The Old-Fashioned Pews.
In the early New England meeting-houses the seats were long, narrow,
uncomfortable benches, which were made of simple, rough, hand-riven planks
placed on legs like milking-stools. They were without any support or rest
for the back; and perhaps the stiff-backed Pilgrims and Puritans required
or wished no support. Quickly, as the colonies grew in wealth and the
colonists in ambition and importance, "Spots for Pues" were sold (or
"pitts" as they were sometimes called), at first to some few rich or
influential men who wished to sit in a group together, and finally each
family of dignity or wealth sat in its own family-pew. Often it was
stipulated in the permission to build a pew that a separate entrance-door
should be cut into it through the outside wall of the meeting-house, thus
detracting grievously from the external symmetry of the edifice, but
obviating the necessity of a space-occupying entrance aisle within the
church, where there was little enough sitting-room for the quickly
increasing and universally church-going population. As these pews were
either oblong or square, were both large and small, painted and unpainted,
and as each pewholder could exercise his own "tast or disresing" in the
kind of wood he used in the formation of his pew, as well as in the style
of finish, much diversity and incongruity of course resulted. A man who had
a wainscoted pew was naturally and properly much respected and envied by
the entire community. These pews, erected by individual members, were
individual and not communal property. A widow in Cape Cod had her house
destroyed by fire. She was given from the old meeting-house, which was
being razed, the old building materials to use in the construction of her
new home. She was not allowed, however, to remove the wood which formed the
pews, as they were adjudged to be the property of the members who had built
them, and those owners only could sell or remove the materials of which
they were built.
Many of the pews in the old meeting-houses had towering partition walls,
which extended up so high that only the tops of the tallest heads could be
seen when the occupants were seated. Permissions to build were often given
with modifying restrictions to the aspiring pew-builders, as for instance
is recorded of the Haverhill church, "provided they would not build so high
as to damnify and hinder the light of them windows," or of the Waterbury
church, "if the pues will not progodish the hous." Often the floor of the
pews was several inches and occasionally a foot higher than the floor of
the "alleys," thus forming at the entrance-door of the pew one or two
steps, which were great stumbling-blocks to clumsy and to childish feet,
that tripped again when within the pew over the "crickets" and foot-benches
which were, if the family were large, the accepted and lowly church-seats
of the little children. Occasionally one long, low foot-rest stretched
quite across one side of the pew-floor. I have seen these long benches
with a tier of three shelves; the lower and broader shelf was used as a
foot-rest, the second one was to hold the hats of the men, and the third
and narrower shelf was for the hymn-books and Bibles. Such comfortable and
luxurious pew-furnishings could never have been found in many churches.
An old New Englander relates a funny story of his youth, in which one of
these triple-tiered foot-benches played an important part. When he was
a boy a travelling show visited his native town, and though he was not
permitted to go within the mystic and alluring tent, he stood longingly at
the gate, and was prodigiously diverted and astonished by an exhibition of
tight-rope walking, which was given outside the tent-door as a bait to
lure pleasure-loving and frivolous townspeople within, and also as a
tantalization to the children of the saints who were not allowed to enter
the tent of the wicked. Fired by that bewildering and amazing performance,
he daily, after the wonderful sight, practised walking on rails, on fences,
on fallen trees, and on every narrow foothold which he could find, as a
careful preparation for a final feat and triumph of skill on his mother's
clothes-line. In an evil hour, as he sat one Sunday in the corner of his
father's pew, his eyes rested on the narrow ledge which formed the top of
the long foot-bench. Satan can find mischief for idle boys within church as
well as without, and the desire grew stronger to try to walk on that
narrow foothold. He looked at his father and mother, they were peacefully
sleeping; so also were the grown-up occupants of the neighboring pews;
the pew walls were high, the minister seldom glanced to right or left; a
thousand good reasons were whispered in his ear by the mischief-finder,
and at last he willingly yielded, pulled off his heavy shoes, and softly
mounted the foot-bench. He walked forward and back with great success
twice, thrice, but when turning for a fourth tour he suddenly lost his
balance, and over he went with a resounding crash--hats, psalm-books,
heavy bench, and all. He crushed into hopeless shapelessness his father's
gray beaver meeting-hat, a long-treasured and much-loved antique; he nearly
smashed his mother's kid-slippered foot to jelly, and the fall elicited
from her, in the surprise of the sudden awakening and intense pain, an
ear-piercing shriek, which, with the noisy crash, electrified the entire
meeting. All the grown people stood up to investigate, the children climbed
on the seats to look at the guilty offender and his deeply mortified
parents; while the minister paused in his sermon and said with cutting
severity, "I have always regretted that the office of tithingman has been
abolished in this community, as his presence and his watchful care
are sadly needed by both the grown persons and the children in this
congregation." The wretched boy who had caused all the commotion and
disgrace was of course uninjured by his fall, but a final settlement at
home between father and son on account of this sacrilegious piece of church
disturbance made the unhappy would-be tight-rope walker wish that he had at
least broken his arm instead of his father's hat and his mother's pride and
the peace of the congregation.
The seats were sometimes on four sides of these pews, but oftener on three
sides only, thus at least two thirds of the pew occupants did not face the
minister. The pew-seats were as narrow and uncomfortable as the plebeian
benches, though more exclusive, and, with the high partition walls, quite
justified the comment of a little girl when she first attended a service in
one of these old-fashioned, square-pewed churches. She exclaimed in dismay,
"What! must I be shut up in a closet and sit on a shelf?" Often elderly
people petitioned to build separate small pens of pews with a single wider
seat as "through the seats being so very narrow" they could not sit in
comfort.
