A Palmful of Water For Your Years Babie

CHAPTER FOUR
‘A Palmful of Water for Your Years’:

Babies, Religion, and Gender among
Crofting Families in Scotland,
1800-1850
Elizabeth Ritchie
I n the winter of 1831, Captain Martin MacLeod saddled up his horse and
pounded over the muddy Skye roads. His baby was ill and the parish
minister refused to baptize it. The Presbytery was meeting that day in
Portree and he had to persuade them to force his minister’s hand.
However, by the time he returned home that evening, the baby was dead.1
Understanding the importance of this rite of passage to the McLeod family
and why the minister refused to perform it illuminates the effect that
changing religious identities had on gender roles and family life within
Scotland’s crofting community.
The Gaelic-speaking, northwest Highlands is a region which
experienced fundamental economic and social change in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, specifically the introduction of
crofting. This area is distinct because its economy, culture, and language
varies from the southern and eastern Highlands and from the northern
Isles. As the new crofting structure developed, significant cultural
adaptations emerged as communities struggled to adjust. Religion played a
defining role in this. Evangelical revivals deeply affected Protestants, and
scholars agree that the faith “provided a real sense of social cohesion.”2
Crofters’ embrace of Evangelical Presbyterianism is central to
understanding how and why gender roles were reshaped between about

1
Roderick MacCowan, The Men of Skye, (Portree: John Maclaine, 1902), 96; Presbytery
of Skye, CH2/330/3, 197.
2
James Hunter, The Making of the Crofting Community, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: John Donald,
2000), 145; Allan W. McColl, Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and
Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843-1893 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2006), 218; and Charles W. J. Withers, Gaelic Scotland: The Transformation of a
Culture Region (New York: Routledge, 1988), 338.

60 The Shaping of Scottish Identities

1810 and the Disruption of 1843.3 The communities examined here share
key features, such as the Gaelic language, the prevalence of crofting and
the advent of Evangelical Christianity.
Evangelicalism was not new in the Highlands, but in the early
nineteenth century there were a series of powerful revivals, particularly in
western Gaelic-speaking crofting communities. The socio-economic
disruption of clearance did not cause revivalism, but it did destabilize the
previous worldview. Evangelical Presbyterianism offered a convincing
alternative spiritual framework and crofters expressed their changed
beliefs through new practices. While devout and charismatic converts
caused ruptures in the Church of Scotland, the general cultural shift which
so many conversions brought also drew crofters back into the fold of
established Presbyterianism, with important consequences for rituals such
as baptism. This chapter therefore concentrates on the period just before
the stirrings of Evangelicalism within the western Gàidhealtachd from
about 1810, and continues beyond the intense phase of revivalism around
the Disruption, after which the crofting community expressed their
religious identity through the Free Church.4 The Evangelical movement
elicited a general cultural shift. Prominent Highland historians, James
Hunter, Charles Withers, and Allan McColl, argue that Evangelicalism
was used by crofters to create a new sense of community.5 It was also used
to reshape gender roles within the community and within the family.6
Because childbirth was a family event which was also life-threatening, the
changing practices around it are particularly revealing about gender roles
and about beliefs.
Before the nineteenth century, key beliefs and rituals surrounding
birth and baptism were drawn from Catholic Christianity and folk belief,
and were in the possession of women. The physical aspects of birth for
crofters remained in female hands, but by the 1850s the role of spiritual
guardian to the child had passed to men. This was because crofters’
Evangelicalism was usually expressed through the Church of Scotland, so

3
There were areas of the crofting region, such as Moidart and South Uist, that were
Catholic and did not espouse Evangelicalism so these areas have been excluded from this
study.
4
Charles W. J. Withers, Gaelic in Scotland 1698-1981: The Geographical History of a
Language (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1984), 174.
5
Hunter, Making of the Crofting Community, 145; Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 338; and
McColl, Land, Faith and the Crofting Community, 218.
6
Elizabeth Ritchie, “The Faith of the Crofters: Christianity and Identity in the Hebrides,
1793-1843” (PhD diss., University of Guelph, 2010), 40.

