The Colonsay Catechist - PART III
Dr. Domhnall Uilleam Stiubhart has been researching the early years of the McNeill dynasty in Colonsay and he has very kindly forwarded a number of transcribed documents. They shed much fascinating light upon the period and are available to any researcher in Colonsay. Dr. Stiubhart has gone even further - he is researching and writing a special series upon the religious and educational background to the period, of which Part I and II appeared in Corncrake issues # 45 and 47.
This week I’ll take a brief look at the difficulties faced by the Church of Scotland and its ministers in the Gàidhealtachd during the 1720s. The Rev. Neil Campbell of Jura and Colonsay was certainly not alone in the troubles he faced, and I hope that we might understand his grievances better if we put them in a wider context. Next time I hope to look at how the Royal Bounty of one thousand pounds for preachers and catechists came to be given to the Church of Scotland in 1725, before returning to Colonsay and its schoolmaster James Moore.
iii: The Church of Scotland
It was now over thirty years since the church had reverted to presbyterianism in 1690. At that time the vast majority of clergy who accepted the new presbyterian establishment were to be found south of the Tay; many ministers further to the north still adhered to the previous episcopal establishment. A new generation of native Gaelic presbyterians were gradually coming through the ranks, but the numbers, especially in the north-west Gàidhealtachd, were still pitifully small. I should like here to discuss the difficulties these ministers faced in fulfilling their office, attending to their flocks, and spreading the presbyterian gospel throughout their parishes.
The most common difficulty facing ministers from the Gàidhealtachd was the sheer unwieldiness of their parishes, many of which had remained largely unchanged since the medieval era. Although the presbyterian Synod of Argyll had undertaken some boundary reforms during the late 1650s, these were promptly reversed when episcopalianism was reintroduced after the Restoration. Larger parishes, with the widely scattered population typical of the Gàidhealtachd of that time, would have several different places of worship, sometimes as many as four or five. These might be well-nigh inaccessible in winter, when the minister would be forced to struggle there on foot, on rugged tracks through mountains, moorland and rivers in spate. If and when he reached his destination, he would generally have to preach outside; even the main church of the parish itself might be little more than a neglected and roofless ruin. We should remember just how disjointed many mainland parishes were, with portions and pendicles scattered often at some distance from the principal seat of worship. In many districts the neat and orderly consolidation carried out in the Victorian era, as presented even in scholarly histories, has obscured the crazy patchwork of earlier times, a seemingly haphazard arrangement rooted in the old medieval estates.
If the mainland parish was all too often an enormous, mountainous and disjointed tract of land, the Hebridean parishes off the west coast were generally even worse. The conscientious minister would visit each of the several islands in his charge, having to pay dear, of course, for the various ferry and accommodation charges he would incur. The seas, treacherous enough in summer, were often quite unnavigable during winter, from October until April. A Highland ministry was thus an extraordinarily demanding one, and the sheer strain of the task soon told upon the clergy.
The obvious and ideal solution, of course, would be to split the larger parishes and to erect new ones. However, a variety of obstacles stood in the way. The fundamental stumbling-block was the objections of local heritors to any such scheme. By law parish landowners had to provide and maintain church, manse, glebe (four "soums" capable of supporting four cows or forty sheep), grass (to support the minister’s horse and two cows) as well as communion elements. They had also to pay the minister’s stipend – his living allowance – out of the teinds, a levy on crops and other farm produce. Not only were most landowners unwilling to pay the extra – often quite considerable – expense, often, given the poor quality of their estates, it was difficult enough for them to pay for the minister they had, let alone pay for an extra one in a new parish. To make matters worse, a clause inserted into an act of parliament of 1696 stated that parishes could not be split without the consent of three-quarters of the heritors. Across vast tracts of the Gàidhealtachd, this measure effectively blocked any further reorganisation of the parish system. Recalcitrant heritors could have other more subtle weapons up their sleeves too: when a new cadre of ministers were settled in Wester Ross in the late 1720s, we see the local landowners refusing to pay the stipends due themselves, but laying the onus of collecting what was due from their tenantry upon the ministers themselves, thereby putting the clergy in a very awkward situation indeed.
