Inside, amongst the sea of box pews, is a strange muddle of columns: Georgian wooden supports for the galleries, rather crudely done out in painted marbling and older, presumably stone structural columns painted over in best buff gloss paint, for all the world like ship's stanchions repeatedly painted over against the sea-born rust. In the late eighteenth century Whitby was the third most important ship-building town in England, after London and Newcastle.
One of the box pews (not one of those marked 'For strangers only') has a neat canvass cover stretched right across the top and a notice explains:
In times past it was the duty of our Church Maid to cover every privately owned or rented pew after the Service each Sunday. This was to prevent the chimney smuts from the cottages below the Church settling in the pews and spoiling the occupants' best Sunday Clothes.
There is a Church Maid still, but smuts are no longer much in evidencen and, even if they were, I doubt many of the congregation still attend in capitalised best Sunday Clothes.
Whitby, and its then newly founded but already flourishing abbey (now standing ruined a little distance from the church), was the site of the Synod of 664 which settled such matters as calculating the date of Easter and the correct form of monkish tonsures, and, in perhaps a historically ill-informed view, reconciled the Celtic and Roman traditions and practices within the British church.