“A Palmful of Water for Your Years” 61

Presbyterian baptism became very important. This ritual took place in the
church rather than in the home, and fathers and clergy, rather than
mothers and midwives, were the principal actors. This shift in cultural
responsibility was complex and changing, and heavily dependent upon
local circumstances and the convictions of individuals.
Exploring how crofters’ Evangelicalism affected birth and baptism
rituals sheds new light on birth, infant care, and family life in nineteenth-
century Scotland. In the 1990s, Leah Leneman, Rosalind Mitchison, and
Gordon DesBrisay explored the issue of illegitimacy in an effort to learn
more about sexuality, family dynamics, and social control in urban
Lowland Scotland.7 Other historians, such as Deborah Symonds, Lynn
Abrams, and Anne-Marie Kilday, have studied infanticide to examine the
changing perceptions about women and the experience of pregnancy and
birth.8 This chapter adds to this body of scholarship by exploring how the
gender identities of men and women were bound up in the rituals of birth,
and how these practices and associated identities were affected by
Evangelicalism in northwest Scotland in the early nineteenth century. It
first considers the experience and the rituals of birth for crofting women
before moving on to examine the ways in which women’s identities as
spiritual guardians to babies diminished. Concurrently, men’s identities,
especially as fathers, expanded as a consequence of Evangelicalism, which
led communities to uphold the orthodox Presbyterian and patriarchal
model of church baptism in which men were to be spiritual guardians to
children.

7
Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman, Girls in Trouble: Sexuality and Social Control in
Rural Scotland 1660-1780 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Leah Leneman and
Rosalind Mitchison, Sin in the City: Sexuality and Social Control in Urban Scotland, 1660-
1780 (Dalkeith: Scottish Cultural Press, 1998); and Gordon Des Brisay, “Wet Nurses and
Unwed Mothers in Seventeenth Century Aberdeen,” in Women in Scotland, c1100-c1750,
eds. Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 137-
155.
8
Deborah A. Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads and Infanticide in Early Modern
Scotland (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Anne-Marie
Kilday, “Maternal Monsters: Murdering Mothers in South West Scotland, 1750-1815,” in
Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance in Scotland since 1400, eds. Yvonne Galloway
Brown and Rona Ferguson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 156-180; and Lynn
Abrams, “From Demon to Victim: The Infanticidal Mother in Shetland, 1699-1899,” in
Brown and Ferguson, Twisted Sisters, 180-203.


Babies, Women, and Birth
Giving birth was dangerous: women died, babies died. A malformation of
the pelvis, breech birth, placenta previa, or hemorrhage meant another
freshly dug grave. In 1822, a minister visiting St. Kilda commented,
“many of the mothers die in childbed, from want of proper persons to
attend them . . . perhaps two out of three [babies], die in infancy. This is
ascribed to a peculiar disease, with which they are seized a few days after
their birth; but it may be as much owing to bad management as to
anything else.”9 The nature of people’s houses offers some explanation for
mortality. They were separated from the byre by a thin board or wattle
partition reaching halfway to the roof, and contained a “couple of
bedsteads, filled with straw or heather or ferns, a few chairs, and a table . .
. the fire is always placed on the middle of the floor . . . there is seldom
more than one window.”10 In addition to medical risks, community lore
suggests other equally serious dangers, as indicated by a story that
circulated in the mid-nineteenth century about a Lochaber woman whose
mind was deranged after she gave birth. She fled to the hills and lived with
the deer, shaking off anyone who tried to chase her down.11 This would
probably now be described as a form of postpartum depression.
The importance of birth and the perils that accompanied it meant that
labour and the days after birth were highly ritualized. These rituals were
deeply gendered and they were imbued with spirituality, both Christian
and folk.12 It is, of course, difficult to ascertain the beliefs and actions of
people who rarely created written records and all the sources used here
are mediated in some way, whether by a court prosecutor, a folklorist
collecting evidence from a culture believed to be dying, or a minister
evaluating his parishioners. However, when examined carefully they can
be, sometimes inadvertently, surprisingly revealing.13 Sources concerned
with folklore clearly show that birth was a liminal time when mothers and

9
Rev. John MacDonald, Journal and Report of a Visit to the Island of St. Kilda at the desire of
the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes,
1823), National Library of Scotland, N.6.b.3 (1-8), 25.
10
Duirinish Parish, New Statistical Account (NSA), 14:346.
11
Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica (London and Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd,
1928), 5:169.
12
Folk belief included fairies, the evil eye, etc. See Ronald Black, ed., The Gaelic
Otherworld, (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005).
13
One particularly contentious source is Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica. An excellent
evaluation of its usefulness and limitations is found in Ronald Black, “‘I Thought He Made
It All Up’: Context and Controversy,” in The Life and Legacy of Alexander Carmichael, ed.
Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart (Callicvol: The Islands Book Trust, 2008), 57-81.


