Communion Seasons

Robert Burns's famous satirical poem "The Holy Fair" (1785) gives many readers their first and sometimes only impression of Scottish communion seasons — as rowdy, carnival-like, hypocritical gatherings where drinking and courting mattered as much as devotion. Burns's poem is a real and valuable piece of literary and social evidence about how these events could appear to a sharp-eyed, religiously sceptical observer, but it is satire with a clear critical agenda, not a neutral eyewitness report, and should not be read as a straightforward factual description of what a typical communion season was like for the great majority of devout participants.

The general structure and historical prevalence of the Scottish communion season — its infrequency, its multi-day format, and its capacity to draw large regional crowds — are reasonably well documented in historical and scholarly accounts of Scottish Presbyterian practice. The "Holy Fair" dimension requires particular care: it is documented that large outdoor communion gatherings sometimes attracted secular socialising, courting, and drinking alongside devotional activity, and that contemporaries (including church authorities) sometimes criticised this; but the vivid, satirical colouring most readers associate with the phrase "Holy Fair" comes specifically from Robert Burns's poem, a literary and polemical source, not a neutral historical or institutional one. This article treats Burns as valuable evidence of contemporary social perception and criticism, flagged explicitly as satire, rather than as a direct, representative factual account of communion seasons as most participants experienced them.

Origins: Infrequency by Theological Design

The Scottish communion season has its roots in a deliberate theological choice rather than mere custom. Scottish Reformed worship, as the companion "Reformed Worship in Scotland" card explores, centred the ordinary Sunday service on preaching and scripture rather than on weekly sacramental celebration, in deliberate contrast to the Catholic Mass's centrality and frequency. Communion (the Lord's Supper) was consequently celebrated far less often — in many parishes, historically, only once a year. This infrequency, rather than diminishing the event's importance, had the opposite effect: because celebrating communion was rare, it became a major occasion, carefully prepared for both spiritually and logistically, rather than a routine weekly rite folded into an ordinary service.

The Structure of a Communion Season

Over time, Scottish Presbyterian practice developed a recognisable, extended structure around the communion event itself, typically unfolding across the better part of a week. A fast day, usually the preceding Thursday, opened proceedings with a call to spiritual self-examination and penitence. Friday was often marked as a "question day," in which lay catechists — not necessarily ordained ministers — offered biblical exposition and interpretation, a format that gave educated laypeople a prominent public religious role unusual outside this context. Saturday brought a preparatory service, reinforcing the themes of self-examination and readiness. The communion itself took place on the Sunday, frequently outdoors when crowds exceeded what the parish church building could hold, and often involving ministers and worshippers from several neighbouring parishes combined into a single large gathering — a practical response, in many cases, to a shortage of ministers able to serve every parish's communion need, as well as to the sheer scale of attendance such infrequent, significant events could draw. A thanksgiving service on the Monday closed the season. This structure, while it admitted considerable local variation in detail and timing, was broadly recognisable across much of Lowland and Highland Scotland by the eighteenth century.

Social Significance: Revival, Gathering, and the "Holy Fair"

The communion season's multi-day, multi-parish, often outdoor format gave it a social significance that went well beyond individual congregational worship. Worshippers frequently travelled considerable distances, particularly in the Highlands, and stayed with relatives or acquaintances near the host parish for the duration, turning the season into a rare occasion for extended family and community contact as well as devotion. In periods of evangelical religious revival, communion seasons could become genuinely dramatic mass events: the Cambuslang Work of 1742, centred on a communion season near Glasgow, is one of the best-documented examples, drawing crowds reported in the many thousands and becoming a notable episode in the wider eighteenth-century evangelical revival associated with figures such as George Whitefield. But the very scale and informality of these gatherings — large crowds, long waits between services, people from many parishes mixing over several days — also created conditions in which secular socialising, courting, drinking, and casual behaviour could and sometimes did occur alongside, or in the gaps between, formal worship. Church authorities themselves were sometimes critical of this drift, and it is this dimension that Robert Burns seized upon and sharpened into satire in "The Holy Fair" (1785), portraying the gathering as a venue for hypocrisy, drink, and flirtation dressed up in religious occasion. Burns's poem is genuinely valuable as evidence of how a critical contemporary observer perceived and wished to expose this social dimension, and it has lent its memorable title to how historians now often describe the phenomenon generally — but it is satirical literature with a clear polemical purpose, not a dispassionate record, and should not be read as proof that most communion seasons, for most participants, were primarily social occasions rather than sincere religious ones.

Logistics, Tokens, and Present-Day Status

The scale and infrequency of communion seasons created a distinct practical problem: how could a kirk session verify, among a large crowd possibly including worshippers from several other parishes, that only those judged spiritually prepared and in good standing (not, for instance, under current kirk session discipline) actually received the sacrament? The solution that emerged — small metal or other tokens, issued to approved communicants in advance and collected at the communion table — is a significant practice in its own right, covered in full in this series' dedicated "Communion Tokens" card rather than duplicated here. As mainstream Scottish Presbyterian practice moved, from the nineteenth century onward, toward more frequent communion — quarterly, and eventually in many congregations monthly — the practical rationale for the old infrequent, large-scale, multi-parish communion season gradually diminished, a change that the historian Stewart J. Brown also links to the demands of industry and commercial agriculture for more regular working hours, which made four or more days of communion services hard to sustain, and the format contracted in most mainstream congregations to something closer to an ordinary, if still carefully prepared, single-congregation service. The historic communion season format has not disappeared entirely: it survives, in reduced, more localised, or more ceremonial form, in some more conservative congregations and in regional traditions, particularly in parts of the Highlands and Islands, preserving a living connection to a practice that once shaped the religious and social calendar of much of rural Scotland.

