Eight Sabbaths of Shame
Mull and the Western Isles, 1651–1653
Historical Background
Twenty years had passed since Martin MacGillivray was seized by armed men and thrown from his own kirk at the command of Murdoch Maclean of Lochbuie. Scotland had changed greatly in the years between, although peace had proved rather harder to establish than any of those who fought for it might once have imagined.
The National Covenant of 1638 had challenged royal interference in the Scottish Church, and the struggles that followed drew Scotland into the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Allegiance shifted between Covenant, King, Parliament and clan, while armies moved through communities that had little influence over the arguments being fought in their name. By 1651 Charles I was dead, Cromwell's army had defeated the Scots at Dunbar, and another Scottish army was preparing for the campaign that would end at Worcester. The Church itself had become deeply involved in deciding who had supported the right cause, who had aided rebellion and what repentance should be required before offenders could again be received into full fellowship.1
For ordinary people, the authority of the Kirk extended far beyond the Sunday sermon. Kirk sessions and presbyteries concerned themselves with marriage, sexual behaviour, drunkenness, quarrelling, absence from worship and the breaking of the Sabbath, so that surviving church records preserve not simply theological disputes but much of the untidy business of community life: births and marriages, poverty and feuds, drink, scandal and the consequences of human weakness.2
Public repentance was intended to make wrongdoing visible. If an offence had harmed the Christian community, reconciliation with that community could also require a public act, and a man might find himself ordered to stand before his neighbours, confess his fault or appear at several different kirks until the authorities were satisfied that his repentance was genuine.
On the islands, such punishments carried an additional burden. A sentence requiring appearances at churches on Mull, Lismore, Morvern, Coll and Tiree involved difficult journeys over land and open water, dependence upon wind and tide, absence from work and the certainty that news of the offence would probably reach each destination before the offender did.
Martin knew something about the uncertainties of church judgement himself. Only a few years earlier he had been deposed from the ministry for involvement with those the Kirk considered rebels and later restored. By 1651 he was minister at Kilninian, once again exercising an authority that had previously been exercised over him.
It was in May of that year that the Presbytery of Lorn gave him an unpleasant task.
A boat belonging to Thomas Hamilton had been robbed at Aros, the offence had taken place on the Sabbath, and the men responsible had apparently been drunk.
• • •
Eight Sabbaths of Shame
Martin read the names for a second time before folding the paper.
There were enough of them to make the affair troublesome, and enough that he knew personally to make it worse. Malcolm Maclean, Captain of Aros, was there, along with Duncan McEan Roy and men from Aros, Arilek, Ledbeg and the surrounding lands. The Presbytery had ordered Martin to summon them to answer an accusation described in the record without much attempt at moderation: the violent and masterful robbing of Thomas Hamilton and his company upon the last but one day of March.3
The final words gave the offence an additional seriousness.
Upon ane Sabbath day.
Martin laid the paper on the table and looked towards the small window, where rain had begun to gather against the glass.
There were robberies that began with hunger and others that began with opportunity. There were old disputes dressed as new grievances, debts settled without troubling a court and goods taken because one man had persuaded himself that another had no proper right to them. Martin had spent enough years among island communities to know that the distinction between theft and grievance could become remarkably thin once several generations of quarrel had been added to it.
Thomas Hamilton's bark, however, had been robbed openly enough for the matter to reach the Presbytery, and somebody had been foolish enough to do it on a Sunday.
One of Martin's elders sat opposite him, waiting.
"How many?"
"Enough."
"That bad?"
Martin pushed the paper across the table.
The elder read until he reached the names and then looked up.
"Captain of Aros?"
"So it says."
"Will he come?"
Martin took the paper back.
"He has been summoned."
"That's not what I asked."
Martin looked at him for a moment.
"No."
The elder's mouth twitched.
There were times when the difference between the authority possessed by the Kirk and the authority recognised by the people upon whom it was exercised seemed considerably greater than anyone in Edinburgh or Inveraray appreciated.
"You'll go yourself?"
"I've been ordered to summon them."
"That's another no, then."
Martin reached for his cloak.
"You've become remarkably skilled at interpreting me."
"I've had practice."
This time Martin did smile.
"Then you can practise while we walk."
• • •
The story that emerged over the following months proved less complicated than some of those involved might have hoped.
Thomas Hamilton had arrived with his bark. Men had boarded it, his goods had been taken and at least some of those goods had subsequently been carried towards Aros. There had been no disputed inheritance, no ancient right solemnly recalled at precisely the moment somebody else's property came within reach, and no misunderstanding that might conveniently transform theft into something more respectable.
