ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY chapels at Duke Street, Queen's Square, and the New Way Westminster, strong suspicion was entertained of the misuse of offertory money. "^ Though begun in the 17th century, it was not really until the early 19th century that the proprietary chapel reached the height at once of its power and of its evil. In 18 I 2 there were three proprietary chapels in the parish of St. Pancras, all well conducted,*** but giving a false idea of the supply of spiritual benefits to the parish, and subsidized by the vestry.**^ Appropriated seats in churches have been known since the earliest times,**" but the abuse of appropriating all the sitting accommodation with the exception of narrow benches in the darkest corners of the church was peculiar to the period now in question. Some pews were probably erected in nearly every London church before 1667 ; *" the Guildhall chapel was fitted with pews in 1676-7, and in 1685 a pew in Bow Church was provided for the master, wardens, and assistants of the Brewers' Company. The vestries were under the necessity of providing, however inadequately, for the poor of the parish, and pew rents promised large returns ; they accordingly erected pews, sometimes without the consent of the incumbent, as at St. Dionis Backchurch in 1685,*" and without faculty; for, as was frankly said in 1723, 'if the Ordinary be never so much disposed to remove Pews or Railes erected without his Licence yet there is no great fear of his coming to the knowledge of it, unless it be a Church in which he keeps his Visitation, for he rarely looks into any other.' *" The pew system was essentially anti-parochial and opulent ; there was no room left in church for the poor.*** How impossible it was to reconcile it with missionary effort was shown at St. Mary Woolnoth in 1780, when John Newton's preaching attracted many strangers, who took the appropriated seats and filled the aisles, to the disgust of the pewholders.*** At St. Dunstan's in the East the pews yielded an annual rental of ^66 4;-. j.d. ; at St. John's Bedford Row, the amount was over ^500 in 1809.**^ In many of the churches built in the early 1 9th century pew rents were the incumbents' only source of income, and yet Bishop Jackson (1869—85) could say that nearly one hundred such churches*" maintained an incumbent and two curates. The fashionable churches were, and still are, the chief offenders in this respect, but Bishop Tait (1856-69) did much to improve matters, and preached his first sermon as Bishop of London at St. James's Westminster, when it was re-opened in 1856 with 150 new and unappropriated seats. Throughout this period the vestry had the control of church funds, and, was the unit of civil organization. The close or select vestry, a body com- posed of twelve or more parishioners elected for life, in which the vacancies were filled by co-option, was the dominant feature in fifty or sixty out of 100 London parishes. In Westminster the select vestries of St. Margaret's and St. John's, and of St. Martin's in the Fields, were at first filled with men who had no interests in the contracts made by the vestry for the lighting, cleaning, and repairing of the church and for civil purposes, with the result
- " D. and C. Westm. extra-parochial box 2 ; ' The Case about the Chapels.'
"' Middleton, Address to the Parishioners of St. Pancras, 1 1.
- " Wilks, Mem. of Rev. Basil Woodd, 40. •*» Arch, liii, 94.
- " Heales, Hist, and Law of Ch. Seats or Pews, 1, passim. *" Bodl. Lib. Tanner MS. 125, fol. 185-91.
"' Johnson, Clergyman's Fade Mecum, 179. *"' Wren, Parentalia, 321.
- " Bull, Mem. of John Nezcton, 246. '*' Bateman, Life of Daniel Wilson, 171.
"' i.e. in the ' Greater London ' of modern times.
