Michelle Brock’s book examines the fortunes of covenanting, conceived of primarily as a collective identity, through the lens of a single Scottish town – the port town of Ayr. This is a defiantly local study and her narrative, which is basically chronological in organization, is partly framed by the career of Ayr’s most important seventeenth-century minister, William Adair. Admitted as assistant minister in 1639, he quit his position as one of the town’s two ministers in 1682 when he refused to subscribe to the Test, which he viewed as ungodly. Adair took a hardline stance during covenanting’s first phase (from the 1630s to the 1650s) but proved more adaptable and flexible under the Restoration, albeit – as Brock shows – not necessarily retreating from his principles. According to Brock, Adair’s influence in shaping the communal identity of the town would be ‘hard to overstate’ (p. 4), although this is of course impossible to demonstrate beyond a certain point.

This is an urban history insofar as it is concerned with urban forms of piety and religious experiences, but also how covenanting identity became embedded in a particular urban community. The town features as an important backdrop, but readers will find relatively little about the development of Ayr in this period, its spatial geography or its economy, although they are all mentioned in passing. Place and space, while not absent, are not at the forefront of Brock’s preoccupations. One thing, nevertheless, about Ayr which she does wish to draw out, although she does not develop this point very far, is that as a port the horizons of townspeople often looked well beyond the town and parish, and outwards across the seas. The connection to Ireland was especially important. As she declares at one point early on: ‘… this book shows how the comparatively small world of Ayr, far from being an isolated place…was densely intertwined with larger ones in ways that had a striking impact on the religious life and ethos of the town’ (p. 8).

This study is best viewed as a contribution to the bottom-up history of covenanting in seventeenth-century Scotland, one which is concerned less with how covenanting was defined than the ‘practical realities of covenanting radicalism’ (p. 6). The main sources mined by Brock are the minutes of the local Kirk Session, read alongside town council minutes and records of the sermons of Adair. What unfolds is a story of how a covenanting identity was made and remade by Adair, the Kirk Session and others in the town in response to the repeated crises and challenges of the mid- to later seventeenth century, which included political upheaval, war, plague, occupation and the periodic repressions of the post-1660 era. Brock emphasizes how far the pressures of war and revolution were felt in gender-specific ways, most prominently in the disruptive influence of soldiers. Under the Cromwellian occupation Ayr became a garrison town. Redcoats would long be an unwanted, frequently threatening, presence in Scotland’s burghs, albeit they could also represent economic and other opportunities. Interestingly, Brock refers to several cases of English soldiers remaining in Ayr, marrying local women and becoming integrated into the local community as partly regulated by the Kirk. After the Restoration, some of these men combined with local merchants to engage in what became an illicit trade with the English Caribbean colonies.

The ecclesiastical discipline pursued under Adair during the 1640s and 1650s was not new, but followed lines that had become commonplace since the Reformation. It focused on reinforcing family values by punishing fornication and adultery, breaches of the sabbath and failure to attend church. The goal was sincere repentance and reaffirmation of membership of the community of the Kirk, as well as to assuage deeper anxieties about communal sinfulness. Whether Ayr ever became a ‘city on the hill’, as imagined by Adair and his fellow covenanters, or even close to it, is hard to adjudicate from Brock’s study. She tends to emphasize successes, in terms of the reach and strength of a covenanting identity among the townspeople, and to read challenges to this as reflecting less a significant seam of resistance and more the rigorous sense of duty shown by the Kirk Session and its agents. On the other hand, she also notes that when Adair was absent, which he was quite frequently, the Kirk Session was much less active. Moreover, for a period from 1664, the imposition of an Episcopalian as his fellow minister impeded the smooth running of the local Kirk and its session.

What we can say with more confidence, and Brock offers ample evidence in support of such a conclusion, is that Ayr became the locus of an entrenched covenanting radicalism, which continued to shape the experiences and allegiances of the local population throughout the later seventeenth century. The latter served to destabilize Ayr and its governance during the Restoration, dividing the town council. Some of its members would prove more accommodating to the dictates of Edinburgh and the national authorities, from Kirk Session, complicating the process of imposing godly discipline on the town’s population and producing episodes of resistance and protest. Eight of the 36 convicted for their involvement in the Pentland Rising were executed in the town, although the Ayr hangman fled the town rather than ‘murther’ those he deemed to be ‘innocent’, while Adair was suspended from his post for a period of over a year from the spring of 1668 due to fears that he had aided the rebels. Memories of covenanting would be an active force in and around Ayr well after Adair’s death in 1694 and the revolution of 1688–89, which brought the re-establishment of Presbyterianism in its wake but also, among many Presbyterians, a further distancing from the Covenants of 1638 and 1643. Brock guides the reader through the complicated theological politics and extensive historiography of this period with an assured touch. Her narrative, however, comes alive when she is dissecting cases retrieved from the Kirk Session records and using these to reconstruct the experiences and predicaments of townsfolk during these fraught decades in a town in which, for a while at least, a notably strenuous version of Presbyterian community prevailed.