St. Andrews Abbey
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E-Book also available on Kindle ISBN NO:9781493644094 Published by The Stourie Press |
After the seven provinces of Pictland merged into one kingdom - Scotland, the Devil walked the shores of Fife with a growing band of Followers. The reformed church and its obsession with fornication and adultery provided him with an abundance of sinners. The old,the infirm, the simpleminded and those dabbling in herbalism, the Presbyterian Church turned over to the Devil then burnt them for believing in his existence.
The church was at the root of many of the suspicions and superstitions that ruled the inhabitants of the villages along the Fife coast. One minister, Patrick Couper, whipped uo so much hysteria among the residents of Pittenweem, they suspected their neighbours of witchcraft and catapulted one woman into the freezing North Sea before crushing her to death on the shore. In 1694, The General Assembly laid out the sins of the Scottish nation, Profane and idle swearing, cursing, Sabbath breaking, fornication, adultery, drunkeness, blasphemy, and other gross and abominable sins and vices. Not even the church though, could foretell that a decade later, Anstruther, Fife's most drunken port would give birth to the Beggar's Bennison, a club for middle-aged gentlemen who despised the unfair taxes imposed by England after the Acts of Union. Club members professed to he interested in scientific enquiry, hiring local girls to pose naked while a learned member gave lectures on such topics as 'the menstrual cycle of the skate'. Behind closed doors, they drank smuggled gin and defied the new belief that if a man indulged in the Sin of Onan, he would go blind. Members were initiated by singlehandedly filling a receptacle known as the 'testing plate' with their own seed. Passing through Fife settlements from Inverkeithing to Tayport, Suspicion and Superstition uncovers the lives of ordinary people as they struggled with the church, the government, the Acts of Union, tragedy and poverty. |
Out 1st March 2014
For International Women's Day
…opens up an alternative view of Scotland's turbulent history, revealing three centuries through the eyes of the nation's women.
The whole of society appears, from ordinary labourers, prostitutes and factory hands to their more celebrated sisters and even witches, body snatchers, and female Jacobites.
Advance Orders
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/scotlands-hidden-harlots-and-heroines/p/6160
For International Women's Day
…opens up an alternative view of Scotland's turbulent history, revealing three centuries through the eyes of the nation's women.
The whole of society appears, from ordinary labourers, prostitutes and factory hands to their more celebrated sisters and even witches, body snatchers, and female Jacobites.
Advance Orders
www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/scotlands-hidden-harlots-and-heroines/p/6160