1837 Brighton Patriot 6 June 2/5 In St. James's Chapel, in this town, the practice of pew-renting is not only carried to its extreme extent, but doors are..locked during service, to prevent the possibility of the poor getting into the body of the chapel.

1875 B. F. Tracy Case of H. W. Beecher 53 Mr. Beecher consulted him on that day as to whether the pew-renting should go off that year.

1987 Jrnl. Eccl. Hist. 38 347 (title) The costs of pew-renting: church management, church-going, and social class in nineteenth-century Glasgow.

1998 K. T. Hoppen Mid-Victorian Generation 454 Pew-renting was one of the most ecumenical aspects of Victorian religion—common to Anglicans, Dissenters, Scottish Presbyterians, and Catholics alike.

1842 Bristol Mercury 22 Oct. 6/1 If the open portions of our churches have, by degrees, been filled up, to his undue exclusion, by pew-renting people, it has been done covertly and insidiously.

1872 T. De W. Talmage Serm. 168 Pew-renting churches and free churches.

2004 www.stmarks.me.uk/briefˍhistory.htm 19 Feb. (O.E.D. Archive) Finance and building have presented continuing challenges, as much in the heyday of the 19th-century pew-renting congregations as today.