In no country and at no time has a more searching system of ecclesiastical discipline been attempted than in Scotland in the first century after the Reformation. Not only was the teaching or the practice of the unreformed faith punished with the severest penalties, not only was attendance at church and the learning of religion, as the reformers understood it, rigidly enforced; but even the private life of the people was watched and scrutinized. The behaviour of the congregation on the way home from divine service, the amusements which formed the relaxation of the people, the dress of the women in the street as well as at kirk, the snuff-taking of the men, domestic broils and filial misbehaviour in the various households,—these and other such matters were discussed by ecclesiastical tribunals and visited with pains and penalties, as much as offences against human or divine laws. The country was overspread with a network of church authorities claiming disciplinary powers, there was quite an arsenal of punitive machines in every district, and the whole system was kept in motion by the free use of espionage. Verily, in Scotland “new presbyter was,” as Milton said, “but old priest writ large,” larger in fact than the original by far. Even the soldiery of the Commonwealth, sufficiently used to the methods of Puritanism in England, were astonished and disgusted with the ways and means of Scottish discipline; so much so that during their stay in the country in 1650 they destroyed many of the weapons of this intolerable tyranny; and it is indeed surprising that the people themselves accepted it so long with submission. That the Church has authority to use discipline over its members is admitted; and that at the present time this authority is too little recognised is, in the opinion of very many, equally true; but in the day of its supremest power the Scottish Kirk Sessions seem to have usurped a universal authority. The punitive rights of the State, the proper control which a man has within his own house, even that discipline which every one should learn to exercise over himself, all these, as well as that influence which more strictly is the province of the Church, the Kirk endeavoured to control and enforce by means of its own ecclesiastical courts.
Of these courts the first was the “Exercise,” as it was at first quaintly called, from the custom of “making exercise,” or critically examining a given passage of Scripture; more properly described as the Presbytery. Next to this came the authority of the Synod, or district court, and the final appeal lay to the General Assembly. Of these the higher courts not infrequently did much more than exercise appellant jurisdiction, issuing orders to spur on the zeal of the inferior ones.
The methods of punishment employed by the Kirk were various. Excommunications were freely launched against offenders, especially against those who did not accept in their fulness the teaching and practices of the reformers. Public penance was also resorted to, often in addition to some other form of punishment; the penance usually involving the use of the “repentance-stool,” or the jaggs, or jougs. The former of these was a wooden structure formed in two tiers or steps, the lower of which, used for less heinous offences, was named the “cock-stool.” An offender, judged to perform a public penance on this stool, was first clothed in an appropriate habit, the Scottish representative of the traditional white sheet, which consisted of a cloak of coarse linen, known as the “harden goun,” the “harn goun,” or the “sack goun.” Thus arrayed, he (or she) stood at the kirk door while the congregation assembled and during the opening prayer of the service; just before the sermon the penitent was led in by the sexton and placed, according to the terms of the sentence, either upon “the highest degree of the penitent stuill” or upon, “the cock-stool”; where he stood barefoot and bare-headed during the discourse, in which his sins and offences were not forgotten. The congregation generally wore their hats during the sermon.
REPENTANCE STOOL, FROM OLD GREYFRIARS, EDINBURGH.
The minutes and accounts of the Presbyteries have frequent allusions to this stool and its accompanying “goun.” Thus at Perth mention is made of the provision of both cock-stool and repentance-stool, and in 1617 the Kirk Session of the same place ordered a stool of stone to be built. The Synods specially enjoined on all parishes the procuring of a repentance-gown; in 1655 as much as £4, 4s. 6d. was spent in one for Lesmahago, and in 1693 Kirkmichael, Ayrshire, ordered one of a special fashion, “like unto that which they have in Straitoun,” to be made. The repentance-stool has maintained its place in scattered instances down to modern times, one of the latest instances of its use being in 1884, when a man stood on the stool to be publicly rebuked in the Free Kirk at Lochcarron. The Museum of the Society of Antiquaries at Edinburgh contains the old repentance-stool, formerly used in the Old Greyfriars’ Church of that city; the repentance-gown of Kinross parish is also preserved in the same museum. It does not always follow that penance implies repentance, and the strong arm of the Scottish Kirk sometimes compelled a man to submit to the former without his experiencing the latter; such was evidently the case with three reprobates who were excommunicated in 1675 by the Kirk Session of Mauchline, Ayrshire, because of “their breaking the stool of repentance on which they had been sentenced to stand in presence of the congregation.”
JOUGS FROM THE OLD CHURCH OF CLOVA, FORFARSHIRE.
THE JOUGS AT DUDDINGSTON.