They had robbed him.
Duncan McEan Roy eventually appeared before the Presbytery and admitted what had happened. The surviving record describes the robbery of Hamilton's bark and the taking of his goods to Aros with little sympathy for the men concerned.
Then came the detail that removed whatever heroic possibilities remained.
They acknowledged that they had been drunk.4
Martin heard of the confession without much surprise. Drink had always possessed the useful property of making a man's reasoning appear persuasive to himself while becoming considerably less convincing when repeated before sober listeners the following morning.
The involvement of the Captain of Aros was another matter. If he had known what was intended, encouraged it or allowed men to act because they believed his authority would protect them, then the offence reached beyond the foolishness of a drunken group. Those examined denied that he had instigated or assisted the robbery, either directly or indirectly, and the question of his involvement was left for further investigation.4
For the others, there was rather less room to manoeuvre.
By the following year eight men had made what the clerk described as a "clear and oppin confession" of their cruel and inhuman spoiling and robbery of Hamilton's bark.5
The punishment devised by the Presbytery was intended to ensure that neither the offenders nor the communities through which they travelled would soon forget what had happened. Each man was to perform public repentance over eight Sabbaths, moving through a circuit of churches that stretched across the islands and adjacent mainland.
The first was Kilcolumkill.
They were ordered to arrive before the congregation and stand at the kirk door while the people entered, wearing sackcloth and with their heads and feet bare. Once the congregation was inside, their humiliation was to continue throughout divine service.5
Martin had witnessed public repentance many times over the years, and experience had taught him that men responded to it in different ways. Some arrived defiant, obeying the sentence while making it perfectly clear that they considered themselves wronged. Others discovered an impressive concern for reconciliation once excommunication threatened a marriage, inheritance or standing within the community. A smaller number came genuinely ashamed and needed little from the Kirk beyond some means of finding their way back into ordinary life.
Eight men standing together presented a different problem, because shame shared among companions could become either support or resentment.
The morning was cold, and when Martin saw them waiting at the church his attention went first to their bare feet upon the damp ground. He disliked himself slightly for noticing. These were men who had robbed another man's property while drunk and had done so on the Sabbath; nobody had promised that repentance would be comfortable. Yet punishment always appeared cleaner in the Presbytery book than it did when embodied in men standing before you.
The congregation began to arrive.
Some people looked openly at the penitents, while others passed with their eyes deliberately elsewhere. One woman hurried two children through the doorway after the younger boy turned for a second examination of the men in sackcloth. His mother caught him by the shoulder and whispered something that ensured his attention remained firmly ahead afterwards.
An older man stopped in front of Duncan.
Martin could not hear what passed between them. The old man said only a few words before entering the kirk, but Duncan watched him go with an expression that revealed more than any formal confession had done.
"Friend of yours?" one of the other penitents murmured.
"My wife's father."
Nothing further was said.
Martin turned away before either realised that he had heard.
That, he thought, was perhaps the part of the punishment the Presbytery understood best. Sackcloth could be endured and cold feet would warm again, but the judgement of people whose opinions still mattered when the Sabbath ended was more difficult to escape.
• • •
Kilninian was appointed for the second Sabbath, which brought the men into Martin's own charge.
News had naturally arrived before them.
By the time a boat crossed one stretch of water, a story could somehow have crossed three, improving itself at every landing. Martin had already heard versions in which Hamilton had been beaten half to death, another in which the Captain of Aros had personally led the attack, and one particularly imaginative account in which the bark itself had been seized and sailed away.
Hamilton still possessed his boat.
Facts rarely satisfied an island community once a story had become entertaining.
The men took their places outside the kirk, and Martin watched from the doorway as his congregation approached. He recognised much the same mixture of curiosity, disapproval and that small satisfaction human beings occasionally derive from another person's disgrace, perhaps because it offers temporary reassurance concerning their own virtue.
One of the elders stood beside him.
"Eight Sundays."
"Aye."
"Coll and Tiree as well?"
"So ordered."
The elder considered the distance.
"That's a great deal of travelling for repentance."
Martin watched one of the men shifting his weight from one bare foot to the other.
"The Presbytery may believe sin improves with sea air."
The elder turned to look at him, uncertain whether the minister had intended humour.
Martin gave him no help.
After a moment the elder asked, "Do you think it'll work?"
Martin knew what he meant.
Would eight Sabbaths make eight men better? Would standing in sackcloth return Hamilton's property, remove the effects of drink or alter whatever combination of opportunity and foolishness had encouraged a group of men to climb aboard somebody else's vessel?
He had no answer that entirely satisfied him.