babies were perceived to be in spiritual as well as physical danger. This
section focuses on the physical experience of birth and how the women
present assumed identities as spiritual guardians, as well as providing
physical assistance. It then examines how, from 1810, some women used
Evangelical Christianity as an alternative source of strength and protection
for mothers and children, gradually resulting in these birth rituals—and
therefore the identity of women as spiritual guardians—being abandoned.
In common with practice in the rest of Europe, births usually took
place in an exclusively female space.14 The woman’s female relatives and
neighbours would cram into the house to boil water, rub her back,
encourage her, place bog violet or sandwort under her to avert the evil
eye, walk her round the room, and gossip together.15 The communality of
birth became a social occasion and it educated young married women
about birth. Unmarried women like twenty-three-year-old Sarah
Beveridge, a servant at Inverarnan on Loch Lomond in 1847, had little
knowledge about such matters: “I never was with a female after giving
birth to a child so I don’t know their various appearances.” 16 In the
Highlands, as elsewhere, the primary purpose of women gathering in a
home for labour and birth was to provide care for the pregnant woman.17
Thus, despite the strong idea of a man’s religious and social responsibility
for his family, fathers were excluded from birth.
In continuity with previous centuries, the role of European fathers in
the nineteenth century was limited to providing emotional support and
temporarily undertaking more domestic and farm work.18 It was rare for
fathers to be involved in the birth itself. In 1814 in Inveran, Sutherland,
eighteen-year-old John MacKay was present at the birth of his daughter;
however, this was an exceptional case since he and twenty-year-old Bessy
MacKay were not married and were trying to keep the birth secret.19

14
Diane Purkiss, “Losing Babies, Losing Stories: Attending to Women’s Confessions in
Scottish Witch-trials,” in Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed.
Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press,
2003), 151; Laura Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century
England,” Past & Present 156 (1997): 87; and Ulinka Rublack, “Pregnancy, Childbirth and
the Female Body in Early Modern Germany,” Past & Present 150 (1996): 85.
15
Carmichael, Carmina, 1:166.
16
Child Murder, Killin, 1847, National Records of Scotland [NRS], AD14/47/151.
17
David Cressy, “Purification, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-
Reformation England,” Past & Present 141 (1993): 113.
18
Rublack, “Pregnancy, Childbirth and the Female Body,” 85, 98-100; and Cressy,
“Purification,” 115.
19
Child Murder, Creich, 1814, WRH, AD14/14/13.


Ordinarily, fathers were conspicuous by their absence and the rituals of
birth and the care for a newborn were female activities.
The main birthing assistance was provided by a midwife, known as a
knee-woman or bean-ghlùin, who was invariably a local woman of some
experience and skill. In the 1840s and 50s in Gartymore, Sutherland, one
such woman was Isabella Matheson. 20 Isabella was “in the way of
sometimes attending women in labour and delivering them and has
consequently more knowledge in that line than any of the rest of our
neighbours.” She was confident in her knowledge, describing how she
“proceeded to feel [Georgina MacKay’s] person when I found
unmistakable symptoms of her having been quite recently delivered of a
child.” Matheson also took Georgina’s pulse, demonstrating that some
rural midwives had modern medical knowledge.21 Midwives were deemed
essential and young John MacKay from Inveran was chastised for not
sending for the “proper assistance” that Bessy needed.22 A midwife could
indeed sort out some difficulties, but the apprehension was over only
when a living baby emerged with mother conscious and healthy.
Knowing human help was of limited effectiveness meant that
supernatural help was frequently solicited. Charms had been developed by
ordinary women, and midwives had a stock of specific prayers and
customs intended to safeguard mother and child. Many were strongly
based on Christianity, although sometimes in forms often not approved of
by institutional churches. They had developed out of Catholic traditions
and so retained many references to saints. One such prayer involved the
midwife going to the door of the house and saying:
Bride! Bride! Come in,

Thy welcome is truly made,
Give thou relief to the woman,
And give the conception to the Trinity.23
St. Bridget—or St. Bride, as she was commonly called—was a popular

patron for women in the Gàidhealtachd, unlike in the rest of Europe

20
The scarcity of evidence about midwifery necessitated this east Sutherland example.
21
Child Murder, Kildonan, WRH, AD14/53/301.
22
WRH, AD14/14/13.
23
Recited by Janet Campbell, originally from Skye, later a nurse in Loch Sgioport, South
Uist. Carmichael, Carmina, 1: 166.


