There are several curious entries in Kirk Sessional Records, showing that
those parochial bodies were as zealous in restricting the customary
festivities at christening parties as they have, in another paper, been
shown to have been in repressing undue feasting at weddings. With respect
of the former, the interference of Kirk Sessions was preceded by that of
the Scottish Parliament, by which assembly it was enacted, in 1581, "that
no banquets shall be at any upsitting after baptising of bairns in time
coming, under the pain of twenty pounds, to be paid by every person doing
the contrary." In 1621 it was further enacted that, "no person use any
manner of dessert of wet and dry confections at marriage banqueting,
baptism feasting, or any meals, except the fruits growing in Scotland, as
also figs, raisins, plum dames, almonds and other unconfected fruits,
under the pain of a thousand marks _toties quoties_."
These enactments appear, however, to have had little effect. In 1695 the
Kirk Session of Greenock ordained that "persons having their children
baptised on the Sabbath day abstain from keeping banquets and convening
people at such occasions on that day, whereby much idle discourse and sin
may be evited." In 1701 it was very seriously complained by the Kirk
Session of Kilmarnock that feasts continued to be held on Sundays after
baptisms, and it was ordered that children should be baptised on the
weekly sermon day (Thursday), except in case of necessity. But, either
through attachment to old customs, or want of inclination to attend the
week-day sermon, children continued to be presented for baptism on Sunday,
and in 1720 the Session again ordered "that none make or hold feasts at
baptising their children on the Lord's day."
In conformity with the Registration Act for Scotland, passed in 1854, all
parish registers are deposited in the Registry Office then established in
Edinburgh. Most of the registers of births commence about the middle of
the seventeenth century, those of only fifteen parishes, out of about nine
hundred, dating from the preceding century. The register of baptisms of
Errol, Perthshire, commences in 1553, but the entries for the years
preceding 1573 are transcribed from an older register which has been lost.
Many of the older registers have been injured by damp, others by fire, and
not a few have suffered from the negligence of their custodians. In many
of them blanks occur. In some instances session clerks of the sixteenth
century recorded in their registers events unconnected with their own
parishes. The clerk of the Kirk Session of Aberdeen made an entry in the
register of the birth of James VI., who was born at Edinburgh, loyally and
piously adding, in the curious spelling of the period (which in previous
extracts in this paper, has been modernised,) "quhame God preserve in guid
helth and in the feir of God, to do justice in punishing of wrayng and in
manttinyen the trewht all the dais of his lyfe. So be itt."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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