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Segregation in Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Margaret Aston
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Extract

The title of this paper, ‘Segregation in Church’, may sound like an appendix to the theme of this year’s conference on Women in the Church. I hope to persuade you otherwise. For although my topic focuses on the ostensibly narrow question of the physical position of the sexes at worship, it is related to much broader issues. Ancient rules about impurity and the protection of holy rites and holy places; the fear of sex and the threat of sexual encounters intruding into divine offices; the elevation of virginity and the Virgin Mary; these are all matters that had to do with the seemingly simple question of the individual’s place at public prayer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 27: Women in the Church , 1990 , pp. 237 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1990

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References

1 I have gained much from the works of this period. ‘Notes on the Division of Sexes, and the Assignment of Seats in Public Worship, in the Primitive Church’, The Ecclesiologist, 29 (1868), pp. 100-5; [J. M. Neale], The Hislory of Pews (Paper read before the Cambridge Camden Society, 22 Nov. 1841), enlarged edns (Cambridge 1842, 1843); Hardy, W.J., ‘Remarks on the history of seat-reservation in churches’, Archaeologia, 53 (1892), pp. 95’106 Google Scholar; Heales, A., The History and Law of Church Seats, or Pews, 2 vols (London, 1872)Google Scholar, a full and careful work from the first volume of which I have derived so many references that it would be tedious to acknowledge them all, and I can only hope to avoid the charge of plagiarism by directing readers to this still-valuable work (hereafter, Heales, Pews). I specially thank Colin Richmond for most generously sharing ideas and sending references and for the loan of his file on church seating.

2 [Neale], Hislory of Pews (1841), p. 48.

3 Deiss, L., Early Sources of the Liturgy (London, 1967), p. 88 Google Scholar; Didascalia Apostolorum; The Syriac Version translated and accompanied by the Verona Latin Fragments, ed. R. H. Connolly (Oxford, 1929), pp. xxx, 119. See PG, 1, cols 725-6, for separate seating of women in the Apostolic Constitutions.

4 Deiss, Liturgy, pp. 57, 92-3, 179, for the order of baptism in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome and the Didascalia Apostolorum (both third century), and for communion in the Apostolic Constitutions (of the late fourth century); The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St Hippolytus of Rome, ed. G. Dix, rev. H. Chadwick (London, 1968), p. 33, and see editorial comment pp. g, m, xliv, 1, 73-4 on the Jewish features in the Apostolic Tradition; The So-called Egyptian Church Order, ed. R. H. Connolly (Cambridge, 1916), p. 184. On the ministrations of holy women in the early Church see P. Brown, The Body and Society (London, 1989), p. 270; ‘The growing segregation of the sexes in the churches often meant that holy women came to minister more frequently to the women of the Christian congregations’; also pp. 327-9, 359. Cf. idem, The Cult of the Saints (London, 198 3), p. 43 for remarks on the effects of pilgrimage in disrupting segregation.

5 Deiss, Liturgy, pp. 88-90.

6 City of God, Bk. 11, cap. 28; PL, 41, cols 76-7. For hints on the possible development of this practice in the third century see above, n. 4, and below, n. 9. On the methods of separation see Davies, J. G., The Origin and Development of Early Christian Church Architecture (London, 1952), pp. 36’9, 43. 71, 87, 91, 127’8 Google Scholar.

7 PG, 33, col. 355; this work dates from the middle of the fourth century.

8 PG, 67, col. 677 (Homilia in Matt. 73:Jer. 22. 17); Brown, Body and Society, pp. 308-9, 316-17. Cf. Eusebius, who looked back to Philo for the antiquity of separation of the sexes; PG, 20, col. 183 (Ecclesiastical History, II, 17). The debt of Christians to Jewish and Roman practice in this matter cannot be explored here.

9 Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition, ed. Dix and Chadwick, p. 29; Deiss, Liturgy, p. 169 (the Apostolic Constitutions). The remark in Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus, on the kiss of peace occasioning ‘foul suspicions and evil reports’, seems to apply to worship in which the sexes were not yet separated; A New Eusebius. Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church to A.D. 377, ed. J. Stevenson (London, 1968), p. 196. J. Bossy, ‘The Mass as a social institution 1200-1700’, PaP, 100 (1983), pp. 55-8, comments on the social context of the kiss of peace, and the possible connection between the introduction of the instrument of the pax and failure to observe the separation of the sexes; R. E. M. Wheeler, ‘A pax at Abergavenny’, The Antiquaries Journal’ 10 (1930), pp. 356-8. Paxes were among the ‘idolatrous’ objects required to be destroyed in England in the late 1570s.