where the Virgin Mary was most strongly connected with birth.24 The
prevalence of these prayers shows that spiritual protection during birthing
was the responsibility of women rather than clergy.
Protection for mother and baby immediately after birth was also
crucial. This was for physical reasons but also because of a fear of the
fairies. It was generally believed across the Gàidhealtachd that fairies could
not nurse and so needed human wet nurses.25 There was, for example, an
incident in the 1830s or 40s from Pladda, a tiny island to the south of
Arran, in which a newly delivered woman was allegedly “carried away” by
the fairies.26 The extent to which people actually believed in fairies can be
endlessly debated. Ministers responding for the New Statistical Account in
the 1840s gave varied responses as to how “superstitious” they believed
their parishioners to be.27 Ronald Black makes a strong Marxist-materialist
argument that fairy stories are “a psychological and metaphorical
construct, designed to help ordinary people struggle through a difficult life
from day to day.”28 Literal belief in fairies in the nineteenth century is
evidenced by the survival of a vast corpus of stories and by a court case as
late as 1895.29 In this context, it is less surprising that, although most
birthing prayers were consistent with Christian orthodoxy, invocations
were sometimes intended to shield against malevolent fairy folk. A series
of rituals also protected babies from the Evil Eye.30 These varied from
region to region but often involved putting salt on the child’s tongue,
keeping it indoors, passing it through peat smoke, placing iron nails in the
bedstead, sprinkling urine on the doorposts, or burning old shoes.31 As
belief in fairies faded, or as people hid their belief from outsiders, these
rituals became described as good luck charms. All were the responsibility
of women, usually the midwife, to perform.

24
Merry Wiesner, “Luther and women: the death of two Marys,” in Disciplines of Faith:
Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy, eds. Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, and Raphael
Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 303.
25
Black, Gaelic Otherworld, 19, 25.
26
Margaret Bennett, Scottish Customs from the Cradle to the Grave (Edinburgh: Birlinn,
2004), 10.
27
Kilmuir and Duirinish Parishes, NSA, 14:274, 276, 348.
28
Black, Gaelic Otherworld, lxxviii.
29
Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary (London: Penguin, 1999).
30
Non-Christian customs invoking protection from spirits also endured at times of death.
Elaine McFarland, “Researching Death, Mourning and Commemoration in Modern
Scotland,” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 24.1 (2004): 26.
31
Bennett, Scottish Customs, 10-12, 33-4; and Black, Gaelic Otherworld, 19-20.


The most important act was ritually bathing the child. A “very old
charm” called ‘The Bathing Blessing’ was recalled in 1914 by an Inverness-
shire resident.
A palmful of water for your years,

A palmful of water for your growth,
And for the taking of your food;
And may the part of you which grows not during the night
Grow during the day:
Three palmfuls of the Holy Trinity,
To protect and guard you
From the effects of the Evil Eye,
And from the jealous lust of sinners.32
As the words suggest, such prayers were spoken as the woman sprinkled
water three times on the infant. The blessing and ritual are evidently a
form of Christian baptism and it shows that women, especially midwives,
had critical spiritual roles in the birthing chamber. Such roles did not exist
for women in the Church. The Presbyterian Church explicitly forbade
women from performing any sacraments and instructed that baptism was
not to be carried out “in privat [sic] corners.”33 What is noticeable about
the blessing is how unaffected it seems to be by Evangelicalism. It has a
distinctly Catholic flavour and its references to the Evil Eye would not
have been tolerated within any Church of Scotland. Indeed, prayers and
charms that folklorist Alexander Carmichael found in Easter Ross, where
Evangelicalism had dominated since the mid-eighteenth century, were still
rooted in Catholicism. 34 Protective practices associated with such a
hazardous experience as birth were not lightly changed or abandoned. In
the crofting community, the spiritual role of women was a place of
slippage between orthodoxy and ‘folk’ Christianity. In an age deeply
concerned with patriarchy and unbending with regards to doctrine, it is
easy to understand why clergy did not encourage birth baptism.35

32
Bennett, Scottish Customs, 53.
33
Thomas McLauchlan, The Book of Common Order (1567; Edinburgh: Thomas and
Archibald Constable, 1873), 100-101.
34
Domhnall Uilliam Stiùbhart, “Alexander Carmichael: Folklorist, Antiquarian,
Compiler of Carmina Gadelica” (paper presented at the Scottish Catholic Historical
Association, Edinburgh, 25 January 2010).
35
If it seemed likely that a baby would die at birth the Catholic Church permitted the
midwife to baptize. Because Protestant theologians argued that baptism was not