It is notable that the only parishes in the Gàidhealtachd which were eventually divided up during the early eighteenth century were either those on land forfeited from their previous episcopal or Catholic owners and run by government officials, or else, very infrequently, where the land was owned outright by zealous heritors. The new parishes erected in Lewis in 1722, in Skye and the Small Isles in 1726, and in Wester Ross in 1727, could only be created because they were situated on the forfeited estates of Mackenzie of Seaforth, MacDonald of Sleat, MacDonald of Clan Ranald and Mackinnon of Strath, all of which were being administered for the government by the Barons of the Exchequer. Even then, the barons were far from happy with seeing what must have been a handy source of private revenue being creamed off by the church. With possible restoration of the estates to agents of the original owners looming, the church had to threaten legal action before the later batches of reorganisation were carried out. On the other hand, the extensive reorganisation of the parishes on Lord Reay’s estate in the far north-west, or Dùthaich MhicAoidh, was solely due to Reay’s enthusiasm for the presbyterian church, and his fervent and tireless lobbying of the commission of the General Assembly year after year.
Most Highland landowners, however, were less than enthusiastic about having to pay for new ministers. On the other hand, the church, both at local and national level, was often not particularly keen on antagonising the leading men in the district, especially given that these men often served as the ruling elders who accompanied their ministers to the General Assembly every May, and so had an important voice in deciding church policy. The situation was even more tricky on the west coast, because the Synod of Argyll was permitted by acts of parliament of 1690 and 1696 to keep the monies due to ministers of unplanted parishes there – the "vacant stipends" – for its own use. Rather extraordinarily, it was thus in the synod’s financial interest to keep these parishes without ministers, a fact which led to more than one clash with zealous local presbyteries.
Last week we saw how a new "super-synod", the Synod of Glenelg, was created in the north-west in 1724. The major alterations in presbytery and synod boundaries around this time were in effect a second-best solution. They allowed the church to intensify its missionary efforts across the western seaboard, without the inconvenience and expense of having to create new parishes. It was evidently intended that these new, more localized church courts would permit more frequent meetings of local ministers, and would also ensure that the General Assembly would be able to supervise the ministers much more closely. However, the basic problem remained: how to ensure the church’s message was heard in vast, widely-scattered and isolated parishes, above all where these parishioners were already being ministered to by local Catholic missionary priests.
Another problem was increasingly preoccupying the church during the 1720s: the sheer lack of Gaelic-speaking clergy in the Gàidhealtachd. Few families in the region were able to send their sons to university, let alone to study divinity. The church tried to get round this problem by trying to rustle up bursaries for any promising young Gaels – "diverse hopeful youths", as they are described in its minutes –and demanded that presbyteries, Lowland as well as Highlands, used what educational bursaries they had to train Gaelic-speaking ministers. Lowland presbyteries were understandably rather slow to pay for Gaels rather than their own sons. After a few years the bursary system was full up.
Even when Gaelic-speaking ministers did minister in Gaelic-speaking parishes, there was the problem of ensuring that they stayed there. Some Gàidhealtachd parishes, especially the many smaller parishes in Argyll, were certainly more appealing than others. There are a number of cases during this time when presbyteries complained that long-suffering ministers in the most demanding parishes in their bounds were – no doubt most willingly – poached by friends and sympathetic acquaintances in neighbouring presbyteries, and settled with easier flocks to care for.
The troubles faced by the Church of Scotland in the Gàidhealtachd were certainly pressing. What made them a matter of national concern was a matter which had been identified with the region for some time now. Nearly every year the church would hear memorials from Highland presbyteries and synods bewailing their grievances, their vast parishes, their unsympathetic heritors, but there was one particular complaint which was guaranteed an audience at the General Assembly, a complaint which increasingly preoccupied the church’s councils, and would soon, for a brief while at least, focus the attention of the state as well. This was the problem of the increase in Roman Catholicism, or, as it was known to protestant contemporaries, the "growth of popery".
