The Church of Scotland's primary role in the relief of the poor in the eighteenth century has meant that its practices for recording financial transactions have come into the view of historians concerned with how poverty was handled. In particular, two legal cases involving the church, those of Humbie (1751) and Cambuslang (1752), feature in the debate over the nature of Scottish poor relief in the period. The visibility of these cases is, in part, because of their inscription in books recording court decisions. Briefly, the Cambuslang decision turned on what expenses could be met from the funds collected for the benefit of the poor. Repairs to property occasioned by the enormous crowds who had attended the communion season in the parish as part of the ‘Cambuslang Revival’ were held to be improper, and doubt was cast on the payment of fees such as those for the session clerk. At Humbie, the decision was that heritors should be fully involved in the administration of funds raised for the poor. We will return to these cases in more detail later, but for now the important point is the way the cases have been used to draw conclusions about record keeping. For Mitchison the Humbie case was, in her original formulation, a turning point. Because of the decision that heritors should be fully involved, ‘[f]rom now on poor-law affairs were to be run more formally, kept in separate books from the general session register, and vetted in legalistic spirit by the heritors’. In a response, Cage argued that the Humbie case needed to be seen in the context of legal assessments (that is, the setting of a rate on landowners and others for poor relief) and that too much emphasis should not be placed on it. Although her initial response did not tackle the implications of this, in subsequent work, where she argues for two implications of Humbie, Mitchison was to modify her views. One implication was that ‘landowners were deliberately using their dominant position in the structure of justice to reduce the claim of the Church to autonomy’, something which we will see further in this chapter.