‘Scandal’ as understood in most of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was a different social stigma from that more familiar to historians of the eighteenth century and later. In recent years, historians such as Karen Spierling have brought to light debates surrounding scandal during the sixteenth century, not just among theologians but also laypeople. John Calvin wrote of scandal as a religious category for behaviour which could be a ‘stumbling block’, a hindrance or distraction, to faith for others in a community. The same concept applied in Scotland during the mid seventeenth century, where ‘scandalous’ behaviour was an important concern at parliamentary as well as parish level. While some historians of early modern Scotland have written about ‘scandal’ and more particularly ‘scandalous carriage’ mainly in terms of sexual misdemeanours, clergymen and elders applied the term to sins such as drunkenness and verbal abuse. ‘Scandalous carriage’ was a prominent concern for Ayr’s kirk session (church discipline) in the first half of the 1650s. These cases of ‘scandalous carriage’ reveal continuities in how the Ayr session viewed ‘scandal’ during the period, including similarities with Calvin’s concerns about behaviour springing from and leading to unbelief, and laypeople disputing with the clergy and elders over what constituted scandal. The contestable nature of ‘scandal’, the importance of ‘scandal’ in Scottish society in the mid seventeenth century, and disagreements between laity and clergy over what constituted scandal during the 1650s, all indicate that scandal remained an unstable and contested religious category.

Early modern scandal

Scandal was an important if contestable matter for early modern Europeans. It was significant enough for John Calvin to write his treatise Concerning Scandals in 1550, dividing them into three categories. The first was ‘intrinsic’ scandal, which came from the gospel itself, ‘in men’s opinion at any rate’, and consisted essentially of the gospel message as something that appeared foolish to the unbeliever. The third was ‘fictitious calumnies’, levelled at the gospel ‘to cause people to have nothing further to do with it’. Calvin’s second category, covering disturbances, quarrels and people living dissolute lives, is of most interest for historians of social discipline. It included a concern over atheistic thinking and the behaviour that followed from it. People who espoused ‘atheistic views’, Calvin wrote, ‘play the role of the buffoon in order that they may have greater licence for belching out blasphemies’. Calvin mentioned their ‘pleasant, jocular way’ and use of ‘slanted witticism’ to ‘obliterate all fear of God’.¹ His view of atheism thus followed from a common early modern concern over atheism as a mocking, profane or sceptical attitude towards doctrine.² Calling such behaviour ‘scandalous’ partly reflected the Calvinist call for godly and sober deportment. In addition, Calvin called atheistic thoughts a form of spiritual adultery. While the reformer also listed theft, dishonesty, marital infidelity and neglect of family life as examples of scandalous actions, one of the most notable features of the second category of scandal was the breadth of possible behaviour which could be what he called (in John Fraser’s translation) a ‘stumbling block’. These behaviours, Calvin noted, often emerge following ‘the appearance of the Gospel’ among a community. In historical context, the reformer meant this to refer to the arrival of Protestantism.³ Previously hidden ungodliness became newly visible in the light of the gospel’s behavioural expectations. Calvin thus defined scandal as a religious category in which the actions of an individual hindered belief among the broader community. This framework is of interest not only in studying Geneva, where Calvin had a personal influence, but also other places where Calvinism took hold.

In a recent important article, Karen Spierling highlighted the need for historians of early modern Europe to focus their attentions on the contested nature of scandal. Spierling wrote of scandal in the Geneva consistoire (consistory) during the sixteenth century, during which time both clergy and laity debated what constituted scandalous behaviour. Broadly, Spierling analysed scandal as a religious category in the manner Calvin outlined, in which bad behaviour could be an obstacle to faith or cause of confusion. In this context, people disagreed over who was scandalizing whom. Geneva’s consistory record includes instances of people disputing the label given to their behaviour. The main instance of the kind of dispute and negotiation Spierling cited was the consistory’s lengthy investigation of a woman called L’Annonciade, on the grounds that her conduct towards a man called de Roviere had offended her neighbours. L’Annonciade disputed the charge, arguing that ministers had allowed her to spend time with de Roviere, and that her behaviour could therefore not be scandalous.⁴ This and other examples underline the potential interest for historians of scandal as a concept discussed by the ordinary parishioner as well as the early modern intellectual.

One of Spierling’s most important observations was the difference between the scandal which undermined the early modern community’s faith and social cohesion and the scandal grounded in individual shame familiar from the eighteenth century onwards. Scandal mattered in sixteenth-century Geneva primarily because the actions of an individual damaged the community, at a time when religious observance and conduct was important in community identity. While the public circumstances which made a sin or crime a scandal would usually lead to a neighbour or church elder calling ‘scandal’, Spierling cited an example of the term being used among family members. Thus the wife of a tavern owner told the consistory that she considered her husband leaving the family and going out to gamble after dinner ‘to be a scandalous thing’.⁵ That she expressed such concern does not necessarily imply that her husband was hindering her beliefs but rather that she considered his activities a bad example for her children and the broader community. In either case his individual shame appeared not to have been the concern. Spierling opened up the question for other early modern historians, in that she recognized the difference between these two understandings of scandal without analysing when and how the transition occurred.

