John McCallum wants us to ‘reconsider the way that we think about the provision of poor relief’ in Scotland during the century after the Reformation (p. 3). In so doing, McCallum seeks to reject a longstanding assumption – based primarily on the work of Rosalind Mitchison – that Scottish welfare in the early modern period was ineffective because it lacked any basis in mandatory taxation. Whereas Mitchison was unimpressed by the locus of poor relief in Scotland, the parish kirk session, McCallum argues that local kirk sessions were responsive to the demands of local paupers, effective in organising collections in the parish and prudent with how the money was distributed. The aspect of poor relief that Mitchison found so dour, McCallum sees as the system's great strength.
McCallum focuses his attention on the activities of 25 parishes following the Reformation Parliament in 1560 to the English invasion led by Oliver Cromwell in 1650. The parishes in the author's sample are mostly Lowland in nature but include a broad range of different types of settlement from the rural Aberdeenshire parish of New Deer, and some of the coastal parishes of Fife, to the often wealthy settlements of Edinburgh. While McCallum is sceptical about trying to aggregate statistical data from this material – it is notoriously patchy and recorded in inconsistent ways – the information mined from these archival holdings is deep and provides tantalising glimpses of a world where previous assessments of relief have rarely ventured.
The book's structure achieves an effective balance in guiding the reader through this material. Chapter 1, while less reliant on the rich archival detail found in other chapters, provides an essential foundation to the rest of the book by exploring the theoretical underpinnings of pious giving in Protestant Scotland. The author shows great awareness of the theological nuances at play in Protestant charity alongside the excellent analysis of the social consequences of this thought elsewhere in the book. The remainder of the book's chapters are divided into two sections. The first explores the chronological development of a formal system of welfare centred on the parish kirk session. The chapters in the second section outline some of the socio-cultural aspects of this system such as the identity of the recipients of relief and the ways individuals could petition for aid.
The first section of the book reflects on the development of the kirk session as ‘the leading vehicle for the development of poor relief in Scotland’ (p. 54). McCallum crafts a convincing narrative that traces the urban origins of organised systems of welfare after 1560 and shows how collections and distributions of alms were ‘regular, well-organised, and raised some substantial … sums of money’ (p. 77). These systems percolated slowly into rural areas. One of the great successes of McCallum's work is that he is able to tease out the broad trends of how this system developed while not losing sight of the subtle differences that one observes in the way kirk session charity operated from parish to parish, especially during the embryonic years of the second half of the sixteenth century. McCallum concedes that, once developed, these systems were hardly ‘innovative’ but, during the war years of the mid-seventeenth century, the persistence of these systems allowed them to remain remarkably stable in a time of unprecedented political upheaval (p. 108).
Readers more familiar with the findings of studies of poor relief elsewhere will be surprised that one rarely hears the voices of those receiving poor relief in this book. The author concedes in the introduction that what follows is ‘inescapably’ about those in authority because the surviving corpus of source material was entirely written by ecclesiastical or secular courts. Nevertheless, despite the author's laudable efforts in the second part of the book, we get little insight into the idea of shame or dependency that Steve Hindle has revealed for the English context or the ways in which parishioners framed their petitions to those in authority. Moreover, despite the rich base of source material, the author's decision to repeat a few key pieces of evidence reinforces the idea that the poor themselves were never intended to be the centrepiece of this book. Considering the author's argument, this was probably a prudent decision. The experience of Scottish poverty awaits its historian.
Poor relief and the Church of Scotland is a hugely successful book that delivers a number of historiographical hammer blows without being bombastic or noisy about it. Firstly, the idea that Scottish welfare was a failed imprint of the English gold standard is no longer tenable. This erodes the uneasy embrace between English and Scottish historiography on welfare and paves the way for a raft of studies on the very different ways that early modern societies could implement successful welfare regimes. The second great success of McCallum's painstaking work is that it makes one wonder why the previous assumptions about turgid and unimaginative Scottish welfare stood largely unchallenged for so long. His argument is not only convincing but seemingly obvious now it has been laid out so clearly. In this manner, Poor relief and the Church of Scotland presents a gracious masterclass of historical revisionism.
