Where a person sat in church was so important for social status that Woodforde was forced to cancel permission for the use of a particular chancel seat:
After breakfast this morning I sent my maid Betty to Mr. Press Custance’s mistress (Miss Sherman) to desire her not to make use of my seat in the chancel any more, as some reflections had been thrown on me for giving her leave. I likewise sent Will to Mr. Kerr’s on the same account…Miss Sherman sent word back by Betty that she was much obliged to me for the use she had already made of it, and did not take it at all amiss in me, she knew from whence it came – and that she would get a new seat made. Mr. Kerr sent me word that he was not the least angry with me, and he expected it.41
Nelly Weeton, keenly aware of class distinction, complained in a letter about her local church at Liverpool:
Christ’s Church nowadays is not what the Church of Christ was formerly. He used to say, ‘to the poor the Gospel is preached,’ but now the age is grown more liberal, so that they pay their teachers. Of course, it is chiefly to the rich that the Gospel is preached. ‘The rich and poor’ do not ‘meet together’. The poor go to pray – nobody knows where, and any scrubby fellow may instruct them. To be ‘clothed in rags’ was once a recommendation to the Church of Christ, but now the surest way of being denied entrance into it…the present age are so little scrupulous, that Fashion, whatever garb she wears, is permitted; indeed, every pains taken to allure her to take her seat in Christ-Church.42
Even if they were not concerned about such class distinction, parishioners frequently resented their duty to attend church on Sundays. Although the labouring classes worked six days a week, they were still expected to spend part of the Sabbath – their one day off – at church. Benjamin Silliman, though, was surprised how all classes in London treated Sundays:
I attended public worship to-day in a great church where there were only a few people. This I have very often seen before in London. Indeed a very great proportion of the people consider the Sabbath as a day of mere rest, of relaxation, of amusement, or of dissipation, according to their employments, and rank in society. A person, while walking the streets on the Sabbath, will meet numbers of the gentry with their splendid equipages, going out into the country for an airing, or perhaps to join a party at some village in the vicinity. It is also a favourite day with them to begin a journey, as it is every where with sailors to begin a journey.43
There was even greater reluctance to attend church services on weekdays, such as official ‘fast days’ or on the king’s birthday, when sermons were sent to the parishes to be read out. ‘This is the general fast and a disagreeable day it is,’ remarked Holland in February 1809, ‘very cold and piercing and windy…I could scarce get any to church but I went in at last but had a very small congregation for a fast. However I went through the intricate service, and gave them a sermon.’44 Later that year, on Wednesday 25 October, he recorded:
This is the King’s accession into the fiftieth year of his reign and the bells are ringing and we are to have prayers. Few assembled. Farmer Morle after promising fairly last Sunday and to provide cyder, disappointed us all, a mean shabby fellow and Farmer Landsey tho as rich as a Jew contributed nothing tho he was at church but the other was not. However we had some few…I believe I gave them as good a sermon and as well deliver’d as any they will hear this day in these parts though I say it myself…and moreover it was my own composition which will not be the case in general I presume.45
On the king’s birthday a few years later, in 1816, Holland remarked: ‘I had prayers to day, but we could collect no congregation besides our own family. Indeed in country places it is in vain to expect the common people on week days.’46 A few months after, attendance had not improved: ‘I have resolved to go with my wife to every person or house in the parish to remonstrate with the inhabitants about their neglect of the public worship of the church, and so we went off this day and had conversation with many of them and made them sensible of their duty and they promised fairly.’47
Byng blamed the deteriorating church attendance and the decline of the clergy on countless good families deserting the countryside:
For whilst decent, and pious families therein resided, the minister attended to his double Sunday duties, and to the weekly prayers on Wednesdays, and Fridays, besides the keeping of holidays; to which the aged, and virtuous poor were urged to attend, by good example.—But the families being gone, no longer are these duties continued; and the divine, himself, from lack of company, pays a pitiful stipend to a hackney curate (who rides over half the country on a Sunday) and retires to London, or to Bath.48
Byng himself was no model churchgoer, attending services but often more interested in antiquarian matters, as at Folkingham in June 1791: ‘the bells rang for church, to which I repair’d with my landlord, and landlady [of the Greyhound Inn]; (this I may call my religious tour, tho’ I sadly fear that curiosity oft’ner than devotion leads me to church)…during the sermon mine host slept, and I slumber’d.’49
In many areas nonconformist sects (‘dissenters’) such as the Baptists, Unitarians, Methodists and Quakers were gaining ground. Their ministers, largely drawn from the middle and lower classes, were more in touch with their congregations and tended to ask only for voluntary contributions. The 1689 Toleration Act had given limited concessions to nonconformists and granted some freedom of worship, allowing them to hold meetings in unlocked, licensed meeting places. Although no longer obliged to attend parish churches, they remained barred from Cambridge and Oxford universities and from holding political or municipal office.
