In every parish the Kirk Session was supposed to maintain a snooping committee to investigate the conduct of the laity. The reckless parishioner who desecrated the Sabbath by cooking a hot meal, by puttering in his garden, or even by taking a walk, was haled before the Session for discipline, and could be reinstated in the communion only by confession of his sin and payment of a fine. For more serious offences the penalties were proportionately heavier, unless one were wealthy or powerful enough to cow the inquisitors. Burns had painfully intimate knowledge of the cutty stool, or mourners’ bench, whereon those guilty of fornication or other deadly sin had thrice to appear before the congregation while the minister rebuked them at length and with specific detail. Girls sometimes committed suicide or murdered their children to escape the public shame, and the effect of the ordeal on those who submitted was more likely to be hardening than chastening. Many another youth besides Burns inwardly resolved thenceforth to live up to the reputation thus fastened upon him. The Kirk frowned upon, and tried to suppress, such secular amusements as music and dancing. In spite of the ban, the custom of ‘penny weddings’, whereby impecunious young couples in the rural districts sought, by giving what was in effect a subscription ball, to raise money enough to set them up in housekeeping, still persisted; but even these gatherings had a slightly furtive quality, and in the stricter homes all such things were taboo. The moral results of the policy of repression were almost wholly bad. The older men, in default of other relaxation, devoted themselves to drink; the younger, to the pleasures that give its point to Burns’s simile, ‘as busy as an Edinburgh bawd on a Sunday evening’.