Birth rituals were part of an oral culture, so pinpointing the exact
influence of Evangelicalism or precisely dating the decline in the use of
long-established charms has proven elusive. The perceived risk of altering
protection rituals was high, so it is most likely that it was converted
Evangelical women with a strong personal faith who instigated the change
in spiritual customs around birth. An important facet of Evangelical
spirituality is personal, extempore prayer rather than set prayers. It would
be very surprising if Evangelical women did not begin to rely upon this
form of spiritual protection in this most dangerous of times in the same
way that they did in the more ordinary circumstances of life.36 Adopting
Evangelicalism also meant ordinary people became more suspicious of
Catholicism and ‘paganism’; however, it would only be converted women
with strong Evangelical convictions who, in the midst of a painful and
dangerous labour, would risk rejecting time-worn prayers and rituals,
however ‘Catholic’ or ‘pagan.’37 When this shift did occur it must have
been instigated by women themselves, as men and the institutional church
had no direct influence on what happened during birth. Evangelical
women were performing as spiritual an act by using extempore prayer as
when they used the old charms and rituals. However, because
Evangelicalism was a strand of the deeply patriarchal Presbyterian Church,
converted women’s shift towards Evangelical understandings of sacred
power and protection eroded their spiritual role during birth.
Before the widespread adoption of Evangelicalism between 1810 and
the 1840s, the spiritual and physical protection of both mothers and babies
was provided at birth and by women. The revivalist period instigated a
general cultural shift and part of this was a complex and dynamic process
of shifting power relations between men and women within the family. In
relation to babies, the impact of Evangelicalism was that the spiritual
element of childbearing became focused on the infant rather than on both
mother and child; that the most significant rituals took place in the church
rather than the home; and that these rituals were performed by men rather
than by women.

necessary for salvation, Presbyterian clergy were less tolerant of this practice. Patricia
Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson
Educational, 2004), 86.
36
Mrs. MacIntyre is one example of a Skye woman who prayed regularly. Roderick
MacCowan, The Men of Skye (Portree: John Maclaine, 1902), 175-6.
37
This was institutionalized in liturgy, including at the baptismal service. McLauchlan,
Common Order, 102, 109.


Babies, Men, and Evangelicalism
Baptism was clearly an important social and spiritual custom in the
Gàidhealtachd. However, from the Evangelical revivals of the 1810s, its
meaning and performance began to change. Church baptism, with its focus
on men as the significant agents, became increasingly important. This
involved a shift towards men, especially fathers, identifying themselves as
the spiritual guardians of children. This is not to claim that ordinary
people had never participated in church baptism previously, but rather
that it gradually became the primary rather than a secondary ritual, thus
reflecting the changing cultural and social mores. To assess this shift, it is
important to examine the differing meanings given to church baptism by
ordinary Gaels and by the Presbyterian Church, and then to demonstrate
how men came to be identified as spiritual guardians through the Church
of Scotland’s baptismal ritual. Understanding how Evangelical revivalism
facilitated a move from the birth baptism practiced by women to church
baptism conducted by men is also essential. A case study of an incident in
Bracadale parish on Skye shows how important baptism was to locals, that
the shift towards Evangelicalism was contested, and that when orthodox
meanings of baptism were enforced there could be unpredictable
consequences.
The official Presbyterian understanding of the sacrament of baptism
was purely theological, and the ritual was symbolic of these beliefs.
However, ordinary people ascribed alternative significance and magical
meanings to it as well. It can be difficult to discern precisely which
meanings people ascribed to birth baptism and which to church baptism,
but it is clear that baptism had three important functions: it protected the
child from fairies; it ensured that if the baby died it could have a proper
burial; and it safeguarded an infant’s afterlife. In Barra, a newborn was on
its mother’s lap when a fairy came to the midwife, trying to trick her with
words so that it could take the baby. This happened day after day, but the
midwife and the mother always had the right response to safeguard the
child. After the baby was christened, the fairy never came back.38 The
word, ‘christened,’ and the time lag after birth in the story suggests a
reference to church baptism. The birth baptism of a sickly newborn also
meant that if it did not survive it could be given a Christian burial. Despite
the official Protestant theology that baptism was merely symbolic, it was a
longstanding practice in Britain that the bodies of unbaptized—often
stillborn—babies were treated differently than those of older children or

38
Black, Gaelic Otherworld, 326.


adults.39 There was often a place just outside the consecrated ground
where parents and friends could hold a simple ceremony.40 By the Sound
of Mull there was a small plot of land for this, and beside Lismore’s
ancient church one graveyard was called, ‘the Burial Place of the
Unbaptized Children.’41 Elsewhere on the west coast, the body was buried
in a rocky area high on a hillside.42 In some regions burial was the father’s
duty while in others he was to attend to his usual work, conspicuously
ignoring his friends while they buried the child. 43 Finally, before the
widespread acceptance of Evangelicalism, it was a prevalent belief that
only baptized babies could go to heaven. Gaels understood the unbaptized
baby to have no soul and, at death, its spirit was believed to enter the
rocks where it was buried.44 In 1879, an elderly minister reminisced that
“on calm nights, those who had ears to hear heard the wailing of the spirits
of unchristened bairns among the trees and dells.”45 ‘Taran’—the Gaelic
word for the ghost of an unbaptized child—had fallen out of use by the
late nineteenth century, indicating that, by then, people no longer feared
this fate for their infants.46 Immediate baptism was no longer necessary.
Although birth baptism was part of popular religion, the clergy
considered it superstition rather than Christianity. In 1747, the
Presbyterian Synod of Glenelg feared that the “superstitious notions of that
sacred ordinance are much nourished and confirmed in the minds of the
people” by birth baptism.47 Superstition was considered an irrational and
unchristian belief system which was contained primarily in the souls and
actions of women. Although clergy had been railing against birth baptism
for decades, as seen in the Synod’s statement, it was only when
Evangelicalism became popularly accepted in the northwest that crofters
shifted their focus from ‘female’ birth baptism to ‘male’ church baptism.
The key reason for this gendered spiritual shift was that the newly
developing crofting community needed to re-form its culture and identity
and found the Evangelical Presbyterianism taught by itinerant preachers

