The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

596
The Highland Monthly
poor ; but as the revenues arising from church-door coU
lections and other sources were for a long time generally
found sufficient, no compulsory assessments were imposed.
Under later statutes, and especially the Act of 1672, the
heritors of each Landivard Parish were conjoined with the
Kirk-Session in administering the legal provision which
had been provided for the poor by the Act of 1579, and
other funds available for their relief; but as the main
source continued to be the church-door collections, these
practically continued under the special charge of the Kirk-
Session—no compulsory assessment being made. In
burghs the obligation to maintain the poor long remained
on the Magistrates, in landward parishes on the Kirk-
Session and heritors jointly ;
but in some burghal-landward
parishes a practice had arisen by the early part of the nine-
teenth century of treating the burgh as one parish, the
country district as another. This was found to be illegal in
the case of the parish of Dunbar by the House of Lords in
1835. Where a parish contained a Royal Burgh within it,
the jurisdiction fell to the Kirk-Session, the Magistrates
and the landward heritors conjointly.
But up to the beginning of this century less than one
hundred parishes had adopted compulsory assessment, and
in the case of the Parish of Inverness and Bona, the whole
burden of maintaining the poor appears to have been long
borne by the Kirk-Session alone, out of church-door
collections and Trust funds, with some precarious con-
tributions raised by voluntary associations.
In time this burden became excessive, and the Kirk-
Session urged the necessity for a legal assessment. A
Board of Administrators for the parish was accordingly
constituted, which met half-yearly, and the Session's pro-
posals were submitted. But they were met by great
opposition and the allegation that the Session was in
possession of funds, which should be applied to and
exhausted in the relief of the poor before a compulsory
assessment was levied ;
the system of voluntary assessment