10 Durandus, G., Rationale divinorum officiorum (Naples, 1859), p. 18 Google Scholar, lib. 1, cap. i, sect. 46; The Symbolism of Churches, trans. and ed. J. M. Neale and B. Webb (Leeds, 1843), P.36, noting: ‘This is the practice in some parts of England even to this day: more especially in Somersetshire’.

11 I owe this reference, and the translation, to Janet Nelson, who comments that it is ‘a rare (? unique) reference in the Carolingian period to segregation in church’. On the Annals see Nelson, J. L., Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London, 1986), pp. 173’94 Google Scholar.

12 Colgrave and Mynors, Bede, pp. 89-99; C. T. Wood, ‘The Doctors’ Dilemma; sin, salvation, and the menstrual cycle in medieval thought’, Speculum, 56 (1981), pp. 710-27;Brown, Body and Society, pp. 433-4. In the Apostolic Tradition (ed. Dix and Chadwick, p. 32) ‘if any woman be menstruous she shall be put aside and be baptised another day’.

13 Douglas, M., Purity and Danger (London, 1978), p. 53 Google Scholar; Gennep, A van, The Riles of Passage (London, 1977), p. 2 Google Scholar, comments on the widespread practice of segregation of the sexes.

14 Councils and Synods with other Documents relating to the English Church, 1, ed. D. Whitelock et al. (Oxford, 1981), pp. 328-9; 2, ed. F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney (Oxford, 1964), pp. 174, 275, 297, 443; Cheney, C. R., English Synodalia of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1941), pp. 121’2 Google Scholar.

15 Robert of Brunne’s ‘Handlyng Synne’, ed. F.J. Furnivall, EETS, 119, 123 (1901-3), p. 277. For proceedings at Brilley (Herefords.) apparently against women, as well as laymen, sitting in the chancel contra ordinacionem ecclesie, see A. T. Bannister, “Visitation Returns of the Diocese of Hereford in 1397, pt. iv’, EHR, 45 (1930), p. 449.

16 The Register of John Chandler Dean of Salisbury 1404-17, ed. T. C.B. Timmins, Wilts. Record Society, 39 (1984), p. 12; Bannister, ‘Visitation Returns’, p. 447; Aston, M., Lollards and Reformers (London, 1984), p. 70 Google Scholar.

17 Heales, Pews, 1, p. 63 et seq. has helped much in this and the following paragraphs; Brown, Body and Society, p. 355.

18 See (for one example among many), cap. 3, Concerning the Church, no 13, sig. A 3v of Bishop Wren’s 1636 Articles to be Inquired of within the Dioces of Norwich (London, 1636)—concerned with the cluttering and darkening of the church, as well as the concealing of church-goers by pews and galleries. Ephraim Udall, Communion Comlinesse (London, 1641), p. 17, remarks on the advantage high pews had in preventing draughts.

19 Book, Year, De Termino Pasche Anno ix regni regis Edwardi quarti (London, 1582)Google Scholar, fol. xiiiir; ‘ieo un [lieu] de seer en le chauncel et la iay mon carpet et lyver et quishen …’. Cf. John Russell’s Boke of Nurture, for directions to a chamberlain to prepare his lord’s pew with ‘cosshyn, carpet, and curteyn, bedes and boke’; Early English Meals and Manners, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, os, 32 (1868), p. 63.

20 Testamenta Eboracensia, ed.J. Raine, SS, 4, 30, 45, 53 (1836-69), 1, p. 91, 2, pp. 175, 207, iv, p. 141n. (cited Heales, Pews, 1, pp. 18,67-8, with some wrong references). On Bocking, see Leach, A. F., The Schools of Medieval England (London, 1915), pp. 275’6 Google Scholar.

21 Guildhall Library, London, MS 9235/1 (not foliated). The same year the parish spent a lot repairing and remaking pews (pews were taken down in 1554-5), both in the nave and chancel, where a joiner earned 5s. ‘for takynge uppe the longe pwes and all the bordes where the awters doe stande’, while a carpenter made pews on the north side of the chancel, and others ‘in the quyre whereas the preestes and darckes doo sytt to singe’. (This is an account of the commissioners appointed by Bishop Bonner for church repairs). There were other payments on Sir Arthur Darcy’s pews in 1555-6, including the purchase of two hassocks.

22 [Neale], History of Pews (1841), p. 8; Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. R. W. Sylvester and D. P. Harding (New Haven and London, 1962), p. 227. This was Bacon’s understanding of the story, The Works of Lord Bacon (London, 1879), 1, P. 328 (in the Apophthegms).

23 Hale, W. H., A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes (Edinburgh, 1847)Google Scholar, new ed. introd. R.W. Dunning (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 158-9;cf.p. 190 for the charge at Stock in 1587 that the schoolmaster had ‘defased the chaunsell in makinge a fire for his schollers’: Appendix E to Second Report of the Royal Commission on Ritual, HMSO, (1868), p. 434, art. 3.