Spierling’s work expanded significantly on previous histories of the Genevan consistoire, which have treated scandal as trivial. E. William Monter’s otherwise thorough study of the consistoire during 1559–69 refers only passingly to the matter of scandal. Despite highlighting how prominent scandal was in the consistory’s concerns, Monter wrote simply of ‘scandal’ as ‘a miscellaneous group which literally covers a multitude of sins’.⁶ More recently, Scott Manetsch observed that scandal prominently included ‘kissing and flirting, dirty jokes, pornography, cross-dressing, use of love potions, and suspicious frequentations’.⁷ Both Monter and Manetsch played down the importance of scandal, referring to such offences as ‘minor’, in Manetsch’s words, or ‘trivial’, in Monter’s.⁸ Nevertheless, the description of such apparently trivial behaviours as scandal offers the possibility that in analysing scandal, historians can shed light on matters such as civility and honesty, which concern smaller behavioural issues such as etiquette as well as broader issues of overall conduct.

Much of historians’ interest in scandal as a religious category concerns the sixteenth century. Beat Hodler’s work from the 1990s sketched the debate surrounding the significance of scandal as a sixteenth-century matter which ‘soon passed away’. He highlighted the influence of New Testament passages on scandal as a stumbling block to other believers, and the work of Thomas Aquinas, in defining scandal as any ‘inappropriate word or action which offers occasion for error or sin’. In contrast to Spierling’s work, while Hodler wrote of scandal as a religious category, he emphasized the public nature of such offences. His work is significant in drawing attention to the need for historians to study scandal as a religious category in identity and ‘everyday problems of the right behaviour’. Moreover, Hodler pointed out the increased prominence of a negative understanding of scandal within Protestant communities.⁹ In more recent years, Emily Butterworth has described scandal as an obstacle to an individual’s position within a social group and as a threat to community unity. Significantly, Butterworth observed that ‘references to scandal in the sixteenth century retained a strong sense of its theological origins alongside vernacular meanings of outrage and dishonour’.¹⁰

Hodler, Butterworth and Spierling thus present three models of the relationship between the religious and secular understandings of scandal. Hodler’s work described scandal as a religious category concerning public offences, with no apparent reference to a secular definition.¹¹ Butterworth wrote of secular and religious understandings sitting alongside each other, and possibly merging, during the sixteenth century.¹² Spierling presented scandal as a corporate religious category during the sixteenth century and as an individual secular category from the eighteenth century.¹³ The difference between Butterworth’s and Spierling’s views is worthy of further investigation. In this light, church discipline in seventeenth-century Scotland presents a case study of interest. The seventeenth century, in particular, presents the possibility of studying the shift implied in Spierling’s work.

Scotland’s kirk (church) provides a relevant comparison because the Scots experienced a Reformation modelled strongly on Calvin’s Geneva. The Scottish reformers applied the polis-wide discipline of the Geneva consistoire in the kirk sessions of parishes across the lowlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While the sessions could impose discipline for sins and offences ranging from drunkenness to Sabbath breach, verbal abuse to keeping inappropriate company, they were stereotyped as being obsessed with sexual offences such as fornication. This perception, apparent in works by historians such as Jenny Wormald or Christopher Whatley, has received statistical support in Michael Graham’s book on Jacobean kirk sessions. But more recent work, most notably John McCallum’s statistics on Fife parishes, has called into question this image of the sex-obsessed kirk session.¹⁴

The perception that kirk sessions were obsessed with sex has influenced how historians of Scotland’s Reformation have discussed scandal. Analyses of scandalous carriage, a term which at face value could refer to all sorts of behaviour much as in the Genevan consistoire’s cases of scandal, are particularly indicative. When writing of the 1650s, Lesley Smith observed the connection between sex and scandalous carriage.¹⁵ More tellingly, Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman wrote about scandalous carriage in relation to sexuality and social control. Given their research focus on matters of sexuality and illegitimacy, Mitchison and Leneman’s discussion of scandalous carriage as ‘any show of physical intimacy between the sexes outwith marriage’, but not demonstrably fornication, may perhaps have been a matter of emphasis rather than category definition. Mitchison and Leneman researched the Scotland of 1660–1780, a time which had less of the social, political and religious upheaval of the 1640s and 1650s. Apparently trivial actions, such as a couple taking a walk, could lead to a detailed investigation ‘and even if nothing more could be proved, a reproof’ on the basis of their connection to sexual offences.¹⁶ In The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, Margo Todd mentioned family disharmony and children begging as also causes of scandal to the Reformed community. Despite this, she wrote of Perth youths’ ‘scandalous behaviour in violation of matrimonial chastity or pre-marital abstinence’.¹⁷ In providing statistics for the Burntisland kirk session, John McCallum defined ‘scandalous carriage’ as ‘all sexual misbehaviour short of fornication or adultery’.¹⁸

As with histories of Geneva, ecclesiastical histories of Scotland have often given little space to scandal. None of Smith, Mitchison and Leneman, Todd or McCallum centred their analyses on scandal, with the topic appearing briefly as a sub-point. The brevity of these references follows from an emphasis on continuities, especially in Todd’s work. In each of these analyses, the scandal described at first resembles the scandal of individual embarrassment of the eighteenth century and afterwards. The examples of scandalous carriage in Mitchison and Leneman’s and Todd’s works could also or even instead make sense with the understanding of scandal present in Spierling’s work. A couple taking a walk, for instance, were committing a public offence which could by example lead other people to sin and lead them away from faith, even if the session were unable to find anything more sinister. These brief analyses of scandal, seen in the light of works on scandal in Calvinist consistories on the continent, underline the possibilities present in using Scotland’s kirk session records to explore scandal.

