The Beauty of Holiness: Anglicanism and Architecture in Colonial South Carolina

9. Pulpits, Pews, and Power

Chapter 9 PULPITS, PEWS, AND POWER In the summer of 1744, the vestry of St. John’s, Colleton, included in the pages of their minutes a plan of their newly completed church (FIGS. 9.1 and 9.2). The nave of the church was organized around three aisles, two extending from the doors on the western elevation and terminating in a cross aisle that spans between doors on the northern and southern elevations. Filling the floor of the church in and around these aisles and the chancel aisle are twenty-seven pews, all of approximately the same size. The sense of uniformity among the pews was reinforced by the fact that the vestry paid carpenter Thomas Cheesman the same amount (£17) to build each of the twenty-seven pews. In 1759 the vestry of St. Helena’s Parish ordered the erection of three new pews in the western end of their parish church. Like most of their counterparts, the vestry of St. Helena’s insisted that the new pews “be built uniform to the others in Height and Model.”¹ This drive toward uniformity among pews in St. John’s, Colleton, and St. Helena’s was typical for South Carolina’s Anglican churches and, in fact, across the British Empire. The same could be said for pew plans and designs in Virginia, New England, and England. Even so, South Carolina is a particularly useful case study because such apparent equanimity is belied by the fact that throughout the eighteenth century, the plan of the Anglican parish church was among the most explicit representations of the sociopolitical hierarchies that governed life in the local parish.² Unlike Virginia, where seating was often divided by gender, seating in South Carolina’s Anglican churches was always by family. One of the primary purposes of recording the plan of the new church in the vestry minutes was not so much to report on its form but to record the legal owner of each pew. The vestry of St. John’s, Colleton, followed the common South Carolina practice of selling pews in an effort to raise funds for the construction of the church. Following a process of subscriptions, the highest subscriber would have the first choice of pews, followed by the second highest, and so on. It was no surprise, for example, that the pews located in the very heart of the church—numbers 4, 5, 9, and 10—were owned by the wealthiest and most powerful men of the parish: John Fenwick, Hugh Hext, John Gibbs, and John Stanyarne, respectively. Those incapable of purchasing an entire pew joined together with others of similar station to secure a seat in the church. Such jointly owned pews, however, were located at the west end of the church, MATERIAL RELIGION AND SOCIAL PRACTICE 310 some distance from the box pews at the crossing. Such wealth-dependent allocation, of course, meant that the rich quickly appropriated the space of the church as a vehicle for establishing and preserving their station.³ Pew subscriptions were the first stage in the process of building the social and political hierarchies of the parish into the very fabric of the church. The association of pews with social status had deep roots in English tradition . In the seventeenth century, seating within the space of the church FIGURE 9.1 Pew plan of St. John’s, Colleton, 1744 (South Carolina Historical Society) FIGURE 9.2 Redrawing of pew plan of St. John’s, Colleton, 1744 (Drawn by author) PULPITS, PEWS, AND POWER 311 was assigned explicitly by social rank. A seventeenth-century vestry of St. Michael’s Parish Church on Barbados, for example, directed the churchwardens to “take order for ye placing and seating of ye inhabitants according to their degree and quality.”⁴ Seventeenth-century English gentry would often embellish their pew with carved ornament, cover it with a canopy, and frequently hang curtains from the canopy under the pretense of warmth, such as was done at Stokesay in Shropshire (FIG. 9.3).⁵ In a pew designed by John Vanbrugh, the Duke of Newcastle sat elevated above the congregation with his own separate entrance and warmed by a fireplace faced with a marble chimneypiece.⁶ These so-called great pews were clear visual signs of the prominence of an individual or a family in the social and political hierarchy of the parish. But over the course of the seventeenth century, Protestants raised explicit objections to great...