39
Gowing, “Secret Births and Infanticide,” 108.
40
41
Black, Gaelic Otherworld, 94; Carmichael, Carmina, 3:4.
42
Carmichael, Carmina, 3:4.
43
Ibid.
44
Ibid.
45
Bennett, Scottish Customs, 11.
46
47
Rev. Thomas M. Murchison, “The Synod of Glenelg, 1725-1821: Notes from the
Records,” in Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness 38 (1937-1941), 84.


and Gaelic teachers fitting for their social, psychological, and spiritual
needs.48 Strong teaching given on baptism by Evangelical leaders and the
sheer number of passionate converts, including some powerful
personalities, meant that standard Presbyterian practices and meanings of
baptism became increasingly popular among crofters. In 1822, the people
of Harris were experiencing a revival, and when word got around that
Rev. John MacDonald, a noted Evangelical preacher, was visiting he was
much in demand to conduct baptisms. In isolated townships church
baptism was taken up when the opportunity arose. One September
morning, MacDonald baptized several children at Killigray and more near
Rodel in the afternoon.49 In Lismore, the practice of baptism had changed
by the 1840s, being conducted on Sundays rather than on weekdays, in a
church, and presided over by a minister.50 The baptism practices of the
Presbyterian Church had an impact on gender roles and identities, and,
unlike in the birthing chamber where it was women who were spiritual
guardians to babies, it was men who assumed this role in the Presbyterian
ceremony of baptism.
The Presbyterian version of baptism was highly gendered. The focus
of the words and the ceremony was exclusively on men: the minister, the
father, and perhaps the godfather.51 A baptism was part of regular Sabbath
worship and after the sermon the minister called the father to the front.52
Walter Steuart’s liturgical guide refers only to “Parent”; however, the
singular strongly implies the father.53 This is emphasized by the injunction
in the liturgy (translated into Gaelic by Carswell) that if the father was
absent, a godfather was to take his place.54 There was no role for the
mother or a female substitute. The minister first explained to the
congregation the meaning of baptism, emphasizing that there is no “virtue
or power . . . in the visible water or outward action.” 55 Protestant
theology emphasized the symbolic nature of baptism and strenuously
refuted any idea that the ritual led to salvation. This was an important
point, considering some of the meanings popularly ascribed to baptism.
After this theological ground was prepared, the minister reminded all

48
Withers, Gaelic Scotland, 340; and Ritchie, Faith of the Crofters, 90-95, 110-117.
49
MacDonald, Visit to St. Kilda, 5.
50
Lismore and Appin Parish, NSA, 7:245.
51
McLauchlan, Common Order, 100, 101, 109.
52
McLauchlan, Common Order, 101.
53
Walter Steuart, Collections and Observations Methodised (Arbroath: J. Findlay, 1802), 82.
54
55


fathers and mothers in his congregation of their duty “to nurture and
instruct [children] in the true knowledge and feare of God.”56 The father
then promised to bring his child up “in the knowledge of the grounds of
the Christian religion,” and in the “life and practice which God hath
commanded in His word.” 57 He read or recited a lengthy statement
indicating his faith and acceptance of his responsibilities as spiritual head of
the home. He promised to teach his children through family prayers,
church attendance, personal example and patriarchal authority. In St.
Kilda, the same visiting minister, John MacDonald, was gratified at the
level of theological understanding of one John Ferguson who presented his
child for baptism. He was “much better acquainted with the principles of
Christianity than his neighbours” because he could read, but no comment
was passed on the baby’s mother.58 After the father’s vow, the minister
prayed and asked the child’s name. He dipped his hand in a large basin of
water and said, “I baptise thee in the name of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost.” He sprinkled water on the baby’s face and followed with a
prayer of thanksgiving. The importance of the father was also evident in
popular customs around church baptism, as in Lismore where at the end of
the ceremony the father handed the baby over to each guest, claiming
them as godparents.59
Presbyterian clergy clearly spelt out the orthodox interpretation of
baptism, but ordinary people continued to interpret the ritual a little
differently. Melissa Hollander, in her study of fatherhood and baptism in
early modern Edinburgh, found that it was a top-down ritual used to
control families.60 In the early nineteenth-century Highlands, however,
communities appropriated baptism as a powerful protective device for
babies, drawing on a more magical worldview than the Presbyterian
liturgy or Evangelical preaching intended to transmit. The popularity of
Evangelicalism did draw people towards the patriarchal church version of
baptism and eroded female-dominated birth baptism; however, the
meaning of baptism, even in a church, was contested. This shows change