Scandal in mid-seventeenth-century Scotland

Scandal was an important matter in mid-seventeenth-century Scotland. The late 1630s and 1640s were a period of religious and political upheaval in Scotland, with the ‘Constitutional Revolution’ parliaments of the 1640s making laws independently of Charles I, and often reflecting the religious climate.¹⁹ The parliament of January 1649 passed the Act of Classes, which determined who would be allowed to participate in parliamentary meetings. The act excluded those who had royalist sympathies, or had simply not voiced any opposition to Charles I. In addition, the Act of Classes banned for a year those who were ‘given to uncleanliness, bribery, swearing, drunkenness or deceiving or are otherwise openly profane and grossly scandalous in their conversation, or who neglect the worship of God in their families’.²⁰ The parliament which passed this law was one dominated by radical Covenanters, who had Oliver Cromwell’s support. This parliamentary interest in scandal had the potential to increase attention to it in the kirk sessions.

The Scottish parliament treated the definition of ‘scandal’ as something assumed to be common knowledge in other acts during the 1640s. Later in 1649, Scotland’s parliament passed an Act against Scandalous Persons.²¹ This act, like many from the 1640s which followed from the concerns of the National Covenant of 1638, placed the main work of enforcing the law on kirk sessions. Nominated persons would assist the kirk sessions, which no longer needed civil processes in addition to ecclesiastical discipline. The 1649 act began by citing ‘the act made at Perth in the year 1645 … to exact the penalties and inflict corporal pains against scandalous offences that are not capital’. Here, as in the Act of Classes, the definition of scandal appears to have been assumed. While the records of the parliament at Perth in 1645 do not contain an act against ‘scandalous persons’ by that name, the 1649 act may have been referring to the 7 August 1645 Act Against Swearing, Drinking and Mocking of Piety.²² This act, in turn, referred to an act of 1641, again unspecified by name, which called for all Scots ‘to be good examples to others of all godliness, sobriety and of righteousness’ in the light of ‘the open abundance of all vices dishonourable to God’, which the lawmakers believed had led to God inflicting recent ‘heavy judgements’. The requirement that people ‘be good examples’ is the positive form of the concern in Geneva that people who acted scandalously were stumbling blocks to others.²³ The 1645 act thus emphasized swearing, drinking and the mocking of piety as setting bad examples, and the 1649 act in turn called such behaviour scandal in a way which resembled the use of scandal in Spierling and Hodler’s work.

The graded fines imposed in the 1645 Act Against Swearing, Drinking and Mocking of Piety relate at least in part to the greater social and moral influence of people with higher social standing. Tellingly, however, ministers would be fined ‘one fifth of their year’s stipend’. The law thus placed a much higher expectation on ministers above all others to set a good example to everybody else. In private acts in 1633, parliament had awarded an annual stipend of 500 merks to the ministers at Burntisland and Pittenweem.²⁴ At 100 merks the fine would be markedly higher than for the barons, who faced fines of only 20 merks. When converted into pounds, the severity of the ministers’ fine is even more apparent. Where the fine for noblemen was £20, 100 merks equated to £66 13s 4d. By contrast, servants would pay 20 shillings. The higher fine for the clergy reflected a bigger scandal if a minister swore, drank or acted impiously, and illustrates the importance of the religious dimension of scandal.

While some historians have researched and written about the kirk session during the interregnum, parish discipline in Scotland during the 1650s remains somewhat understudied. Lesley Smith’s work in the 1980s highlighted the continuing presence of session discipline at a time when other kirk activities such as the General Assembly had been interrupted. A proclamation by English commissioners in Scotland in January 1652 announced a restructuring of Scotland’s legal system which excluded the kirk sessions. The occupying government told judges not to regard any oaths previously sworn before ecclesiastical discipline. Commissions of the Peace would replace the kirk sessions in judging cases of blasphemy, slander and fornication. These changes would only take effect in 1655, however, along with the introduction of the Council of State presided over by Lord Broghill. None of the proposed changes, Smith noted, was followed up. The efficiency and effectiveness of the kirk sessions ensured their continuing presence during the interregnum, despite the desire of occupying soldiers and governors to create a comprehensive system to replace them.²⁵ Smith’s work is highly valuable and illuminating, but in focusing on the continuation of kirk session activities under a new and foreign form of government and justice it overlooks the possible effects of the interregnum on session interests.

In more recent years, Chris Langley’s work has done much to explore how the Constitutional Revolution and interregnum played out at parish level. His recent work on Scotland’s ‘second Reformation’ has focused on how communities worshipped during the mid seventeenth century. A significant theme in Worship, Civil War and Community 1638–1660 is how the flexibility of worship, with variations from parish to parish, continued from the Jacobean period through the 1650s. This flexibility ensured the continuing centrality of the Church in the lives of ordinary people during the chaos of the mid seventeenth century. Yet despite these continuities at parish level, Church leaders during the 1640s ‘became increasingly concerned with sins of political disaffection’. While the line between political rebellion and moral sin became blurred during the Constitutional Revolution, the presence of English troops in Scotland during the Cromwellian occupation necessitated the kirk sessions exercising moderation and avoiding overly divisive charges.²⁶ While Langley’s work is illuminating, historians can do much more on the subject of ecclesiastical disciplinary interests during the mid seventeenth century. Scandal, as in this chapter’s case study, is one such subject.