24 Bond, F., The Chancel of English Churches (Oxford, 1916), p. 126 Google Scholar.

25 Greater London Record Office (hereafter GLRO), DL/C/340, fol. 33r; Heales, Pews, 1, p. 136.

26 Montague, Richard, Articles of Enauiry and Direction for the Diocese of Norwich (London, 1638)Google Scholar, sig. A 2v, no 10 (one of several questions concerning the arrangement of the chancel); cf. Wren’s question at Norwich (above n. 18), ‘Are there any kind of seats at die east end of the chancell, above the communion table, or on either side up even with it?’

27 When things were being changed back again and ‘innovations’ cast out, St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange made its altar-rails into chancel seating. E. Freshfield, ‘On the Parish Books of St. Margaret-Lothbury, St. Christopher-le-Stocks, and St. Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange’, Archaeologia, 45 (1877), pp. 82-3. For Deerhurst, and some other examples (photographed before they were altered) see R. H. Murray, ‘The evolution of church chancels’, Transactions of the Birmingham Archaeological Society, 31 (1905), pp. 67-86; Bond, Chancel, pp. 122-8; Randall, G., Church Furnishing and Decoration in England and Wales (London, 1980), p. 15 Google Scholar, and illus. 148. Udall, Communion Comlinesse, fols. A. 3r.A 4v.pp. 1,2, gives an interesting description of how 40 to 50 communicants could be accommodated at one time in pews (made to fold down) going ‘square about the chancel’, with a removable rail.

28 Correspondence of John Cosin, ed. G. Ornsby, SS, 52,55 (1868-70), 1.pp.xxix, 215-17 (cited at 216); cf., Works of William Laud, ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss (Oxford, 1847-60), 5, pp. 480, 491; Documents Relating to Cambridgeshire Villages, ed. W. M. Palmer and H. W. Saunders, no IV (Cambridge, 1926), p. 62; cf. p. 66 (Ickleton; Mrs Rolfe not to sit in the chancel with her husband).

29 Mirk was instructing people in their duty to kneel when he said that none should ‘lene to pyler ny to wal’; Instructions for Parish Priests, ed. E. Peacock, EETS, 31 (1918, rev. 1902), p. 9. On the (probably) late thirteenth-century benches at Clapton-in-Gordano (Somerset), Dunsfold (Surrey), and other early examples, see Cox, J. C., Bench-Ends in English Churches (London, 1916), pp. 6, 9, 147, 154, 171’2 Google Scholar; Smith, J. C. D., Church Woodcarvings: A West Country Study (Newton Abbot, 1969), pp. 8’15, 52’3 Google Scholar; Randall, Church Furnishing, p. 56, and illus. 51.

30 Councils and Synods, 2, pp. 1007-8.

31 This must often have been necessary. For instance, JohnBaret, a prominent merchant of Bury St Edmunds, who died in 1467 and whose tomb is in the Church of St Mary, specified in his will of 1463 that he was to be buried not in, but beside, this grave, without damaging it, ‘under the ground siile ther my lady Schardelowe was wont to sitte, the stoolys removyd’. Wills and Inventories… of Bury St. Edmunds, ed. S. Tymms, PCS, 49 (1850), p. 15, cf. p. 13 for Lady Shardelowe, d. 1457; R. S. Gottfried, Bury St. Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290-1539 (Princeton, 1982), pp. 156-9; N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Suffolk (Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 128-9; Udall, Communion Comlinesse, pp. 1-2, refers to pews made removable for burials.

32 Reg. Chandler, p. 43 (88);cf. pp. 90-1 (247), 159-60(533). Ferrour was one of the parishioners giving evidence when Julian Farman and Margery Coterell were charged in April 1409. They were released from custody in Sherborne Castle in June 1410.

33 ‘… car lesglise est en commen pur chescun … nul lieu est pluis a lun que a lautre”; Year Books, Omnes anni Regis Henrici Septimi (London, 1585), fol. xiir;Heales, Pews,1, pp. 12,81-2. The question of whether a seat was parcel of the incumbent’s freehold was still a legal issue in the eighteenth century: Richard Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, 4 vols (London, 1775), 1, p. 337. For an example of the installation of such fixed searing see the payment to carpenters at Yatton (Somerset) in 1447-8, ‘to the settyng in of here segys’; Church-Wardens Accounts, ed. Bishop Hobhouse, Somerset Rec. Soc, 4, (1890), p. 86.

34 English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. G. G. Perry, EETS, 20 (1866), p. xviii; Allen, H. E., Writings Ascribed lo Richard Rolle (New York and London, 1927), pp. 449’66 Google Scholar. As it was the Feast of the Assumption and Rolle’s prayer might well have been centred on the Virgin, this intrusion into a woman’s place may not have been pure coincidence. (See below).