It is perhaps difficult for us nowadays to understand just how wide-spread, indeed universal, anti-Catholicism was in the English-speaking areas of the United Kingdom during the early modern period and beyond. Speaking of England itself, Eamon Duffy describes it as "as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason"[1.]; to Linda Colley, anti-Catholicism was "a powerful cement between the English, the Welsh and the Scots, particularly lower down the social scale."[2.] The church records of the time are crammed with references to the dangers of "swarms of trafficking priests" and "popish emissaries".
Periodic bursts of panic about the growth of popery were all too common in the early eighteenth century. Whether they were justified in a purely religious sense is another matter. There certainly was some increase in the number of Roman Catholics in Scotland during this period; indeed, the numbers may have doubled. However, the actual figures involved were extremely small, possibly from some six thousand at the end of the seventeenth century to over sixteen thousand in 1763 – still a mere two per cent of the Scottish population at the time.[3.] But such statistics tend to hide the facts, firstly, that the growth was overwhelmingly in one region – the Gàidhealtachd; and secondly, that rather than being a slow curve upwards, such increases inevitably took place in short bursts as priests and other missionaries entered new areas and began to win over followers. The early 1720s saw just such a phase, and to local presbyterians it must have appeared as if the world was turning upside down.
Under the dynamic leadership of Bishop James Gordon the Catholic mission to the Highlands was revitalized, especially in the 1720s. Under the patronage of Alexander, second duke of Gordon, from 1716 onwards boys were trained up for the priesthood in the remote seminary of Scalan in Gaelic-speaking Banffshire. Now, for the first time, there was a substantial number of local priests operating in the Gàidhealtachd, able to use local knowledge and family networks to win converts at all levels of society. With the help of Catholic sympathizers among the local gentry, the priests were holding their own in areas on the western seaboard such as the Rough Bounds, Uist and Barra, areas of Catholic religion since the earlier seventeenth century. On the other hand, there were new successful mission fields, such as Lochaber, and the areas bordering Catholic Strathglass. The priests’ task was perhaps made easier by the dying off of the final generation of the old episcopal ministers. Many of the new generation of episcopal preachers, indeed, saw Catholics as allies against an encroaching presbyterianism. This was the more so because both denominations were strongly linked with the jacobite cause.
Catholicism and jacobitism were interchangeable in the eyes of the presbyterian church: "’Tis needless to observe that to make one a Papist, is to make him also a Jacobite." James VII had been exiled for his championing of the catholic cause, and his son, the titular James VIII, held to his father’s religion. The catholics in Scotland, it must be said, were hardly blameless in their political views. They were imbued with jacobitism; Bishop Gordon had encouraged James VIII to launch the 1715 rising; his Highland successor Bishop Hugh MacDonald was to welcome Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745. Catholics were estranged from the protestant establishment, and the Church of Scotland was all too willing to stress this in their official memorials to the government. The growth of Roman Catholicism in the Gàidhealtachd was not just a threat to the church, it was also a threat to the entire British state. The Presbytery of Lorn, in a memorial of 1722, appealed to the General Assembly thus:
We have long lyen under personal grievances but now the growth of Popery is like to turn dangerous to state & church it being certain that every one that is brought over to Popery, is at the same time brought over to be an enemy to His Majesty King George, and the protestant succession in his royal family, upon the security whereof depends under God our most valuable libertys and privileges, sacred & civil.
To the church at this time, Catholicism "appears to diffuse and spread itself so exceedingly, that if it be not timeously and effectualy presented, threatens the apostatizing of many unto Popery, to the great disturbance and danger of this National Church and the Protestant Succession".
Whether the government was prepared to do anything about it is another matter. Following the failure of the 1715 jacobite rising, the Gàidhealtachd had been left as something of a power vacuum. The Independent Companies had been disbanded, and the legal apparatus of the region placed in the hands of Squadrone supporters. Despite the constant demands of the Church of Scotland that action be taken against the growth of popery, the authorities were as a rule unwilling to put the penal laws into effect, and make matters worse for them in an already somewhat lawless region. Priests were thus still allowed to preach and convert, while Catholic heirs could be educated in their faith of their father, and succeed to his estate. The situation was especially difficult for presbyterian clergy who ministered in areas dominated by local Catholic magnates, above all in the great swathes of country where the duke of Gordon was superior; or else lived far from legal authorities who could perhaps be persuaded into taking action against local Catholics.
