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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Ulster Presbyterians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formally dealt out retribution, repentance and reconciliation through church discipline administered by Kirk sessions and presbyteries. These institutional structures had given Presbyterians an organizational framework that enhanced their geographical concentration in the north-east of Ireland. Hitherto, historians of Presbyterianism in Ireland have taken the view, often based on evidence from the period before 1740, that discipline was effective, broad in its coverage, and hard yet fair in its judgements, claims made all the more remarkable as the north-east had the highest illegitimacy rates in Ireland during the period under consideration. It has been argued that though the system largely survived the eighteenth century, it collapsed at the turn of the nineteenth because of a loss of morale among Presbyterians after the failure of the 1798 rebellion in which many thousands of them had taken part.
I am grateful to the AHRB for the award of a postgraduate studentship under which the research for this paper was carried out. I would like to thank Dr David Hayton for comments upon an earlier draft of this paper and Dr Paul Gray for permission to use his as yet unavailable thesis.
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29 For a list of the surviving pre-1800 recotds see Barkley, Eldership in Irish Presbyterianism, 22.
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40 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, vol. 2: Parishes of County Antrim 1, 1838–9, ed. Angélique Day and Patrick McWilliams (Belfast, 1990), 86.
41 PHS, Ballybay session book, 23 May 1820.
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53 Cashdollar argues that this was the case amongst Reformed communities in Britain and America during the nineteenth century: Spiritual Home, 139, 148.
54 This is not to suggest that religious differences were unimportant in determining levels of illegitimacy. See the comments of Gray, ‘Illegitimacy’, 159–63,314–15.
55 Hempton and Hill, Evangelical Protestantism, 105–28.
56 OP 8 (1837), 167.
57 Cashdollar, Spiritual Home, 138–50.
58 Ibid.