An Ulster precedent: the Six Mile Water revival, 1625

Large open-air communions had an early Irish chapter. In the summer of 1625 a religious revival swept the Six Mile Water valley in south Antrim, where Scottish settlers gathered in large numbers to hear the Scots minister James Glendinning. The historian Patrick Fitzgerald notes that more liturgically conservative members of the Church of Ireland reacted badly to these open-air communions and their display of religious enthusiasm. The tension fed into the wider conflict over Charles I's church policy, which in Ulster culminated in Wentworth's "Black Oath" of 1638.

Before Burns: a hostile view from 1759

established Burns was not the first to mock the outdoor communion. The historian David Hackett Fischer, in Albion's Seed (1989), quotes an anonymous pamphlet of 1759, A Letter from a Blacksmith to the Ministers and Elders of the Church of Scotland. Its writer describes preaching in the fields on the Thursday, Saturday and Monday of the season, with people asleep on the grass, couples "making assignations", and "a pious circle sitting around some ale-barrel". Nearer the tent, he says, some wept while others laughed. The pamphlet is as partisan as Burns, written to shame the practice, so it shows how critics saw the gatherings rather than how most worshippers experienced them. It does show that Burns's picture drew on an existing line of complaint.

Across the Atlantic: from holy fair to camp meeting

shared Fischer argues that the American camp meeting was not invented on the frontier but carried there from the borderlands of Britain, where Scottish Presbyterians held "Holy Fairs" that he calls "camp meetings by another name". In his account, Presbyterian emigrants were holding field meetings in the backcountry by 1734, and the outdoor "big meetings" of the 1760s and the Methodist and Presbyterian gatherings after the Revolution grew from the same root. He also quotes Benjamin Ferris, who wrote in 1726 that Presbyterians called the sacrament "that feast of fat things" (a phrase from Isaiah 25:6) and often "a love feast". Ferris, who later became a Quaker, was unimpressed, complaining that the members were "often in contention and quarreling".

shared The general link is well supported. Leigh Eric Schmidt's Holy Fairs (1989) traces in detail how Scottish and Scots-Irish sacramental occasions shaped American revivalism, and the great Kentucky gatherings of 1800–01 grew out of Presbyterian communions. Fischer's version is broader and looser. He groups Lowland Scots, Ulster Presbyterians and English Anglicans together as one "North British" culture, and he runs the Presbyterian communion together with the Methodist love feast, a separate fellowship meal of Moravian origin. Readers should treat his border thesis as one argument among several, not as settled.

• The Cambuslang Work of 1742, a communion season near Glasgow, is reported to have drawn crowds in the many thousands, making it one of the largest documented religious gatherings in eighteenth-century Scotland.
• "Question day," held on the Friday of a communion season, gave lay catechists — not ordained ministers — a prominent public role in biblical exposition, an unusual degree of lay religious authority for the period.
• Robert Burns's "The Holy Fair" is one of the most widely read pieces of eighteenth-century Scots-language satirical verse, and its title has become the standard shorthand historians use for the phenomenon it criticises, even though Burns coined it for polemical effect, not as neutral description.
• Communion seasons sometimes combined several neighbouring parishes into one event, partly because of a shortage of ministers able to serve every individual parish's communion separately.
• The outdoor "tent preaching" sometimes associated with very large communion gatherings required literal preaching tents or temporary structures to shelter ministers and nearby worshippers from Scottish weather.
• Because communion was so infrequent in many parishes, a single communion season could be the only time all year some worshippers received the sacrament.
• The practical need to verify who was entitled to receive communion at these crowded, multi-parish events is the direct administrative origin of communion tokens, covered in a dedicated card elsewhere in this series.
• The format's social dimension — travel, lodging with relatives, mixing with worshippers from other parishes — made communion seasons genuinely significant community events quite apart from their religious purpose.
• A pamphlet of 1759 mocked outdoor communions for their sleepers, ale-barrels and courting couples, more than 25 years before Burns wrote "The Holy Fair".
• Presbyterians in colonial America sometimes called the sacrament "the feast of fat things", a phrase taken from the Book of Isaiah.
• The great Kentucky camp meetings of 1800–01, often treated as a purely American invention, grew out of Presbyterian communion gatherings of the Scottish type.

• Do not treat Robert Burns's "The Holy Fair" as a neutral, factual historical description of communion seasons generally; it is satirical literature with a critical agenda and should be flagged as such whenever cited.
• Do not state that all or most communion seasons were primarily social or disorderly occasions; the available evidence indicates sincere devotional participation was the norm, with disorderly behaviour a criticised minority phenomenon at some large gatherings.
• Do not imply weekly communion was ever the Scottish Presbyterian norm historically; infrequent (often annual) celebration was the deliberate, theologically grounded pattern for an extended period.
• Do not describe "Holy Fair" as official church terminology; it is a term popularised by Burns's satire and subsequently adopted by historians as descriptive shorthand.
• Do not duplicate detailed communion token content here; token mechanics belong to the dedicated "Communion Tokens" card elsewhere in this series.
• Do not state that the communion season format has vanished entirely from Scotland; it survives in reduced or regional form among some congregations today.
• Do not present Fischer's borderland thesis, that the camp meeting was simply the Holy Fair transplanted, as settled; it is an argument, and it merges Scottish, Ulster and English practice.
• Do not treat the 1759 Letter from a Blacksmith as neutral reporting; like Burns's poem, it was written to criticise.