There is a basic problem when we discuss such phenomena as "the growth of popery" – or the survival of episcopalianism or indeed the growth of presbyterianism itself during this period. The simple question is, what exactly did such ideological commitment mean to the people of the Gàidhealtachd in the early eighteenth century? As we have seen, there was a tiny number of clergy of all denominations ministering across a huge area to a scattered population. In the absence of a settled local ministry and a comprehensive system of church schools and catechists, most people were simply not exposed to matters of dogma, and didn’t particularly care about them either.
In fact, what most people wanted of a clergyman seems to have been that he marry them, bury them, and, above all, that he baptize their children, so that if a child died early, he or she could be buried with a name in a churchyard. It was not overly important who carried this out, as long as he was a man of God. Judging from the church records of the time, most people were prepared to pray with priests and ministers alike. Neither side, of course, could let this state of affairs continue. The Church of Scotland, as we shall see, laid increasing stress on catechizing and educating the people of the Gàidhealtachd in the presbyterian faith, reaching out to a new generation. Although it is not so well documented, it is clear that there was a similar drive among Catholic priests to bring up young people in their own faith. There was a polarizing of religion during this period, but for most people during the early eighteenth century we might be permitted to wonder just how strong confessional allegiances were – as long, of course, as they remained detached from political and clan loyalties.
Notes to the above:
1. Eamon Duffy, ""Poor protestant flies": conversions to Catholicism in early eighteenth-century England" in Derek Baker (ed), Religious motivation: biographical and sociological problems for the church historian (Studies in Church History xv, Oxford, 1978), 289-90.
2. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the nation 1707-1837 (London, 1992), 23.
3. Daniel Szechi, "Defending the True Faith: kirk, state, and Catholic missioners in Scotland, 1653-1755", Catholic Historical Review 82 (1996), 399.
Readers Write
NOTICE:
Any correspondence relating to current events will hopefully be found in the first part of the "Corncrake" after the News section. Items in connection with history, genealogy etc. will appear here.
MacCannell Matters:
I recently forwarded to a reader a MacCannell history that I had been given, it transpires that the original was the work of Anne McCannell and is an ongoing work-in-progress. Anne has been in touch and generously invites me to put researchers on Colonsay MacCannells in touch with her so that all available information can be shared. I would have posted Anne's address here but have failed to manage to get it off her message - but I have saved it in my address book so to be put in touch just send me a message and request that I forward it to Anne MacCannell - Editor
Hi, I love your newsletter!
I was the first one to find this site and emailed my family about it. Bea is my
Aunt, my father's older sister. I travel to Scotland a few times a year for
business. Last year, I took my wife with me during our Thanksgiving. I didn't
realize that the ferry did not run every day, and our schedule did not allow us to
wait the additional three days for the boat, so we missed the opportunity to see
the Island. We spent the night in Oban for their Christmas Lighting
ceremony/parade. It was a lot of fun.
I love the history of the family, and of the island. I have been after my
relatives for years about the family line and any stories they have, but they
have never come up with anything concrete. Bea is really pushing now to pull it
all together, and it's fantastic. I will be back in Scotland in a few months,
and I will try to get over to the Island then. When I come to Scotland, it's
usually to Edinburgh.
I was fitted for a kilt a year or so ago. To the best of anyone's knowledge,
the MacCannell's fall under the Lord of the Isles. Do you know if that is
correct?
I am also trying to get the family to have a "homecoming" back to Colonsay
sometime soon. My dad (David) has 8 siblings, plus my grandmother, and all the
kids, and their kids- quite a brood!
Timothy J MacCannell
Hi Kevin
Anne McCannell gave me your email addresses and told me about Corncrake. I
am so happy to hear about Corncrake. My McCannells are on the last issue of
your Corncrake but I have them from Jura. No matter. I got most of mine from
IGI in Scotland and then from a researcher in Canada for them when they
moved to Ontario Canada and then I found them myself in Manitoba, Canada in
North Dakota, USA, Montana, USA and in California USA.
