Why Is There a Ledge Under the Seat? Furniture Built for Standing Up

Choir stalls are fixed wooden seating arranged in rows facing each other across the part of a church where the daily services were sung, and they were built for a community obliged to attend those services many times a day. The offices required standing for extended periods, which is genuinely demanding over years and for elderly members impossible, and the response was a seat that tips up with a small projecting ledge on its underside, positioned so that somebody appearing to stand can rest a substantial part of their weight on it. The arrangement satisfies the letter of the requirement while making it survivable, which is a compromise the institutions concerned understood perfectly well and formalised in their furniture.

The brackets carry carvings whose subjects are startling given where they are:

• •Everyday scenes including cooking, harvesting, shoeing horses and domestic arguments
• •Proverbs and moral tales illustrated literally
• •Animals behaving as people, and people behaving as animals
• •Grotesques, monsters and hybrid creatures
• •Obscene and scatological subjects, carved in considerable numbers
• •Occasional religious subjects, which are a minority

The apparent contradiction between the setting and the content has several explanations and none is complete. The carvings are on the underside of a seat and are invisible when it is down and largely hidden when it is up, so they occupy a space outside the visible decorative programme of the building. Medieval attitudes to the boundary between sacred and profane differed from modern expectations, and comparable material appears in manuscript margins, on roof bosses and on exterior carvings throughout the period. The carvers were craftsmen given a small space and apparently considerable freedom. And the subjects frequently carry a moral reading, since a scene of folly illustrates what to avoid, which is the justification generally offered and which does not account for all of them.

The stalls are one element of a larger structure and the parts have their own names and functions. Canopies rise above the seats, frequently elaborately carved and sometimes reaching the full height of the aisle, which shelter the occupants and mark the importance of the space. Elbow rests divide the seats and carry their own carvings. A screen separates the choir from the nave, which in some traditions closes the space almost completely and in others is open, and that arrangement determined whether a congregation could see the services at all. Desks in front hold the books. Seating order within the stalls encoded rank precisely, with the most senior positions at particular ends, and disputes about who sat where are recorded in institutional records with some frequency.

These objects are unusually well represented among medieval survivals for structural reasons. They are fixed furniture in a part of the building that continued in use, so they were not removed when tastes changed. They are made of oak, which lasts. Their carvings face downwards and inwards, protecting them from wear and from light. And crucially they were overlooked by iconoclasts during periods when religious imagery was systematically destroyed, since the destruction targeted images of saints and devotional subjects and these carvings are mostly neither, so in churches where every statue and window was smashed the seats survived intact. That accident means they are among the best surviving evidence for medieval secular imagery and for how ordinary life was depicted.

A hinged seat with a bracket underneath let somebody obliged to stand for hours rest much of their weight while appearing to stand. The brackets carry everyday scenes, proverbs, grotesques and obscenities, with religious subjects a minority. They survived iconoclasm because the destruction targeted devotional images and these are mostly secular, which makes them exceptional evidence.