Eighteenth-Century Anglican Worship: Architecture

Part 5. Architecture

Until the mid-nineteenth century, most of England’s churches were mediaeval structures swiftly adapted to reformed worship in 1559-1562, with the introduction of the 1559 Prayer Book and the accompanying Elizabethan Injunctions. These had then been subjected to a process of slow evolution over the next two centuries as reformed worship matured and evolved its own customs leading to the classic “Prayer Book” interior. This developed around the turn of the seventeenth century as the church’s nave was filled with pews, a two or three-decker pulpit placed towards the east end of the nave for the regular services, and the screened-off chancel served as the Communion space. This two-room plan worked well as it allowed an easy adaption of the mediaeval floor plan to Protestant worship. Indeed, so successful was it that new churches were built to the same ground plan throughout the 1600s including some of the earliest colonial Anglican churches.

[St John the Evangelist, Leeds, W.R. Yorks, built 1634 is an example of a fully developed Prayer Book interior. A 19^th-century print, but it is largely unchanged today.]

“The Handsomest Barn in England”

However, some of these Virginia churches also show an adaption of the two-room plan when new construction was involved which was the elimination of the structural chancel. One of the earliest of these building was St Paul’s, Covent Garden, London (Inigo Jones, 1632) which was described by its architect as ‘the handsomest barn in England.’ Instead, a screen physically divided the church into a larger nave and a smaller chancel. This plan was used for some of Wren’s London Churches in the 1670s, though by this time, the chancel was usually reduced to a small “communion place” immediately around the Holy Table. This plan was carried forward by Nicholas Hawksmoor and James Gibbs into the eighteenth century. Gibb’s St Martin-in-the-Fields is well known, as it stands in Trafalgar Square, and was widely imitated in the American colonies by structures such as Christ Church, Philadelphia, and St Philip’s, Charleston, SC. However, Gibb’s churches are nowhere near as interesting as Hawksmoor’s rough-hewn, in-your-face creations such as St George-in-the-East, St Anne’s, Limehouse, and Christchurch, Spitalfields, all in London. Sadly, history has not been kind to the Hawksmoor churches, and no original interior survives, though that of Christ Church, Spitalfields has been partially reconstructed.

[The looming presence of Christchurch, Spitalfields, London]

Box Pews and Drafty Auditoriums

The early eighteenth-century church was very definitely an auditorium. City churches of this period consisted of a nave, rarely bigger than 90 feet by 60 feet for acoustic reasons, with a small, screened-off, communion place at the east end allowing room for two rails of communicants to gather; one knelt, and the other standing, or kneeling, waiting to receive. The pulpit was usually placed some distance down the nave, either on one side or in the center alley. Tall box pews would fill the nave, whilst the galleries, often on three sides of the nave, would be filled with low pews or benches, often free seats for the accommodation of the poor. Heating was just about unknown in churches in the 1700s, apart from the odd stove in the squire’s private pew, so the box pew came in handy for reducing the draughts and providing a place where families could huddle together for warmth in the winter months! Where finances permitted it, the churches were decorated with non-figurative art, and occasionally scenes from the Bible. The main artistic expression was the Commandment Boards at the east end of the nave, which occasionally gained figures of Moses and Elijah, as the archetypes of the Law and the Prophets.

The eighteenth century also experimented with the one-room plan in which the communion place was reduced to a mere vestige. These churches could be either rectangular, such as Hannah-cum-Hagnaby, Lincs, or Pohick, Falls Church, and Christ Church, Alexandria in northern Virginia; round or oval such as All Saints,’ Gateshead, Co. Durham, or St Chad’s, Shrewsbury; or even octagonal as in the case of the Monumental Church, Richmond, VA. The Virginia examples originally had the pulpit in the middle of the north wall, and the altar at the east end, a vestigial reminder of the old two-room plan. The two English examples placed all their liturgical fittings together at the “east” end in a form which was to be popular for a generation, 1785-1815, though these arrangements rarely survived Victorian “improvement.”

[Pohick Church c.1767 – sympathetic 20^th-century reconstruction of the original interior showing a common Virginia variant of the one-room plan. The cross above the Holy Table would not have been there in the 1700s, not for much of the 1800s either!]

Designed for the Prayer Book Liturgy

What must be emphasized about the eighteenth-century Church interior is that it was designed around hearing and participating in the Prayer Book Liturgy. A parish church was a sacred auditorium, not in the sense of being a lecture theatre like the Puritan-inspired structures of New England or Old Dissent in the Old Country, but as a place where the liturgy was executed and above all, seen and heard. Where they have been preserved and are used on their own terms, eighteenth-century churches fit the BCP liturgy like a glove, and any serious acquaintance with their convenience leads one to wonder what in the blue blazers the Victorians were thinking when they replaced them with quasi-mediaeval monstrosities!

Eighteenth-century liturgical arrangements did not die out overnight, and as late as the mid-1850s, an adaptation of the Prayer Book interior was still favored by some architects. The 1856 restoration of St Peter’s, Barton-upon-Humber still incorporated a combined pulpit and reading desk, but newfangled, choir stalls were installed, not in the chancel, but at the east end of the nave. There were stalls in the chancel, but these were used by the communicants. Sadly, this interesting hybrid was swept away in 1898.

The Lord’s Supper: An Intimate Gathering

Eighteenth-century worship was calm and reasonable and focused on audibility and intelligibility. The church interiors of that period fit those considerations perfectly. The object was to gather the congregation around the place where the service was being conducted so that Morning Service and Evening Prayer were read to the congregation from the pulpit-reading desk combination in the nave. Communion was celebrated in the chancel with the Communicants gathered around the Table, so they could hear and see the sacramental action. This gave the Lord’s Supper an immediacy and an intimacy often lacking in post-Tractarian practice.

[St Stephen’s, Fylingdales, Yorks., a late example of a Prayer Book interior]