Hefting the sack of flax onto his shoulder, Johne Forrester steps, rather unsteadily, out of the alehouse and sets off down the dusty trail towards the Kirk. As he passes the last low structure of the toun, wisps of smoke are already rising through the thatch. It is a fine late afternoon in August. A cloudless sky colouring to the West. Swifts and martins swoop through the still air, snatching their sustenance from the clouds of midges and hoverflies that dance on the rising warmth.
The dismal howffs of the Kirkton straggle on along the Garrel Burn. From the North, the Kilsyth Hills sweep down across the parish to the banks of the Kelvin. Beyond them, other hills rise towards the Trossachs and the Highlands beyond.
His ale was paid for from a few bawbees skimmed from the sale of a month’s worth of linen yarn spun by Besse, his wife. If he had settled for one she would be none the wiser but the second and the third depleted the month’s taking enough to be noticeable and the reek on his breathe will betray more than one thirst-quenching dish…but the gossip was so alarming he had to bide.
Apparently, Sir William Livingstone has obtained a charter from the King to create a Burgh of Barony and has purchased the feu of the Minister, Reverend William Livingstone, upstream from the Kirkton on the Garrel Burn, farther from its confluence with the River Kelvin.
The new Burgh, they say, will straddle the track linking Glasgow to Stirling and Edinburgh. The proprietor will bigg up his new town and is expected to rename the parish after their seat, as so many other ‘gentlemen’ are doing. The gudemen on that land, once kindly tenants of the minister, will be turned off, made broken men and vagrants.
This parish has been border country since ancient times. A Roman named Antoninius built forts within the parish. What remains of the wall his soldiers built runs West to East through the place. It was built to protect his Empire’s northern border from the folk to the North. Highlandmen still raid but these are more peaceful times. And the benefits of peace? New roads, markets and destitution!
Decades ago, the Forresters and their neighbours were ‘kindly tenants’, their rights to their fermtoun rigs heritable and inalienable. Now the Livingstones ignore the claims of tenants who have no title deeds – and none have. If they pay their rents and work their rigs, they may be tolerated to stay. Unless Sir William chooses another tenant or to use their plots to build a burgh.
His father, Johne, farms the rigs at Balmalloch, a joint tenancy at will with three other gudemen. They pay their rents in oats and family labour mostly, a couple of chickens. The soil is heavy except close to the confluence of the Garrel and the Kelvin. Up beyond the head-dykes at Balmalloch there is only peat bog and waste.
The weather was poor when his father first farmed here but the last run of years have been better.
Each year the gudemen parcel out the good infield rigs and the poorer outfield rigs within the fermtoun’s head-dyke. The rigs are interleaved to ensure a fair share of the better and poorer ground; it makes for peaceful, neighbourly relations.
Each family has a souming of beasts they can graze beyond the head-dyke in the summer; small brown sheep, a milk cow, horses and some oxen. Between them, they own enough oxen to put together the plough-gate necessary to till the heavy earth of the rigs, eight oxen yoked to a wooden plough with an iron share.
In a month or so, it will be time to shear their corn.
Johne picks his steps carefully as he passes the manse on the Eastern edge of the toun. He notes the Reverend Livingstone, erstwhile feu-holder, scowling from his window. The Minister is no doubt composing some new fulmination against the times and manners. Best not earn a rebuke for his untimely stociousness; he’ll get enough rebuke from Besse when he gets home.
The man was a fire brand when first ‘called’ as minister of Monaebrugh. He is a fierce advocate of the Presbyterian Kirk and the Second Book of Discipline. Johne was only six when he took over the living. He remembers the preacher’s tremendous voice and forbidding countenance. He was terrifying, forever denouncing the inroads of Episcopacy, twice on the Sabbath and once on Thursday night.
By the time Johne was fourteen, the Minister had irked the King so grievously that he was put under house-arrest. It amazed young Johne that the sermons he heard each Sunday from the pulpit of Monaeburgh kirk could upset the King in London. But they did.
For six years after that, Livingstone paced back and forth across the parish but was allowed to go no further. He had no audience for his sermons and fulminations apart from folk like the Forresters. There were no learned men to pass on his sermons. Pent up here, the Minister subjected the gudewives and cottars of Monaeburgh to a lengthy master-class in Presbyterianism.
