IN EARLY MODERN SCOTLAND, the religious doctrine of Calvinism permeated everyday life through the regulation of personal behaviour. From the Reformation in 1560 until the turn of the nineteenth century, Scotland's network of church courts – the kirk sessions – policed the manners and morals of their parish congregations, punishing purse and person in the name of a godly society. The kirk sessions operated with and alongside a sophisticated network of secular courts at local level. Individuals were also governed by codes of honour, shame and reputation, like their contemporaries on the European continent. Recorded detail from ecclesiastical and secular court cases involving neighbourhood disputes, the supernatural, violence, gossip, slander and sexual misconduct, have proved a valuable source for the historical investigation of ordinary folk and the ways in which their everyday lives were shaped by the values and strictures of reformed religion.

In a society where church and state championed marriage and the godly household, this meant that divisions were drawn not just between the sexes but also within them. The existence of a gendered double standard when it came to regulating popular behaviour has long been debated, but real divisions existed amongst men of different ages, economic power and status. This chapter will draw on the experiences and representations of some individual men and boys in the legal process to examine the workings of patriarchy and masculinity during the early modern period. It will show how social status, economic power, and age combined to inform and influence the experience of authority within these two paradigms.

While the history of Scotland's Reformation has been well documented, the study of ordinary folk has only received attention in recent decades. Furthermore, historians have tended to focus on the actions of the kirk sessions when investigating the implications of Reformation for popular behaviour, thanks in part to the wealth of qualitative detail contained in these records. Rosalind Mitchison and Leah Leneman were early pioneers of such historical investigation, concluding that the experience of the official regulation of behaviour in both rural and urban areas was dependent on gender and social status up until around 1780.