35 Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, ed. A. W. Pollard (Westminster, 1903), pp. 121, 130; Hudson, A., The Premature Reformation (Oxford, 1988), p. 150 Google Scholar.

36 Lollard Sermons, ed. G. Cigman, EETS, 294 (1989), pp. 179-81, cf. p. 200. On the medieval offence of coming to church solely for the sermon, see Owst, G. R., Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1926), p. 173 Google Scholar.

37 Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical 1604, ed. J. V. Bullard (London, 1934), p. 94 (no xc), cf. p. 16 (no xviii); Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. W. H. Frere and W. M. Kennedy, Alcuin Club Collns., 14-16 (1910), 3, p. 166 (no 4), cf. pp. 288-9 (no 40). 2, p. 277 (no 47); Laud, Works, 5, pp. 388,428, 597. Talking in church was an ancient offence (Councils and Synods, 1, p. 217,2, pp. 31,1117), but walking about during divine service seems only to have become a regular object of enquiry in the later part of the sixteenth century. Is it indicative of more comfortable seating that in 1586 sleeping was added to walking and talking as irreverent behaviour at Common Prayer? W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, Alcuin Club Collns., 25-7 (1924), 2, pp. 60,96,119, 126;3, pp. 186,218,261. (Going to a sermon for a good sleep was a jocular commonplace long before).

38 For instance, Archbishop Neile at York asked whether churchwardens and sworn men left church in the middle of the service to see who was in alehouses or ‘evilly employed’ elsewhere; Articles (London, 1633); P. Clark, The English Alehouse (London, 1983), pp. 157-8. For activities on this score in the archdeaconry of Essex in the 1580s see Hale, Precedents, pp. 191, 193. Among the many sets of visitation articles that pursued those who came to church for sermon only, see those of Harsnett at Norwich (1620), and Wren at Hereford (1635), and Hale, Ibid., pp. 180,182-3,187-8,189,200, for sixteenth-century proceedings, including the question of individuals going to parishes other than their own for sermons. On the question of church attendance, see C. Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (Panther edn., London, 1969), pp. 457-9. Individual cases like that of Julian Farman (n. 32 above) who had not attended church for five years, or William Nicholl (Hale, Precedents, p. 49), reported in 1498 as rarely coming to church, suggest that long-term absentees in rural parishes would eventually be exposed. Note the comment of Rose Hickman on Antwerp being safer than England in Mary’s reign, ‘bicause there were not parish churches but onely cathedrall: wherein though the popish service was used, yet it could not be easily knowen whocame to church, and who not’; M. Dowling and J. Shakespeare, ‘Religion and politics in mid-Tudor England through the eyes of an English Protestant Woman: the Recollections of Rose Hickman”, BIHR, 55 (1982), p. 101.

39 Schwartz, G. and Bok, M.J., Pieter Saenredam. De schilder in zijn tijd (Maarssen, ’S-Gravenhage, 1989), p. 93 Google Scholar, illus. 100 (preacher in north transept of St Odulphus Church, Assendelft, not dated, but see p. 92, illus. 99, for drawing of 11 Aug. 1633); see p.95 for plate 11 below, p. 261. Saenredam (1597-1665) was born in Assendelft.

40 Clark, English Alehouse, p. 311; Burke, P., Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1979), p. 30 Google Scholar.

41 Depictions of St Bernardino preaching are specially plentiful; see Origo, I., The World of San Bernardino (New York, 1962)Google Scholar, plates III, Va, VI, VIIa; J. Cartwrighr, ‘S. Bernardino in Art’, Cap. 5 of A. G. Ferrers Howell, S. Bernardino of Siena (London, 1913).

42 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen, EETS, 212 (1940), pp. 14-15; Penguin edn. trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 49-50. Among the examples of this literary commonplace, Chaucer’s Troilus first sighted Criseyde in the temple, where ‘he was wont to gide / His yonge knyghtes,… Byholding ay the ladies of the town’ (Bk 1, lines 153-5); and it seems likely that the meeting-place of Calisto and Melibea in the original Act I of La Celestina was in a church. (I owe these examples to Barbara Everett). Temple trysts were already a literary topic in antiquity, witness Ovid, Martial, and Juvenal; M. P. Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (Princeton, 1986), pp. 8-9.

43 Ladurie, E. Le Roy, Montaillou, trans. Bray, B. (London, 1978), pp. 164’5 Google Scholar. On lechery in church, see Owst, Preaching, p. 173, n. 3.

44 Origo, San Bernardino, p. 46; The Complete Works of John Gower, ed. G. C Macaulay (Oxford, 1899-1902), 2, pp. 145-7 (Confessio Amantis, Bk V).

