The dum-lump on the end of Sam’s nose is hot and hard. The loon rubs, tentatively, with the tip of his grubby finger. The rubbing stirs the embers but there is still no sign of it coming to a head. He thinks he looks a fool and the deemies in the kitchen will laugh at him. Their teasing is part of his reason for taking his books up the Whitehill to study this Saturday night.
It is a fine evening in early summer. From where young Samuel Forrester reclines in the pasture, there is a bonny view down across the Carse towards the Forth. From the foot of Whitehill, the land seems flat as a sheet, the river invisible, until the Braes o Doune rise gently in the distance.
The Carse is a herring-bone quilt of oats and barley, nuances of green interleaved, separated by the weedy haggards of cleared stones. Here and there, a ditch has been dug, angling towards the Leckie Burn.
To his left, where the Leckie Burn runs off the hill, is the Laird’s house at Leckie where Moir, the proprietor, bides.
To his right he can see the village of Gargunnock, a puckle houses on a single street, each with a long toft running back from it. The Kirk and the wee plook of Keir Hill where there was a fort, in ancient times. In the manse by the Kirk, the Minister lurks like a queen ant. Sam imagines his Elders fretting around him, bringing him snippets, rumours of sin to feed his preaching.
Between the big house and the village is the farm at Bield where his father, Walter, is the hind. Which makes young Sam the hind’s servant, his loon.
Tomorrow, on the Sabbath, Sam is to be examined. He turns the page of the Catechism[i] and puzzles down the words. Question then answer.
Question 63: Which is the fifth commandment?
Answer: The fifth commandment is, Honor thy father and thy mother; that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Sam has decided to skip the head-nipping mysteries of justification, effectual calling and Divine Providence for the simple go-tos of the Ten Commandments. More prudent, he thinks, to simply avoid sin since that is what gets you into trouble.
His father’s role as Hind at the Bield gets them a cott and a kailyard, a few acres to sow themselves and measures of meal, bere and pease for sustenance. No coin.
Sam has no mother. If she were here, she, too, would be part of the team: setting lime-kilns, gathering, carting and spreading muck, clearing out the byres and stables. But she disappeared before Sam knew her. As the junior member of the family team, much of her work falls on Sam.
Together, father and son, use the tenant’s team of four horses to plough his rigs. Hard darg, autumn and spring. Eleven now, Sam serves as gamesman, walking backwards across the unbroken ground before the team as they proceed four abreast. All four are tethered to a single beam which keeps them in line whilst his father chivvies and chides the horses forward, their strength dragging the ploughshare through the fine alluvial soil, the handles of the plough bucking and wraxing with every stone or lump of coarser earth. Weeks of walking backwards, holding up that beam. Samuel is very good at walking backwards.
But ploughing is done, for now. The corn stands in the rigs, the hairst will be a whiles yet. And the summer light lingers long into the evening.
A few may-fly flitter in the warm air: no sign of midges yet but they will come.
Sam skims the next question: What is required in the fifth commandment? He opts, instead, for the more pragmatic question 65: What is forbidden in the fifth commandment?
Answer: The fifth commandment forbiddeth the neglecting of, or doing anything against, the honor and duty which belongeth to every one in their several places and relations.
So where did the “father and mother” bit go? All of a sudden it’s everyone and anyone.
Sam does try to honour his father. It often feels that his father is all he has in the world, though he knows he still has relatives in Kilsyth. Grannie Christian and Grandpa, his uncles and aunt.
His father is a taciturn man. He has a cynical turn and a dry sense of humour. He has lived through good times and bad. He brought Sam to Bield of Leckie when the boy was 9. Led the boy across the Campsies to their new Parish. A starveling like the rest of the bairns but fit to assist with the ploughing.
That was the end of Sam’s formal schooling. Still, he could already read and write and figure.
He realises, to his dismay, that the Fifth Commandment has a subsidiary question, as if the first answer wasn’t clear enough.
What is the reason annexed to the fifth commandment?
Does God need a reason? That didn’t seem to be what the earlier answers said.
The reason annexed to the fifth commandment is a promise of long life and prosperity (as far as it shall serve for God’s glory and their own good) to all such as keep this commandment.
So, if Sam does not neglect his honours and duties to every-one in their several places and relations he will receive long life and prosperity? Not salvation, Sam reminds himself, for only justification through faith and having been ear-marked as one of the Elect ensures that: and you are either Elect from the outset or you’re not! He aggravates the dum-lump again, perversely enjoying the irritation.
When his father led him across the Campsies from Kilsyth to Gargunnock, the land was infested with vagrants and beggars. They travelled the roads in bands, extorting alms from gudemen and cottars alike: wild and broken as any Highland bandit. His father said, there was talk of arresting them all and making slaves of them. The notion worried Sam as the trekked North. But Walter had a place, he assured Sam. He was no vagrant. In order to secure his place in the new parish, Walter had had to beg a testimonial from the Minister in Kilsyth that he was ‘honest and Christian’.
“Your grandpa’s misdemeanours were overlooked.” his father said.
His grandpa, John, was no stranger to the cutty-stool, it seemed. But those were more permissive times, his father explained, near the end of King Charles’ sinful reign, when papist sentiments and loose morals sapped the discipline of the Elect.
What did he mean? How?
Like Sam, Walter had lost his mother young, when he was barely 2. Samuel’s grandfather remarried 12 years later, a woman named Christian Naipper from Kilsyth[ii]. Walter was a man by the time his father remarried. His step-mother was only 10 years older than Walter. Samuel’s Uncle Tom was closer still in age.
The two brothers had worked for their father on the farm in Kilsyth since childhood, their labour in the field limited only by the requirement to attend the Parish school[iii]. They learned to plough and sow and reap, to thresh. They herded cattle on the moss where, his father said, the bones of dead martyrs still lay fankled in the shough. They learned to tan, make rope from flax. All the artifices a gudeman needs to tend his plot. Or a hind to serve him on it.
