INSTITUCIO NES INTERNACIO NALES

The careful planning and activities of the Convocation and its committees meant that when the first Assembly of the Free Church

convened, the organisation of the new church was well advanced.' Nevertheless there were still many problems to be faced; problems of man-power, continuing finance and providing the necessary buildings.

The problem of man-power resolved itself into three sections. Were there enough ministers to supply all the congregations who wished to have their own minister? Were there enough elders and lay members to support the ministers in their ministries? Were there enough

members able and willing to provide the money needed for the expansion of the Church into every parish?

There are doubts about the exact number of ministers who joined the Free Church. 130 ministers and 76 eiders signed Dr.Welsh's

protest and left the Established Church in his wake on 18th Hay,1843. Pitcairn et al. also claimed that during the following two days the number of ministers signing the Act of Separation and Deed of Demission had risen to 458.’ HcCosh put the total at 454 ministers and 192 probationers^ while Thomas Brown listed a total of 481 ministers who "left the Scottish Establishment in 1843".# Of these figures those of McCosh are likely to be the most correct since, at least for the three study presbyteries, they agree with the entries in the Church of of Scotland Fasti. G e o r g e Robertson suggests a possible reason for the discrepancies between these figures. He claims that some

ministers delayed their departure from the Church of Scotland for a variety of reasons; to ensure there was a meeting place to hold their services, or to ensure they had somewhere to live or to conduct a last

1. Thomas Pitcairn, Patrick Clason and John Jeffrey, The affectionate representation of ministers and elders lately connected with the Established Church (Edinburgh, n.p., 1843) 2. McCosh, The wheat and the chaff, 1843.

This presented a presbytery by presbytery analysis of the names of ministers joining the Free Church and'remaining with the Established Church. It also gave thumb-nail sketches of those ministers who had supported the non-intrusionist movement but did not leave the Establishment.

3. Tÿiomas Brown, Annals, 1893. pp. 797-812 4. Fasti, vol.5.

communion in their old church. It was for this last reason that George Brown, minister of New Byth in the Presbytery of Turriff for twenty-six years, did not Join the Free Church until early July, 1843.*

The inclusion of probationers by HcCosh is particularly

important since these men were already licenced preachers of the Gospel and could be ordained as soon as congregations called them. Thus it would not be erroneous to say that in fact c650 ministers joined the Free Church in 1843, if probationers are included. Such was the overall picture for the whole of Scotland.

Unfortunately for the new church the support it received was not evenly spread. Within the bounds of the Synod of Boss 76% of

ministers joined the Free Church while only 19% of ministers within the Synod of Dumfries did so.* This point is well illustrated by

Table 6.1 which shows the number of ministers joining the Free Church and the number of Free Church congregations in each of the study

presbyteries. By 1848 the number of ordained Free Church ministers in pastoral charges had risen to 700.’’

TABLE 6.I

NUMBER OF MINISTERS J,QINXMG.._THBA?EEE_GHURCJLjy[D-.jrflE_Mim£R_QE. FREE CHURCH.CONGREGATIONS IN THE THREE STUDY PRESBYTERIES Presbytery Total number Ministers joining Free Church

of Ministers Free Church Congregations No. % No. % parishes

Cupar 22 9 40.9 12 60. 0

Dundee 28 16 57. 1 20 71.4

St.Andrews 22 5 22.7 8 36.4

National 1195 454 37. 9

Source. McCosh, The wheat and the chaff. 1843

Estimating the number of elders throughout Scotland who seceded to the Free Church is much more difficult. It appears that the only reasonably authentic national figure available is that of the 76 elders 5. George Booth Robertson, Spiritual awakening in the north east of

Scotland and the disruption of the Church in 1843,, Ph.D. Thesis in the University of Aberdeen, 1970. pp.438-9.

6. McCosh, The wheat and the chaff, p. 12. 7. Buchanan, Ten years conflict, 1852. p.468

who signed 'The Protest' made on 18th May, 1843.# The only other source of numbers is the minute books of individual kirk sessions. Established kirk sessions do not always mention the Disruption in their minutes even if their minister and some members of the kirk session seceded to the Free Church and thus contain no record of the number of elders who joined the Free Church. This problem is not eased by the fact that some ministers appear to have run their parishes without the aid of ruling elders. Even as late as 1850 six parishes within the bounds of the Presbytery of Cupar had no ruling elders whatever and two other parishes had only one.# Thus eight out of nineteen parishes had no effective kirk sessions. The whole question of elders who joined the Free Church or remained in the Established Church is fully discussed in Chapter 8.