45 Piers Plowman by William Langland, C-text, ed. D. Pearsall (London, 1978), p. 115, passus VI, lines 143-4; Piers the Plowman, ed. W. W. Skeat (Oxford, 1961), 1, p. 143,2, p. 80. Skeat saw ‘yparrocked’ as die equivalent of ‘imparked’ or ‘fenced in’ by palings; (see parrock, OED, related to ‘park’, and later used for folding sheep). On the fixed seating implied by the word ‘pew’, which could mean simple benches, see Cox, Bench-Ends, pp. 6, 8.

46 Churchwardens’ Accounts of S. Edmund &S. Thomas, Sarum, 1443-1702, eà.H.]. F.Swayne, Wilts. Rec. Soc. (Salisbury, 1896), pp. 37, 39, 42, 273; Churchwardens’ Accounts of Ashburton, 1479-1580. ed. A. Hanham, Devon and Cornwall Rec. Soc, 15 (1970), pp. 10,12,18, 23,26,33-4, 37-8. For work on men’s and women’s pews in London parishes, see The Medieval Records of a London City Church (St. Mary at Hill), ed. H. Littlehales, EETS, os, 125,128 (1904-5), pp. lxv, 251-2 (1503-4); The Accounts of the Churchwardens of St Michael, Cornhill 1456-1608, ed. A. J. Waterlow (London, privately printed, n.d.), pp. 16, 50, 242(1459, 1473, and 1583); Guildhall MS 4071/1, fols 6v, 22r, 24r (expenses of 1474 making pews in the Lady Chapel).

47 Prior, M., ed., Women in English Society 1500-1800 (London, 1985), p. 146, n. 88 Google Scholar. For the provision of a pew in 1583 for the wife of the rector of Wicken Bonhunt (Essex) see Emmison, F. G., Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts (Chelmsford, 1973), pp. 246’7 Google Scholar.

48 GLRO, DL/C/338, fols 68v-9r. The two pews (measuring together 6 by 12 feet) were ‘scituate behinde the seate or pewe of Mr Peter Tonkes wief and under or neere the pulpitt’, indicative of the front of the women’s side of the church. For a vestry decision of 1593 about widowers’ claims to their sometime wives’ pews see Smith, J. E., A Catalogue of Westminster Records (London, 1900), p. 186 Google Scholar.

49 See Whitaker, T. D., An History of the Original Parish of Whalley, 3rd edn (London, 1818), p. 249 Google Scholar, on the ‘proud wives of Whalley’ being provoked to ‘rise betimes’ to come to a church where the places behind the gentry were filled ‘first come first speed’; also D. Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985), pp. 32-3 on Alice Garvin, reported by a Bridgwater woman, who thought she needed taking down a peg, coming to church ‘like a lion staring’; and on the women’s anger at the Tisbury reseating in 1637, where widows seem to have been displaced.

50 On seating disputes see Hill, C., Economic Problems of the Church (Oxford, 1956), pp. 175’82 Google Scholar; Emmison, Morals and Church Courts, pp. 130-6; Underdown, Revel and Rebellion, pp. 22, 30-3.

51 Essex Record Office (hereafter ERO), D/AEA 8, fol. 28or; D/AEA 11, fol. 151V; Hales, Precedents, pp. 158, 175.

52 The English Works of Sir Thomas More, ed. W. E. Campbell (London, 1931), 1, p. 88, from the section on wrath in the Treatyce… uppon…the last thynges.

53 Register of Henry Chichele, ed. E.F. Jacob (Oxford, 1938-47), 4, pp. 169-75, cited at p. 174 (aby = suffer, atone, pay for); Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England, 2nd edn (London, 1653), pp. 254-5. The row had started at Mass in the morning, when Lestrange was seated in his place known as ‘le closette’, and Trussell was standing beside a seat [iuxta quamdam cathedram). Baker’s report is much more categorical than Chichele’s investigation on the ‘striving for place’, and perhaps allowance should be made for the fact that in his day the question of whether there was any strife or contention among parishioners over seats or pews was a regular object of enquiry. Second Report of Ritual Commission, Appendix E, pp. 568b, 603a (Archdeacon of Canterbury, 1636; Cosin, Durham, 1662).

54 Three Lancashire Documents, ed. J. Harland, Chetham Soc, 74 (1868), pp. 112–15; Bowman, W. M., England in Ashton-under-Lyne (Altrincham, 1960), pp. 73’84, 167’8 Google Scholar; Harland, J., Some Account of Seats and Pews in Old Parish Churches of the County Palatine of Lancaster (Manchester, 1863), pp. 3’6 Google Scholar. At Myddle, Richard Gough learnt from ‘antient persons that at first there was onely three rows of seates in Myddle Church, and that the space betweene the South Isle and the South wall was voyd ground, onely there was a bench all along the South wall’: R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. D. Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981), pp. 77-8. The long-lasting system of’ancient seat roomes belonging to… houses’ was obviously compatible with separation of the sexes;J. Popplewell, ‘A Seating Plan for North Nibley Church in 1629’, Trans. Bristol and Gloucs. Arch. Soc., 103 (1985), pp. 179-84, where the squire’s recently built family pew was specifically for men and women, but for parishioners there was still women’s seating (perhaps in a block, seventh seat on, behind the men).