Johne’s parents were born at the beginning of the Reformation, children of the true Kirk and Godly Commonwealth. Their justification was established, according to the Minister, before the London influence reintroduced Romish ideas of Bishops and Idolatry, Ceremonials and the Arminian heresy.
When the King lifted his sanctions[i], Livingstone returned to the pulpit to denounce the Bishops that the King wanted to empower in Scotland. He was deposed again the next autumn.
The King sent Livingstone away to a new ministry in Lanark a few years later.
It didn’t last.
In the Spring, he was summoned to appear before the Court of Commission to answer charges. The Minister denied the legitimacy of the court so the court, obviously, deposed him from his ministry again and ordered his imprisonment, back in Monaebrugh, under close guard. Older but evidently no wiser, he is once again imprisoned in the manse.
Muzzled, he broods in the manse: forbidden to preach, scowling at the folk as they pass. Judging everyone from the grey windows of the manse, without the power to call the wayward to the stool.
True to his faith, he still denounces papist practices the King is trying to impose upon the Reformed Kirk. According to the gossips, he deplores kneeling rather than sitting at the Lord’s Supper. He condemns private Communion and the Baptism. He execrates the observance of Christmas and Easter. The topic of the confirmation of bishops is best avoided.
And now he has sold his feu.
When finally out of sight of the manse, Johne pauses to admire the country.
The bere and oats stand tall in the rigs. A good crop promising a sufficient winter. Soon, everyone will set to work, mowing the stalks with hand sickles, tying the sheaves, threshing the grain with flails and gleaning what seeds can be retrieved from amongst the stubble.
Four grains of bere for every seed sown: three for one of oats – one to gnaw, one to sow and one to pay the rent.
In Autumn, they will plough the infield and outfield rigs where the gudemen decide, collaboratively but as always, to plant their staple, oats.
They will plough the infield rigs left under stubble in the Spring. These rigs they devote to bere for ale. The oats are sown in February, the bere in April. Nothing else is grown except a little flax in the outfield and kail in their kailyards. The outfield rigs lie fallow two years out of three, manured by livestock penned by wattle hurdles. The fermtoun’s herdsman keeps the beasts out of the crops until after the hairst.
Rain or shine, tradition dictates the precise date for ploughing, sowing and hairst begin. As if there was no weather. As if nothing changes over years and centuries. The dates are a thing agreed. It makes for less squabbling. They thrive on oatmeal; oatcakes, porridge, gruel and broth. Meat when a beast dies and is found fresh. Existence is precarious; adequate in good years, hungry in poor years. Dubby, cold and damp, usually.
But tonight, dragonflies buzz above the rushes on the banks of the Garrel Burn. The water tumbles across its rocky bed, murmuring sleepiness into his foggy head. A buzzard soars above the moss, like Besse looking out for him.
Besse is from Tranent in the Lothians. She is a gudewife – a good wife. Inside or out, she is constantly carding and spinning flax and wool, grinding oatmeal (in secret) on an old hand quern, preparing their porridge, making their oatcakes, all with their first-born, Johne, at her breast. A linen skirt and a rough plaid pinned across her breast are all she has to wear. Winter and summer she goes barefoot.
They bide in a low thatched cottage, a single room with a central hearth – no lum. An earthen floor and a thatch of heather and broom. Walls of stone then turf. No boards. They own a meal chest, a kist, two stools, a pot and some wooden cups and spoons, the (illicit) quern and a box bed which divides the room.
This is the way of it. And it is good.
Yet he has been seduced, wretch that he is, by gossip and a third cup of ale.
The buzzard mewls shrewishly as it soars against the blue.
[i] 1612
© John Bolland 2026
[i] Kilsyth, A Parish History (electricscotland.com)
[ii] James VI wrote: “Understanding the unquiet and turbulent disposition of Maister William Livingstoun, professing himself rather a fire-brand of discord then, according to his dewtie and function, a good instrument for the unity and peace of the Church . . . oure pleasure and will is that, by our speciall command, in our name, you do confyne the said Maister William Livingstoun within the bounds of his own paroche, quhair he is preacher, inhibiting him to transcend or come forth out of the boundis thairof without our special licence had and obtenit, and that under pane of rebellion…Let this wild, young minister keep to his mosses and his badgers. They are his native place, and the best place for him.”
[iii] the Articles of Perth
[iv] i.e. if the baby was about to die.
[v] 2nd baronet and a Privy Councillor
[vi] They should grind their meal in the proprietors mill and pay a mullage for the privilege.