Bums on Pews in 17th C Warton
Worries about church attendance are not new.
In the Lancashire village of Warton more than 300 years ago the new vicar quickly learned that many parishioners had better things to do on Sunday than attend St Oswald’s. Others showed a level of disrespect for church property which is shocking even today.
The lamentable state of affairs that confronted the Rev Thomas Lawson on his appointment in 1681 is recorded in John Lucas’s ‘A History of Warton Parish’.
“It hath ever been…a beastly custom of unclean and irreverent persons,” writes Lucas, “to pollute and debaube the walls (and sometimes the very doors) of the place where Almighty God is to be worshipped, with piss or other more nasty excrements; an irreverence travellers tell us not to be seen, or so much as heard of in any of the eastern nations.”
He goes on:
“It was here … a scandalous practice or custom, for those who despised or did not know or consider the great benefits and advantage of the public service of our Church, to loiter away their time in the fields, in the church-yard, or in an ale house perhaps, till the greatest part of it was over and then to come into the church. And Sunday afternoons were generally (by the younger sort especially) spent in idle sports and pastimes.”
Attendance at the Sunday afternoon service had fallen to fewer than 10 adults, claims Lucas.
This was all clearly unacceptable to the new vicar. And when “his publick and private admonitions” failed to swell the congregation, he chose action, opting for a classic stick and carrot approach. First, he needed some new muscle on the team.
“He took care to have such church wardens and other officers made choice of in the Parish, as he knew to be men of integrity, and who would not look upon their oaths as a thing of course and form, as too many do, but be sensible of the obligation it laid upon them carefully to observe all the particulars contained in their Book of Articles, Warrants, and co…and take care to bring all those to condign punishment who were obstinate in the practice of their irreligious courses.”
It’s not clear from Lucas’s account precisely what “condign punishment” involved in late 17th and early 18th century Warton. Churchwardens were generally responsible for the enforcement of morality in the parish and had the power to take people before the ecclesiastical courts. But the impression given is that their enforcement techniques were more direct and energetic.
“Though at first they did meet with some opposition, and opprobrious language from the patrons of vain sports, yet they presently drave them out of the church-yard (their general randezvouze) and by finding out, and pursuing them to their more distant and private haunts, did frequently break up their unlawful assemblies and brought them in a little time to be more frequent in their attendance.”
The “carrot” meanwhile, came in an unexpected form.
“Mr Lawson…also promoted the singing of psalms with notes, himself paying a master for teaching some that were willing and apt to learn,” writes Lucas.
“This brought great numbers to the church; some out of devotion, and others out of curiosity.”
Singing in church would have been a novelty at this time — and a contrast with the even more sober alternative attractions being offered by the Quaker meetings which were popular in North Lancashire in the later seventeenth century.
Lucas reports that the Rev Lawson’s efforts ensured that the Parish was “brought to that decent order that it was fit to be proposed as a pattern to its neighbours.”
The “pious and diligent” Mr Lawson ministered to his parish for nearly 30 years until his death in 1710.
It’s interesting to note that the Warton historian John Lucas became a church warden himself after he took a job as schoolmaster at St John’s charity school in Leeds.
