Forgue Parish History

The beginning and the Middle Ages

The history of Christianity in Scotland goes back to Saint Ninian in 400CE. In the 5th century Saint Columba established a monastery at Iona. 

It is not known when Forgue Kirk was first built. Surviving stones indicate that it was a Romanesque style building of about 1050 CE like the church at Leuchars in Fife and like that building would have had many alterations.

The Celtic church grew independent of Rome spreading from Ireland until it accepted Roman practices in the mid-7th century. Saint Margaret (1045-1093), the half-Hungarian, half-English new Queen of Scots  married King Malcolm lll, Malcolm Canmore, about 1070.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the popes reinforced their power to appoint bishops. Rome insisted on a single set of church rules throughout Europe. The cosmopolitan Queen Margaret found the church of Scotland out of touch with practice in the rest of Christian Europe. Clergy were often married, sons succeeded fathers in parish churches, confession and Communion were rarely celebrated and sabbaths were not kept. These and other faults were searched out by the energetic and pious Queen and reformed 

However much resentment Saint Margaret’s reforms provoked in her day, some of her work was of lasting importance. It was Saint Margaret and her royal sons who began the work of organising a system of parishes covering the entire country, with a Kirk at the heart of each.

The first written mention of the parish church at Forgue is in 1257. The church is dedicated to Saint Margaret who was canonised in 1250, though whether the reference is to Saint Margaret of Scotland is not clear. It also remains possible however that someone took advantage of her canonisation to displace an old-fashioned Pictish dedicatee. Forgue may be one of those parishes which existed well before we have evidence of it. Forgue was in the diocese of Aberdeen, Inverkeithny in that of Moray.

Forgue, was dependent for its income on the abbey of Arbroath. The arrangement started sometime in the early part of the thirteenth century. There is a Bull (a papal instruction) of Pope Alexander lV dated 1257 which confirmed an earlier grant of the church to Arbroath. Confirmation was needed because on the previous occasion the laird, Sir William of what was hen called Ferendracht, had forgotten to ask the permission of the bishop of Aberdeen.

The income of Duncan, the incumbent in 1257, was protected but as soon as he died (in 1268) the monks put in a Chaplain. Some of the income due to the church certainly went to him, but he lost the greater part of it. Forgue was now the monks’ church, and they were specially permitted by a second papal bull to divert the rest of the revenue to Arbroath ‘for the purpose of hospitality’.

Dependence on distant Arbroath Abbey was far from an ideal way of providing for the proper upkeep of the church building. By the early sixteenth century, the strain was beginning to show. In 1535, the abbey of Arbroath and Sir James Crichton of Frendraught did a deal. The abbey leased to the laird the annual income from the teinds, the sheaves which the local farmers were obliged annually to give to Arbroath as owners of Forgue church. In return, the laird paid the abbey £100 Scots. The abbey converted into ready cash income which the monks might have had trouble collecting, and the parish gained because the laird agreed to mend the church roof.

It is barely possible to put together lists of the names of the men who served as Forgue parish priests, far less find out whether they were caring and inspiring pastors. A few names however survive. Duncan has been mentioned. In 1371 the priest was called Christimus, and he was probably a University graduate – quite a rare distinction in those days. In 1535, William Christieson was described as “a perpetual vicar at the altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Chancel at Forgue”. 

In the sixteenth century there were still too few parish churches. Their buildings and furnishings might be dilapidated. The 1535 deal at Forgue involved repair of the roof, but how long had it been leaking and did the laird ever do the work?

Mass was said, not sung, and the Latin used was unknown to the congregation. Sermons, in language which could be understood, were preached only once or twice a year. There would be no hymns or psalms for the congregation to sing. The service must have been no more than incomprehensible and invisible action behind the rood-screen, mumbled, inaudible, mysterious.

Yet even the parish scene was never wholly dark for long. Waves of reformers -the friars are the best known- struggled to reinvigorate the medieval church again and again. At parish level, if people could not read the Gospel or take part in public worship, they could nevertheless follow the church’s teaching through the symbolism they found around them in the church and its worship.

There might be rough paintings and crucifixes on the walls of even the humblest churches. The festival of the Christian Year gave a pattern to the seasons and punctuated farming life – the offerings of candles at Candlemas and bread at Lammas, or the Easter palm procession (and at Forgue the fair) on Palm Sunday.

In 1535, Sir James Crichton of Frendraught gave 24 marks annually for the support of the priest and the altar, fixed on rent payable from the lands of Bognie. The laird may have stipulated in return for the endowment that the repose of his soul and the souls of his family and descendants should forever be prayed for. Such gifts in exchange for prayers were a common practice in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century.