56
As John MacDonald did in 1822 in Rodel: see MacDonald, Visit to St Kilda, 5.
57
Steuart, Collections, 82.
58
MacDonald, Visit to St. Kilda, 15.
59
Lismore and Appin Parish, NSA, 7:245.
60
Melissa Hollander, “The Name of the Father: Baptism and the Social Construction of
Fatherhood in Early Modern Edinburgh,” in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern
Scotland, eds. Elizabeth Ewan and Janay Nugent (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008),
68, 72.


was neither linear nor was it solely under the control of the institutional
church.
Despite baptism increasingly being brought within the walls of the
church and coming under patriarchal Presbyterianism, Highlanders
continued to give baptism magical significance. Just as clergy did not trust
women to carry out baptism properly in the home, parents also kept an
eagle eye on clergy to ensure they did an adequate job.61 Converted
Evangelical fathers would have been horrified at the suggestion, but the
carefulness with which Highlanders treated church baptism implies a
‘magical’ attitude. In Bernisdale, Skye, Evangelical John MacCowan
(1788-1858) refused to have his children baptized by a minister whose
doctrine seemed dubious. He waited until the minister was replaced in
1832, at which point he produced five children for baptism.62 For the
converted Evangelical, the focus and practice of baptism changed, but it
remained a protective ritual which had to be performed by the right
person and in the right way.
In the minds of converted crofters, the ‘right person’ to conduct
church baptisms was an Evangelical minister. Such ministers imitated the
Reformers’ intensive system of religious education around sacraments.63
They noticed that their Moderate colleagues had not always taken their
duties in this area seriously. A man from Barvas, Lewis, had had “five of his
children . . . baptised, but . . . not one question was ever asked by the
minister concerning his own salvation.”64 Often one of the first actions of a
reforming minister, such as Alexander MacLeod who arrived like a
whirlwind in 1826 to this Lewis parish, was to strike everyone off the list
of communicants until they could prove they had sufficient doctrinal
knowledge and were living a suitably Christian life. He reduced the
communion roll of Uig parish from eight hundred to only six individuals.65
Evangelical ministers wanted to encourage church baptism, discourage
birth baptism, and identify fathers as spiritual guardians of their families.
Such zealous enforcement caused unforeseen problems, dividing
communities into those deemed sufficiently pious and those who were
not.

61
For example, parents in Kenmore in 1783 insisted that their child be re-baptized after
the minister omitted some words. John MacInnes, The Evangelical Movement in the
Highlands of Scotland 1688-1800 (Aberdeen: The University Press, 1951), 11-12.
62
MacCowan, Men, 54.
63
Ritchie, “Faith of the Crofters,” 208; and Hollander, “Name of the Father,” 69.
64
MacInnes, Evangelical Movement, 7.
65
Ibid.