While it is not central to his analysis, Langley briefly referred to ‘a concern with public scandal’ as one of three ‘interrelated concepts of decorum’ along with ‘an emphasis on personal, emotional decency and increasingly politicized notions of soldiers’. Langley applied the concept of scandal particularly to how parishioners and clergy handled customs relating to death. Parishioners could cause scandal by having too many people at a lykwake, watching over a recently deceased person, by encouraging superstition and perhaps provoking social disorder. Clergymen, on the other hand, worked to avoid public scandal by verifying deaths.²⁷ Discussing this custom, Langley hints at the sort of ‘sexual offences’ scandal familiar to historians of early modern Scotland, while also noting the sort of non-sexual behaviour that could be a hindrance to the community’s legitimate religious practice. While brief, these examples highlight the possibilities of exploring scandal in interregnum Scotland.

Ayr’s kirk session and scandal

Ayr’s kirk session offers a valuable case study in the matter of scandal in consistorial records, and the interests and activities of kirk sessions during the interregnum, because it saw an increase in the number of people appearing before it for ‘scandalous carriage’ during the early 1650s. As the session had been established during the Jacobean age, this increased focus on scandalous carriage showed a notable change from traditional priorities. By population size, early modern Ayr had none of the significance of Edinburgh, Glasgow or Aberdeen. Alexander Webster recorded Ayr’s population as 2,964 in 1755, a century after the Cromwellian occupation. By contrast, Edinburgh including the parish of St Cuthbert’s had a population of 43,315, and 23,546 people lived in Glasgow.²⁸ Webster’s numbers provide a good indication of Ayr’s population during the interregnum, which would have been affected by both the possible absence of many male inhabitants and the presence of English soldiers. Ayr was thus neither the most populous town, nor the most religiously or politically important. The session’s interest in scandal, presented in the statistics in Table 7.1, may be exceptional.

The statistics presented in Table 7.1 place the Ayr session’s interest in scandalous carriage in context. Presenting kirk session interests in aggregates over a long period of time tends to flatten out yearly fluctuations, which may be statistically significant. Such aggregates can lead to an assumption that session interests and activity remained steady and average from year to year. Even allowing for this flattening out, some longer-term trends and continuities become apparent. The session’s activity increased significantly in the 1650s. However, dividing the 1650s into two halves demonstrates a significant drop in the session’s recorded activity in 1656–61, compared to 1650–5. While fornication remained the primary concern during the first half of the 1650s, more people appeared for Sabbath breach in six years than in the previous eleven.

This peak in the Ayr session’s activity in the later 1640s and early 1650s was part of the first of two surges in Scottish kirk session efforts mentioned in passing by Philip Benedict in his Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed. The mid-seventeenth-century surge (the second occurred during the early eighteenth century) began during the 1640s.²⁹ The Ayr session’s surge is notable in that it peaked during the interregnum. During the 1640s, the session saw relatively few people per year, ranging from fourteen in 1641 to sixty in 1648. The numbers for 1648 do not include the eighteen banns of marriage announcements that year. In contrast, the numbers for 1651–7 start at eighty-nine (or 126 with banns announcements) in 1651, trough in 1652 with fifty-two (or eighty with banns announcements), peak in 1653 with 140 (or 178 with banns announcements) and end with seventy-one (108 with banns).³⁰

The surge in Ayr’s session activities occurred later than some sessions during the Constitutional Revolution and interregnum. South Leith’s kirk session, notably, recorded more cases from 1643. This apparent increase in the session’s activity may have been because of David Aldenstoune’s work as the session’s clerk at South Leith. Fornication, previously dominant in the South Leith session’s record, became significantly less important as the session prioritized Sabbath breach and verbal abuse.³¹ While historians can easily identify Aldenstoune’s influence in South Leith’s changing priorities after 1643, the religious climate of the Constitutional Revolution may have influenced the session’s apparent desire to discipline comparatively minor offences.

The Ayr session statistics compare interestingly with work on continental consistory statistics in works by Monter and Manetsch. During the 1970s, Monter, writing on urban excommunications in Geneva for 1564–9, placed scandals and lying as the main reason for people to be excommunicated. The consistoire excommunicated 347 in that time, which was eighteen per cent of all excommunications. Of those, 213 were male and 134 female. Scandal and lying were significantly less prominent in Geneva’s rural excommunications, at almost twelve per cent, and again with significantly more men than women charged.³² Manetsch’s work on Geneva presented a similar pattern. In two different sets of statistics, scandal was the third highest priority in city suspensions (over eight per cent for both 1568–82 and 1542–1609). In both statistics, quarrelling (over twenty-nine per cent for 1568–82 and nearly twenty-eight per cent for 1542–1609) was the main concern. In Manetsch’s work too, scandal was a less common concern in rural suspensions.³³ While excommunications and suspensions are not directly comparable, the prominence of scandal in both sets of statistics of sixteenth-century Geneva is notable. Before the mid seventeenth century, the number of people appearing in Ayr kirk session for scandalous carriage, regardless of the disciplinary action taken, was a far less significant proportion of the session’s concern compared to the excommunications and suspensions in sixteenth-century Geneva.