I am unable to get my McCannells back any further than JOHN MCCANNEL b.
1781and his wife MARY SMITH b.1775. I have taken information on John and
Mary's children from the Colonsay web page which is the same as the last
Corncrake with McCannells.(I am so happy to see McCannells as I have found
it such a hard name to trace both back, sideways an down).
My family is the attachment 'MY LINE descendants of John McCannell born
1781'
You are welcome to post it as all listed have passed away now. I have lots
of information including wills etc. which others are welcome to if they just
ask. #5 below Cyril Malcolm Davis was my father b: August 27, 1913 in
Vancouver, BC, Canada d: June 23, 1994 in Eagle Ridge Hospital, Port Moody,
B.C., Canada
I have three other McCannell families which I have on my FTM which all
originated in Jura, Islay and Colonsay. I know people living from each
family and they and myself are interested in going back in the lines. Mostly
I want to see if the three other lines and mine connect. They tell me it is
okay to post their trees just in case something comes up.
I have them as attachments for you.
Gilbert McDonald McCannell born 1791
Descendants of Donald McCannell
Descendants of John McCannel
Kevin I hope you don't think I have given you too much here but just thought
someone may write and want McCannel(l) information and I want you to have it
and feel free to hand this out or post it. It is so weird that there seem to
be so few McCannells and yet we can't find a common ancestor for our lines.
Plus the ones in PEI in Canada don't seem connected either.
Thanks again for listening to me here and take care.
Judy in BC Canada
rhassall@axion.net
[Judy sent 4 attached documents as follows: 1.Descendants of John McCannell Sr., 1781 - 1841; 2. Descendants of Gilbert (McDonald) McCannell 1791 - 1888, born Sheneghael, Kilmeny; 3. Descendants of John McCannel m. Marie Sinclair; 4. Descendants of Donald McCannel, m. Mary Lindsay 8 January 1820 They can be consulted at Homefield or forwarded … please mention diaspora/mccannellJH1 (or 2,3,4) please - Editor]
Hi, my name is Ellen Darroch and I am currently researching my family history.
I know that my Great-Grandfather, Donald Darroch (1850-1925), came from Jura and I am reseraching into this.
My Great-Grandmother, Ann McFadyen, was born on the 17th October 1865 on Kilchattan, Colonsay. Her father was John McFadyen and his occupation in 1865, according to Ann McFadyen's Birth Certificate, was that of a Fisherman. Her mother was Margaret McNeill and her occupation in 1865 was that of a Domestic Servant.
I have looked at your Census of 1841 and see that there was a family of McFadyens in Kilchataton. Is this my Great-Grandmother's family? If so, do you have any further information on the family?
Also, do you have any information on my Great-Grandmother's mother, Margaret McNeill and her family? I do not have any information on her parents' names.
Ann McFadyen moved to Glasgow and married her first husband, Alexander McMillan, in 1888. They had 2 children, Alexander and Sarah. Ann's first husband died and she married my Great-Grandfather, Donald Darroch, in 1894. They had 2 children, Donald Darroch and Margaret Darroch. Donald Darroch was my Grandfather. Ann McFadyen died in 1902. My Grandfather moved to Birkenhead, Wirral, Merseyside and remained there. I, myself, live on the Wirral, Merseyside.
I would dearly love to trace any living descendants still on Colonsay or any descendants who have moved away from the Island and who like me are trying to trace their roots. Do you know of any such people?
If you need any further information please do not hesitate to contact me on
Elle@darrochofjura.freeserve.co.uk.
I am coming to Colonsay in the Summer and it would be wonderful to know more about my Great-Grandmother's family.
I very much look forward to hearing from you - Elle
We will be happy to receive more letters and, as always, the editor would like to hear from anyone who might wish to contribute. Individual articles on news or local events will always be welcome.
Contact
"Murchadh Saighdear" by Andrew McMorrine
