The Stool of Repentance

“Temperance,” wrote Walter Steuart in 1770, “is the golden mids between abstinence and intemperance; for attaining whereof, when we are sufficiently strengthened and refreshed with our ordinary diets, we should abstain betwixt them, and if we will not suffer ourselves to be thus rationally bounded, I cannot see how we can otherwise eschew the evil of being tempted to excess in drinking, both from the specious pretences and solicitations of our own voluptuous tempers, and the enticement and example of others; and if we transgress the bound above proposed, we cannot but fall into temptation … ”[1] Fair enough.

Historically, getting drunk in Scotland could be expensive, shameful, and dangerous (the latter is still true in certain parts of the country, if for different reasons). King and Church each worked hard to forestall temptation and punish those who succumbed to it. James VI, before he became a James I, and correctly known as James VI & I (His Majesties?), passed laws approving this “manner of bounding,” discharging “all haunting of taverns and ale-houses after ten hours at night, or any time of the day, excepting time of travel, or for ordinary refreshments, under the pain of being punished as drunkards.” If one denied the accusation of drunkenness, and claimed the reason for staggering about and rambling on about Rex fuit Elizabeth, nunc est regina Jacobus was simply some illness or “giddiness of the head,” such defenses, “though they may be true, yet are not relevant to defend the accused against the punishment of drunkenness …” Nor is it “to be thought hard” that the tippler is to be treated as a drunkard, “seeing it is a common observation, that tipplers are harder to be reclaimed than drunkards themselves.”

Fines for haunting taverns were “to be applied as the fines for other immoralities.“ A later Act of Parliament provided a hierarchy of fines for the hierarchy in the populus: noblemen could expect to pay 20 pounds, gentlemen, heretors, or burgesses 10 merks (a merk being 13 and 1/3 shillings, or 2/3 of one pound); servants 20 shillings, and so on, until, ominously, you got to the poor, who comprised the majority of the population and were “to be punished in their persons.” As for other crimes, drunkenness could be a defense for those committed in drink but only for those who are rarely drunk (inter ebrios). The habitually drunk (ebriosos) “should be most severely punished, both for their drunkenness, and for the crimes occasioned by it; and such as know they are subject to extravagancies in their drink, merit as little.” No such distinction was made between those who would indulge, rarely or habitually, in a toast to their drinking buddies: the drinking of healths was “Satan’s Snare” and, therefore, quite forbidden. Slainte Mhath!

There was more in store at the Kirk, which combined public exposure and repentance rather like a modern tabloid press and obligatory visit to a rehab center. Public repentance was not uncommon anywhere in Europe at the time, but the Kirk elaborated on the auto-da-fé and sackcloth. The penitent would be dressed in a white sheet (black for the fornicator), legs bared, and taken to sit on a new item of Kirk furniture, the Stool of Repentance. Such a stool was elsewhere familiar only in the Reformed Church of Hungary and Transylvania. Diarmaid MacCulloch writes that evidence of the novelty of this artifact is shown by “the English traveler who in 1598 turned up for worship at St. Giles High Kirk in Edinburgh and made for what he thought looked like an honorable and conveniently empty seat. The unfortunate gentleman thus provided sustained merriment of the assembled congregation before he eventually fled.” (The “sustained merriment” is likely the main reason the anecdote survives. There were few recorded laughs in the Old Kirk.)





The ritual (MacCulloch again) “was designed to provide a theater of forgiveness that would bring an offender back into the fold of the community from outside, a drama that often assumed the form of a serial in several episodes over successive Sundays.” He would be brought through the streets from the Kirk prison and taken to the front of the Church to perch on the stool, in his sheet, holding, like the painted saint with his instrument of martyrdom, a symbol of the act to be repented. (The participant in a violent quarrel, for example, would hold a knife or sword. MacCulloch doesn’t mention which symbol the drunkard would earn - an empty pint glass, perhaps, a handful of unpaid bills, or simply a vomit-stained sackcloth.) “Once at the stool, the penitent must make a speech of repentance and it should be sincere. The congregation was the judge as to whether the tears were real …” Forgiveness and absolution was in the congregation’s gift and even the clergy were subject to it. Further penalties would result from an unsatisfactory performance, while a positive verdict was followed by a handshake or a kiss and a hearty welcome back to fellowship.

The Stool of Repentance assisted with the staging of the soap opera, but it is not certain that it proved much of a deterrent. The “immoralities” of some certainly survived the ordeal intact: “In 1589, the Kirk of Edinburgh publicly disciplined and witnessed the repentance of Francis, earl of Bothwell for the crimes of murder and treason. It followed the ceremony with a spirited sermon on the sins of the nobility from one of Edinburgh’s chief ministers in front of Bothwell and the rest of the Scottish noblemen present. Bothwell did rather take the shine off the day’s proceedings by raping the daughter of the late early of Gowrie after he had left St. Giles Kirk…”


[1] Collections and Observations Concerning the Worship, Discipline and Government of the Church of Scotland (1770).