Despite its earlier relative unimportance, ‘scandalous carriage’ became a significant concern in the early 1650s. As one of only seven interests to appear in all four periods surveyed above, scandalous carriage was a subject of considerable interest, particularly in 1651–3. In 1651 and 1652, it was the Ayr session’s main disciplinary concern. Twenty-five people appeared before the session in 1651 and eighteen in 1652. In 1653, when forty-eight people appeared before the session for fornication, adultery or filthiness, and forty-two for Sabbath breach, fourteen people appeared before the session for scandalous carriage. And what these statistics fail to show is the Ayr session’s remarkable zeal in pursuing such cases. In 1652, the session followed up scandalous carriage cases fifty-six times and heard fourteen witnesses. In contrast, they followed up Sabbath breach cases twenty-seven times, and filthiness cases twenty-four times with three witness reports.³⁴

This interest in scandalous carriage is one of several examples in Ayr’s mid-seventeenth-century kirk session of what Margo Todd once called a ‘periodic crackdown on fashionable crimes’.³⁵ Todd’s comment may best apply to the crackdowns within a year, such as when a session makes an announcement regarding Sabbath breach and in subsequent weeks focuses attention on bringing previously neglected offenders to repentance. Todd’s words appear to apply to more sustained changes in session interests. Historians can seek to understand what circumstances may have led clergymen and elders to depart from their usual practices and priorities.

Margo Todd and Judith Pollman correctly advise that the manuscripts of consistory and kirk session records are not reliable sources for generating crime statistics. Aside from water damage and other forms of wear, kirk session manuscripts occasionally show evidence of pages having been removed. Moreover, what is recorded does not necessarily include what the Stirling Holy Rude kirk session called ‘privie admonitiounis’, the early modern equivalent of a twentieth-century policeman clipping a youth over the ears.³⁶ In studying consistorial records, historians encounter not only the failings of the people who appeared before the clergy and elders, but also the interests, and even failings, of the elders themselves. This in itself is interesting, especially in a period like the mid seventeenth century. The statistics nonetheless provide a more grounded general impression of the place scandal had in kirk session interests during this period than a solely qualitative analysis could do. Yet the qualitative evidence is highly important too, and to that we now turn.

Scandal was more prominent in the Ayr kirk session’s interests than the category ‘scandalous carriage’ might suggest. The statistics for Ayr presented earlier show cases of ‘scandalous carriage’ where the session provided no specific label for the offence. Kirk sessions referred to scandal more widely than in the ‘scandalous carriage’ cases alone, even before the 1640s. The Aberdeen session, for example, called Thomas Hogg’s wife to public repentance before the pulpit and also put her in ward, in April 1638. She had committed ‘scandalous behaviour in the kirk’ and ‘uttered imprecations’. That her ‘scandalous behaviour’ was in the church makes it likely that she had interrupted the service with physical violence or possibly attended while intoxicated.³⁷ Whatever her actions had been, their location lessens the likelihood that her scandalous behaviour had involved sexual misconduct.

Reflecting this broader use of scandal, the phrase ‘scandalous carriage’ covered both all kinds of unproven sexual conduct and many other forms of misconduct. In one typical case, on 8 January 1644, the Ayr session admonished a married couple for ‘unchristian and scandalous carriage’. David Ferguson and Margaret Gardiner’s scandalous carriage had been ‘railing, scolding and flyting ane with ane uther and the said David for stryking of his said wife with futt [and] hands and chieflie in the tymes of thair drunkenes’.³⁸ While the divide between public and private spaces during the early modern period was not so clear-cut as in the twentieth century, the dispute between the couple appears to have started at home and become apparent outside.³⁹ Their disorderly marriage was scandalous in disrupting the community, where the clergy expected husbands and wives to behave well towards one another, and provide a good example to other couples. Conflict and drunkenness undermined the religious life of others in the community.

The Ayr session also used the term ‘scandalous carriage’ for non-sexual matters elsewhere in their records. On 28 August 1643, Ayr’s clergy and elders expressed a concern that people ‘in burgh and land of both sexes, old [and] young’ were committing scandalous carriage by neglecting worship, keeping inappropriate company, drunkenness, idleness, marital disharmony, parents failing to catechize and instruct their children, children disrespecting their parents, and neighbours verbally abusing each other.⁴⁰ The session responded by dividing the parish into areas for the session to patrol, a practice also recorded in session registers such as those of Stirling and Burntisland during the Jacobean period.⁴¹ As well as underlining the significance of scandal in Constitutional Revolution discipline, the establishment of patrols in the 1640s shows the clergy intensifying their efforts to reform the population in a local setting.

More tellingly, the absence of specific reference to sexual offences in the Ayr session’s act of 28 August demonstrates that Scottish historians have commonly defined scandal too narrowly and not necessarily in line with what kirk sessions themselves understood. Instead, the Ayr session’s concern about scandal resembles Calvin’s writing of atheistic thinking in scandal. Each of the behaviours the session listed stemmed from a lack of fear of God. Ayr’s kirk session returned to the matter of scandal based in ‘neglecting of Christiane duties’ during 1646 and also 1648, which indicates the significance of scandal in the session’s considerations during the period even in the absence of a statistically significant number of actual ‘scandalous carriage’ cases.⁴²

The Ayr session’s concern over scandal was also evident elsewhere in Scotland at this time. The Kirkcaldy presbytery passed an act on 7 August 1644 ‘considering the greate abounding of the scandalous sinnes of drunkenness, curseing and swearing, and profana[tio]ne of the lords day’. Continuing in such ‘gross and scandalous sinnes’ after a second or third offence would result in a parishioner being barred from the Lord’s Supper. The act also mentioned flyting, railing and miscalling of neighbours, though the presbytery did not directly call those behaviours ‘scandalous’.⁴³ Here, while the act makes a modicum of sense with a twentieth-century definition of scandal, the early modern religious understanding fits best. Drunkenness, cursing, swearing and breaking the Sabbath were scandalous actions not in that they caused private shame so much as that they acted as a stumbling block to the salvation of individuals in the wider community. In this light, by barring repeat offenders from the Lord’s Supper the clergy and elders aimed temporarily to remove from communion anyone who could lead others astray.