Whilst the brothers worked on their father’s rigs, Christian nursed his babies.
Sam decides to avoid the Sixth commandment since it seemed fairly open and shut to him. The Seventh was more perplexing.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
When Sam skipped on to the prohibitions it was not, as he half-expected, fucking your neighbour’s wife.
The seventh commandment forbiddeth all unchaste thoughts, words and actions.
But how do you know a thought is unchaste until you’ve thought it? And what does unchaste even mean? And if you wake up in the chaumer at the crack of dawn with your prick hard as a bar and weeping, had you thought that dream or had it just happened? And when does thinking of wee Jeannie Moir become unchaste? Fine to do or say nothing: though what then if you’re handfasted or married? But how is a boy to avoid thinking?
His Granny Christian wasn’t a bad sort. She had raised Sam with her own when his own mother disappeared. They do not speak of her. Christian’s younger son and daughter, James and Jonet, were his playmates and his uncle and aunt. The boys attended school together until the dominie flitted and the school shut down.
They say the weather changed when Sam was born. He wondered, when he was younger, if it was his fault but the dominie assured him that it was the great iniquities and persecutions of King Charles and his successor, James, that had provoked God’s wrath.
“Iniquities including, your grandpa’s fornications, perhaps?” his father teased when Sam came home from school with that explanation..
Famine came with the new Dutch King and the poorer sorts died by the wayside.[iv] There was not much long life and prosperity for seven long years no matter how respectful folk had been.
God was ‘dishonoured by the impiety and profaneness that aboundeth…in profane and idle swearing, cursing, Sabbath-breaking, neglect and contempt of the Gospel ordinances, mocking of piety and religious exercises,’ and, of course, ‘fornication, adultery, drunkenness, blasphemy and other gross and abominable sins and vices.’ the Kirk declared.[v]
The Ministers (“Suddenly recovering their Puritan zeal,” his father said) preached like corbies from the pulpit ‘denounc[ing] the threatened judgements of God on evil-doers to bring them to a conviction of their sin and danger’. The Elders took to visiting again around the parish: to examine and catechise.
To avoid the ‘heavy displeasure and just indignation of the Holy One’, dancing, festivity and frolic at weddings and funerals and playing golf on the Sabbath were proscribed (again). Not that there was much to fuel merriment and dancing in the bleakness and hunger, Walter said.
In 1696 there was a cold bad summer, a rainy late harvest, a great frost in August so that the corn was frosted and much of it was still left to shear at Christmas.
In 1697 it was the same. Flies and insects, frogs and newts disappeared.[vi]
Sam remembers starvation with a sickening dread. The constant chill in his bare feet, his fingers. The corn was not ready to harvest until November or December. The Forresters cut their corn in frost and snow, all of them – Christian and her bairns and Sam too – the older boys, Wee John and Samuel, cropping the meagre stalks till the handle of the heugh froze to their stiff hands. He lost all feeling in his hands and feet then, when it came back, it came back in a sore, fiery tingle. Even then, with carrying and gleaning, some corn was left to rot in the field.
There was only thinner gruel and crumbling oat cakes. The meal in those years tasted sweet, like malt. The bannocks fell to pieces when Christian set them on the table.
As cottars’ bairns and old folk starved to death, Sam watched their corpses drawn on sleds across the icy ground, no coffin or mortcloth and barely a rag on their withered flesh. The famished living wearied of quarrying the frozen earth to bury their own[vii].
Though they survived, Sam and his young aunt and two uncles were skinny runts, malnourished, feral, devious. Always hungry. Always whining. They had learned to fear God.
They were too many mouths to feed.
The eighth commandment requireth the lawful procuring and furthering the wealth and outward estate of ourselves and others.
Next Spring, rather than plough and sow, Sam’s father and his Uncle Tom set off to find other work. Tom went West and found employment labouring in a town called Port Glasgow on the Clyde. Walter set off North into the Carse of Stirling where, now, the light is fading.
In the morning, Sam and his father will walk the half-mile to Gargunnock Kirk where they will sit near the back through the readings, the sermon, the examination of the substance of the preaching and, eventually, the examination of Sam’s understanding of the catechism.
Sam skips back in the book to check what he must not do tomorrow.
The fourth commandment forbiddeth the omission or careless performance of the duties required, and the profaning of the day by idleness, or doing that which is in itself sinful, or by unnecessary thoughts, words or works, about our worldly employments or recreations.
Scant chance of that in the Kirk, he reflects. The boil on his nose is starting to throb. As he sets off downhill towards the Bield, thoughts of Jeannie Moir come unbidden.
[i] The Shorter Catechism – Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland (fpchurch.org.uk)
[ii] Her mother was a Jarvay. Samuel’s grandfather, John, had not waited on ceremony however, Christian had a son by him two years before they wed.
[iii] Exceptions made at sowing or the hairst.
[iv] It is estimated that between 5% and 15% of the population died during King William’s Ill Years: the crop failures and famine, in fact, associated with volcanic activity in Iceland.
[v] T.C. Smout : History of the Scottish People
[vi] The unheard-of-manifold judgements continued […] not always alike but the seasons, winter and summer, so cold and barren, and the wonted heat of the sun so much withholden that it was discernible in the cattle, flying birds and insects decaying, that seldom a fly or a cleg was to be seen. Alistair Dawson, So Foul and Fair a Day
[vii] Through a long continuance of these manifold judgements, deaths and burials were so many and common that the living were wearied with burying the dead. […] corpses were drawn on sleds [through the winter landscape] Many got neither coffin nor winding sheet. Dawson ibid.