55 J. F. Williams, The Black Book of Swaffham’, Norfolk Archaeology, 33 (1965), pp. 251–2; cf. Heales, Pews, 1, pp. 49, 52, ascribing dates to these entries; Blomefield, F., An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 6 (London, 1807), pp. 218, 220, cf. pp. 208, 213 Google Scholar. On Botwright, see Emden, A. B., A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 81 Google Scholar. For a sixteenth-century example of priced and numbered pews being appropriated only to women, see Freshfield, ‘On the Parish Books’ (above n. 27), p. 61.

56 A True Relation of those sad and lamentable Accidents, which happened in and about the Parish Church of Withycombe in theDartmoores (London, 1638), cited pp. 5,7; 2nd edn, amplified by reports of eye-witnesses, A Second and most exact Relation (1638), cited p. 18.

57 Hale, Precedents, pp. 261-2; cf. pp. 251, 258, 263-4, for women who scoffed at ministers, and even hung up washing in the church.

58 Testamenta Eboracensia, 1, p. 42; Reg. Chichele, 2, p. 86 (in dextro for the Trinity Chapel on the south side at Tewskesbury); also the licence to Thomas Lorkin referred to below, n. 72, shows that ex parte boriali was synonymous with ex manu sinistra.

59 Perdrizet, P., La Vierge de Miséricorde (Paris, 1908), pp. 122’4, 152’3, 194 Google Scholar. The multiple forms of this image included plenty in which the sexes were not separated, and when they were there were, of course, exceptions to the rule of women being on the Virgin’s left, but as the many examples cited in this work show, this was rare. See also M. Warner, Alone of all her Sex (Pan Books, 1985), pp. 327-8.

60 Sheingorn, P., The Easier Sepulchre in England, Medieval Institute Pubs., Early Drama, Art and Music Reference Series, 5 (Kalamazoo, 1987), pp. 34ff Google Scholar.; Randall, Church Furnishing, pp. 142-3; on the patron saint enjoying an honoured position at God’s right hand, see Bond, Chancel, pp. 26-8.

61 Vallance, A., English Church Screens (London, 1936), pp. 1’12 Google Scholar and Greater English Church Screens (London, 1947), pp. 1-12; Cautley, H. M., Suffolk Churches, 4th edn (Ipswich, 1975), pp. 137’42 Google Scholar; Randall, Church Furnishing, pp. 94, 145-6, illus. 174. Eamon Duffy suggests the possible importance of Ps. 45. 10 (Vulgate 44), ‘Astitit regina a dextris suis’ (used in modern Marian liturgy) in determining this iconography. I have not been able to investigate its history.

62 Cox, Bench-Ends, pp. 17, 126. See also Eamon Duffy’s paper above, p. 181 for the way in which the grouping of women saints on church screens may reflect segregated seating.

63 Kerry, C., A History of the Municipal Church of Si Lawrence, Reading (Reading, 1883), p. 34 Google Scholar.

64 Ashburton Accounts, pp. xii-xiii, 5,18; Church-Wardens’ Accounts of Croscombe, Pilton, Yatton … and St. Michael’s, Bath, ed. Bishop Hobhouse, Somerset Rec. Soc., 4 (1890), pp. xiv-xv, 6 ff. 21; for women’s contributions ‘to the payntyng of the Mary’ at Yatton in 1467, see p. 104. Pilton’s Lady Altar was in the north aisle and Hobhouse commented (p. 49) ‘The women seem to have used that part as their special chapel and place of offering’; Accounts of the Wardens of the Parish of Morebath, Devon, 1520-1573, trans. J. E. Binney (Exeter, 1904), pp. 6-7, 13,38, 72, 81,95.I am grateful to Eamon Duffy for drawing my attention to the last, specially interesting accounts.

65 Kerry, Reading, pp. 30,32-3,77-82. The seat payments here in 1498 were for wives and older women only. For an example of a church which in 1524 had women sitting on both north and south sides, see Minutes of the Vestry Meetings … of St. Christopher le Stocks … London, ed. E. Freshfield (London, 1886), pp. 71-2.

