Publisher's Synopsis
After the seven provinces of Pictland merged into one kingdom, Scotland, the Devil walked the shores of Fife with a growing band of followers. The reformed church and its obsession with fornication and adultery provided him with an abundance of sinners. The old, the infirm, the simpleminded and those dabbling in herbalism, the Presbyterian Church turned over to the Devil then burned them for believing in his existence. The church was at the root of many of the suspicions and superstitions that ruled the inhabitants of villages along the Fife coast. One minister, Patrick Couper whipped up so much hysteria among the residents of Pittenweem, they suspected their neighbours of witchcraft and catapulted one woman into the freezing North Sea before crushing her to death on the shore. In 1694, the General Assembly laid out the sins of the Scottish nation, profane and idle swearing, cursing, Sabbath breaking, fornication, adultery, drunkenness, blasphemy, and other gross and abominable sins and vices. Not even the church though, could could foretell that a decade later, Anstruther, Fife's most drunken port, would give birth to The Beggar's Bennison, a club for middle-aged gentlemen who despised the unfair taxes imposed by England after The Acts of Union. Club members professed to be interested in scientific enquiry, hiring local 'poster girls' to pose naked while a learned member gave lectures on such topics as 'The Menstrual Cycle of the Skate'. Behind closed doors they drank smuggled gin and flaunted the new belief spread by pamphlets from London that any man participating in the sins of Onan would go blind. Members were initiated by singlehandedly filling a receptacle known as 'the testing plate' with their own seed. Passing through Fife settlements from Inverkeithing to Tayport, Suspicion and Superstition uncovers the lives of ordinary people as they struggled with the church, the government, The Acts of Union, tragedy and poverty.