Usually a pathway is left between pews in the center to allow for a procession some have benchlike cushioned seating, and hassocks or footrests, although more traditional, conservative churches usually have neither cushions nor footrests. Pews are generally made of wood and arranged in rows facing the altar in the nave of a church. Disputes over pew ownership were not uncommon. Alternatively, wealthier inhabitants often expected more prestigious seating in reward for contribution to the material upkeep of the church, such as the erection of galleries. At this time many pews had been handed down through families from one generation to the next. During the late medieval and early modern period, attendance at church was legally compulsory, so the allocation of a church's pews offered a public visualisation of the social hierarchy within the whole parish. Ĭertain areas of the church were considered to be more desirable than others, as they might offer a better view of services or, indeed, might make a certain family or person more prominent or visible to their neighbours during these services. Roberts: a notice that the pews were to be free in perpetuity was sometimes erected as a condition of building grants. When the pews were privately owned, their owners sometimes enclosed them in lockable pew boxes, and the ownership of pews was sometimes controversial, as in the case of B. Pews were originally purchased from the church by their owners under this system, and the purchase price of the pews went to the costs of building the church. In these churches, pew deeds recorded title to the pews, and were used to convey them. In some churches, pews were installed at the expense of the congregants, and were their personal property there was no general public seating in the church itself. Everyone knew what that meant everyone knew that the high pew was one of the bulwarks of Protestantism, and that an open bench had upon it the taint of Rome". Hence the use or avoidance of pews could be used as a test of the high or low character of a Protestant church: describing a mid-19th century conflict between Henry Edward Manning and Archdeacon Hare, Lytton Strachey remarks with characteristic irony, "Manning had been removing the high pews from the church in Brighton, and putting in open benches in their place. The rise of the sermon as a central act of Christian worship, especially in Protestantism, made the pew a standard item of church furniture. Ĭhurches were not commonly furnished with permanent pews before the Protestant Reformation. Wooden benches replaced the stone ones from the fourteenth century and became common in the fifteenth. Over time, they were brought into the centre of the room, first as moveable furniture and later fixed to the floor. The first backless stone benches began to appear in English churches in the thirteenth century, originally placed against the walls of the nave. The interior of a church in Gotland, Sweden (19th century)
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