66 More, Works, 4, pp. 229, 233.

67 Prior, M., ‘Reviled and crucified marriages: the position of Tudor bishops’ wives’, in Women in English Society, pp. 118’48 Google Scholar; P. Tyler,’The status of the Elizabethan parochial clergy’, SCH, 4 (1967), pp. 87-8. On the law of baptism, including that by women in cases of necessity, and reservations about this, after the Reformation, see Phillimore, R., The Ecclesiastical Law of the Church of England 2nd edn (London, 1895), 1, pp. 491—4 Google Scholar; Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 52, 57; Cardwell, A., A History of Conferences (Oxford, 1841), pp. 163, 172, 174’6, 214 Google Scholar.

68 The Two Liturgies A.D. 1549, and A.D. 1152, ed. J. Kettley, PS (1844), p. 85; G. Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning (Baltimore and London, 1978), p. 170. Note that in Foxe’s illustration of Bilney the women are seated and the men stand. On such representations of women as godly hearers and readers of Scripture, see J. N. King, The Godly Woman in Elizabethan England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 38 (1985), pp. 41-84.

69 For remarks on this development, see Bossy, J., Christianity in the West 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985), p. 142 Google Scholar. The belief that pews as we know them (part of this development but obviously not its cause) came in with the Reformation, mentioned by Gough, History of Myddle, was perpetuated by Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, 1, p. 330, and cf. Phillimore, Ecclesiastical Law, 2, p. 1424. Of course, it may be true that there was relatively little pre-Reformation church seating in backward areas of the north and west For the impact of reform on church seating in Germany see R. Wex, Ordnung und Unfriede. Raumprobleme des protestantischen Kirchenbaus im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert in Deutschland (Marburg, 1984); P. Jezler, ‘Etappen des Zürcher Bildersturms’, in Bild und Bildersturm im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. M. Warnke and R. W. Scribner (forthcoming). I am grateful to Peter Jezler for sending information.

70 See Amussen, S.D., An Ordered Society. Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 28, 137’44 Google Scholar, for a discussion of some East Anglian seating disputes, which shows clearly how claims of wealth conflicted with traditional arrangements, with mixed results.

71 Addams, J., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Ecclesiastical Courts at Doctors’ Commons, and in the High Court of Delegates, 2 vols. (London, 1823–5), 2 Google Scholar, Fuller v. Lane, pp. 419–39, cited at pp. 434-5; cf. pp. 423,433, for his assumption that husbands and wives would sit together, and families be placed in one pew. This became a key judgement, including what was said about the ‘higher classes’ leaving room for ‘their poorer neighbours’. Phillimore, Ecclesiastical Law, 2, p. 1427: note the qualification that churchwardens had authority for maintaining order, to decide where certain classes of the congregation ‘such as boys and young men’ should sit, apart from others.

72 CUL, Ely Diocesan Records, F/5/35, fols. 185V-7V, 209r-v; Heales, Pews, 1, pp. 101-3. Lorkin (see DNB), who died in 1591, had five daughters. The space allotted him on the north side of the church by the entrance to the chancel was wide enough (11 by 7 feet) for two pews. Randall, Church Furnishing, p. 58 gives examples of Elizabethan family pews that still survive.

73 Churchwardens’ Accounts, Sarum, pp. 169–70 (on the arrangement of pews in 1619–20), 187, 205,207,209,211,215–16,217,223-4 (reference to ‘clap’, ‘hanging’, and ‘sliding’ seats), 226, 237; cited at p. 205. (On ‘hanging’ seats see Cox, Bench-Ends, p. 19). Some, at any rate, of these changes in seating arrangements at St Edmund’s were linked with the group of godly magistrates (Henry Sherfield, Bartholomew Tookie, and others), who in 1630 ordered forms with ‘For the Poore’ painted ‘in great red letters’ on each, to be reserved for the ‘churche poore’; ibid., p. 190; P. Clark and P. Slack, eds, Crisis and Order in English Towns (London, 1972), cap. 5, esp. pp. 183-6. For the placing at North Benfleet, c. 1580, which had an unusual mix including seating by household—for some chosen houses—as well as for wives, men, women, and servants, see Emmison, Morals and Church Courts, p. 132; Underdown, Revel and Rebellion, p. 32, for a seventeenth-century parish mixing customary and private seating.

74 Lincolnshire Archives Office, Cor./M/1, no 8; Injunctions of Richard Barnes, SS, 23 (1850), p. 124.

75 ERO, D/AEA 29, fol 284r; Hale, Precedents, pp. 241-2.

76 ERO, D/AEA 10, fol. 149V; Hale, Precedents, p. 171.

77 GLRO.DL/C 341, fols 39v-40v(10 July 1617); cf. Emmison, Morals and Church Courts, p. 135, for a case of 1600 in which deafness led to a change of seat.

