Disability in the Industrial Revolution: physical impairment in British coalmining, 1780–1880

kirk sessions decided who should receive it. While collections were notionally voluntary, their public nature (at the church door or during worship) introduced a coercive element, as did occasional door-to-door collections. As well as distributing cash directly to the needy, sessions might supply clothing, shoes and occasionally food or fuel, or even pay for repairs to people’s houses. They also funded medical treatment and, when all else failed, they paid for winding sheets and for the digging of graves for the poor. The system’s ability to adapt to individual needs meant that it was ‘recognisable and functionally comparable within a wider international context of welfare’ (166). Sickness as well as long-term disability (physical and mental) were relieved, yet the majority of recipients of relief were apparently neither disabled nor sick. Thus, although pre-modern systems of relief have a reputation for making a harsh distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, that is a reflection of policies and pronouncements rather than practice. Most payments went to people because of their immediate necessity, many of whom were able-bodied, notably single parents struggling to combine employment with bringing up children, while the unemployed might receive one-off payments to help them back into work. Just as the able-bodied poor were supported in spite of a reluctance to help the ‘idle’ and ‘sturdy’ poor, a similar cultural hostility to helping ‘strangers’ was also not borne out in practice, as kirk sessions often provided relief to outsiders in difficulty. The final chapter gives an overview of the range of secular sources of poor relief that sat alongside the kirk sessions. It serves to show that, while other agencies supplemented their work, the kirk sessions were ‘the engines of poor relief’ (240) In recent decades, Scottish ecclesiastical historians have begun to exploit the great riches contained within the kirk session records. New questions have been asked, new insights gained, and our understanding of the nature, role and impact of the Reformed church in Scotland has been transformed. This book is an excellent example of that enriching turn in Scottish ecclesiastical history that has swept away so many lazy characterizations of Reformation Scotland in general and its church in particular. It is an absorbing study, clearly and engagingly written and its findings are firmly placed within the context of scholarship on Scottish, English and European poor relief.