An examination of Skye enables these points to be assessed in detail. In
common with many parts of the crofting community, Skye experienced
major revivals in the periods 1812-14 and 1842-44, especially in the
island’s north and west parishes where there were many devout and
powerful local leaders. One such popular Church of Scotland minister was
Roderick MacLeod, or Maighstair Ruaraidh, who became minister of
Bracadale in 1823. MacLeod was a strong proponent of the belief that the
sacraments should be dispensed only to committed converts. He was the
same minister who had refused to baptize the child of Captain Martin
MacLeod of Drynoch in the story at the start of this chapter. The MacLeod
baby was not the only unbaptized child in Bracadale and a general
controversy erupted in the parish, in Presbytery, and finally in the General
Assembly at Edinburgh. Maighstair Ruaraidh maintained that he would
“baptise the children of none but those who give satisfying evidence that
they are under the Spirit’s operation; and [he] excluded none but those
who were grossly ignorant or immoral.”66 Over the course of two and a
half years, fifty children were refused while only seven were granted
baptism. Resentment in parts of the community bubbled over and the
minister was suspended for several months. The Presbytery took over the
task of examining parents, and two-year-old Roderick Shaw from Struan
became a test case at the General Assembly. This situation illustrates the
messy and contradictory transition that occurred when Evangelicalism
began to be adopted.
Evangelical revivalism had only just taken root in Skye in the 1820s
when Maighstair Ruaraidh began to enforce the strict Presbyterian view of
baptism, which focused on theological knowledge, Christian lifestyle,
religious experience, and church membership. The cultural shift towards a
broadly Evangelical worldview by means of a critical mass of converts was
far from complete. It was therefore a problem when Maighstair Ruaraidh
would not conform to the popular understanding of baptism as spiritual
protection, but sought instead to establish the view that it was a sacrament
for professed Christians only. His efforts to exert these ideals struck at a
core element of popular religion and were divisive in a society in which
baptism was a critical protective ritual. Being rejected for baptism was
humiliating and it offended against both tradition and against parents’
protective instincts. Martin MacLeod and other wealthier farmers and
tacksmen resisted, breaking away to create an Episcopal church where

66
William Hanna, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Thomas Chalmers (Edinburgh:
Sutherland and Knox, 1851), 508-9.


their children could be baptized. Although crofting parents were also
excluded, they had neither the power nor resources to take such an action,
nor did they wish to disassociate themselves from Evangelical figures like
Maighstair Ruaraidh who were becoming the champions of the new
crofting society. Considering the importance of baptism, it is possible that
crofters whose children were denied this ritual in Evangelical parishes may
have returned to relying on birth baptism. If this were the case, the irony
is that in the most Evangelical of parishes, like Bracadale and Uig, female-
dominated birth baptism may have enjoyed an underground resurgence at
the same time as the general trend was moving away from it.
Evangelicalism brought a general move towards church baptism and the
patriarchal ideal of spiritual guardianship, but the shift was uneven,
contingent on local circumstances, and it was reversible.
Crofters were being drawn in to Presbyterian rituals and meanings,
but the fear and anger displayed when they were refused church baptism
shows that they must have continued to ascribe spiritual power to the
ritual rather than it being merely symbolic. As religious practices, family
life, and identities in the early nineteenth-century Highlands changed
because of Evangelicalism, baptism remained critical. Crofters began to
rely on orthodox and patriarchal church baptism rather than popular
religious and female practices of birth baptism; however, this shift was
erratic and contested.
Conclusion
Evangelical revivals in the crofting community from the 1810s initiated an
alteration that went far beyond individual piety. This examination of
customs and beliefs around birth shows how integrated religion and family
life were. It is therefore unsurprising that the arrival of Evangelicalism
brought profound change. Women, especially midwives, had possessed
identities as spiritual guardians at birth through protective prayers and
rituals for mother and baby; but when crofters adopted Evangelicalism this
female identity was weakened. This weakening was evident as the use of
conventional prayers and customs around birth declined, and the
community came to increasingly rely upon the rituals of the Church of
Scotland. As women’s roles as spiritual guardians were reduced at birth,
so were they reduced again in church baptism where they had no role.
Evangelicalism also provided new and authoritative religious identities
within the family for men as crofters increasingly accepted the idea that
men had spiritual responsibility for their families. As crofters adopted
Evangelicalism, fatherhood became a more important part of Highland


masculinity and crofters’ gender identities adhered more closely to the
patriarchal ethos of Scottish Presbyterianism.
To trace a linear progression from female-dominated popular
Christianity to male-dominated church Christianity is, of course,
simplistic. What actually happened at birth depended on the women
present and it is likely that blessings and rituals continued to be performed
in the female space of the birthing chamber or in private moments. There
is also no way of knowing if babies were secretly given birth baptisms in
defiance of a devout Evangelical father, or even behind the back of the
child’s mother. The Bracadale case showed how the enforcement of strict
Evangelical criteria excluded some people from church baptism, which
perhaps served to reinstate women’s spiritual role. Despite aberrations
and inconsistencies, what is important is the general shift in ideas and how,
as the community used Evangelicalism to reshape their culture, crofters
came to believe it was no longer necessary for women to guard the child’s
spiritual safety through birth baptism. Instead, the religious teaching and
guidance of the father was seen as paramount, and so the mantle of
spiritual guardianship was passed from one sex to the other. The crofting
community’s adoption of Evangelicalism brought a significant shift within
the family, adding new rituals and altering gender roles.

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CHAPTER FOUR

‘A Palmful of Water for Your Years’:

Bride! Bride! Come in,

St. Bridget—or St. Bride, as she was commonly called—was a popular

A palmful of water for your years,

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