Attacks flared up sporadically against Catholics and nonconformists, as in the Birmingham (or ‘Priestley’) Riots of July 1791, when rioters attacked many chapels and homes of dissenters. Byng learned about this unrest on his Lincolnshire travels: ‘I read, in the newspapers, the accounts of the riots at Birmingham: one party inflames, and then accuse the other of warmth!’50 One of the casualties was the house of sixty-seven-year-old William Hutton, a dissenter, bookseller and historian. His daughter Catherine Hutton wrote to a friend how the mob was convinced that unless they destroyed the meeting houses, the dissenters would destroy the Church: ‘Such was the belief of the best part of the mob, and such belief must have been occasioned by the insinuations of their superiors, but the motive of the greatest part was plunder…Dr. Priestley…unintentionally, and himself the first sufferer, he was, I think, one of the primary causes of the riots in Birmingham, by rousing the spirit of bigotry and all incharitableness in others.’51 Joseph Priestley was a dissenting minister and vigorous supporter of liberal reform of government, education and theology, making him unpopular with the establishment, who were suspected of inciting the riots.52
In the 1730s John Wesley and George Whitefield had embarked on preaching a different, evangelical type of Christianity that became known as Methodism. Wesley’s preaching was hugely influential with the middle and working classes. Although his followers were Anglican, they also attended Methodist services and were encouraged to build chapels or preaching houses. Wesley hoped to transform the Church of England, but at the end of the eighteenth century, after his death, groups of Methodists split from the Anglican church, and Methodism became a serious rival. According to Simond, ‘The sect of the Methodists, who preach hell and damnation, and place faith before works, has made astonishing progress.’53 Charles Fothergill thought they were a force for good. When passing through Wilberfoss in Yorkshire in 1805, he ‘observed a Methodist meeting in a very small thatched cottage which was crammed full almost to suffocation: they were singing psalms. These meetings are common to almost every village, and this sect, though in general confined to the lowest and consequently to the most ignorant orders of the people, has certainly been productive of great good whatever may have been urged against it.’54
Holland particularly disapproved of Methodists when they neglected to attend his Sunday services:
I saw a great number of people passing by about
dusk, I suppose it was from a Methodist meeting at Hodges. These men do a great deal of harm, they pretend to great sanctity but it is ostentation not reality. They draw people from the established church, infuse prejudices in them against their legal pastors and of late they are all democratic [revolutionary] and favourers of French principles, and I suspect that some of the philosophers get among them under the character of celebrated preachers and so poison their minds against the established government.55
A few months later he was ranting again: ‘Met the Methodist William Hill. He squinted at me under his hat as he passed. How now, said I, at neither church this day? I have been elsewhere replied he. So much the worse, returned I, the proper place is your own parish church.’56 Over a decade later, he was still unhappy: ‘These Methodistical people tho they talk much of their piety yet have very little of the true principle of religion in them. Their chief religion consists in censuring others but giving themselves what latitude they please. We have some in this parish…who esteem themselves great saints yet indulge themselves in every kind of sensuality and moral turpitude.’57
Frequently critical of Anglican clergymen, Byng lamented that the rise of Methodism was due solely to their negligence:
about religion I have made some enquiry, (having been in so many churches) and find it to be lodged in the hands of the Methodists; as the greater clergy do not attend their duty, and the lesser neglect it; that where the old psalm singing is abolish’d none is establish’d in its place; as the organ is inconvenient, and not understood; at most places the curates never attend regularly, or to any effect, or comfort, so no wonder that the people are gone over to Methodism.58
While Holland felt threatened by Methodists, he tolerated the Quakers but disliked Catholics and Jews, even though they formed only a small part of the population. By 1800 there were around 100,000 Catholics in England and Wales, and many of these were Irish immigrants.59 Substantial numbers of Jews had moved to England from Europe in the early eighteenth century, adding to the established Jewish community, mostly poor refugees from the ghettos of Germany and eastern Europe. Many of them became pedlars and dealers in secondhand clothes, forming settlements in towns such as Birmingham and Canterbury from where they travelled into the surrounding countryside offering their wares. Others traded with sailors in ports like Liverpool, London, Plymouth, Bristol and Portsmouth. The main community of Jews at Portsmouth was clustered near the dockyard gate, and the only two synagogues recorded for Hampshire in a 1787 directory were at Portsmouth, one at White’s Rowe and the other at Daniel’s Row.60 Some of the pedlars did so well in the seaports that they were able to found prosperous businesses, while the Jewish banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild became a major financier to the Government, helping to fund the Napoleonic Wars. Rothschild had originally been a textile merchant in Manchester, but moved to London and established his banking business there in 1805.
Another threat to the authority of the Church was superstition – despite the ‘enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, superstitions were rife. In 1787 the antiquary Francis Grose published what he called a Provincial Glossary, and his section on popular superstitions in this book began:
It will scarcely be conceived how great a number of superstitious notions and practices are still remaining and prevalent in different parts of these kingdoms, many of which are still used and alluded to even in and about the metropolis [London]; and every person, however carefully educated, will, upon examination, find that he has some how or other imbibed and stored up in his memory a much greater number of these rules and maxims than he could at first have imagined.61
Gilbert White was conscious of the tenacity of superstitions:
It is the hardest thing in the world to shake off superstitious prejudices: they…become so interwoven into our very constitutions, that the strongest good sense is required to disengage ourselves from them. No wonder therefore that the lower people retain them their whole lives through, since their minds are not invigorated by a liberal education, and therefore not enabled to make any efforts adequate to the occasion.62
As a clergyman preoccupied with studying natural history, he was probably more rational than most.
