Robert Burns’ satire in ‘Holy Willie's Prayer’ on the sanctimonious church elder, modelled on Willie Fisher of Mauchline, is a classic puncturing of the pretensions of the religiously self-righteous. It is a trope that endures. In his Lewis trilogy the crime writer Peter May has his hero Fin McCleod denounce the hypocrisy of a Free Church investigation committee as ‘a bunch of Holy Willies pour[ing] out bile in the guise of piety’. Images of the church elder in paintings give priority to grave seriousness, making the kirk session a feared body. The connection of the session with the prosecution of sin, especially sin of a sexual nature, has understandably coloured both the popular imagination and the historical record. This has meant that we have relatively little on how such bodies were run in the eighteenth century. This chapter gives some details on the composition and governance practices of the eighteenth-century church at parish level. It starts by considering some key positions on the session – minister, session clerk, elder and deacon – considering in turn their selection and key attributes. It then considers the nature of the business they conducted, with a particular focus on the record-keeping practices that it entailed.

Ministers

The reason for starting with the minister rather than the elders is that meetings of the session could not occur with his acting as moderator. He was, in the words of the 1704 Overtures, ‘Moderator ex officio, and constant out of necessity’. This could cause some problems when there was a long gap between ministers, which was often occasioned by disputes over suitable candidates.