Parish-level continuities

Ayr’s kirk session records illustrate the continuities in how the session pursued cases of scandal, its concern over unbelief, and how the laity sometimes disputed accusations of scandal. The Ayr session’s use of ‘scandal’ during the 1650s was not a significant departure from its recent practice. The session examined Jonet Kirk on 5 March 1649 for the ‘scandalous cariage’ of scolding on the streets. One witness reported that she had called someone a ‘sland bluid beggar lown’ and refused to co-operate when two session members tried to persuade her to go home. Another witness had seen ‘hir clapping with hir hands [and] stamping with her feet in the open streits’.⁴⁴ Matthew Alexander appeared before Ayr’s clergy and elders two months later for the ‘scandalous behaviour’ of drunkenness, wife beating and Sabbath breach.⁴⁵ The nature of Alexander’s offence, recorded in a short summary, underlines how scandal could act as a broad term for several offences in Calvinist discipline.

The way these concerns continued during the 1650s demonstrates at parish level how the scandal of the interregnum followed from scandal as understood in previous years. William Mitchell, a town clerk, appeared before the Ayr session at the end of 1650 for the ‘ordinar sin of drunkennes’. The session referred to ‘the great paines’ they had taken ‘to reclaime him from his scandalous cariag’.⁴⁶ In August 1652, Elizabeth Houston, Isobel Kennedy and Margaret Ferguson also appeared before the session for drunkenness, which the clergy and elders called ‘scandalous carriage’. Houston was ‘so drunk that sho was caried to the court of gaird with in houres at night and th[ai]r stayed till the morning’. Houston, Kennedy and Ferguson had all been drinking with soldiers who had been billeted at their houses, which the session called ‘very scandalous’. In Houston’s case, the session noted that she had previously kept an ‘honest’ house.⁴⁷ The use of ‘honest’ as an antonym of ‘scandalous’ suggests, perhaps, the corrupting influence the session believed the soldiers were having on women previously living lives of Christian propriety.

While drunkenness and inappropriate company hinted at possible sexual offence without necessitating it, violence and verbal abuse also persisted as forms of scandal. Thomas Cawter appeared before the session in January 1651 for ‘scandalous speaches’ against James McDougall. While at church one Sunday, he had called McDougall a thief and struck him.⁴⁸ Cawter’s scandalous carriage recalls not only Jonet Kirk’s verbal abuse, but also Thomas Hogg’s wife before the Aberdeen session of 1638. The session summoned Jon and Jonet Boyd the following year for ‘flyting and base cariag’. Jonet particularly had been living ‘scandalouslie and not christianlie’ in scolding her husband.⁴⁹ The session’s investigation echoes its concern over Matthew Alexander’s physical violence towards his wife, and over David Ferguson and Margaret Gardiner’s scandalous carriage in 1644. The session’s involvement in such marriage difficulties might seem invasive to today’s readers, especially the concern over the ‘scandal’ of the couple’s actions within the community. Since the divide between public and private was not so clear in the early modern period, however, the actions of a married couple could more easily affect the community. Moreover, in a positive sense the presence of such cases in kirk session records highlights the interest that clergymen and elders had in people behaving responsibly within marriage.

Several ‘scandalous carriage’ cases from 1651 arose from concern over what Calvin termed ‘atheistic thoughts’. On 6 January, for example, the Ayr session saw William McKerrall for drunkenness. Since his accusation he had committed ‘scandelous cariage such as suering and blasphemie’. The clergy and elders put him in the place of public repentance until he showed signs of actually having repented. Most kirk sessions did not list swearing and blasphemy as ‘scandalous carriage’. The Ayr session did not go any further in describing McKerrall’s words or the manner of his swearing and blasphemy: the behaviour perhaps fitted Calvin’s description of people acting without fear of God, if not necessarily playing the buffoon.⁵⁰ Any public and deliberately offensive expression of religious dissent could be scandalous. This concern over scandal makes sense when considering the mid seventeenth century as a second Reformation in Scotland. Placing swearing and scandal in this context recalls Calvin’s writing of previously hidden ungodliness coming to light after the new presence of the gospel in a community.⁵¹

Later in the same month, William Livingston and William Cunningham appeared before the session for actions which pointed to scandal through atheistic thoughts. Livingston had been laughing when people were leaving church. The location of his laughter, where clergymen expected a serious demeanour, suggested a mocking disposition towards religious matters regardless of the target of his laughter. The session deemed Livingston’s misbehaviour ‘scandelous to gods people’, which highlights the corporate nature of scandal during the mid seventeenth century.⁵² Livingston’s actions would in all likelihood not have scandalized God’s people by making them look bad in the eyes of unbelievers in land or burgh. ‘Scandal’ here describes Livingston’s laughter as a potential threat to the faith of others. While the session does not use the phrase ‘scandalous carriage’, it points to the effect that one man’s irreligious behaviour might have by making it easier for others to have no fear of God, undermining the religious life of the community. Whatever Livingston may have been laughing at, the session seems to have taken his mirth as an example of buffoonish, light carriage which suggested he had no fear of God. Cunningham’s ‘sinful and scandalous cariag’ had been leaving church in the middle of a service without explaining why.⁵³ Here, again, scandal was a community matter. Leaving a service without explanation, if not punished, would give other members of the congregation with a less than firm faith an excuse to absent themselves without explanation.