"It may make them think."
"About God?"
Martin glanced again towards the doorway.
"At the moment, probably about shoes."
The elder coughed into his hand, and Martin opened the kirk door.
"Bring them in."
• • •
Lismore was appointed for the third Sabbath. After that the men were to appear at Kilcolumkill in Morvern, Breachacha in Coll and Kirkiboll in Tiree before returning to the first two churches to complete their sentence. At each stage a minister was expected to provide a certificate confirming that they had obeyed, and those testimonials were eventually to come into Martin's hands so that he might present them to the Presbytery before the appointed deadline.5
It was an orderly arrangement on paper, but the islands rarely showed much respect for arrangements made on paper.
Martin knew the difficulties of travel between Mull, the smaller islands and the mainland better than most of the men who issued such instructions. A crossing planned confidently the evening before could become impossible by morning. A favourable wind might hold long enough to tempt a boat from shore and then turn before the destination was reached, while tides required no permission from presbyteries before determining when a man could travel.
There were practical obligations as well. Cattle still needed tending, crops could not always wait and families did not cease requiring food because a husband had been ordered to spend another Sabbath performing repentance in another parish.
None of these things cancelled the sentence, but they belonged to the same world in which that sentence had to be carried out.
Martin began gathering the certificates as they came.
He kept them beside the other Presbytery papers and checked each carefully against the order. There was something faintly absurd about reducing repentance to documentation, but he also understood why it was necessary. Without the certificates, every man could simply claim to have stood where he had been ordered and behaved with exemplary humility while doing so.
The affairs of faith might concern matters unseen, but church administration remained more comfortable when supported by ink.
The testimonial from Lismore did not arrive.
Martin waited.
A boat came from the direction of the island carrying two men and a bundle of goods, but no certificate accompanied them. Another crossing brought a message concerning unrelated parish business. Still there was nothing.
As the days passed, Martin became increasingly doubtful that the weather could be blamed.
• • •
The truth emerged later.
The men had simply failed to appear at Lismore as they had been ordered. Their absence was reported to the Presbytery, and the matter was deferred for further trial when the island ministers could next meet.6
Martin read the report with more weariness than anger.
The elaborate sentence of eight Sabbaths had apparently begun to unravel by the third.
One of his elders found him still sitting with the paper.
"Bad news?"
"Do you remember Hamilton's men?"
"I doubt anyone on Mull has been permitted to forget them."
"They didn't go to Lismore."
The elder thought for a moment.
"Weather?"
"It doesn't say."
"Perhaps they were detained."
"All eight?"
"A large family gathering?"
Martin looked across the table until the elder abandoned the attempt.
"What happens now?"
"They'll be called again."
"And then?"
"That depends upon what they say."
The elder sat down opposite him, and for a while neither spoke.
Somewhere outside the kirk a man was working, the repeated strike of a tool carrying through the wall with the regular rhythm of labour. Martin listened to it and thought about the men from Aros and the many systems through which people tried to govern one another.
He had spent much of his life within institutions that believed human behaviour could be shaped by law, church discipline, public shame and prayer. He had seen each succeed on occasion, and he had seen each fail often enough to understand that none offered the certainty its strongest advocates sometimes claimed for it.
There was always a temptation among men sitting in judgement to imagine that repentance could be measured through obedience to the sentence imposed. A man was told where to stand, what to wear and what words to say, after which a certificate might confirm that the prescribed act had been completed.
Perhaps sometimes that was enough.
Martin's own life had taught him to be less certain.
Years earlier, the Kirk had judged him and removed him from the ministry before later restoring him. The record of both decisions remained, but Martin knew better than most that the judgement entered into a church book and the judgement a man carried privately within himself were not necessarily the same thing.
Now another document lay before him, and he wondered what eight men had learned from being ordered across the western seaboard in sackcloth. Perhaps one had discovered humility, another resentment and a third nothing more profound than the distance to Lismore and the discomfort of travelling without proper shoes.
The elder eventually rose.
"You'll summon them?"
"Aye."
"You don't sound pleased about it."
Martin folded the report and placed it with the other papers.
"It's rarely a good sign when the same names keep coming back."
The elder pulled his cloak around his shoulders.
"Perhaps they'll have learned something."
"Perhaps they have."
Martin watched him leave, although his thoughts remained with the men and the unfinished sentence.
Punishment could be ordered by a Presbytery.
Changing a man was another matter.
• • •
When Hamilton's men next appeared before the Kirk, they would have explanations. Men generally did, and some of those explanations might even prove true.
