From 1143, the fisherfolk of the part of Leith west of the river – North Leith – were the subjects of Holyrood Abbey, who owned the boats and the fishing rights, and obliged them to attend services at the Holyrood Abbey. When the Abbot Bellenden erected a bridge across the Water of Leith near Sandport Street in 1486, he also provided a church (the bridge tolls helped finance it), dedicated to St. Ninian and later – after the Reformation – it would become the first North Leith Parish Kirk.

Prior to the Reformation, Newhaven had a chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St. James, which had been built in 1505-06 by King James IV as the centrepiece of this new shipbuilding village he had established for the construction of the largest warship in the western world. James had apparently intended this would one day become a full church, but his untimely death at Flodden in 1513 put paid to those ideas, and it remained for its relatively short life a chapel – where the chaplain was ordained to say Mass – and an outpost of the Preceptory of St. Anthony in Leith.

The village was a feudal possession of the City of Edinburgh, who had purchased it off the permanently cash-strapped King in 1510 to ease his financial burdens; brought about in no small part by the building of Newhaven itself and the Great Michael project. The City was content to tax and Newhaven, but not to provide it with any of the benefits that local governance might bring. The chapel was ruined by the invasion of the English under the Earl of Hertford in 1544, when Edinburgh and Leith were burnt on the orders of King Henry VIII. John Knox’s zealous Reformatory mob finished the job around 1560.

After this the chapel was unused and allowed to fall into ruin, although secular chaplains were still appointed by South Leith when the spoils of St. Anthony’s were divided up after the Reformation. This was purely a position of privilege to extract an income from its 6 acres of land. The burial ground was probably still used locally, but the populace were sent to worship not in nearby South Leith but all the way up in St. Cuthbert’s or the West Kirk of Edinburgh; a mile further away and uphill. North Leith, also a possession of Edinburgh, was given its parish kirk in the old St. Ninian’s in 1595, but for it took a further 35 years for Newhaven to be transferred into the parish of its nearest church.

In 1630, the sensible decision was made to detach the barony of Newhaven from the West Kirk and incorporate it into North Leith parish. However Edinburgh’s administrative machinations meant that the little port’s fish tithes continued to go that city until 1805.

The Newhaven fisher folk were fiercely self resilient and independent. They answered chiefly to the sea and had deeply resented being sold by King James IV to Edinburgh in 1510. They never saw themselves as of Edinburgh. And they certainly didn’t see themselves as of Leith.

The Kirk tried to exert authority on Newhaven through the office of the church baillie; an appointee whose job it was to try and maintain a semblance of basic discipline and justice amongst the parishioners. A baillie court was established in Newhaven, where those who had strayed could be tried and sentence passed. In 1605, Janet Merlin and her mother had to make public repentance for naming a baby that was now 20 weeks old and was not yet baptised. Marion Anderson was ordered to make public repentance, on pain of being put in the jougs (an iron corporal punishment collar), for cursing the minister and his family. David King was ordered never to be found drunken again on pain of being put in the stocks for 24 hours. All relatively serious offences at the time, however the punishments were all relatively minor. This was not the case for all; in 1601, a man found guilty of stealing grain from a store in North Leith using a skeleton key was ordered to be abandoned on the beach at low tide with his limbs bound and to be left to the sea.

The folk of Newhaven couldn’t resist the Kirk’s power entirely, but managed to exert some independence by negotiating themselves the right to maintain their own poor. At this time the parish provided financial support from its own means for its own poor. Like many Scottish parishes, North Leith could hardly care for its own poor, so readily accepted Newhaven’s offer to not encumber it with theirs. In Newhaven, support meant the Society of Free Fishermen, an early “friendly society”; for the benefit of its members. The sea was cruel and frequently snatched life away on a whim. The community could not have existed without its own system to care for those left behind.

The earliest record of the Free Fishermen is a property sasine in 1572 and it’s undoubtedly older. It was incorporated by a charter of James VI in 1573. The society was open to any fishermen paying their dues, and it conferred the rights to dredge for oysters, use the fraternity’s pier, as well as the financial benefits of the society. John Buchan modelled his 18th century adventure novel The Free Fishers off of the society, although he moved the centre of its organisation to Fife.

However, Newhaven’s offer to support its own poor wasn’t entirely brotherly Christian charity – as they point blank refused to make any provision to the North Leith poor box as was expected of them. Their point of view was simple; they would care for their own, as they always had done, let North Leith do the same. On the Sabbath, the Free Fishers set up their own collection plate on the road from Newhaven, at the old North Leith boundary, so that no Newhaven money need leave the barony for the benefit of North Leithers.

This was an outrageous affront to the Kirk’s authority, but the North Leith minister, David Forrester, was a diplomatic sort and very independently minded himself, so he took the pragmatic decision to turn a blind eye and not needlessly stir discontent amongst his charges.

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