Calvin’s concern over buffoons and their irreverent behaviour ‘at feasts and in discussions’ may have been part of the reason the Ayr session also regarded penny bridals as scandalous carriage. Alexander Osburne and Marion McGrain appeared before the session on the February of 1651 for ‘hir sinfull cariag’ and ‘his great sin and abuse … of drinking, fiddling, [and] dancing’ at their penny bridal, which lasted three days and nights. The session charged seven people who had been at that rather wild and prolonged penny bridal with ‘sinfull miscarriage’. Scandal in this instance involved ‘drinking and promiscuouse dancing for the most pairt of that first night and the nixt day following for som tym th[e]‌rof’.⁵⁴ The session’s use of scandal as encompassing drinking and dancing, in the light of Calvin’s treatment of scandal and the reformer’s influence on Scotland, suggests that the session’s concern was with the threat that riotous excess of every kind presented to the offenders’ and others’ salvation.

Penny bridals could, however, be scandalous not only in drinking and dancing. The kirk session of Humbie, a hamlet in East Lothian, made an act regarding penny bridals in 1645 which limited the number of attendees to twenty. In addition, the session required ‘that there be no pyping or dancing at all befor or after dinner or supper’, that people leave after eating, ‘and withal that there be no lowse speaches, filthie communication and singing of badie songs or prophane minstrelling’. While the Humbie session’s concerns shared notable parallels with the Ayr session, Humbie’s clergy and elders did not refer to such behaviour as ‘scandal’. Despite this, Humbie’s session act demonstrates clearer parallels with Calvin’s discussion of scandal and buffoonish behaviour, particularly in its reference to ‘lowse speaches’ and ‘filthie communication’.⁵⁵ The drinking and dancing highlighted by the Ayr session could distract others from salvation by providing an opportunity to live similarly dissolute lives. Loose speeches and filthy communication, on the other hand, fit more closely Calvin’s description of ‘pleasant, jocular’ speech and ‘slanted witticism’.⁵⁶ Regardless of how many other sessions used ‘scandal’ to refer to penny bridals, the Ayr session’s description of drinking and dancing at penny bridals as ‘scandalous carriage’ emphasizes that kirk sessions were not ‘narrowly obsessed with sex’ and aimed to promote belief in word and action.

The corporate nature of scandal was a significant feature when laypeople negotiated or disputed the session’s words. Sara Duncan appeared before the session on 5 December 1653 for the sort of behaviour that scandalous carriage cases usually denoted. She asked the Ayr session, however, to remove her scandal from her, with reference to her former association with one James Barrie. While the session register for that day did not detail what had occurred, Duncan ‘profesed hir sorrow for hir sinfull [and] scandalous cariag’ while at the same time denying ‘any sinfull [and] carnall acting with the said James Barrie’. The session, being unable to find James Barrie and investigate further, ordered Sara Duncan to repent publicly on the next Sunday. While her case resembles many scandalous carriage incidents during the seventeenth century, a significant feature of her supplication to the clergy and elders was her claim that she had been ‘scandaled’ in addition to that ‘she was scandalous to the Lordes peiple’.⁵⁷

While William Livingston appeared to have accepted that his conduct had been ‘scandelous to God’s people’, the session record hints here that Sara Duncan was disputing the nature of scandal. The nature of kirk session registers makes it difficult to determine Duncan’s exact words, and thus whether she acknowledged that her behaviour had been ‘scandalous carriage’ or ‘scandalous to the Lordes peiple’.⁵⁸ She may have recognized herself the hurt her actions could have given the believers in her community while at the same time maintaining she had not done anything wrong beyond that. That she had been ‘scandaled’, in this case, could point to the situation being a hindrance or distraction for her or that she had experienced a level of shame. Her use of scandal in reference to herself, however, suggests instead that the ‘sinfull [and] scandalous cariag’ for which she had professed her sorrow was the kirk session’s term rather than hers. In saying she had been ‘scandaled’, Duncan’s words recall L’Annonciade disputing how the Geneva consistoire called her behaviour scandalous.⁵⁹ Sara Duncan, that is, may have believed her scandal to be scandal taken from external perceptions of her actions rather than given by anything inherently sinful. Duncan’s dispute differs from L’Annonciade’s in that she did not cite a clergyman allowing her to behave as she did. This may point to a layperson rejecting the concept of scandal as imposed by the clergy more generally.

