I recently bought my first e-book - Argyll Courts. It contains summaries of proceedings of thousands of law court cases in Argyll in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. In one appendix there is a list of nearly 200 people from the Campbeltown area who were summoned before the JP court in 1686 for 'Irregularities in Church Attendance'. Initially I assumed these were people too lazy to be bothered going and were being publicly shamed, until I discovered that the descendents of at least two of those named later moved to America, where they helped found the American Presbyterian Church. Does anyone on this list know the real reason these people were hauled before the court? Iain McKenzie

Iain Others will probably know more about this than I do, but I would say there was little doubt that these people were attending services conducted by "unlicensed ministers". At that time, it was the Presbyterians who were unlicensed, which is consistent with the subsequent activities of the descendants of the two you mentioned. Remember that the King of Scotland at that time was James VII (James II of England) who was a Roman Catholic. In Tarbert in 1683, very close to that time, a number of people in North Kintyre were prosecuted for attending services conducted by an unlicensed minister - probably the Revd John Darroch who preached on several occasions in houses in Skipness (and elsewhere, I would imagine, but Skipness is the focus of my interest). A *possible* ancestor of mine, "Angus McIntaylor in Skipnish" was one of the three court officers appointed. Martyn ----- Original Message ----- From: "Iain McKenzie" <iain-mckenzie@sol.co.uk> To: <SCT-ARGYLL-L@rootsweb.com> Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 9:35 AM Subject: [ARGYLL] Argyll Courts > I recently bought my first e-book - Argyll Courts. It contains summaries of proceedings of thousands of law court cases in Argyll in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. > > In one appendix there is a list of nearly 200 people from the Campbeltown area who were summoned before the JP court in 1686 for 'Irregularities in Church Attendance'. Initially I assumed these were people too lazy to be bothered going and were being publicly shamed, until I discovered that the descendents of at least two of those named later moved to America, where they helped found the American Presbyterian Church. > > Does anyone on this list know the real reason these people were hauled before the court? > > Iain McKenzie