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Kirk is a Scottish and former Northern English word meaning 'church'. The term the Kirk is often used informally to refer specifically to the Church of Scotland, the Scottish national church that developed from the 16th-century Reformation. Many place names and personal names are derived from kirk.
As a common noun, kirk (meaning 'church') is found in Scots, Scottish English, Ulster-Scots and some English dialects, [1] attested as a noun from the 14th century onwards, but as an element in placenames much earlier. Both words, kirk and church, derive from the Koine Greek κυριακόν (δωμα) (kyriakon (dōma)) meaning Lord's (house), which was borrowed into the Germanic languages in late antiquity, possibly in the course of the Gothic missions. (Only a connection with the idiosyncrasies of Gothic explains how a Greek neuter noun became a Germanic feminine).
Whereas church displays Old English palatalisation, kirk is a loanword from Old Norse [ citation needed ] and thus retains the original mainland Germanic consonants. Compare cognates: Icelandic & Faroese kirkja; Swedish kyrka (where the first ‘k’ was later palatalized as well); Norwegian (Nynorsk) kyrkje; Danish and Norwegian (Bokmål) kirke; Dutch and Afrikaans kerk; German Kirche (reflecting palatalization before unstressed front vowel); West Frisian tsjerke; and borrowed into non-Germanic languages Estonian kirik and Finnish kirkko.
As a proper noun, the Kirk is an informal name for the Church of Scotland, the country's national church and this term is frequently used in the media, [2] in everyday speech and in the church's own literature. [3] The Kirk of Scotland was in official use as the name of the Church of Scotland until the 17th century. Kirk Session is still the standard term in church law for the court of elders in the local congregation, both in the Church of Scotland and in any of the other Scottish Presbyterian denominations.
Even more commonly, The Free Kirk is heard as an informal name for the Free Church of Scotland, the remnant of an evangelical presbyterian church formed in 1843 when its founders withdrew from the Church of Scotland. See:
A pair of rhyming jibes remain from the time of the heated split of the Disruption in 1843, when about a third of the Auld Kirk of Scotland left to form the Free Kirk. The Free Kirkers, who had sometimes given up homes as well as church buildings and started financially from scratch, were taunted with the rhyme: “The Free Kirk, the wee Kirk, the Kirk without the steeple”. This rhyme linking the Free Kirk with the derogatory diminutive "wee" was offensive, and a reply was devised in: The Auld Kirk, the cauld Kirk. The Kirk wi’out the people. [4]
High Kirk is the term sometimes used to describe a congregation of the Church of Scotland that uses a building that had been a cathedral prior to the Reformation. As the Church of Scotland is not governed by bishops, it has no cathedrals in the episcopal sense of the word. In more recent times, the traditional names have been revived, so that in many cases both forms can be heard: Glasgow Cathedral, as well as the High Kirk of Glasgow, and St. Giles' Cathedral, as well as the High Kirk of Edinburgh. The term "High Kirk", however, should be used with some caution. Several towns have a congregation known as the High Kirk that were never pre-Reformation cathedrals. Examples include:
There is no connection between the term 'High Kirk' and the term 'High Church', which is a type of Churchmanship within the Anglican Communion.
The first court of Presbyterian polity where the Elders of a particular congregation gather as a Session or meeting to govern the spiritual and temporal affairs of the church.
The verb to kirk, meaning 'to present in church', was probably first used for the annual church services of some Scottish town councils, known as the Kirking of the Council. Since the re-establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, the Kirking of the Parliament has become a fixed ceremony at the beginning of a session. [7] Historically a newly married couple would attend public worship as husband and wife for the first time at their kirking. In Nova Scotia, Kirking of the Tartan ceremonies have become an integral part of most Scottish Festivals and Highland Games. [8]
Kirk is found mainly as an element in many placenames of Scotland, England and countries of large British expatriate communities. [9]
Scottish examples include Falkirk, Kirkwall and numerous Kirkhills and Kirktons. Examples in England are Ormskirk and Kirkby in Lancashire, and Kirkstall, Kirklees and Kirklevington in Yorkshire. Newkirk, Oklahoma state of the United States, is another example.
The element only found in place names of Anglo-Saxon origin but also in Anglo-Gaelic Southern Scottish names such as Kirkcudbright, a place around a Cudbright church. Here, the Gaelic element cil- (coming from a monk's cell) might have been expected to go with the Gaelic form of Cuthbert. The reason appears to be that kirk was borrowed into local Galwegian, it does not seem to have been a part of spoken Gaelic in the Highlands or Ireland.
When the element appears in placenames of the former British empire, a distinction can be made between those where the element is productive ( named after a church) or transferred – from a place in Britain. Kirkland, a city in the United States, is an exception, being named after the surname of an English settler, Peter Kirk.
The element kirk is also used in anglicisations of continental European place names, originally formed from one of the continental Germanic cognates. Dunkirk (French Flanders) is a rendering of Dutch West-Flemish dialect of Duunkerke or standard Dutch form of Duinkerke.
Kirk is also in use as both a surname and a male forename. For lists of these, see Kirk (surname) and Kirk (given name), and also Kirkby (disambiguation). Parallels in other languages are far rarer than with placenames, but English Church and German Kirch can also be a surname.