Belief in ghosts was certainly widespread, something that Nelly Weeton noted with some amusement at Upholland in Lancashire in 1807: ‘Scarcely a field, gate or stile is without its attendant spirit; and in some of the houses the noises these beings, or shadows, or sprites or whatever they are, are said to make, are terrible beyond anything.’63 She estimated that more than 10 per cent of buildings around Upholland were haunted, and one ghost was especially troublesome:
the Mill-house below Mr. Dannett’s, is the terror of the whole neighbourhood. I was the other evening at Mr. D’s when a subject of this kind occupied two or three hours. Miss D. is superstitious in the extreme…and she will repeat such a long string of the strangest apparitions, horrid yells, looking glasses falling, furniture moving, tongs, shovel and poker dancing, raps at the door or the window, windows being broken without hands or any living creature near, noises as if someone were spinning, churning, dancing, or a mill going; and many other appalling things not worth writing.64
Scornful of most superstitions, Nelly nevertheless admitted she was ‘not entirely free from some little fears of this kind, but there are few, perhaps none, who in my situation would feel so little fear as I do’.65
Ghosts were feared as being the restless spirits of the dead, and in April 1810 the Morning Post reported on the superstitious rites behind one suicide’s burial:
The officers appointed to execute the ceremony of driving a stake through the dead body of James Cowling, a deserter from the London Militia, who deprived himself of existence, by cutting his throat, at a public-house in Gilbert Street, Clare Market, in consequence of which, the Coroner’s Jury found a verdict of self-murder, very properly delayed the business until twelve o’clock on Wednesday night, when the deceased was buried in the cross roads at the end of Blackmoor Street, Clare Market.66
Suicides were routinely punished by denying their bodies a Christian burial, but the remaining ritual was to prevent the ghost haunting the living. Burial at night at the crossroads was intended to confuse the ghost if it tried to wander, and the stake was to stop it rising up to walk. Substantial stakes sometimes protruded above ground for years afterwards.
Many common beliefs concerned events that were interpreted as omens, usually bad omens. A howling dog signified a death in the family, while a coal spitting out of a fire and landing at someone’s feet in the shape of a coffin foretold their imminent demise. ‘Any person fasting on Midsummer eve, and sitting in the church porch,’ Grose recorded, ‘will at midnight see the spirits of the persons of that parish, who will die that year, come and knock at the church door, in the order and succession in which they will die.’67 Tallow rising up the wick of a candle was sometimes called a ‘winding-sheet’ and foretold a death in the family. Even clergymen like Woodforde were not immune to such omens, and he noted several in his diary, including a similar one concerning a candle: ‘There was a very large and long handle of a coffin in one of our candles this evening, as many people call it, and lasted a very long time indeed.’68
Another portent of death appeared when he was brewing beer: ‘In the boiling of the beer this morn’ I saw a great number of thick brownish kind of bubbles swimming on the surface of it, very much like ratafee-cakes, and they are called in Norfolk, burying-cakes, and the common people say here that is a sure sign of some of the family or their friends dying very soon. I never saw them before.’69 Woodforde was frequently unnerved by such omens, and on another occasion he recorded: ‘I dreamt very much last night of my losing my hat. It is said to be a sign of losing a very near friend.’70
Particularly popular were charms and rituals for assessing future marriage prospects, and Grose detailed one example: ‘On St. Agnes night, 21st of January, take a row of pins, and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Pater-noster on
sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him or her you shall marry.’71 He also mentioned superstitions relating to luck, many involving chance events: ‘It is lucky to put on a stocking the wrong side outwards: changing it alters the luck. When a person goes out to transact any important business, it is lucky to throw an old shoe after him.’72 Certain things were to be avoided: ‘To kill a magpie, will certainly be punished with some terrible misfortune…It is held unlucky to kill a cricket, a lady-bug, a swallow, martin, robin red-breast, or wren.’73 To ward off bad luck or evil, amulets were valued, like the caul advertised at London in the Morning Post in August 1779, widely believed to be the most effective talisman against drowning:
To the Gentlemen of the Navy, and others going long voyages to sea.
To be disposed of a CHILD’s CAWL. Enquire at the Bartlet Buildings Coffee-house, in Holborn.
N.B. To avoid unnecessary trouble the price is Twenty Guineas.74
Grose recorded other strange amulets: ‘The chips or cuttings of a gibbet or gallows, on which one or more persons have been executed or exposed, if worn next the skin, or round the neck, in a bag, will cure the ague, or prevent it.’75 Witchcraft was behind some beliefs: ‘A stone with a hole in it, hung at the bed’s head, will prevent the nightmare: it is therefore called a hag-stone, from that disorder which is therefore occasioned by a hag, or witch, sitting on the stomach of the party afflicted. It also prevents witches riding horses; for which purpose it is often tied to a stable key.’76 A horseshoe nailed over a doorway was a common talisman against witches, as well against bad luck and evil.
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