In another suggestive case, Marie Hunter appeared before the session on 24 July 1654 for being with an Englishman ‘scandalouslie among the corne’ and had been ‘kising others on the way coming home’.⁶⁰ Several Ayr women accused of scandalous carriage during the early 1650s were so accused because of their associations with occupying English troops.⁶¹ The use of ‘scandalous carriage’ in this context may have been an example of the sort of caution highlighted in Langley’s Worship, Civil War and Community. Such hesitance within this context, however, would suggest that the normally zealous session simply looked the other way instead of probing into a possible sexual misdemeanour. The session may have been insufficiently staffed for the purposes of such an investigation. With fifteen members listed on 24 July 1654, however, the Ayr session was not significantly smaller than the nineteen members present at the start of 1640.⁶² It may simply have been that the women concerned did not go as far as fornication, or managed to keep anything further from surfacing.

Marie Hunter’s case demonstrates more clearly than Sara Duncan’s how laypeople and elders could disagree on what constituted scandal. Hunter confessed to being with Jon Wedrick, the English soldier, in the fields. Despite this, she ‘effrontedlie [and] obstinatlie denyed any scandalous cariag’. Her denial, in effect, was over what the session had called her actions rather than what she had done. The session referred to her mere presence in the field with Wedrick as scandal, without saying what they had been doing ‘among the corne’. Wedrick reported that he intended to marry Marie Hunter and while in the fields ‘did fall a sleip besyd her’. He also stated that ‘he had don no wrong or miscariag’ in kissing her on the way home.⁶³ Wedrick’s words may, perhaps, indicate the cultural divide between English honest courtship and the Scottish cause for detailed inquiry.⁶⁴ More tellingly, Hunter’s denial of scandal highlights a clash between two understandings of what constituted scandal. In a clearer manner than Sara Duncan’s denial of scandal, Hunter and Wedrick understood scandal to be in actions which were inherently sinful. Ayr’s kirk session by contrast saw scandal in a couple being in isolation, which hindered or distracted others from salvation by being an opportunity both for the couple and others, who may have used Hunter and Wedrick’s example as a step towards sin.

Negotiating or disputing scandal was not limited to women, as seen in Spierling’s work and this chapter thus far. The session saw William Logan in early December 1651 for persistent overfamiliarity with Margaret Murchie, a married woman. Logan initially attempted to counter the accusation of ‘scandalous cariag’ by claiming that ‘some evill spirit, and presumption’ had led him to frequent Murchie’s company. Where Sara Duncan and Marie Hunter had denied any scandal had occurred, Logan denied that he and Murchie ‘had ever com[m]‌ited any wickednes togither’.⁶⁵ Here, again, the layperson referred to the absence of any acts inherently sinful, rather than the potential of seemingly innocent actions to lead to sin and threaten one’s faith.

Logan and Murchie’s statement of repentance explicates the idea of scandal as behaviour which causes people to stumble. The ‘hynous sin’ they had committed ‘by ane too much conversing togidder and familiaritie’ was that they ‘provoked our yok fellowes in mariag to jealousie, and suspri[c]‌es’.⁶⁶ The way they had been too familiar with each other, in other words, had caused other married couples to commit the sin of jealousy. The ‘susprices’ Logan and Murchie mentioned the other married couples committing could mean injury, wrong, outrage or oppression.⁶⁷ Their overfamiliarity, that is, may have soured relations among and between other married couples, possibly by suspicion or clashes based in different expectations of how much people could relate to others’ spouses. Here, the ‘scandal [and] offence’ was in directly causing the sin, rather than presenting the possibility that others would do likewise.

Conclusion

The interregnum, by its name, suggests a discontinuity or series of discontinuities, a break from the past or interval between two time periods which would have otherwise perhaps been smoothly linked. At parish level, the Ayr session’s increased interest in ‘scandalous carriage’ was a break from their more usual priorities. This apparent discontinuity, however, disguises significant continuities in how kirk sessions handled scandal. While the presence of English soldiers, for instance, is particular to the 1650s, the session’s interest in scandal is recognizable from the 1640s in Scottish kirk sessions as well as from sixteenth-century Geneva. The concern over scandal in mid-seventeenth-century Scotland, when seen in the light of Calvin’s writing that scandal emerges after the appearance of the gospel among a community, indicates that while Scotland’s lowlands were thoroughly reformed on paper, the clergy and elders who formed the kirk sessions had concerns over persistent unbelief and considered belief to be fragile and easily undermined.

The continuities within the Ayr session’s interest in scandal hold an important development from the sixteenth century. Ayr’s parishioners differ most significantly from the Genevans cited in Spierling’s work in that individual laymen and women did not call others’ actions scandalous, and sometimes disputed accusations of scandal, challenging whether an action was inherently sinful. Scandal in the Ayr session’s records, if not in Ayr’s society more generally, was still a corporate and religious category in the mid seventeenth century, much as it had been in Geneva a century before. Despite this, the laity’s understanding of scandal provides an intriguing link to the scandal of individual shame familiar from more recent history. In considering only inherently sinful actions as scandal, the parishioners who disputed accusations of scandal shifted the emphasis away from the stumbling block principle and its focus on the potential of apparently innocent acts to hinder or distract others from faith. This understanding of scandal as arising from particular acts connects more readily to the scandal of individual shame in both its stronger focus on an individual’s actions, and in how clearly a line could be drawn between what was and was not sinful and scandalous. While scandal remained a religious category during the mid seventeenth century, the disputes between Ayr’s parishioners and clergy suggest that the category was still unstable and debatable.

A. Johnson, ‘Scandalous Ayr: parish- level continuities in 1650s Scotland’, in Church and people in interregnum Britain, ed. F. McCall (London, 2021), pp. 171–192. License: CC BY-NC-ND.