An object of ire among Victorian reformers of worship was the pew – the box pew or the little drawing-room that richer churchgoers fitted up for their families, blocking the view. “What is the history of pues,” asked John Mason Neale in 1841, “but the history of the intrusion of human pride, selfishness and indolence into the worship of God?”
People paid rents for their pews, and the poor were left to sit on benches at the back or ledges at the side. But in the 19th century, the focus was returning to the altar, not the pulpit (which had often been put far back westward in the nave). And architectural restorers hankered after a medieval style of seating, in benches with carved bench-ends, sometimes sprouting with poppy-head ornament.
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