The Reformation

Less than a generation later before 1560 the nature of piety began to change as the Reformers abolished observances and festivals. Religious feeling became personal and more thoughtful, less a matter of community observance. The theology changed too, and the laird’s pious gift of 1535 fell foul of the Reformers’ equally pious horror of prayers for the dead.

The Old Kirk changed from Roman Catholic observance to Presbyterianism in 1560. In August 1560 the Parliament of Scotland agreed to reform the religion of the country. The Reformed faith was defined by the Scots Confession written by John Knox. The Reformation required the founding of schools and poor Relief in every parish.

In the Forgue area the lairds were mainly Episcopalians and, later, often Jacobite sympathisers. 

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At Forgue, the priest, Alexander Home, may have stayed on voluntarily or in hope that the change to Presbyterianism would not be permanent. The first certain protestant in the parish church was Andrew Spens, a reader – perhaps a former priest, as many readers were – who did not arrive until 1574. He does not seem to have been a success. Not until 1590, again a whole generation after 1560, was the first ordained minister, Rev John Philip, inducted – and he only lasted a year before he moved to Rothiemay. Things really only stabilised with the ministry of Rev James Hay, who served the parish between 1608 and the mid to late 1620s.

At national level there is no problem in putting a date to the Reformation: 1560. Carrying through the Reformation in the parishes often took more than a generation. Successive attempts by the Stuarts to impose Bishops on the emerging Presbyterian church in Scotland caused ministers to ignore political changes throughout the 1620-40s.

The Second Reformation

The crisis came to a head in the 1630s, when James Vl’s inept son Charles l fell out with his Scottish subjects. Like his father, he wanted an Episcopalian church throughout Britain, controlled by himself. He intended to bring Scottish worship ‘into line’ with England. 

Charles had also foolishly added to the number of his enemies by threatening to confiscate from the lairds the church lands they had acquired at the Reformation.

In 1637 Charles l and Archbishop Laud imposed Bishops and a new prayer book on Scotland. This was the background to the National Covenant of 1638. Though it was Presbyterian in tone, many in Scotland who were far from fanatically religious signed it. The Covenant was a broad manifesto, bringing together for a while many different concerns. At the same time, though the king had grievously mishandled things, he still had plenty of supporters in Aberdeenshire. What had been a national protest became a revolution, as differences in the Covenanting party surfaced and the extremists took over the leadership. A long conflict broke out, and many localities suffered in the Bishops wars between 1639-1641.

They included Forgue and Inverkeithny, as Presbyterian Turriff skirmished with the royalist lairds round about. James Graham, marquess on Montrose was one of those who signed the National Covenant, and the next year he entered Turriff with an army of Covenanters. The King’s lieutenant in the north, the marquess of Huntly, put in an appearance in the town but found his men outnumbered and withdrew to Forglen without fighting.

The fate of the Forgue area was closely entwined with the troubles of the Crichtons of Frendraught. It all began when in 1630 Crichton of Frendraught killed Gordon of Rothiemay in a scuffle by the Deveron. He wounded the son of Leslie of Pitcaple in a second brawl. When the Gordon marquess of Huntly tried to restore peace, there was a third row. To keep Crichton out of further trouble, Huntly sensibly sent him home to Frendraught, accomplished by his own brother, Lord Aboyne. There followed an event which shocked Scotland. Aboyne and his servants perished in a midnight fire which devastated the castle. One of Pitcaple’s servants was found guilty and executed, but popular opinion blamed the Crichtons. Certainly, that was the view held by the Gordons, who proceeded to ravage Frendraught house and mains, and terrifying the tenants.

In 1638 Forgue Kirk and the Manse were burnt down. It was soon rebuilt by the heritors. 

Given the pattern of events in the civil war in the area, it was inevitable that Montrose would be drawn into this local falling-out. In his covenanting period, he tried vainly to get Huntly. To end the feud. When he appeared in Strathbogie for King Charles, the Crichtons opposed him. The Frendraught estate was ravaged in retaliation. Finally, when Montrose made his last desperate throw in 1650, Crichton of Frendraught – with appalling ill luck – chose to join him. He was in time only to offer Montrose his horse as the royalist army was conclusively routed at the battle of Carbisdale. Montrose himself was later captured and taken to Edinburgh to be executed.

In 1644, the minister of Forgue became professor of Divinity at Aberdeen, as the devastation of the area by the rival armies was at its height.

The Forgue elders could have offered an assistant, if they or their minister had really wanted one. The parish was not poor. A visitation in 1642 found the fabric in good order, doors and pulpits green in colour, windows well-glassed. The laird of Frendraught was remarkably generous. He had rebuilt the church after its burning in 1638. He had given – decides the cups – a pulpit cloth and a communion Table. Inverkeithny received cups as Forgue did, and also Aberchirder, and they were worth £80 – presumably sterling, a very large sum at that time.

The Return of the Bishops

In Forgue, Rev Alexander Garden (minister 1644-74) though ordained in days of Presbyterian supremacy, readily submitted to the bishop. He was succeeded in the parish by his son George, whose interesting career is summarised in Chapter 5. The ministers of Inverkeithny in 1660, Robert Irvine and his new assistant, Richard Maitland also conformed.

The Maitland family are an example of what are called ‘Levitical’ families in the Church of Scotland. These are generations of ministers who occupy the same parish one after another, as if the radical changes which affected the church nationally never happened. Richard Maitland’s son John was to succeed him in Inverkeithny. John became minister of Forgue. David was an episcopal minister in a meeting-house in Forgue.

Networks were important in other ways. Successive ministers of Forgue from 1628 till almost the end of the century maintained a connection with King’s College. Alexander Garden, the minister of Jm1-1rk@itlmy whose manse was destroyed by Montrose (see Chapter 3) had a bursary for four years, funded jointly by the presbyteries of Strathbogie and Elgin, to study theology in Aberdeen. Care was taken to find parishes – like Forgue or Inverkeithny – for the brighter pupils in the divinity class. After a while in the parish they returned to Aberdeen, well set for a distinguished academic career.

Jacobite and Episcopalian 

Just how powerless those in control of the Church nationally might be when they wanted to make local changes is borne out by events in Forgue and Inverkeithny.

Rev Patrick Harvey, who succeeded Rev George Garden in 1680 died in 1704. There was a short vacancy until John Maitland, son of the minister of Inverkeithny was called from Insch in 1707. Though he was inducted by the presbytery, Maitland was at heart an Episcopalian. He solved his conscience under Queen Anne much as George Garden did. Anne was a Stuart, not the one he thought should be on the throne, but just about acceptable. Her successor in 1714, the Hanoverian George I, the ‘wee, wee German lairdie’, was not. Maitland refused to pray for him and was deposed by the General Assembly.

So great was the support for episcopacy in the parish that it was impossible for the representatives of the presbytery to gain access to the Kirk or even the Kirkyard to intimate the sentence. Support was found at all levels of society. The laird’s wife got hold of the keys of the Kirk and refused to allow the presbytery to arrange pulpit supply in the vacancy.

The presbytery eventually took control by presenting a minister to the parish. The patron and the people were excluded. There was no other way an appointment of someone acceptable to the church authorities could be made. The patron was the husband of the lady who hid the keys, and the people were openly hostile.

The new minister was Alexander Forbes (minister 1716-1748). In choosing him, the presbytery had completed the easy part of their task. They then had to face an induction at which there was sure to be violence. When the day came, neither the soldiers who had been promised nor the sheriff who said he would come actually turned up. the presbytery was chased ignominiously across the Forgue burn. The induction was adjourned to the more sympathetic atmosphere of Presbyterian Auchterless.

Even then, the disturbances did not come to an end. John Maitland refused to quit the Manse of Forgue for about a year. By the time he agreed to go, a chapel had been built at Pennyburn for him and for those who, like him, could not accept the return of presbytery. John Maitland’s brother James, the minister of Inverkeithny, was also in trouble and for the same reason. He was thrown out of Inverkeithny in 1715 for refusing to accept the authority of the General Assembly and the presbytery. Like his brother John, he hung on in the Manse, where he opened a meeting-house for worship by those who agreed with his attachment to the bishops. In 1721, however, he left and joined John at the chapel at Pennyburn, along with a third brother, David.

Although he had demitted from Forgue well before the Revolution, the career of Rev George Garden, perhaps the most distinguished of all the ministers of Forgue, is of some interest. He was a son of Rev Alexander Garden and a grandson of another Rev George Garden. He attached King’s College Aberdeen where he was a friend of the future minister of Auchterless, Patrick Scougall, son of the bishop of Aberdeen and the author of a work of spirituality Tlze Life of God in tlze Soul of Man. The book was immensely popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and is still in print today.

In 1677 George Garden was ordained to his father’s charge at Forgue. In 1679, he was translated to St Machar’s in Aberdeen, and then in 1683 to St Nicholas. He was therefore taking full advantage of the family and college networks which characterized the Church in the north-east under the bishops.

Garden was among those opposed to the return of presbytery in 1688-89. He did not however choose to leave the Church of Scotland, and he was not pushed out until 1692, when he was suspended for refusing to pray for King William and Queen Mary. In 1701, he got into further trouble with the General Assembly for writing a scholarly treatise on the thoughts of a mystical Belgian lady. This time the fathers and brethren threw the book at him and he was deposed. But did he still consider himself under the Assembly’s jurisdiction? Probably not, since he continued to minister to a congregation of his former parishioners who were Episcopalians.

Dutch William was succeeded in 1701 by Anne, the daughter of James VU and II, who had fled to France in 1688. Anne was of course a Stuart, and so during her reign Garden, like Maitland his successor in Forgue, managed to be an Episcopalian without being a Jacobite. It was not an easy balancing act, and he soon gave it up. In 1715, after Anne’s death, he returned to the pulpit of St Nicholas, thanks to the Old Pretender, when Jacobite forces briefly occupied Aberdeen.

Of course, it all ended in tears when the rebellion collapsed.  Garden fled to the continent. But by 1720, he was back, a candidate for the bishopric of Aberdeen. He died in 1733.

The calm before the storm

In 1840 a dispute arose over the nights of Heritors – who armed and paid for Kirk buildings – to appoint ministers congregations wished to appoint them and rejected Heritor’s rights. In 1843 about the third of the ministers of the established Church of Scotland left the church and set up the Free Church of Scotland.

This dispute started in the neighbouring parish of Marroch in 1741. The churches were re-united in 1929.

In the Forgue area, presbytery had got off to a faltering start after the Revolution of 1688. Its subsequent progress was silent, steady and successful. At Inverkeithny, an unbroken continuity of three generations of ministers loyal to presbytery, over no fewer than 137 years, laid the ghosts of episcopacy. William Milne became minister in 1721, his son John in 1767, and his grandson James in 1809: and James did not die till 1858.

There was a similar continuity of Presbyterians at Forgue parish, though without the additional advantage of genealogy. Rev Alexander Forbes, whose turbulent induction had had to be removed to the Presbyterian fastness of Auchterless, remained minister of Forgue for forty-two years, living in wealth and style, courtesy of a deceased Irish uncle until 1758.

Local events were equally dramatic, though not in Inverkeithny, which sat tight in the Auld Kirk. A few years later, the minister said that he thought the reason for this was that in practice the views of the congregation had for a long time been taken fully into account by the presbytery before they approved a patron’s nominee.

At Forgue, the patron and the heritors do not seem to have been particularly oppressive. They paid for a new church in 1821 and a new Manse in 1826. Rev James Cordiner, who had been minister since 1834 – when his predecessor had died of apoplexy in mid-sermon – stayed in the Auld Kirk. Some of his people, however, left to find the Forgue Free Church.

Repairing the Alters

By 1900, after a prolonged effort at Church Extension, there were 400 ministers of quoad sacraparishes, (that is parishes created by the subdivision of the large parishes) the equivalent of the old chapel ministers. Ythan Wells was one of them and it was Rev John Abel, minister of Forgue, who was one of the moving spirits in creating the new parish. What the Auld Kirk had done was to find a way to give seats in the General Assembly to ministers in the same position as those whose imminent ejection from it had brought about the walk-out in 1843.

The ill-feeling between the Auld Kirk and the Free Kirk gave something of a spice to all this. Tradition has it that the choice of a site for Ythan Wells parish church had a great deal to do with the fact that it lay between a large population in the south of Forgue parish and the Free Kirk at Auchaber. At the same time, it might be argued that the game was started by the Free Kirk. The choice of Auchaber as a site for their congregation might have had something to do with the fact that many people from the south had to walk a very long way to Forgue!

At Forgue, although the minister did not go out in 1843, it must have been feared that at the next vacancy, the relative loss of manpower in the Church of Scotland would make it difficult to find a successor. The speed with which the Church recovered in this as in other ways is demonstrated by the fact that when James Cordiner died in 1849 the new minister, John Abel, was in place within months.