Assessing the number of lay people joining the Free Church is extremely difficult although various estimates have been made. Reid writing in 1960 claims that the Free Church had c.250 000 members in 1 8 4 7 . Also in 1960 Burleigh estimated that the Established Church lost about a third of its membership of all classes.’’

Stewart Brown, twenty years later, assumed that 40% of lay members left the Establishment.’’- These figures must be regarded as extremely doubtful especially as these writers do not give the sources of their "guesstimates".

There appear to be only three sources from which national membership figures could be calculated - local church records, the Religious census of 1851 and the membership figures cited in Ewing's

Annals of the Free Church (1913). Each of these sources has its faults not only as a source of information on numbers of laity joining the Free Church in 1843 but also inherently.

8. Pitcairn et.al., Affectionate representation, 1843. 9. Cupar Presbytery minutes 26th March, 1850.

10. Reid, /firir and nation, 1960. p. 143.

11. Burleigh, Church History, 1960. pp.352, 373, 12. Stewart Brown, Thomas Chalmers, 1982. p.336

Individual kirk session records rarely give numbers of members or communicants in 1843-4. Kirk session minutes reveal frequent revisions of communion rolls without giving details and the rolls themselves seem seldom to have survived. Among those that are still extant are Dundee Free Hi11town with 488 members in 1843'# and Dundee Free St. Peter's with 1 000+ in 1844. ' These figures do not help in ascertaining the proportion of seceders as they provide no indication of congregational size in these areas before the Disruption.

Cupar Parish Session, after 1841, recorded the number of tables at each coiranunion in both the Parish and St.Michael's Churches (see Table 6.2 p.165). The drop in the number of tables at communion services after the Disruption gives some indication of the size of the secession in the parish. This was c.30% in the Old Church and c.20% in St. Michael ' s. This differential illustrates, in part, the

influence some ministers were able to exert over their congregations, Adam Cairns, the minister who usually officiated in the Old Church, seceded while James Cochrane at St.Michael's did not. From 1845 the Kirk Session began recording the actual number of communicants at each table, On average each table at the Old Church represents one

hundred communicants whilst a table at St. Michael's represents fifty.’* Thus over 400 parishioners appear to have joined the Free Church from a congregation of more than a thousand. This estimate of the pre- Disruption roll seems reasonably accurate since there was a

authenticated roll of over 500 male heads of family at the time of the call to James Cochrane in 1842.’* These figures agree more with the estimate made by Stewart Brown than with that made by Burleigh but the events in one congregation cannot be assumed to be representative of the Church as a whole.

Figures relating to four other parishes reveal there was wide differences in the rate of secession between individual parishes, Anstruther Easter Kirk Session recorded the number of communicants at

13. Dundee Free Hilltown Kirk Session minutes 12th July, 1843, 14. Dundee Free St.Peter's Kirk Session minutes 4th March, 1844, 15. Cupar Parish Kirk Session minutes 1845 - 50,

16. Thfe Witness 16th April, 1842, 164

TABLE

NUMBER OF TABLES.AT PARISH COMMUNIONS HELD IN CUPAR OLD AND CUPAR SX, MICHAEL''S .CHURCHES . 1842-44

Date of Number of Tables

Communion Old St. Michael's

July 1842 9 7 December, 1842 7 7 July,1843 6 6 December, 1843 5 5 July, 1844 7 6 November, 1844 5 5

Source:- Cupar Parish Kirk Session minutes

most communion services between May, 1839 and November, 1845. Eight services before the Disruption had attendances ranging from 298 to 390 with an average of 341. There is no record of a communion service in November, 1843. This omission may have been due to there being

insufficient time for the new minister to make the arrangements. The attendances at communions during the next two years averaged 166.

Thus there seems to have been a drop in the average attendance of 175 which would indicate that 51% of the congregation seceded. In fact the parish communion roll indicates a drop of only 43%. The

discrepancy could have been due to people from neighbouring parishes taking communion or, since the Sentinel supported the Free Church, to faulty reporting.

A newspaper report indicates that the greatest number attending communion services in the Parish of Largo before the Disruption had been 534. The report also stated that there had been 311 communicants at the Free Church service in the parish at the July, 1843 celebration and that 58 more people had joined that Church shortly afterwards. This seems to denote a secession by 58% of the parishioners.

