“In front, on either side of the pulpit (or very rarely in the foremost row in the gallery), was a seat of highest dignity, known as the ‘fore seat,’ in which only the persons of greatest importance in the community sat.”
Not only in New England, but in the other Colonies as well, seats and pews in the galleries seem to have been preferred as the most desirable by persons of quality and consideration in the community next to the specially exalted seats belowstairs.
In many places, particularly in the Middle and Southern Colonies, the churches were regarded as the most dignified places of sepulture for persons of consequence, and their gravestones, with the armorial bearings and inscriptions almost effaced by the treading feet of generations of worshippers, are to be seen in the aisles and chancel pavements. The chancel was esteemed the most honourable place of burial and as an instance of this may be mentioned the grave of General Forbes, the hero of Fort Duquesne, in the chancel of Christ Church, Philadelphia. John Penn, one of the Proprietaries, is buried at the foot of the chancel steps. It is interesting in this connexion to note, by way of exception, that Judge Moore of Moore Hall, the stout old Pennsylvania Loyalist, and the person of greatest consequence in the parish of St. David, Radnor, directed that he and his wife, the Lady Williamina Wemyss, should be buried at the threshold of the church. Emblazoned hatchments were frequently used at the time of funerals and some of them are still preserved in our old churches. As in England, during much of the eighteenth century, it was the fashion in the Colonies to bury persons of note at night by the light of torches.
In not a few of the early churches there was an utter lack of uniformity in the style of the seats or pews employed and permission was often granted to influential persons to buy space within the churches and erect pews of their own, suited to their personal fancy. The space not occupied by these privately owned pews was sometimes filled with movable benches, stools, or chairs, and it was not an unusual thing for the humbler members of the congregation to bring their seats with them and put them wherever they could find room. We find ample evidence of this condition of things in places as widely apart as the simple country parish of St. David’s, Radnor, in the Welsh Barony, and King’s Chapel in Boston. In early days the members of St. David’s congregation fetched thither nondescript seats as they listed and it was not until well into the eighteenth century that rough benches were furnished and “rented for the support of the Church.” Not till the middle of the eighteenth century do the parish records show the existence of pews and the custom seems to have then prevailed of “selling a piece of ground within the Church on which the purchaser had the privilege of building such a pew as he desired.” With this system, or rather lack of system, in seating, it appears that squabbles occasionally arose as we may judge from the following minute in the old register:--