The seats were, until well into this century, almost universally hung on
hinges, and could be turned up against the walls of the pew, thus enabling
the standing congregation to lean for support against the sides of the pews
during the psalm-singing and the long, long prayers.
"And when at last the loud Amen
Fell from aloft, how quickly then
The seats came down with heavy rattle,
Like musketry in fiercest battle."
This noise of slamming pew-seats could easily be heard over half a mile
away from the meeting-house in the summer time, for the perverse boys
contrived always in their salute of welcome to the Amen to give vent in
a most tremendous bang to a little of their pent up and ill-repressed
energies. In old church-orders such entries as this (of the Haverhill
church) are frequently seen: "The people are to Let their Seats down
without Such Nois." "The boyes are not to wickedly noise down there
pew-seats." A gentleman attending the old church in Leicester heard at
the beginning of the prayer, for the first time in his life, the noise of
slamming pew-seats, as the seats were thrust up against the pew-walls. He
jumped into the aisle at the first clatter, thinking instinctively that the
gallery was cracking and falling. Another stranger, a Southerner, entering
rather late at a morning service in an old church in New England, was
greeted with the rattle of falling seats, and exclaimed in amazement, "Do
you Northern people applaud in church?"
In many meeting-houses the tops of the pews and of the high gallery
railings were ornamented with little balustrades of turned wood, which were
often worn quite bare of paint by childish fingers that had tried them all
"to find which ones would turn," and which, alas! would also squeak. This
fascinating occupation whiled away many a tedious hour in the dreary
church, and in spite of weekly forbidding frowns and whispered reproofs for
the shrill, ear-piercing squeaks elicited by turning the spindle-shaped
balusters, was entirely too alluring a time-killer to be abandoned, and
consequently descended, an hereditary church pastime, from generation to
generation of the children of the Puritans; and indeed it remained so
strong an instinct that many a grown person, visiting in after life a
church whose pews bore balustrades like the ones of his childhood, could
scarce keep his itching fingers from trying them each in succession "to see
which ones would turn."
These open balustrades also afforded fine peep-holes through which, by
standing or kneeling upon "the shelf," a child might gaze at his neighbor;
and also through which sly missiles--little balls of twisted paper--could
be snapped, to the annoyance of some meek girl or retaliating boy, until
the young marksman was ignominiously pulled down by his mother from his
post of attack. And through these balustrades the same boy a few years
later could thrust sly missives, also of twisted paper, to the girl whom he
had once assailed and bombarded with his annoying paper bullets.
Through the pillared top-rail a restless child in olden days often
received, on a hot summer Sabbath from a farmer's wife or daughter in an
adjoining pew, friendly and quieting gifts of sprigs of dill, or fennel,
or caraway, famous anti-soporifics; and on this herbivorous food he would
contentedly browse as long as it lasted. An uneasy, sermon-tired little
girl was once given through the pew-rail several stalks of caraway, and
with them a large bunch of aromatic southernwood, or "lad's-love" which had
been brought to meeting by the matron in the next pew, with a crudely and
unconsciously aesthetic sense that where eye and ear found so little to
delight them, there the pungent and spicy fragrance of the southernwood
would be doubly grateful to the nostrils. Little Missy sat down delightedly
to nibble the caraway-seed, and her mother seeing her so quietly and
absorbingly occupied, at once fell contentedly and placidly asleep in her
corner of the pew. But five heads of caraway, though each contain many
score of seeds, and the whole number be slowly nibbled and eaten one seed
at a time, will not last through the child's eternity of a long doctrinal
sermon; and when the umbels were all devoured, the young experimentalist
began upon the stalks and stems, and they, too, slowly disappeared. She
then attacked the sprays of southernwood, and in spite of its bitter,
wormwoody flavor, having nothing else to do, she finished it, all but the
tough stems, just as the long sermon was brought to a close. Her waking
mother, discovering no signs of green verdure in the pew, quickly drew
forth a whispered confession of the time-killing Nebuchadnezzar-like feast,
and frightened and horrified, at once bore the leaf-gorged child from
the church, signalling in her retreat to the village doctor, who quickly
followed and administered to the omnivorous young New Englander a bolus
which made her loathe to her dying day, through a sympathetic association
and memory, the taste of caraway, and the scent of southernwood.
An old gentleman, lamenting the razing of the church of his childhood,
told the story of his youthful Sabbaths in rhyme, and thus refers with
affectionate enthusiasm to the old custom of bringing bunches of esculent
"sallet" herbs to meeting:--
"And when I tired and restless grew,
Our next pew neighbor, Mrs. True,
Reached her kind hand the top rail through
To hand me dill, and fennel too,
And sprigs of caraway.
"And as I munched the spicy seeds,
I dimly felt that kindly deeds
That thus supply our present needs,
Though only gifts of pungent weeds,
Show true religion.
"And often now through sermon trite
And operatic singer's flight,
I long for that old friendly sight,
The hand with herbs of value light,
To help to pass the time."
Were the dill and "sweetest fennel" chosen Sabbath favorites for their
old-time virtues and powers?
"Vervain and dill
Hinder witches of their ill."