were far more likely than we could ever be to accept hierarchical principles as natural, just, and true. Perhaps they also drew more positive comfort from certain features of hierarchy in theory and practice than we might be tempted to allow. The fact that God Himself was its author must have counted for something. This transcript was not only “public,” but “divine.” Moreover, the seating arrangements made it plain that virtually everybody was not only someone else's inferior, but someone else's superior. Across the board, responsibilities cut both ways and “everyone have neede of other.”Footnote 75 Perhaps the “chain of being” not only constrained people but provided them with a sense of security during unsettling times. Chains, it should be noted, are useful for both purposes. They can be clung to, as well as rattled.

People must also have noted, probably with some degree of satisfaction, that comparatively humble churchwardens were empowered to rebuke and discipline members of the gentry. Of course, this was easier said than done, but there were many occasions upon which things were not only said but done. Furthermore, the seating arrangements were so shot through with anomalies that hierarchy usually looked significantly less rigorous in practice than it did in theory. In Sutton, there were husbandmen in among the yeomen, taxpayers sitting behind those who did not contribute, and lowly tenants next to substantial freeholders. In many parishes, there were deaf people close to the front. Furthermore, the servants of gentry families often heard divine service from some of the best seats in the house of God and looked down on many of their social superiors.Footnote 76 This was privilege by association rather than by birth or wealth. On occasion, such anomalies caused problems, but most of the time they did not and they certainly must have softened the face of hierarchy somewhat. The same can be said of the message, contained in many early modern texts, that individuals could aspire to grow and prosper within their appointed rank, even though the theoretical ideal was static.Footnote 77 Church seating, furthermore, was not merely hierarchical, but communal. In one sense, people of all ranks gathered in sacred space to adopt the same postures and hear the same words.Footnote 78 Even the poor or young, on their “common” benches, may on occasion have experienced a sense of belonging.

As we have seen, earthly interpretations of God's hierarchy frequently differed, and the consequences of disagreement could be socially disruptive. On the other hand, disputes within the ranks of the gentry and yeomanry also created space in which “lesser” folk could operate with a degree of agency by making a deferential choice. We might also presume that, in any disagreement between superiors and inferiors, somewhat divergent understandings of the hierarchical code would have emerged. Rioters, for example, emphasized paternalism over deference; their wealthy opponents did the reverse. The essential point, however, is that evidence of dispute and divergence can be comfortably accommodated within a historiographical interpretation that assumes an enduring and theologically grounded acceptance of the hierarchical “chain of being” throughout society.

Lastly, the records of church seating disputes in Sutton and elsewhere have suggested that God's obedient allies were more likely to be relatively poor than rich. In troubled parishes, it must have been apparent to all that the worst of selfish sinners against God's law and order were the gentlemen and yeomen (or their wives) who occupied the most prestigious seats. This situation may sometimes have fed resistant impulses, but perhaps it more often generated a certain glow of righteous indignation or moral superiority among the more cooperative and less powerful parishioners. In such villages, many of the lower-ranking parishioners must have been critical of their wealthiest neighbors, but they are likely to have constructed their criticisms securely within the dominant framework of hierarchical values. It may be anachronistic to interpret such thinking as merely or mainly tactical. The lowly laborers of Sutton could have felt intensely critical of their social superiors, who were supposed to set an example, on good hierarchical grounds. Angry reactions were even permissible, on condition that they did not escalate into active resistance. Had not the homilist observed that honest people, witnessing the contentious conduct of others, would find that their stomachs “may be moved to rise against it”?Footnote 79

Under this interpretation, the seemingly nondeferential or socially irreverent expressions of some early modern people can be understood not as the tip of an insubordinate iceberg, but as the frustrated fruits of deeply held, divinely ordained, hierarchical convictions that did not always appear to inform the conduct of social superiors. It is surely overstating the case to suggest that majority attitudes were “inherently subversive,” “implicitly running counter to the norms and values of society's elite.”Footnote 80 Ordinary people may well have felt that the hierarchical system of values belonged to them and to God just as securely as it belonged to their mightier neighbors. Such neighbors, if they committed selfish and discordant sins in God's own house, would surely receive their comeuppance, if not now then later. The lower orders had no need to rise up (stomachs excepted), for the mighty would eventually succumb to the Almighty.Footnote 81

Academic social historians are often happier to deal with evidence of secret insubordination among our poorer ancestors than with indications that many of them may have been instinctively obedient. We no longer admire submissiveness in the face of social domination, unless we can also categorize it as skin-deep.Footnote 82 It is easier for us to empathize with the disgruntled Cheshire servant who attacked his lord's pew than with the Oxford woman who humbly declined to move to a superior seat on the grounds that it was “too high for one of her degree.” Similarly, a group of Macclesfield tenants refrained from occupying a seat in which they had every right to sit, “because it is hye in the church emonge the beste sorte.” Of course, there were sound pragmatic reasons for adopting such a position, and “ambitious” or “malipert” actions would lead to harmful consequences. Nevertheless, the assumption that such people did not really believe what they said is not necessarily more defensible than the assumption that they did. Evidence of self-deprecating social conduct is hard to find in the ecclesiastical court records for the simple reason that it was perfectly acceptable within a hierarchical society. Scoffers and farters are lined up in disorderly rows, but historians must be prepared to play “spot the deference” if they wish to develop a properly rounded understanding of society as a whole. Kevin Dillow tells us confidently that modest and deferential conduct was “far from the norm.”Footnote 83 Can we be so sure?

