Post-Reformation approaches to the poor, and in particular the Calvinist system in Scotland, are traditionally seen as harsh, condemnatory, and discriminating. There is much truth in this. However, this chapter reveals that we need to be much more careful about defining exactly where the lines between deserving and undeserving lay for religious and social elites after 1560. It assesses the ways in which kirk sessions discriminated between those they deemed worthy and unworthy, demonstrating that kirk session relief was not as harshly discriminating as has been suggested, and does not resemble the later application of Poor Laws where the only excuse for poverty was physical inability, and the mobile or able-bodied poor were penalised. Kirk sessions did not tend to exclude the poor from outside their parish, and nor did they exclude the able-bodied, unemployed or underemployed poor. The real dividing line was instead between the idle and the willing to work, and equally importantly, along moral lines between the sinful and the well-behaved poor.
REPORT OF THE Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress