The Beggar's Benison E-Book

David Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 495

Beschreibung

Two clubs, dedicated to proclaiming the joys of libertine sex, thrived in mid and late 18th-century Scotland. The Beggar's Benison (1732), starting from local roots in Fife, became large and sprawling, with branches in Edinburgh, Glasgow - and St Petersburg. As a toast "The Beggar's Benison" was drunk at aristocratic dinners in London as a coded reference to sex, and the Prince of Wales (later George IV) became a member. In Edinburgh, also, the Wig Club (1775) gave the elite of the Scottish Tory establishment a forum in which to dine, gamble and venerate a wig supposedly made of the pubic hairs of the mistresses of Charles II. Both clubs flourished in a great age of raucous clubs in which bawdy often played a prominent part, and both died as changes in sensibility made such behaviour seem gross and unacceptable. As the Victorian age approached, the clubs withered away under its disapproving glare. In this book, the author tells the story of these clubs, analyzes the obscene relics of their rituals which survive, and places the clubs in their social, cultural and political contexts. It is an extensively researched study, but at the same time recognizes the entertainment value of the many anecdotes concerning the clubs, the absurdities inherent in the antics of club rituals, and the appeal of the bawdy.

Leseprobe

THE BEGGAR’S BENISON

Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and their Rituals

DAVID STEVENSON

This ebook edition published in 2013 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © David Stevenson, 2001

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Tuckwell Press

The moral right of David Stevenson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-630-4 Print ISBN: 978-1-86232-134-2

Version 1.0

Ebook production by Laura Kincaid,tenthousand creative services

Those to whom I have thought of dedicating this book might well be in two minds as to whether the gesture was a complimentary one, given its subject   I therefore dedicate it to its potential readers     *     ‘Keep them out of female sight’Hugh Cleghorn, on

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. The Benison: Fabulous Foundations

Assemblies of Good Fellows

Ancient Genesis and Medieval Monks

The King and the Beggar Maid

The King over the Water

The Colony of Merryland

2. The Benison: Records and Relics

The Records and Supplement

The Diploma and the Code

Bawdy Talk, Bawdy Verse, Bawdy Song

The Benison Lectures

The Proceedings of the Benison, 1733–1738

Fanny Hill in Merryland

Medals and Seals

Test Platter and Breath Horn

Punch Bowls and Wine Glasses

Pandora’s Box and the Benison Bible

Phallicism and the Benison Relics

The Lure of the Phallus

3. Enlightened and Unenlightened Sex

The Benison and the Disease of Masturbation

Libertinism and Enlightenment

4. Politicised Obscenity

Libertines and Jacobites

Anti-Union Obscenity

Hell-Fire Clubs?

Allan Ramsay and Patriotic Bawdy

5. The East Neuk of Fife

A Provincial Society

Fair Trade: Smuggling and Sex

6. The Benison Class of ’39

John McNachtane

Customs Officers

Smugglers

Jacobites and Whigs

Gentry

Merchants and Craftsmen

7. The Beggar’s Benison, 1739–1836

Aftermath of the ’45. The Benison and the Duke of Cumberland

The Benison, 1739–1790

Vincenzo Lunardi and the Prince of Wales

The Earls of Kellie and the Benison

From Blessing to Toast

The Benison, 1790s–1836

8. To Russia with Lust

9. The Wig Club, 1775–1827

The Allure of Pubic Hair

The Foundation of the Wig Club

Rise and Fall

Apparatus Appertaining to the Wig

The Knights of the Wig

10. The Twentieth Century

Epilogue: The Jezebel Club

Appendices1. Officials of the Beggar’s Benison

2. Beggar’s Benison Diplomas: Known Copies

3. Relics of the Beggar’s Benison and the Wig Club

Preface

As our own culture changes around us, so does what interests researchers in our cultural past – and what convention allows us to write about. That Scotland had two clubs in the eighteenth century, the Benison and the Wig, dedicated to the celebration of sexuality has long been known, but this has not been seen to be something worth studying, or reputable to study. Some interest was taken in the Beggar’s Benison in the late nineteenth century, when it became known that obscene artefacts had survived, but understandably at that time what was published tended to be evasive and allusive, dropping hints of obscenity that might be interpreted by the learned but otherwise giving the impression that the Benison was just a rowdy gentleman’s club – a bit naughty and shocking, but no more. The publication of the Benison Records and Supplement in 1892 added confusion. Publication was strictly limited, copies available by subscription only, for fear of prosecution. Moreover the material they made available was – insofar as it was seriously considered at all – greeted with suspicion. The works were so chaotically presented, and the editorial material so incompetent, that they were difficult to analyse. What they revealed about club activities was so shocking that it seemed unbelievable – surely it could not be authentic, and must be a forgery? And, anyway, the whole thing was so nasty that no scholar would wish to waste time on it. So the Records and Supplement lingered in a sort of limbo of uncertainty – historical sources, folklore, or pornographic fiction? In the late 1930s Louis Jones, an American scholar studying English clubs, stumbled on the Benison, and formed an honourable exception to the tendency to glance at the evidence, then turn aside in horror. Jones made the first serious study of the club and in terms of the context in which he wrote it is commendable. But he was limited by the fact that he was a literary historian with little knowledge of the Scottish background, and far more seriously by the fact that in a scholarly work much of what went on in the Benison was simply unmentionable. Thus the chapter he wrote on the Benison has a yawning gap at its centre. Moreover, his book on English clubs, published in America in the middle of the Second World War, had no detectable impact in Scotland.

In the sixty years since Jones wrote much has changed. The bounds of social and cultural history have expanded enormously, and the history of sex has emerged as a thriving discipline. As modern debates over sex rage it is natural that questions about how the matter was dealt with in the past now seem interesting and relevant, and not merely prurient. A sign of changing times was the republication of the Records and Supplement in 1982, with an introduction by the Scottish writer Alan Bold. The basic material for studying the Benison was now much more easily available. But Bold made no attempt at scholarly assessment of the material he reprinted, so doubts as to its reliability remained.

This is where I came in. I stumbled on a copy of the 1982 reprint in a bookshop (among remaindered books) in the early 1990s, and became fascinated by the challenge posed by the question of authenticity. I had just finished work on a study of early freemasonry, which had introduced me to the great world of eighteenth century clubs, and, I thought, it would be interesting to have a quick look at this very different club. The quick look became a longer study, as it gradually emerged how complicated the club was and how remarkably neatly it fitted into the decade of its foundation, the 1730s. It was not a freak eruption of obscenity, grotesque in soberly Calvinist Scotland, but very much a creature of its age. And it is I think a creature our age is at last ready to face, instead of shying away. But only just ready. While all nuances of hetero- and homo- sexual activity are matters of both popular debate, embarrassment and shock over auto-sexual activity still lingers. Or (lest that be interpreted as a puzzling reference to doing it in the back of the car), masturbation. It was the Benison’s speciality, and that is why the taboo about studying the club has lasted so long.

Acknowledgements

The debts incurred by a historian during research and writing are many. Professor T. C. Smout, University of St Andrews, has been most helpful and encouraging. I am also indebted for information and help to Professor Robert Crawford, Dr R. G. W. Prescott, Dr Norman Reid and the staff of library Special Collections of the same university. David Brown (National Archives of Scotland), M. Y. Ashcroft (North Yorkshire County Record Office); and library and archival staff of many other institutions have also contributed their invaluable but often anonymous and unsung expertise and services. Larry Hutchison kindly made the Benison Bible available to me, and George Dalgleish helpfully introduced me to the Benison relics in the National Museums of Scotland. David Gaimster performed similar services in the British Museum, and Professor Ian Carradice in St Andrews University. David S. Howard and Peter Lole gave me the benefit of their unrivalled expertises regarding, respectively, Chinese armorial porcelain and glassware.

Shiona Airlie (formerly of the Burrell Collection), Caroline Allen (Christie’s), M. Y. Ashcroft (North Yorkshire County Record Office), the Black Watch Museum, David Brown (National Archives of Scotland), A.J. Campbell, Simon Cottle (Sotheby’s), Alex Darwood (of the Kilrenny and Anstruther Burgh Collection), John Gifford, Dr Tim Hitchcock, Larry Hutchison, Peter Lole, Hazel Forsyth (Museum of London), Lord Scarsdale, Michael Sharp (A. H. Baldwin & Sons) and a London private collector have also proved most helpful in hunting down references and relics. Finally, I am much endebted to my agent, Duncan McAra, for his editorial and other labours in seeing the work through to publication, and to my publishers, John and Val Tuckwell.

Abbreviations

Adam, Political state     C. H. Adam, View of the political state of Scotland in … 1788 (Edinburgh, 1887)

Anstruther, Family     A. W. Anstruther, History of the family of Anstruther (Edinburgh, 1923)

BBWCC     St Andrews University Library and University Collections, Beggar’s Benison and Wig Club Collection. The manuscript and printed material is classified as MS 38351

BOEC     Book of the Old Edinburgh Club

Cockburn, ‘Friday Club’     H. A. Cockburn, ‘An account of the Friday Club, written by Lord Cockburn, together with notes on certain other social clubs in Edinburgh’, BOEC, iii (1910), 105–78

CB     G. E. C[okayne], The complete baronetage (6 vols., Exeter, 1900–9)

CP     G. E. C[okayne], The complete peerage (New edn., 13 vols., London, 1910–40)

Conolly, Eminent men     M. F. Conolly, Biographical dictionary of eminent men of Fife (Cupar and Edinburgh, 1866)

DNBDictionary of national biography

FastiFasti ecclesiastiae Scoticanae (9 vols., Edinburgh. 1915–81)

Fergusson, Henry Erskine     A. Fergusson, The Hon. Henry Erskine, lord advocate for Scotland (Edinburgh, 1882)

Gourlay, Anstruther     G. Gourlay, Anstruther; or illustrations of Scottish burgh life (Anstruther, 1888)

Grant, Edinburgh     J. Grant, Old and new Edinburgh (3 vols., [1880–3])

Grant, Edin. MarriagesRegister of marriages of the city of Edinburgh, 1751–1800 (STS, 1922), ed. F. J. Grant

Grant, St AndrewsThe commissariot record of St Andrews: register of testaments, 1549–1800, ed. F. J. Grant (SRS, 1902)

HSLThe history of Scottish literature. Vol. i, Origins to 1660, ed. R. D. S. Jack (Aberdeen, 1988); Vol. ii, 1660–1800, ed. A. Hook (Aberdeen, 1987)

Hutchison, ‘Bension’     L. Hutchison, ‘The Beggar’s Bension’, Scottish Book Collector, i (1987–9), no. 4, pp. 25–7

Jones, Clubs     L. C. Jones, The clubs of the Georgian rakes (New York, 1942)

NAS     National Archives of Scotland (formerly Scottish Record Office

NLS     National Library of Scotland

NMS     National Museums of Scotland

NRA(S)     National Register of Archives (Scotland)

OEDOxford English dictionary, 2nd edn

PSASProceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland

RCRBRecords of the Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland, 1345–1779, ed. J. D. Marwick (8 vols., Edinburgh, 1870–1918)

Records and Supplement     Records of the most ancient and puissant order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, Anstruther, and Supplement to the historical portion of the ‘Records of the most ancient …’ (2 parts, Anstruther [recte London], 1892). Though the two parts are usually found bound together they are cited separately as they have different paginations. A new edition in one volume, with preface by Alan Bold, was published in Edinburgh, 1982

Rogers, Social life     C. Rogers (ed.), Social life in Scotland from early to recent times (3 vols., Grampian Club, 1884–6)

SAUL     St Andrews University Library

Smith, ‘Sexual mores’     N. Smith, ‘Sexual mores and attitudes in Enlightenment Scotland’, in P. G. Boucé (ed.), Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Britain (Manchester, 1982)

SP          J. B. Paul (ed.), The Scottish peerage (9 vols., Edinburgh 1904–14)

SHS          Scottish History Society

SRS          Scottish Record Society

STS          Scottish Text Society

Stevenson, Anstruther     S. Stevenson, Anstruther. A history (Edinburgh, 1989)

Stone, Family     L. Stone, The family, sex and marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London, 1977)

Supplement     See under Records above

Williams, Dictionary     G. Williams, A dictionary of sexual language and images in Shakespeare and Stuart literature (3 vols., London, 1994)

Wood, East Neuk     W. Wood, The East Neuk of Fife (2nd edn, Edinburgh, 1887)

CHAPTER ONE

The Benison: Fabulous Foundations

From 1732 to 1836 the eastern tip of Fife in Scotland was the home of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland, a club devoted to the convivial and obscene celebration of the idea of free sex, with sidelines in its early days of support for smuggling (free trade) and distinctly subversive political sentiments. Members differed in social status, in religion and in politics, but they were bound together by the idea of a club at a meeting place in which such divisions should be ignored, and shared grievances against government – and indeed against change in general – served to unite members. Instead of reacting against the status quo with bitterness and activism, members relieved their frustrations through symbolic mockery and alcoholic defiance.

The Benison was provincial in origins, but it spawned branches in Glasgow, Edinburgh – and even St Petersburg, and it inspired the élite Wig Club in Edinburgh – which was rather more seemly than the Benison in its rituals though equally fervent in the devotion to sex. Early members of the Benison were local merchants and gentry, but later members were recruited from upper ranks of society, even reaching royalty in the person of the Prince of Wales (later George IV). The Benison and the Wig are less well known than the famous English Hell-Fire Club, but they were far longer lasting and, for the historian, have one great advantage over it. The Hell-Fire Club is only known through fragmentary references in scattered sources, whereas both manuscript records and obscene artefacts survive relating to the two Scottish clubs, making it possible to reconstruct at least some of their activities in detail. Whether other such clubs existed in eighteenth-century Britain is hard to say, but it may be that the Benison and the Wig are unique not in having existed, but through records of them having survived the horrified purging of later ages. They provide a unique insight into aspects of the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ and while their age-old obsessions with the demands of the phallus may seem at first sight most unenlightened, there is a case to be made, especially for the Benison, that they were Enlightenment institutions, taking on board the emerging culture and ideas of the age (while protesting at some aspects of it). Clubs as institutions lay at the heart of the spread of Enlightenment, the argument that sexual activity should be embraced as pleasure and not simply procreative duty was an enlightened theme. Edinburgh might be ‘a hotbed of genius’ as Smollett wrote. Members of the Benison dreamed of the East Neuk of Fife as a hotbed of free sex.

Assemblies of Good Fellows

The eighteenth century was the great age of the club, an institution defined by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary of 1755 as ‘An assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions’. The simplicity of the definition is masterly, wide enough to embrace an extraordinary range of institutions while indicating essential parameters. A club was a gathering of people brought together by mutual enjoyment of each other’s company. All were, in each other’s eyes, ‘good fellows’. But those involved regarded themselves as more than just informal, random gatherings of friends. Their friendship and shared interests created an institution, though it might be a very fluid one. They met voluntarily, but bound themselves by rules defining behaviour and activities, and shared the costs. A club might be born fully formed, with purpose, rules and membership laid down from the start, or it might evolve from informal meetings, gradually acquiring the trappings of ‘clubship’.1

The word is broad enough for almost any attempt at generalisation beyond such basic points to be open to question, but some features were common. It was very rare in the eighteenth century for clubs to have their own premises like later gentlemen’s clubs, providing places where members could drop in at any time to find company and leisure facilities. Instead they held pre-arranged meetings, some at first in coffee houses, but mostly in taverns, the convivial consumption of alcohol becoming almost a defining feature of club life. Meetings might be regular or irregular, frequent or infrequent. In some cases – as with the Beggar’s Benison – meetings only took place once or twice a year, becoming special events in members’ social calendars, annual celebrations of some particular aspect of shared friendship. The club was primarily an urban phenomenon, though sometimes in rural areas in England clubs of landowners emerged, with members meeting in each other’s private houses. But such arrangements inevitably tended to divide members into host and guests, undermining the usual equality of club sociability, just as the fact of meeting in a family home placed constraints on behaviour.

Usually conviviality was the central element of the club, but frequently this was combined with the advancement of some interest or cause. Sometimes these were seriously pursued. A club might be a forum where members sought to instruct themselves in matters such as antiquities, medicine, literature, or debating skills. Some such coteries developed into learned societies, with sober discussion and lectures. Descending from high seriousness was a range of attitudes to the interests espoused by clubs, with advancement of knowledge often becoming secondary to conviviality, and perhaps no more than a pretext for meeting. In the eighteenth century as today, in golf clubs actually playing golf could be merely a preliminary to socialising. Sometimes absurd interests were joyfully proclaimed, with ridiculous club names. Identity thus established, members could proceed to build the daft myths and rituals which so much appealed to the taste of the age.

Ritual of some sort existed in nearly all clubs. It might be minimal, concerned with no more than rules of proceeding, choosing members, naming and addressing officials, or it might be highly elaborate and symbolic, as with the freemasons. Again, however, there was great variety of attitudes. Ritual might be treated solemnly, but it might equally burlesque such pomposity. Yet, even when enjoyed as ludicrous, ritual could become important in binding men together. The joy of clubs was that members were free to make what they wanted of them. The form was infinitely flexible. Some appeared and disappeared with bewildering rapidity, but others lasted for generations.

Men had of course in previous ages often formed informal, voluntary groups for socialising and other activities, but the rise of convivial clubs into being a major feature of British society began in the coffee houses and taverns of London after the Restoration of monarchy in 1660. The Puritan restraints of the previous era had been removed, and meeting just for sociable pleasure was increasingly regarded as acceptable and not mere sinful idleness. The example of the libertine Charles II and his court indicated that worldly enjoyment had official sanction, and it seemed that relaxed sociability (and indeed sexual immorality) was symbolic of loyalty to the restored monarchy, demonstrating rejection of a repressive past. There did however, survive a whiff of the subversive about the word ‘club’. Clubs which were purely interested in hedonism might be harmless, but those in authority found it difficult at first to accept that letting organisations emerge which discussed serious, and even topical, matters without the blessing or supervision of church or state was not dangerous. Private gatherings in clubs could be concerned with political issues, and were therefore potentially subversive. A different fear about clubs was expressed by many moralists. They were shocking and deeply dangerous because they took men out of their families, the natural forum for sociability, and were all too often blatantly devoted to earthly enjoyment, distracting men from higher things.

The fact that in spite of lingering suspicion clubs were allowed to thrive and become widely accepted in the eighteenth century indicates an increasingly ‘open society,’ with the state disinclined to interfere in private life, the churches still longing to do so but too divided and weak to be effective. However fears that men gathering together in clubs might be a threat to morals or political stability never disappeared. The great century of clubs was thus also the great century of mistrust of clubs. In the first half of the eighteenth century there was much worry about Jacobite clubs,2 though many of the groups to which the name ‘club’ was attracted were nebulous gatherings of disgruntled drinkers. Even after the Jacobite threat faded, suspicions that for men to gather together was for them to conspire together remained, and such attitudes seemed ultimately to be justified by the coming of the French Revolution. Political clubs with revolutionary ideologies briefly flourished before being suppressed. ‘Clubship’ in general lost its attraction for many through fears of such contamination. Some clubs closed, many that survived went through a generation of decline. Even freemasonry, that vast organisation of lodges that constituted a highly successful network of clubs and counted royalty and aristocrats among its members, came under suspicion, and the foundation of new lodges was forbidden. Both the Benison and the Wig Club show signs of decline in the 1790s.

Nonetheless, in general the concept of clubs as innocent forums for sociability came to prevail. The decline of religious constraints and a relatively tolerant secular regime were essential preconditions for the rise of the clubs. The social changes underlying the movement may be seen in terms of increasing urbanisation and the growing strength of the middle ranks of society – growing both in numbers and in wealth (and therefore leisure), increasingly secularised (though without questioning underlying religious beliefs), increasingly educated, and with widening interests. The middle ranks – from successful craftsmen through merchants to professional men and officials – dominated most clubs, though country gentlemen and aristocrats played a leading part in some. Central to many clubs was an acceptance of a limited suspension of social hierarchy in the name of convivial brotherhood. Alcohol blurred social distinctions. A craftsman like Gavin Wilson, shoemaker in Edinburgh, was a member of the Cape Club, a remarkably large and amorphous club, and so was the earl of Haddington. The nobleman clearly did not feel his membership was derogatory to his status. But other clubs were much more limited socially. Haddington was also a founder of the Wig Club, and in its records Wilson appears as an artisan commissioned to make objects for ritual use. The idea of his becoming a member would have been absurd. The Cape was unusually wide ranging socially, the Wig was unusually narrow. A narrowness is seen also in clubs associated with certain professions – medicine and law, or with intellectual interests in philosophy or antiquities. They might not be consciously socially exclusive, but the shared knowledge and interests that bound members together often implied leisure and/or specialised education.

One of the joys of the club for many men was the opportunity to escape from the constraints and responsibilities of family and household. Full advantage was often taken of the absence of the restraining influence of women, whether mothers, sisters, wives or daughters, on talk and behaviour. In the ideal club you were in the company of fellows with whom you could behave with a freedom not found elsewhere. Your choice might be for fairly decorous company, or for the outrageous, or by belonging to several clubs you could indulge a range of sociable tastes. The essentials were that you choose your own company and parameters of behaviour with a liberty not obtainable in any other institution – and the absence of women and children was central to exercising such freedoms. In the eyes of some, however, even among the educated and secular-minded, the very fact that clubs provided forums for exclusively male sociability was damaging to society. William Alexander, a Scottish physician, produced a History of women (1779) which argued the point. Men could not be trusted on their own, and one of the main functions for which nature intended women was to act as civilising influences on men. If men were to achieve their full potential for civilisation, they needed the company of women (though they could have too much of it, in which case they became effeminate). Without women, men declined into ‘roughness of behaviour and slovenliness of person’. Alexander did not specifically attack clubs, but concentrated his wrath on the English custom of women withdrawing from table after dinner, leaving the men on their own. Men often showed impatience if their ladies were slow in withdrawing, ‘which is a certain indication, that they either want to debauch themselves with liquor, or indulge in those indecencies of discourse, which the company of women always restrains’. In France things were handled far better: the ladies did not withdraw, and conversation and enjoyment in such mixed company was superior. He had a point, for in clubs as well as after dinner at home, as Alexander suggested, the main advantages taken of male exclusivity were to get drunk and talk dirty.3

At dinner, the ladies withdrew from the men. Through clubs, the men removed themselves from women to tavern or other meeting place. But though this decreased socialising between the sexes, it also, paradoxically, in some respects paved the way for the emergence of institutions advancing sociability between the sexes outside the family. Once the shock of unsupervised male sociability in clubs had been absorbed, it was easier for the idea of voluntary social institutions including women to be accepted as well. In Scotland the church fought a long delaying action, but as the eighteenth century passed, middle and upper class women were accorded places in the explosion of sociability. Assemblies, dances, balls, concerts and theatre emerged, creating a world of socialising outside home and family for women as well as men. At first such activities were strictly supervised to preserve the proprieties, but not by outside authority. Instead internal officials were appointed to regulate conduct, to placate the Presbyterian conscience and maintain decorum. Nonetheless, what the church long condemned as ‘promiscuous dancing’ gradually became accepted. It is hard to imagine such developments taking place without the previous victory of the male clubs. But if this mixed-sex sociability in some ways followed the example set by the clubs, another perception was that it was the evils of the all-male clubs that made mixed sociable bodies acceptable, even desirable, as they formed a more seemly alternative, with women performing their civilising role.

In the emerging networks of voluntary social institutions, men had it both ways. The company of women at assembly or concert when they felt like civilising female presence, exclusive male company when they tired of such restraint. And often, as William Alexander feared, the major motive for fleeing the company of women was to be free to talk about them. This could be restrained to the respectable – in terms of language if not alcohol. Toasting or ‘raising the ladies’ was common, a beauty-competition held in the absence of the contestants, with the winner being the lady whose champion could drink most toasts without slumping into unconsciousness. But talking and singing about the ladies in terms of respect and admiration often led on to bawdiness and obscenity, considerations of beauty and love giving way to raw sex. There is of course nothing surprising or novel in men having such obsessions, and combining idealising women with regarding them as products for consumption, but clubs did give men additional opportunities to talk convivially about their own fantasies and prowess and deeds. In anecdotes, boasts, verse and song they celebrated women – from a male perspective. There was, after all, no more universal a topic, no more common an interest which could bind members together than shared lust for the female.

Ancient Genesis and Medieval Monks

Like many a club with mock pretensions to importance, the Beggar’s Benison felt an urge to create grandiose origin myths to support its claims, to validate its rituals, and to be enjoyably ludicrous. In some more serious clubs there was a danger of, in time, coming to take myths of ancient origins to be literally true. Some freemasons really came to believe in ancient freemasonry. But for many the legends of origins were seen as symbolic rather than historical, and for some the legends were fun more than anything else. In the case of the Benison it was clearly felt that to have merely one foundation myth would indicate poverty of imagination. Consistency was boring.

As well as cheerful claims to the utmost antiquity more specific and local mythological backing was thought appropriate. The Beggars took a passing glance at the Middle Ages, speculating about the deeds of randy monks of the priory on the Isle of May (which had later moved to Pittenweem). As staunch Protestants, members took it for granted that supposedly celibate Catholic monks were sex-mad, and masturbation was regarded as a monastic speciality. The name of the island that the monks had roamed added a double bonus. It bore a girl’s name, which was also the name of the month specially associated with spring and fertility.

The confused body of Benison mythology also included reference to a medieval lord – or even earl – of Anstruther who earned the nickname Fisher Willie because of his zeal in developing the fishing industry. Though it is not specifically stated, the implication is that he too was somehow a founder of the Benison. But the only example of the activities of Fisher Willie celebrated within the Benison suggests that it was not fishing that won him immortality – or rather that he was a fisher of women rather than fish. A verse supposedly recited by the earliest known ‘sovereign’ of the Benison, John McNachtane, told of the exploits of ‘Earl Willie,’ depicting the earl seducing May – the Isle of May, which symbolised the female sex:

May was not like other lasses, –

From twelve her breasts swell’d in a trice;

Firm they were as two cupping-glasses,

Just like peaches, dainty and nice.

And so on. The Isle of May was Venus arising from the waves, and Fisher Willie was eventually married to her – by, appropriately, the prior of Pittenweem.4 The reference to Venus added classical allusion to the biblical and medieval, but looking at the stark cliffs of the Isle of May, which from some angles give it the shape of a whale, it takes some effort of imagination to see it as Venus, but no doubt drink and unfocused lust helped.5

The King and the Beggar Maid

For their main myth, however, the Beggars settled on something more modest chronologically, inventing a tale set in the early sixteenth century.

Motifs in folklore are often common to very different cultures, and the ‘king goes in disguise among his people’ motif is known from Russia to Arabia – and to Scotland. Here it became attached to King James V, forming an interesting contrast with his reputation for brutality.6 James found little favour among historians, one referring to ‘the revulsion with which he must be regarded’, another to his being ‘probably the most unpleasant of all the Stewarts.’7 But in popular lore he was to be remembered as a man who liked to wander among his people incognito, socialising and listening to their opinions, and, in fact as well as tradition he was notorious for bedding women of all ranks with promiscuous zeal, making him an ideal royal patron for the Beggar’s Benison.

James had became king in 1512, at the age of one year. As he grew up the regent, his step-father the earl of Angus, ‘was accused of deliberately encouraging the young king in a precocious career of vice’8 – the idea being that a youth who developed an obsession with sexual indulgence would show little interest in government, and therefore leave the exercise of power in Angus’s hands. If there was such a plot, it was only partly successful. James did indeed pay undue (but what is due?) attention to sex, but kept a close watch on government as well. He was chided in verse for his licentiousness by David Lindsay of the Mount, poet and herald. In one poem several characters discuss the king’s reputed conquests, mentioning girls in Stirling, Linlithgow – and one in Fife:

Bot, schir, I knaw a maid in fyfe,

Ane of the lustiest wanton lassis.9

Possibly, but no more than that, the lusty wanton lass in Fife was the inspiration for the ‘beggar maid’ of the Benison myth associated with the king.

In reply the king, also in verse, jeered at Lindsay for lack of activity in Venus’s work. The poet felt it necessary to protest that he had had plenty of affairs in earlier years – and then, having thus boasted his past manhood, he proceeded to seek credit for his present morality as well. He had repented

That euer I did Mouth thankles so persew

The ‘mouth thankless’ was a term for the vagina that appealed to early Scottish poets.10 The king’s own conduct, continued the courtier-poet, was deplorable. He pulled no punches:

Thoucht ye rin rudelie, lyke ane restles Ram,  run

Schutand your bolt at mony sindrie schellis  shooting; shells (vaginas)

…

For, lyke an boisteous Bull, ye rin and ryde  run

Royatouslie lyke ane rude Rubeatour,  riotously; libertine

Ay fukkand lyke ane furious Fornicatour.  fucking

…

On Ladronis for to loip ye wyll nocht lat.11whores; leap; not stop

In thus denouncing his sovereign Lindsay must have known he was quite safe: the young king gloried in his sexuality and its expression. For the courtier-poet to call the arrogant royal stud a bull and a ram was flattery. To the men of the Benison, two centuries later, the reign of James V had been a golden age. A king who had set an example of sexual licence, and had lived in an age when bawdy was an element which was included comfortably within the ‘high’ literature of the court, sounded like a dream come true.

The stories of James revelling in disguise mostly rest on oral traditions, unsatisfactory sources for the historian.12 But one documented incident indicates that in reality as well as a myth he had a taste for disguise and exploitation of the advantages of observing while remaining himself unobserved. In 1536 he journeyed to France, to arrange his marriage. The proposed bride was Marie of Vendôme, but James,

indulging his taste for chivalric adventure, disguised himself as a servant in order that he might view his prospective bride incognito. However, the quixotic gesture backfired spectacularly when, finding Marie ugly, hunchbacked, and not at all to his taste,

James insisted on a change of bride.13 The chivalry of the episode is hard to detect: it sounds more like a calculated act to make sure that he was not committed to a bride unseen. This known incident of James assessing candidates for his bed in disguise gives a measure of plausibility to the stories of his bucolic philanderings in Scotland, and eastern Fife was a plausible setting for some of these tales, for the king and court frequently stayed at St Andrews or at Falkland Palace. Often in legend James is portrayed as wandering in the guise of a beggar, and the poems ‘The Gaberlunzie Man’ and ‘The Jolly Beggar’ were believed to celebrate his exploits in that role.14 But he was also reputed at times to have called himself ‘the gudeman of Ballengeich’, indicating a man of humble status but not poverty.15 The association of the term with royalty became deeply established. In the mid-seventeenth century the term was used as code for Charles I.16 A century later it was current in Jacobite circles to refer to another royal exile, Prince Charles Edward.17 More widely, the memory of James V was kept alive by stories of his hearty enjoyment of the basic pleasures of life.18

And wha can match the fifth King James

For sang or jest?19

In the Beggar’s Benison myth, one day James V in his ‘king as commoner’ guise came to the Dreel Burn, the boundary between the two little burghs of Anstruther Easter and Anstruther Wester in the East Neuk. He hesitated because he didn’t want to get his feet wet (hardly a heroic moment). In such crises, it is said, it was customary to call on the services of poor women, who would wait by un-bridged streams for this purpose: ‘By easy adjustment of their garments, they waded across streams, bearing the men upon their shoulders’.20

A beggar lass was duly waiting, and carried the king over the burn. James then gave her a gold coin for her services, and in return she gave him her thanks in the form of a blessing or ‘benison:’

May your purse naer be toom  never empty

And your horn aye in bloom.  always

Here the Benison taste for double entendre reveals itself. At first sight this may be a blessing on the king’s wealth (the gold in his purse) and hunting horn, but behind this lies the blessing of his testicles (in the purse of the scrotum),21 and his erect (‘in bloom’) penis. The implication is clearly that the beggar lass had granted the king more than aquatic transport: she was rewarded with gold for sexual favours.

The two-line version of the ‘benison’ quoted above is in Scots, but more commonly, as a toast or motto, the club used a shorter, anglicised version:

May Prick nor Purse never fail you.

Different wording, but the same sentiments. It is possible that the Beggar’s Benison picked up the blessing from oral traditions of James V, but the only written reference to it known before the club was founded in 1732 comes not from Fife but London, where it appears as a ‘cant’ – the vocabulary of the criminal underground – term. A pamphlet printed in 1728, catering for the taste for sensational accounts of criminals, related the crimes and adventures of one James Dalton. This petty criminal specialised in purse-snatching, mugging, robbing coaches, ‘biting’ (cheating) whores, and infiltrating gatherings of ‘mollies’ (homosexuals). On one occasion a coach held up by Dalton and his gang contained an actor and a ‘Lady of Pleasure’. On his money being demanded, the actor launched into a harangue about the poverty of his profession. He was so poor that he had had to work out a careful budget before venturing out even for a frugal night with a whore. Now he was being further humiliated. He, a man who often played an emperor on the stage, would ‘be forc’d to go to Bed without either his Mistress or his Supper’ if he was robbed. The thieves were entertained by this dramatic performance, ‘being Lovers of the Sport which was going forward’ (sex). They let the actor keep his money so he could have his whore, and sent him on his way

wishing his – [prick] and Purse might never fail him.22

Quite possibly the blessing was an old one – for a beggar to give a man a combined blessing on his two most important possession, money and genitals, sounds good business practice – but the chronological coincidence of the blessing making its first known appearance in 1728 and it becoming the Benison club motto in the 1730s suggests that the Benison had picked up the blessing from English sources, and produced a suitably ‘ye olde’ Scots version of it to suit it to the adventures of James V. Calling it a ‘benison’ rather than a blessing had added advantages. Dr Johnson in his Dictionary says the word ‘is not now used, unless ludicrously’, so this semiarchaic word added to the Benison both an air of antiquity and a comic touch. Even better, where the word did linger on in Scottish usage, in popular song, it usually referred to the sexual favours – from a kiss onwards – that a woman might grant a man.23

Thus the ‘Beggar’s Benison’ was a most suitable title for a club devoted to sex. The words indicated the sexual favours of women in general, blessed gold and genitals, and referred to the specific encounter of James V and the beggar maid. The members of the Benison saw themselves as the heirs of the disguised king who had fornicated his way through Fife. For them, James was an archetypal figure of sexual fantasy, of masculine roving and enterprise, of blithe acceptance that sex was pleasure. And they saw themselves as kings like him, for they too were rulers, by right of the phallus.

The King over the Water

The Beggars enjoyed playing with symbolism, half seriously, half wittily. The king and the beggar maid story is most superficially a simple anecdote of James V’s wandering in disguise. Beneath that lies the story of a sexual encounter. Dig deeper, and there are subversive political allusions – so well hidden that they have been overlooked in the past.

When the Beggar’s Benison was founded in 1732 less than a generation had passed since the Jacobite rising of 1715 and the abortive attempt of 1719. Beneath surface calm and acceptance of the Hanoverian dynasty, which had succeeded to the British thrones in 1714, Jacobite sympathies were strong in Scotland. Longing for the restoration of the old Stuart dynasty, dethroned in 1688–9, was widespread, though ineffectual. Pledges of support for the cause were exchanged among friends and contacts were maintained with Jacobites exiles on the Continent. Symbolic rituals evolved whereby Jacobites at once revealed and veiled their loyalties. Even in the presence of opponents, support for the cause could be covertly indicated. Drinking a loyal toast to the crown might outwardly be a toast to the Hanoverians George I or II, but by passing their toast glasses over water in a glass or jug on the table, Jacobites symbolically converted their toast into a pledge to the ‘king over the water,’ the exiled Prince James Edward, in their eyes King James VIII and III.24 Intellectually this might be little superior to a child arguing that if you have your fingers crossed when making a promise it is not binding, but to frustrated Jacobites it was meaningful. Genuine intrigue and this sort of sentimental Jacobitism created a mystic, allusive mythology, with the king over the water as one of its most enduring images.

The lyric poetry and song of Jacobite allegory presents the political issue in the guise of romantic yearning, a seeking and finding of true love. Scotland is seen as a girl searching for true love (legitimate authority) by seeking out and submitting to a figure representing the Stuart dynasty. Often the girl (Scotia, Caledonia) is represented as a Lowlander who rejects unworthy suitors but at last finds true love with the Highland Laddie – the Stuart cause. Sometimes the Lowland lass is admitted to have been faithless in the past, straying from true love (loyalty), but returning to her ‘true identity after yielding to the Highland patriot’.25 Conveniently, of course, being female, the girl in recognising her true destiny becomes subservient. Stuart royal power over Scotland is male power over the female. Grieving Scotland seeks happiness and at last finds love through loyalty and submission. Country and dynasty are reconciled, and the assumption is, will live happily ever after. This is the romantic, acceptable face of the erotic Jacobite vision, giving a powerful emotional charge to a political ideology. Sentimental, nostalgic lyric bathed political loyalties in a warm glow of the sensual. The beggar maid myth of the Benison parodies this with cheerfully iconoclastic enthusiasm – but in a coded form.

The Benison story tells of a Stuart26 king who for a time is without his legitimate royal authority (James V was in disguise). He is stranded, separated by water from where he wants to be. He is then carried to where he wishes to be, ‘over the water’ by the beggar maid. The story then ends not with romantic love but with a sex for gold exchange. Benison bawdy has thus appropriated the lyric Jacobite fantasy and stripped it naked, substituting raw sexual reality. A beautiful girl representing Scotland? Make her a beggar maid, emphasising the poverty of mis-governed Scotland – and parodying the element in the ‘Highland Laddie’ myth that stressed that he identified with its ordinary folk.27 The beggar maid in helping the disguised king over the water and having sex with him does so because she wants cash payment, not because she is ‘Scotia’ idealistically helping her true sovereign back to his thrones and then submitting to his male authority.

Interpreted in this way, it seems at first sight that the Benison’s beggar-maid story is anti-Jacobite. In place of idealisation of the exiled dynasty is the message that it is simply after sexual gratification. But explaining the tale simply as a crude Hanoverian joke does not work, because James V, the substitute for the Stuart pretender, was the Benison’s hero. He was rightful king, and his sexual opportunism was something was to be admired. Thus the Benison-Jacobite story is politically ambiguous, and examination of the club’s membership reveals why (see Chapter 6). Both Jacobites and Hanoverians were members. They met basically through personal friendship – and obsession with sex – and it might have been thought expedient to ignore politics altogether for fear of causing impossible tensions. But these men were not political activists, and their commitment to their causes was not blind. They were malcontents who found in the Benison a safe forum for expressing their frustrations in semi-comic, coded forms. All could agree that Scotland was badly governed under the Hanoverians, and Jacobites, though they believed that legitimacy demanded that the Stuarts should be restored to the throne, could concede that that dynasty had contributed to its own downfall by its policies. Moreover, both Hanoverians and Jacobite members had imbibed from the libertine atmosphere of the Restoration monarchy of the last of the Stuarts (Charles II and James VII and II) a robust belief in the legitimacy of the pursuit of sexual pleasure. The many satires that had depicted the royal power of the promiscuous Charles II as essentially phallic power had been digested and appreciated.

Out of this men of different political inclinations had devised a mock historico-political myth. Successful monarchy was successful sexual adventure. James V was a hero through his open embracing of sex as central to life and rule, an attractive figure compared with the Hanoverians George I and George II, with their outward pretence of piety combined with mistresses kept out of the public eye. Politics was a mug’s game. Better concentrate on the more personal satisfactions of sex (or sexual fantasy), and confine potentially disruptive political discussion to playing with the connections of sexual and political power. Disillusioned Jacobites as well as Hanoverians could laugh cynically at the idealisations of Jacobite propaganda, of suffering but loyal Scotland and the gracious Stuart saviour who would return to claim her, rule her and bring peace and prosperity. Out of half-bitter, tipsy laughter there emerges a bawdy version of Jacobite idealism. None of this wishy-washy stuff about the suffering exile and love, but a beggar girl and the buying of sex.28 There is superb bathos in the Benison’s setting of the ‘king over the water’ idea. The English Channel is reduced to the Dreel Burn, Britain and France to the two Anstruthers, a nobly suffering exiled king to one who didn’t want to get his feet wet. Here is myth of a golden Stuart past that could unite malcontent Hanoverians and Jacobites in joyous smutty fun, with a glorious send-up of the rival propaganda versions of Scotland’s past.

That there is no direct evidence for this ‘Jacobite’ interpretation of the beggar maid story is not surprising, for (like mainstream Jacobite talk of the Highland Laddie and Scotia) it was deliberately allusive rather than explicit. One possible objection to the Jacobite interpretation might be that, if the Benison wanted a sexually voracious hero-king to play with in their convivial stories, surely they would have chosen the promiscuous Charles II, far closer in time and far better known, for the role. But distance made James V safe. No-one would be likely to fear subversion if it leaked out that a club revered his memory, but Charles II had been the second last of the Stuart kings, and his absolutist and pro-Catholic tendencies had done much to lead to the overthrow of the dynasty. A club dedicated to Charles II, even if the dedication was ribald, might well be seen as a guise for Jacobite activism. Moreover, even the tolerant Jacobite and Hanoverian members of the Benison might have found it hard to talk of the controversial (especially as the persecutor of Presbyterian dissidents) Charles II without acrimony. Moreover, Charles II had been Stuart in blood but anglicised, and had ruled from England, whereas James V had lived in an idealised golden age when Scotland had been independent and before the Reformation had brought religious conflict to divide the country.

The obliging maid in the Benison myth was a beggar primarily because she represented Scotland, notorious for poverty. But there was possibly another inspiration. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was first performed in London in 1728 and soon became hugely popular, not least because there was concealed within it political satire attacking the government of Sir Robert Walpole. Was an echo of this, the using of beggars to hide political meanings, in the minds of the malcontents who created the Beggar’s Benison just a few years later?

The Colony of Merryland

The Beggar’s Benison is usually known as just that, but the club’s full title was the Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Merryland.

Merry had long been a word with meanings relating to sex and bawdy. ‘Merry May’ was not an amusing time of year but a breeding time. Shakespeare has Ophelia chide Hamlet for being ‘merry’ when his talk got risqué. The Merry Wives of Windsor were not merely comic.29 Charles II, the ‘Merry Monarch’, was noted for promiscuity rather than humour. Robert Burns was to use ‘merry’ frequently. His illegitimate child was ‘Sweet fruit o monie a merry dint’. ‘Her cunt’s as merry’s mine’ says one girl of another who had expressed disapproval of the former’s fornication. Bawdy combinations including merry abounded. A ‘merry-bout’ meant sex; a ‘merry-legs’ was a whore, a ‘merry-maker’ a penis.30 Merryland was a relative latecomer, and indeed only once had its use been noted before the Beggar’s Benison was founded. In 1652 an English newspaper had referred to a ship on the Thames, which was being used as a brothel, as a floating ark of pleasure ‘bound for Merryland’.31 Merryland was a fantasy land of sexual pleasure and, more specifically, the female body. The word seems thereafter to disappear until it was used by the Benison in 1739. Then, for a few years beginning in 1740, ‘merryland’ became prominent in English pornography, which featured ‘a whole series of strange publications consisting of descriptions of female anatomy in terms of elaborate topographical metaphor, complete with shrubs, hillocks, vales and grottoes’.32 First was The potent ally; or succours from Merryland ([London], 1740). Thomas Stretzer’s A new description of Merryland. Containing, a topographical, geographical, and natural history of that country also first appeared in 1740 (under the pseudonym ‘Roger Phequewell’), and reached a fourth edition by 1741, a tenth by 1742. In 1741 two editions of Merryland displayed, also by Stretzer, appeared. In 1743 was added A short description of the roads which lead to that delightful country called Merryland to these ingenious inquiries. Merryland had clearly become a hot word in pornographic circles, but the attempt to produce an ambitious series of engravings, a Complete set of charts of the coasts of Merryland went beyond the bounds of acceptability. The plates were seized and destroyed,33 and thereafter pornographers tired of this topographical obsession.

Merryland died of over-exposure, though some of these works were reprinted several times later in the century. Only, it seems, on Beggar’s Benison membership diplomas did the word survive. Superficially, the fact that the Benison was using the term ‘Merryland’ immediately before it suddenly emerged as fashionable in published English pornography might seem to make plausible to argue that the English authors involved borrowed the term from the Benison, but this would almost certainly be incorrect. It is more probable that the word remained in use in England between 1652 and 1740 unrecorded, then winning favour by writers for a few years. It may also have been in use in Scotland, but the fact that works of pornography are known in a number of cases to have been circulated in manuscript before publication makes it quite possible that the Benison picked it up in unpublished English pornography in the 1730s. This might seem to suggest an unlikely close link between provincial Fife and English pornographers, but such a link undoubtedly existed, for the Benison had read a manuscript of Fanny Hill long before publication (see Chapter 2). Someone in the Benison had access to unpublished English pornographic material.

‘Merryland’ was the female territory the Beggars lusted after, and their obsessions with the Isle of May, the merry month, doubtless made them especially fond of the conceit. More widely, Benison members feasted their imaginations on the East Neuk, with its coastline full of caves and crannies. Further, ‘merryland’ may well have had another resonance, obliquely (and therefore safely) recalling merry Charles II and the libertine era he had presided over. Charles had visited Dreel Castle in Anstruther in 1651, so could claim local credentials. Bring back the Stuarts and restore the proper cultivation of Merryland?

NOTES

1. For clubs in Britain as a whole see R.J. Morris, ‘Clubs, societies and associations,’ in The Cambridge social history of Britain, 1750, vol. iii, ed. F.M.L. Thomson (Cambridge, 1990), 395–443; J.C. Ross, An assembly of goodfellows. Voluntary associations in history (Westport, Conn., 1976); and P. Clark, British clubs and societies, 1580–1800. The origins of an associational world (Oxford, 2000). Clark’s comprehensive book unfortunately appeared too late for its arguments to be fully considered in writing the present work. Much of the interest in Scottish clubs has, been concentrated on the more high-minded institutions: see N.T. Phillipson, ‘Culture and society in the 18th century province: The case of Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment,’ in The University in Society, ed. L. Stone (2 vols., Princeton, 1975), ii, 407–48 and D.D. McIlroy, Scotland’s age of improvement. A survey of eighteenth century literary clubs and societies (Washington State, 1969). For other clubs see Cockburn, ‘Friday Club’, 105–78; A. Clark, ‘An old Edinburgh club’ [the Luggy Club], BOEC, xxxi (1962), 43–51; J.B. Sutherland, ‘An Eighteenth Century Survival: the Wagering Club,’ BOEC, ii (1909), 149–66; R. Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh (1st edn. Edinburgh, 1824; the 1868 edition has been used), 138–58; Grant, Edinburgh, iii, 122–6. See also, J. Strang, Glasgow and its clubs: or glimpses of the condition, manners, characters and oddities of the city (3rd edn, Glasgow, 1864).

2. M.G.H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite politics in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994), 292–7.

3. W. Alexander, The history of women (3rd edn, 2 vols., London, 1782: 1st edn 1779), i, advertisement & 475, 486, 493–4.

4.Records, 15–16; Supplement, 66–7. Fisher Willie’s name may contain a double-entendre. A fisherman is a predator, therefore Fisher Willie stands for predatory penis, which fits perfectly with the Beggars’ obsessions. See Williams, Dictionary, iii, 1536, for some early examples of ‘will’ etc. meaning penis. Some of the wording in the verse McNachtane recites raises suspicion that it may have been composed towards the end of the Benison’s existence rather than in its earlier days.

5. G. Legman, The horn book. Studies in erotic folklore and bibliography (London, 1964 & 1970), 142–3 wished to add the Knights Templar and the Druids to the Benison’s ancestry, an exercise in myth-making rivalling those of the club’s own founders in fertility of imagination.

6. P. Burke, Popular culture in early modern Europe (London, 1978), 152.

7. Gordon Donaldson and Jenny Wormald, quoted in J. Cameron, James V. The personal reign (East Linton, 1998), 329.

8. C. Bingham, James V, king of Scots, 1512–1542 (London, 1971), 90–9.

9. D. Hamer (ed.), The works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (4 vols., STS, 1931–6), i, 46 & iii, 57.

10. Williams, Dictionary, i, 919.

11. Hamer, Lindsay, i, 103; iii, 117; Bingham, James V, 98.

12. Many of these stories are to be found in J. Paterson, James the fifth: or ‘the gudeman of Ballangeich’: his poetry and adventures (Edinburgh, 1861).

13. C. Edington, Court and culture in Renaissance Scotland. Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 33, 101.

14. Bingham, James V, 95–6.

15. See D. Stevenson, ‘The gudeman of Ballengeich’, Folklore and the historian, ed. D. Hopkin (Folklore Society, 2001, forthcoming)..

16.Lauderdale papers, ed. O. Airy, ii (1885), 50; D. Stevenson, Revolution and counter revolution in Scotland (London, 1977), 96.

17. E. Charlton, ‘Jacobite relics of 1715 and 1745’, Archaeologia Aeliana, new series, vi (1865), 34; P.K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 1688–1788 (Cambridge, 1989), 329..

18. See note 15 above.

19. James Beattie, 1768, quoted in R. Fergusson, Poems, ed. M.P. McDiarmid (2 vols., STS, 1954–6), i, 143.

20. Rogers, Social life, i, 219. It may be, in fact, that the story that it was customary for women to do this is based on the Bension myth.

21. See Williams, Dictionary, iii, 116–19 for purse as scrotum.

22. E. Partridge, A dictionary of catch-phrases (London, 1977), 145, citing A genuine narrative of all the street robberies committed since October last by James Dalton … (London, 1728), 26–7.

23. D. Herd, Ancient and modern Scottish songs, heroic ballads, etc. (reprint, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1973), i, 204; ii, 43, 99. Herd’s collection first appeared in 1776, but most of the songs date from much earlier. The poet Allan Ramsay included ‘bension’ in his list of Scottish words which needed an ‘Explanation’ in an appendix to his Tea table miscellany (4 vols., Edinburgh, 1724–37). Robert Burns never used the word.

24. The ‘over the water’ theme in Jacobite propaganda appears early, but the toast derived from it may be late. It appears as practised by Fielding’s drunkenly raucous Squire Weston in Tom Jones (London, 1749), who holds his glass over the water-filled wine-glass cooler while drinking to ‘The King’. It is said that after the coronation banquet of George III in 1760 finger-bowls were banned from royal banquets (until 1905) as some guests were suspected of using them seditiously during the loyal toast, G.B. Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish table glass (New York, 1956), 307; Monod, Jacobitism and the English people, 305–6n.

25. M.G.H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite politics in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 1994), 135–43.

26. Strictly speaking James V was not a ‘Stuart’ but a ‘Stewart,’ the change to the former (French) spelling only coming under his daughter, Mary Queen of Scots.

27. See Pittock, Poetry, 57, 58, 93 for this theme.

28. These generalisations about the early Bension are supported by information and analysis which follows in chapters 2 and 4–7 below.

29. R. Burns, Poems and songs, ed. J. Kinsley (3 vols., Oxford, 1968), i, 100; ii, 903.

30. E. Partridge, A dictionary of slang and unconventional English (3rd edn, London, 1949), 517; Williams, Dictionary, i, 879.

31. Williams, Dictionary, ii, 874.

32. P.J. Kearney, A history of erotic literature (London, 1982), 53. The brief Merryland craze perhaps owed something to Erotopolis: The presents state of bettyland (1684) which gave a social and geographical description of this female territory, R. Thompson,