Dundee St.David’s Kirk Session recorded 1 120 communicants a fortnight before the Disruption in May, 1843. In the October of that year the Free Church in the parish was claiming a communion roll of

17. The Sentinel 28th'March, 1844. Anstruther Easter Parish communion roll, 1843,

nearly 700, showing that approximately 60% of the congregation had seceded.

Monifieth Kirk Session distributed 490 communion tokens in July, 1842 but only 300 in June, 1844 (there is no record for 1843), Thus 39% of the membership seem to have joined the Free Church. In this parish the minister seceded but none of the elders joined him.'-’

The average rate of secession from the five parishes, for which comparative figures are available, was 46%. This rate is slightly higher than the 33% estimated by Burleigh in 1960 and the 40% estimated by Stewart Brown in 1982. Although it is not possible to arrive at a statistically reliable figure with any degree of confidence from such a small sample as five parishes it does appear likely that more than 40% of the communicants of the Established Church did in fact join the Free Church during 1843.

The faults with the 1851 Religious Census in Scotland have been widely discussed.#* These include the fact that the census was voluntary and many ministers made no returns. Such returns as were made were almost certainly subjected to at least rounding up. There is evidence of this in the number of instances where attendances were stated in exact tens or hundreds since it is most unlikely that many congregations consisted of precisely e.g., 110 or 200 persons.

Furthermore attendance figures for each diet of worship are given with no indication of how many people were present at more than one service on census day. Thus it is not possible to arrive at probable

membership figures.

The major fault with the Scottish census is that the returns from individual churches were lost many years ago.#’ The suimnary tables derived from the missing returns by individual congregations are

18. Dundee St.Davids Kirk Session minutes 8th May, 1843.

Dundee St.Davids Free Kirk Session minutes 4th October, 1843. 19. Monifieth Kirk Session minutes.

20. e.g., Andrew L. Drummond and James Bulloch, The Church in Victariaii Scotland, (Edinburgh, St. Andrew Press, 1975). pp.110-3

21. David J.Brown, Historical Search Room, Scottish Record Office,

easily available and those relevant to this study are given in Table 6.3 These tables show that in eight years the Free Church had

achieved near parity with the Established Church in numbers of places of worship although they were, in general, slightly smaller. The average Established church had 586 seats and the average Free church had 512. It would appear that Free Church members were the better church-goers, especially to afternoon and evening services. Some of this increased attendance was undoubtedly due to the appearance in church of domestic and other servants whose work had prevented attendance in the morning. Despite a common modern belief to the contrary, much of the extra attendance was probably due to the number of working class members and attenders rising late on Sundays and going to church later in the day. This phenomenon was much more evident in

TABL^-6-^

COMPARISON OF THE ESTABLISHED AND FREE CHURCHES,-. ACCOMMODATION AND ATTENDANCE 30/3/1851

Estab. WHOLE OF SCOTLAND Free % Free of Estab. places of worship 904 824 91.2 sittings (000s) 530 422 79.6 attendances (000s) morning 229 255 111.4 afternoon 120 174 145.0 evening 20 57 285.0 PARISH OF CUPAR places of worship 3 1 33.3 sittings 3 300 1050 31.8 attendances morning 1 300 850 65.4 afternoon 1 450 950 65.5 evening 70 PARISH OF DUNDEE places of worship 11 12 109.1 sittings 8 884 11 518 129.6 attendances morning 5 603 6 455 115,2 afternoon 6 334 7 452 117.7 evening 700 1 400 200. 0 PARISH OF ST.ANDREWS places of worship 1 6 2 33.3 sittings 456 1 144 78.6 attendances morning 2 085 766 36.7 afternoon 1 696 833 49. 1 evening 350 - —

Source;- Religious Census 1851 - Tables and Report Percentages personal calculations

167

Dundee where there were many more industrial wage earning Free Church members than in the other parishes represented in Table 6.3. There is further support for this contention in that Thomas Dodds, Dundee Free Lochee, instituted evening services in 1847 for the benefit of working people in his area.##

Although the original congregational census returns have been lost many of them were published in local newspapers shortly after the census date.#’ These were collected by James Dawson and published in his Statistical History of Scotland in 1855.

Ewing presents an entirely different set of data in that he gives membership numbers for 1848. It is unlikely that his data was markedly wrong as it was based on contemporary official Free Church figures.