78 ERO, D/AEA 12, fol. 43V; Hale, Precedents, p. 177.

79 GLRO, DL/C/338, fols 61V-21r; Heales, Pews, 1, pp. 117-18; Laud, Works, 5, pp. 500-1.

80 Udall, Communion Comlinesse, pp. 17-18—the young imitating the aged and sickly, who were those originally allowed to bring a stool with them, but then, with bishops’ connivance, the custom of sitting spread to others, moving from stools, to benches, and then to pews.

81 ‘Mr. Denne’s Observations on a Triple Stone Seat at Upchurch in Kent. In a Letter to Mr Gough’, Archaeologia, 12 (1796), pp. 103-5 (cited at p. 104). For the new seating in Co. Durham churches in the 1630s, including John Cosin’s parish of Brancepeth, where the seating-plan of 1639 placed women behind men in the transepts, and wives in the side aisles, see H. L. Robson, ‘The Cosin Furniture in Durham Churches’, Antiquities of Sunderland, 24 (1969), pp. 1-12.

82 G. B. Hall, Records of St. Alphage, London Wall (London, [1882]), p. 31; Documents relating to Cambridgeshire Villages, pp. 58 (Bourn), 66 (Ickleton), 67 (Knapwell), for men and women presented for sitting together in church in Ely diocese, 1638; Montague, Articles of Enquiry and Direction for the Diocese of Norwich (London, 1638), sig. A2v; Wren, Articles of Enquiry for the Diocese of Ely (London, 1662), p. 7 (cap. 3:15); Amussen, Ordered Society, pp. 137-8. For parishes responding affirmatively to Wren’s question in 1662, see W. M. Palmer, ‘Episcopal Visitation Returns, Cambridgeshire, 1638–1662’, Transactions of the Cambs. and Hunts. Arch. Soc., 4 (1930), pp. 394 (Hungry Hatley: seats so ordered ‘that men and women do not sit promiscuously together), 405 (Dry Drayton: men, women arid younger people ‘sett distinctly’), 408 (Histon: men and women sit apart). Cf. pp. 371, 381, for troubles over women’s seats in 1638.

83 G. Wheler, The Protestant Monastery: or, Christian Oeconomicks. Containing Directions for the Religious Conduct of a Family ([London], 1698), p. 100, cf. p. 99 on the antiquity of this custom and its retention in the Greek and French reformed churches; idem, An Account of the Churches, or Places of Assembly, of the Primitive Christians (London, 1689), pp. 119-20; Legg, J. Wickham, English Church Life from the Restoration in the Tractarian Movement (London, 1914), p. 150 Google Scholar, cf. p. 153 on segregation at West Wycombe in 1763. See Cross, J., Tarrant Crawford Churchwardens’Account Book, 1637’, Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries, 17 (1923), pp. 162—4 Google Scholar, for an example of a church that seems to have arranged its seating on the lines described in this passage, with blocks of men and women on both north and south, the men in front. On Sir George wheler see DNB.

84 Wheler, Account of the Churches, pp. 118-19.

85 Crew, P. M., Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1544-1569 (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 168’9 Google Scholar, cites an eye-witness; ‘The Calvinists have a certain order in their prêches: the women sit in the middle in a circle, fenced in by stakes … around them soldiers hold watch …’.

86 Egan, T.A., Ballintubber Abbey (Ballintubber, 1971), p. 8 Google Scholar; Milford, T.R., Two Brothers: A Milford Memoir (1986), p. 20 Google Scholar; R. Gott, ‘Travels around Ruthenia’, The Guardian, 12 Sept. 1989; W.J. Murnane, Penguin Guide to Ancient Egypt (Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 220-1; information of Robin Harcourt Williams, Librarian and Archivist to the Marquess of Salisbury. An aspect of segregation I have not attempted to trace is the occasional practice of burying men and women in different parts of a churchyard, referred to by Jacqueline Simpson in Our Forgotten Past, ed. J. Blum (London, 1982), p. 171. Discussion at the delivery of this paper pointed to aspects of the question that need investigation, as well as illustrating the continuity of tradition. Eamon Duffy and Margaret Harvey both had personal experience of Irish parishes in which men and women were separated; the former remembering how the usual mixed seating for Mass at Dundalk in the 1950s was superseded by age and sex groupings once a month, for Sunday communion. The latter also recorded the dismay of some Vietnamese on finding that the sexes were not separated in the church they attended on arrival in Birmingham. Gordon Huelin’s memory of nonce-boards telling men and women where to sit in St John’s, Wilton Road, daughter church of St Peter’s, Eaton Square, may illustrate a tendency of segregated seating itself to become a class matter, being maintained specially among servants and the poor (see Amussen, Ordered Society, pp. 143-4, on Norfolk). The example of All Saints, Margaret Street, which kept the sexes divided up to the 1960s, raises the question of the role of the ritualist movement in reviving segregation in church. A. L. Drummond, The Church Architecture of Protestantism (Edinburgh, 1934), pp. 42-3.