Of course, it was not only the gentry and yeomanry who misbehaved in church. In all parishes, the wardens and questmen had to monitor the congregation during services with a view to disciplining those who did not sit quietly to absorb hierarchical and other messages. Such people were of widely varying status. During this period, the deanery of Ely produced a good crop of miscreants: sleepers, “walkers and talkers,” throwers of hats, excommunicates who refused to leave, and others who refused to stay.Footnote 84 Indirectly, these were all offences against hierarchical duty, and the majority of parishioners probably found them disturbing, just as they did the more explicitly status-related misdemeanors that have formed the basis for this article. Those who framed presentments or appeared as witnesses in seating cases spoke regularly of “the great greefe & scandall of the Congregacon” or “the disturbance of the whole congregacon.” In Guilden Sutton (Cheshire), the Martins claimed that the “intrusion” of their rival “was an offence not only to the wiefe of the said John Martin but also to the whole Congregacon there assembled.” Offenders “occasioned a scandall” or committed “a great wrong.”Footnote 85 In 1594, a couple of Sutton women fought for a seat, “to thoffence of Allmightie god & evill example of others.” Two other combatants behaved themselves “unquietly and uncharitablye openlye in the Churche,” when they refused to occupy their appointed places. When a young Essex girl sat in a pew with her mother, rather than in the seats appointed for the use of maidens, she caused “the greate offence of many reverent women.”Footnote 86

The mental dictionaries from which all this affronted vocabulary was drawn generally belonged to church officers and interested parties, rather than to more humble or objective parishioners. Its claims to consensuality should not, however, be dismissed too readily. The phraseology was actually quite varied, and it was not in any case applied so universally that we can term it common form. Churchwardens, furthermore, were elected by their neighbors, even if those of the “better sorte” figured most prominently in the selection process. They usually served for a year at a time, after which they returned to the parochial ranks. For a variety of reasons, they needed to be seen to represent their communities, and we know that they were often selective in reporting offences, turning a blind or partially sighted eye toward those people whose misbehavior had not upset the neighborhood too deeply.Footnote 87 Naturally there were exceptions, and there were certainly exaggerations, but when the average church officer told the court that the congregation was offended, then just possibly it was.

In conclusion, Scott's model seems to be of only limited value in helping us to interpret the evidence relating to early modern church seating. Fundamentally, it leaves little if any room for the distinct possibility that a divinely ordained hierarchical order was perceived by most people as an absolute and unquestionable truth. English hierarchy was more real, more subtly shaded, and more accommodating of anomalies than an essentially dichotomous, conflictual, and knowingly modern framework for analysis can comfortably allow. The hierarchical code, rather than being devised by the social elite and cunningly appropriated by the lower orders, was made by God and then debated by all. This is a crucial distinction, since it lies right at the root of our understanding of early modern social life. The apparent and perhaps surprising passivity of most parishioners in matters relating to seating placements may not reflect the success of gentry hegemony or the pragmatic need to conceal inner feelings so much as a commonplace willingness to behave in a dutiful manner under the eyes of God. Of course, not everybody could manage this, and all who live under a hierarchical system will experience the need to let off steam at one time or another, but the counterbalancing egalitarianism of “common prayer” helped to ensure that most people endeavoured to do their duty and felt affronted by those who did not. Divine hierarchy held people in place, but it also offered them benefits, taught them to feel incorporated, and allowed them, within limits, to think critically of their social superiors. Arguably, most people were motivated not by a shadowy wish to resist hierarchy, but by a profound desire to make it their own. Rather than “limiting its effects on their lives,” they worked to maximize its impact in their favor.Footnote 88

As we have seen, most quarrels occurred among the relatively powerful as they competed for places at the front of the church. To this extent, anxiety over “order” within the ranks of the gentry and yeomanry may have been fuelled as much by the rivalry of near equals as by the grunts of the many-headed monster (who sat more peaceably at the back). It is an interesting possibility that the “chain of being” was more problematic for the leaders of local society than it was for men and women of lower rank. Frequently, we have been encouraged by social historians to envisage early modern church services as occasions upon which the “chief parishioners,” from whose ranks the churchwardens were chosen, looked anxiously and critically backward for evidence of disorderly conduct in the body of the congregation. We can end with the provocative suggestion that it may often have been the other way round.