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‘… This Congregation here Present …’: Seating in Parish Churches During the Long Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

W. M. Jacob*
Affiliation:
London

Extract

Parish churches during the ‘long eighteenth century’ were meeting places for the whole community, elite and popular. Accommodating the hierarchically ordered and theologically aware society of England and Wales in church was not a simple matter. How might the elite and the popular, the squire and his relations, and his groom, and boot boy and the milk maid, and aspiring farmers and attorneys and their wives and sisters and cousins and aunts, along with day labourers and paupers, be included together as the body of Christ before God? People were sensitive about their social stratification.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2006

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