Polwhele, remarks that in Truro Church, about the year 1800, he had seen several people sitting with their hats on,[1070] as they might have done at Geneva, or in the time of the older Puritans.  This, however, was something wholly exceptional at that date.  One of the things which had displeased English Churchmen in William the Third was this Dutch habit.  He so far yielded to their feeling as to uncover during the prayers, but put on his hat again for the sermon.[1071] A minute in the Representation of the Lower House of Convocation, during their session of 1701,[1072] shows that this irreverent custom was then not very unfrequent.  After all, this was but a very little matter as compared with gross desecrations such as happened here and there in remote country places during the last ten years of the preceding century.  ’Amongst the Lambeth archives is a very long letter by Edmund Bowerman, vicar of Codrington, who gives a curious account of his parish.  The people played cards on the communion table; and when they met to choose churchwardens, sat with their hats on, smoking and drinking, the clerk gravely saying, with a pipe in his mouth, that such had been the practice for the last sixty years.’[1073] This was in 1692.  In 1693, Queen Mary wrote to Dean Hooper that she had been to Canterbury Cathedral for the Sunday morning service, and in the afternoon went to a parish church.  ’She heard there a very good sermon, but she thought herself in a Dutch church, for the people stood on the communion table to look at her.’[1074]

Throughout the eighteenth century, a variety of secular matters used to be published, sometimes by custom and sometimes by law, during the time of divine service.  In a general ignorance of letters, when a paper on the church door would have been an almost useless form, such notices were to a great extent almost necessary.  But in themselves they were ill becoming the place and time; and a statute passed in the first year of our present sovereign has now made them illegal.[1075] The publication just before the sermon of poor-rate assessment, and of days of appeal in matters of house or window tax,[1076] must often have had a very distracting effect upon ratepayers who otherwise might have listened calmly to the arguments and admonitions of their pastor.  John Johnson, writing in 1709, remarked with much truth that it was quite scandalous for hue-and-cries, and enquiries after lost goods, to be published in church.[1077] Even in our own generation.  Mr. Beresford Hope, telling what he himself remembers, records how in the church he frequented as a boy, the clerk would make such announcements after the repeating of the Nicene Creed, or of meetings at the town hall of the executors of a late duke.[1078]