Hogmanay is the Scots word for the last day of the old year and is synonymous with the celebration of the New Year in the Scottish manner. It is normally followed by further celebration on the morning of New Year's Day and, in some cases, 2 January—a Scottish bank holiday. In a few contexts, the word Hogmanay is used more loosely to describe the entire period consisting of the last few days of the old year and the first few days of the new year. For instance, not all events held under the banner of Edinburgh's Hogmanay take place on 31 December.
Presbyterianism is a Reformed (Calvinist) Protestant tradition named for its form of church government by representative assemblies of elders. Though there are other Reformed churches that are structurally similar, the word Presbyterian is applied to churches that trace their roots to the Church of Scotland or to English Dissenter groups that formed during the English Civil War.
Cumbric was a variety of the Common Brittonic language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North" in what is now the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, northern Lancashire in Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands. It was closely related to Old Welsh and the other Brittonic languages. Place name evidence suggests Cumbric may also have been spoken as far south as Pendle and the Yorkshire Dales. The prevailing view is that it became extinct in the 12th century, after the incorporation of the semi-independent Kingdom of Strathclyde into the Kingdom of Scotland.
Scottish English is the set of varieties of the English language spoken in Scotland. The transregional, standardised variety is called Scottish Standard English or Standard Scottish English (SSE). Scottish Standard English may be defined as "the characteristic speech of the professional class [in Scotland] and the accepted norm in schools". IETF language tag for "Scottish Standard English" is en-scotland.
George Wishart was a Scottish Protestant Reformer and one of the early Protestant martyrs burned at the stake as a heretic.
St Giles' Cathedral, or the High Kirk of Edinburgh, is a parish church of the Church of Scotland in the Old Town of Edinburgh. The current building was begun in the 14th century and extended until the early 16th century; significant alterations were undertaken in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the addition of the Thistle Chapel. St Giles' is closely associated with many events and figures in Scottish history, including John Knox, who served as the church's minister after the Scottish Reformation.
The Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster is a Calvinist denomination founded by Ian Paisley in 1951. Doctrinally, the church describes itself as fundamentalist, evangelical, and separatist, and is part of the reformed fundamentalist movement. Most of its members live in Northern Ireland, where the church is headquartered, and in County Donegal. The church has additional congregations in the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain and Australia, and a sister denomination in North America, the Free Presbyterian Church of North America, which has congregations in Canada and the United States. It also has a sister denomination in Nepal which was formed from the Nepal mission to the Unreached in November 2013.
In local usage, a burn is a kind of watercourse. The term applies to a large stream or a small river. The word is used in Scotland and England and in parts of Ulster, Kansas, Australia and New Zealand.
The Free Church of Scotland is a conservative evangelical Calvinist denomination in Scotland. It is the continuation of the original Free Church of Scotland that remained outside the union with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1900, and remains a distinct Presbyterian denomination in Scotland.
Galwegian Gaelic is an extinct dialect of Scottish Gaelic formerly spoken in southwest Scotland. It was spoken by the people of Galloway and Carrick until the early modern period. Little has survived of the dialect, so that its exact relationship with other Gaelic language is uncertain.
The Scots Kirk Paris is a Presbyterian Protestant church situated in Paris, in rue Bayard near the Champs-Elysées in the 8th arrondissement. It is the only congregation of the Church of Scotland in France, part of the International Presbytery.
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 15th century, its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually indistinguishable from early Northumbrian Middle English. Subsequently, the orthography of Middle Scots differed from that of the emerging Modern English standard. Middle Scots was fairly uniform throughout its many texts, albeit with some variation due to the use of Romance forms in translations from Latin or French, turns of phrases and grammar in recensions of southern texts influenced by southern forms, misunderstandings and mistakes made by foreign printers.
The Scottish Reformation was the process whereby Scotland broke away from the Catholic Church, and established the Protestant Church of Scotland. It forms part of the wider European 16th century Protestant Reformation.
The languages of Scotland belong predominantly to the Germanic and Celtic language families. The main language now spoken in Scotland is English, while Scots and Scottish Gaelic are minority languages. The dialect of English spoken in Scotland is referred to as Scottish English.
Laigh Kirk can mean "Low church" in general or the Church of Scotland in particular. Many place names and personal names are also derived from it.
The Scottish people or Scots are an ethnic group and nation native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. In the following two centuries, Celtic-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde and Germanic-speaking Angles of Northumbria became part of Scotland. In the High Middle Ages, during the 12th-century Davidian Revolution, small numbers of Norman nobles migrated to the Lowlands. In the 13th century, the Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles became part of Scotland, followed by the Norse of the Northern Isles in the 15th century.
Scottish religion in the seventeenth century includes all forms of religious organisation and belief in the Kingdom of Scotland in the seventeenth century. The 16th century Reformation created a Church of Scotland, popularly known as the kirk, predominantly Calvinist in doctrine and Presbyterian in structure, to which James VI added a layer of bishops in 1584.
The Highland Church was a Gaelic-speaking congregation of the Church of Scotland, based in Tollcross, Edinburgh. Formed by the union of St Oran's Church and St Columba's Gaelic Church in 1948, the congregation continued united with Tolbooth St John's in 1956.
St Oran's Church was a Gaelic-speaking congregation of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. Originating in the early 18th-century, the congregation continued until 1948, latterly meeting at Broughton Street.
The Six Johns of the Scots Confession and the First Book of Discipline | ||
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