Whatever may be the basic faults with the census data and, hence, with those of Dawson they do not seem to apply to the three study presbyteries. Both Dawson and Ewing supply data for twenty- four of the Free Church congregations included in Table 6.4. These twenty-four sets of data correlate very highly using Pearson's product- raoment coefficient of correlation#* which gives a coefficient of 0.942 which is significant at well above the 0.001 level.#' Thus the census data can be used in this study with as much confidence as can normally be given to historical data. It would, however, be rash to assume that these remarks can be applied to data from other areas or

22. Dundee Free Presbytery minutes 6th October, 1847.

23. Drummond and Bulloch, The church in Victorian Scotland, (1975). p.111.

24. James Hooper Dawson, The abridged statistical history of Scotland, (Edinburgh, W.H.Lizars, new issue, 1855)

25. William Ewing, Annals of the Free Church of Scotland,

(Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1914, 2 vols) (hereafter, Ewing, FC Annals) vol. II

26. For an explanation of this technique see e.g. Roderick Floud, An introduction to quantitative methods for historians, (London, Methuen, 1979). pp.138-42

27. Significance at this level means that the "odds" of the degree of correspondence shown by these two sets of data occurring purely by chance are well' over 1 000 to 1. For a fuller explanation of statistical significance see e.g., Anthony Haber and Richard P. Runyon, General Statistics, (London, Addison- Wesley, 2nd edn. 1973), pp.208-10.

other denominations without verification.

One aspect of the Disruption which is clear from this section of the study is that there is a great need for more extensive research into the number of lay people who joined the Free Church in 1843.

George Robertson makes the same point in his study of the north-east of Scotland and, in particular, makes several assertions which require verification. He claims that in parishes with an active, assiduous Evangelical minister during the period immediately preceding the

Disruption, large numbers of members would join the Free Church. He also suggests that an Evangelical laird in a parish was able to exert great influence for the Free Church and that a combination of

Evangelical laird and minister was usually irresistible, although the reverse was also true, Finally he holds that elders were more likely to follow their minister's lead than was the rest of the congregation.

The only one of Robertson's assertions which seems to be fully substantiated by the present study is that relating to elders. The reason for elders following their minister appears to have been the fact that ministers were able to select their own elders. This study provides some support for Robertson's other points but there is insufficient hard evidence for a definite statement to be nnade.

Doubt must remain on these aspects until enough comparable Established and Free Church communion rolls relating to the period of the Disruption have been examined in detail and analysed.

The number of local congregations in which Free Church members worshipped expanded very slowly after 1843. Table 6.4 (p.170) shows those congregations founded within the study area between 1844 and 1900 when the Free Church amalgamated with the United Presbyterian Church to become the United Free Church. To some extent this slow expansion was due to the pre-Dlsruption success in founding potential

congregations. Chalmers, in a report to the first Free Assembly, said that 687 local associations in support of the Free Church had been

28. George Booth Robertson, Spiritual awaifening, 1970. pp. 454-5. 29. chap.8 pp.226-29.

f o r m e d T h i s was an increase of 282 (70%) in the month before the new church had been constituted.

FREE CHURCH COHGREGATIQHS FOUNDED. 18.4.4-19.0.0. Congregation Founded Membership

FREE PRESBYTERY OF CUPAR Strathmiglo North 1877 131

FREE PRESBYTERY OF DUNDEE Dundee St.Enoch's 1874 Wellgate 1850 266 in 1866 Chalmers 1852 150 in 1859 Broughty Ferry 1861 205 in 1866 East

FREE PRESBYTERY OF ST.ANDREW'S

Carnbee 1844 74 in 1855

St.Honan's 1878 82 in 1900

Wormit 1890s opened 1900 as U.F.church

Source: - Ewing, F. C,annals, (Edinburgh, 1914)

Each of these associations was a potential congregation which would require a minister. As only 454 ministers left the

Establishment for the Free Church there was obviously a serious shortage of ordained ministers. Act XIX of the first Free Assembly put the shortage at 285 ministers with an immediate need for 201. Figures for the Synod of Fife were 27 and 15 while those for the Synod of Angus and Hearns were 27 and 20. Within the study area the Free Presbytery of Cupar required 4 ministers, Dundee needed 6 and St.Andrew's were short of 3.^'

The 192 probationers who adhered to the Free church went a long way towards filling the Immediate need for ministers. The remaining congregations had to make do with preachers i.e., licentiates,