The Victorian Revolution

It was some of the Free Church Seceder’s who first used hymns and also reintroduced the Lord’s Prayer. It was almost a century later before the Free Church acquired one, in 1822. The Church of Scotland widely used paraphrases from the 1780’s, but for many years they were not approved formally. The first Auld Kirk hymn collection, entitled The Scottish Hymnal, appeared in 1870, though hymns had been in use in parish churches a little before that. By the end of the 1890’s the main Presbyterian Churches all used the same Church Hymnary, and Metrical Psalter. Behind these authorized collections, we should not forget the legacy of the Moody and Sankey Evangelical campaign in 1874 which was built around Hymn singing.

With hymns came pipe-organs. These was an organ in Aberdeen in 1857, and in Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh in 1860. An organ was installed in Forgue in 1872, one of the earliest in the north, the gift of the owner of Glendronach distillery. The congregation at Ythan Wells had begun to sing hymns at least by 1885. They presumably continued to employ a precentor, who led the congregation singing, since they did not acquire an organ until 1893.

The Episcopalians

Forgue and Inverkeithny lay in strongly Episcopalian country – the laird of Auchintoul for example was one of the inner circle of Jacobite leaders in the rebellion of 1715. At that time, there were six ministers owing nominal allegiance to the presbytery of Turriff. Two of them, closet Episcopalians, were deposed for refusing to pray for King George. All the five openly episcopal clergy within the bounds (who no longer acknowledged the presbytery anyway) favoured the Jacobite’s.

The eventual rout of the rebels served only to strengthen the Presbyterian cause. Nevertheless, the chapel founded by the three Maitland’s at Pennyburn after the removal of John and James from Forgue and Inverkeithny prospered. When John Maitland died in 1740, he was succeeded by Rev Alexander Smith. Things must have been looking up for the Episcopalians, for in that year a new chapel was built on the ridge above the farm of Parkdargue to serve the Episcopalians of both Forgue and Inverkeithny.

Indeed, there may have been more than one episcopal chapel in the parish of Forgue. There is fragmentary evidence of another at Cornyhaugh, perhaps founded by Rev David Maitland, but served until 1769 by a man called Irvine, a relation of the laird of Cornyhaugh. It is uncertain whether all those who attended that chapel had come from Forgue parish church. Cornyhaugh may in fact have been a gathering of Episcopalian exile from Rothiemay, Mayen and Marnoch as well as from Forgue. When Rev Andrew Macfarlane left the charge in 1777 – he was to go on to be episcopal bishop of Moray – the congregation may have survived as an independent body, or else the people may have joined (or re-joined) the Episcopalians of Forgue.

Despite the loss of their buildings and the impact of the Laws of 1746 and 1748 against episcopal worship, the congregation in Forgue did not die. At some point after 1760 they even built their chapel. By and by, the panel laws fell into disuse. During their time of trial, Episcopalian numbers remained remarkably high. They were no longer the predominant group in the parish, thanks to Presbyterian revival, but in 1755 roughly one out of every eight adults in Forgue was an Episcopalian. There were only a few in Inverkeithny. A century later, the number in Forgue had dropped, though it was still significant.

To care for the spiritual needs of what, after the death of the Pretender, was a politically reliable congregation there were a series of priests, some remarkably Jong in office, which must have stabilized the situation as the congregation moved into the nineteenth century. A new chapel was built on the present site in 1795.

Forgue was affected by the High Church or Anglo-Catholic movement at a remarkably early date. Rev James Smith, who became rector in 1840, was sufficiently well-thought of to be made Dean of the diocese of Moray in 1854. He must have been a man of great energy, and his congregation both loyal and wealthy, since in 1856-57 the present St Margaret’s church was built. But Smith was a High Churchman, before it was safe to hold such views. Despite his obviously successful ministry, the bishop sacked him from his deanery after only five years. In 1865, he was made to resign from Forgue.

Dramatic tension seems to have lessened among the Episcopalians in Forgue after that. There were a series of rectors until the middle of last century, but by then the numbers had fallen away. Between 1956 when the last rector left and 1961, St Margaret’s was served from Folla Rule and then, until its closure in 1969, from Insch.

Looking forward

Five years later, in 1953, the two ancient parishes of Forgue and Inverkeithny were united. Since the national union of 1929, Forgue had been called Forgue Old, and the 1953 union was known as Forgue-Inverkeithny. Forgue-Inverkeithny was linked with Ythan Wells-Auchaber in 1982. Finally, all four churches were made into a single charge named Auchaber United in 1992, and the following year they were formally linked with Auchterless.

Forgue church building was sold in 1998 to the Friends of Forgue Kirk, a charity created to preserve the building and the organ in the interest of the local community. Inverkeithny church building is in the care of a similar charity.