Martin would listen because listening was part of the duty entrusted to him, just as summoning them had been part of it and receiving their certificates would have been had they completed the sentence in the manner required.
Afterwards he would return to Kilninian, where other matters would already be waiting.
There would be children to baptise, marriages requiring testimonials, tenants worried about harvests and old people for whom the approach of another winter made questions of salvation more immediate than they had seemed in spring. The ordinary work of a parish would continue long after Thomas Hamilton's missing goods had ceased to interest anyone except Thomas Hamilton.
Martin had come to understand that this was how communities survived their own foolishness.
Wrongdoing was remembered, and sometimes remembered for generations, but life required people to continue living alongside one another after judgement had been passed. Cattle still needed feeding, boats required mending, walls had to be repaired and a neighbour who had watched a man stand barefoot in sackcloth on one Sabbath might find himself needing that same man's help before winter was over.
The Presbytery could order eight Sabbaths of public shame and prescribe precisely where the men were to stand.
What happened when they returned home belonged to the more complicated judgement of ordinary life.
Historical Note and Sources
The central events in this story are unusually well documented in a reference file of extracts and transcriptions from the Presbytery Records of Lorn, held in the archives of the Mull Museum, Tobermory, Isle of Mull, under the reference CHURCH 01-001.
On 14 May 1651 Martin MacGillivray, recorded as Mr Mairtelne Mcillevray and identified as minister at Kilninian, was ordered to summon a number of men associated with Aros and neighbouring settlements to answer for the "violent and masterfull robbing" of Thomas Hamilton and his company on a Sabbath near the end of March 1651. The record names several of those required to appear and places Martin directly within the proceedings.3
Subsequent proceedings record the confession of the robbery and the removal of Hamilton's goods to Aros. The men acknowledged that they had been drunk, while those examined denied that the Captain of Aros had instigated or assisted the offence.4
Eight men eventually made what the record describes as a "clear and oppin confession". Their sentence required them to stand at the kirk door before the congregation entered, dressed in sackcloth and with their feet and heads bare, and then remain in that state during divine service. The appointed circuit included Kilcolumkill, Kilninian, Lismore, Kilcolumkill in Morvern, Breachacha in Coll and Kirkiboll in Tiree, followed by return appearances at the first two kirks. Martin was ordered to present the certificates issued by the ministers as proof that the sentence had been obeyed.5
The surviving record later makes clear that the men did not appear at Lismore as ordered. Their failure was reported and referred for further consideration, which means that we cannot assume the prescribed eight-Sabbath circuit was ever completed.6
The conversations between Martin and his elder, the individual parishioners, Martin's thoughts about punishment, the scenes at the kirk doors and the circumstances surrounding the absent testimonial are fictional reconstruction. The robbery, drunkenness, confession, form of punishment, sequence of churches, Martin's role and the failure to appear at Lismore are taken from the surviving record.
Reference Guide
1. Church of Scotland — History of the Church of Scotland. Used for the broader Covenanting and seventeenth-century political and religious setting. Source link
2. Church of Scotland — Kirk records bring Scottish history to life online. Used for the role of kirk sessions and presbyteries in regulating Sabbath observance, drunkenness and other aspects of community behaviour. Source link
3. Presbytery Records of Lorn, reference file CHURCH 01-001, Mull Museum Archives, Tobermory, Isle of Mull — entry dated 14 May 1651. Martin MacGillivray ordered to summon the accused men concerning the Sabbath-day robbery of Thomas Hamilton and his company.
4. Presbytery Records of Lorn, reference file CHURCH 01-001, Mull Museum Archives, Tobermory, Isle of Mull — proceedings concerning Thomas Hamilton's bark. Confession of the robbery, admission that the offenders had been drunk, and evidence concerning the Captain of Aros.
5. Presbytery Records of Lorn, reference file CHURCH 01-001, Mull Museum Archives, Tobermory, Isle of Mull — 1652 proceedings. The eight men's open confession and the detailed sentence of public repentance in sackcloth, barefoot and bare-headed, together with the prescribed circuit of churches and Martin's responsibility for the ministers' certificates.
6. Presbytery Records of Lorn, reference file CHURCH 01-001, Mull Museum Archives, Tobermory, Isle of Mull — later entry concerning the Lismore appearance. The report that the men who spoiled Thomas Hamilton's bark failed to appear at Lismore as ordered and that the matter was referred for further consideration.
Archive Acknowledgement
I am grateful to the Mull Museum, Tobermory, Isle of Mull, for preserving and making accessible the reference material used in researching this story, including file CHURCH 01-001, containing extracts and transcriptions from the Presbytery Records of Lorn.
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