Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350–1560 9781526129604

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Mairi Cowan

death, Life,  and religious change

in Scottish towns, c.1350–1560

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Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns, c.1350–1560

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Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns, c.1350–1560

Mairi Cowan

Manchester University Press Manchester

Copyright © Mairi Cowan 2012 The right of Mairi Cowan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 8023 4 hardback

First published 2012 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

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To Uncle Bill

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Contents

Preface and acknowledgements Introduction

page ix 1

Part I: Lamenting the dead 1 How the living influenced the dead 2 How the dead influenced the living

17 52

Part II: Summoning the living 3 Communities of religion 4 The individual in the community

85 128

Part III: Subduing thunderbolts 5 Religious dissent 6 Catholic reform

153 180

Conclusion Bibliography Index

209 211 247

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Preface and acknowledgements

This book started as a doctoral dissertation at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto. The MA and PhD programmes at CMS provide students with training in conventional areas of medieval studies, of course, but they also present many opportunities for a more holistic engagement with the study of the Middle Ages where students are encouraged to do such fun things as act in mystery plays, sing in re-creations of medieval masses, and play Latin scrabble. I hope that both the rigorous interdisciplinary coursework and also the convivial socio-academic environment at the University of Toronto have left some mark on this book, and I would like to thank all who made (and continue to make) the Centre such a special place to study. In particular, I thank my dissertation committee of Elizabeth Ewan, who gave unfailing advice, support, and encouragement while patiently teaching me virtually everything I know about medieval and early modern Scotland; Joe Goering, a historian of intellectual culture, who showed me how not to be afraid of the Great Books and Big Thoughts of the Middle Ages; and Mark Meyerson, who introduced me to theories of social history and historical anthropology while never allowing me to lose sight of the essential humanity of the medieval people I was studying. These scholars are role models all. The School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the St Andrews Society of Toronto provided financial support that enabled me to travel across the Atlantic and conduct research in the archives, libraries and churches of Scotland, and I would like to thank the personnel in all these places for going out of their way

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to help a fumbling student from abroad to locate original documents for historical interpretation unmediated by distance and editors: I will never forget the experience of opening an envelope that contained an otherwise forgotten charter and smelling the unexpected and utterly delightful aroma of beeswax, still sweet after 600 years. While many authors have an ideal reader in mind as they work, I was so fortunate as to have not just one but three ideal readers for whom to write. I thank each of them humbly for their willingness to devote time from their very busy lives to read and comment on my drafts. Elizabeth Ewan, carrying on her role as primary adviser, continued to be the most generous scholar I know. She shared her knowledge – and even books! – about medieval and early modern Scottish towns, and offered wise and always welcome guidance through the rough patches of research. Hilary Evans Cameron, who commands perhaps the sharpest reasoning skills of anyone I have met, brought her analytical lens into focus on my prose and not only pointed out unsupported claims and lapses in logic, but also applied her keen ability to discern what I was actually trying to say and then suggest better ways of saying it. Whitney Hahn corresponded with me from three different continents to provide the perspective of an intelligent and curious non-specialist. Although she apologised repeatedly for not having much of a background in medieval and early modern Scottish history, her confusion was in fact extremely valuable to me as a guide to determining how much explanation might be required by a sensitive reader with expertise in things other than the scope of this monograph. As a novice to the book-writing procedure, I would like to thank the staff at Manchester University Press and the anonymous reviewers of the typescript for their patient assistance in getting the book through production, and I would like to thank also my supportive friends and colleagues at the University of Toronto for their patient assistance in getting me through the process. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends from outside the academe who have been wonderfully encouraging of my historical curiosity and who, in so being, have endured my many historical rants and raves with remarkably good humour. I would like particularly to thank my parents, John and Norma

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Cowan, who have always supported me in my education. I thank them also, along with my parents-in-law, Linda and Todd Meyer, for help in caring for my daughter Daphne, who was a gurgling baby when this book began and is now a singing and dancing bilingual schoolgirl. Most especially, I owe much gratitude to my spouse, Chris. For more than half of our lives he has been a sounding board, adviser, and travelling companion to both physical and metaphysical sites of historical interest, and I thank him for listening patiently to my imaginative wanderings, for providing intelligent observations on my nascent ideas, and for accepting my curious ways.

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Introduction

In about the year 1460, a new bell was installed at the parish church of St Giles, Edinburgh. Its surface was adorned with an image of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, the arms of Guelderland, and the Latin inscription ‘defunctos plango: vivos voco: fulmina frango’, which translates into ‘I lament the dead, I summon the living, I subdue thunderbolts’. Though purchased by the town’s burgesses, the bell was cast not in Edinburgh or even in Scotland but rather in Flanders, a prosperous region in the southern Netherlands that exported both its goods and its artistic culture throughout Europe.1 Church bells like this one were rung on many different occasions. They tolled through the night on All Hallows’ Eve to request prayers for the recently deceased and they pealed on bright mornings to celebrate a royal birth; they marked ‘church’ time at the beginning of a religious service and also ‘town’ time at the start of a mason’s day of work; they chimed a welcome to visiting princes and they struck a summons to defend the city against attack. Visible to some and audible to many, this bell of St Giles connected its church to all the inhabitants of Edinburgh living and dead, rich and poor, local and foreign, pious and profane. At the time of the bell’s manufacture, Edinburgh was the largest of Scotland’s towns. Its population was probably approaching 12,000, making it roughly the same size as Norwich, Bremen, Delft, and Zurich. Only a few Scottish towns, including Aberdeen, Perth, and Dundee, had more than 5,000 inhabitants; most were considerably smaller, with populations in the hundreds rather than the thousands.2 If a premodern ‘town’ is defined as any settlement where a significant proportion of the population lived off non-

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agricultural occupations such as trade, industry, and administration,3 towns had existed in Scotland since long before this period, and perhaps as early as the Iron Age. But most towns took on a new character during the twelfth-century revival of European urban culture when King David I (1124–1153) created the first official Scottish ‘burghs’, towns that were incorporated by charters granting special rights such as monopoly over trade in surrounding areas. ‘Burgesses’ were privileged inhabitants of the burghs. They had the right to buy or sell in the town’s market without paying a toll, to hold land free of any services other than rent, and to be tried by their peers in a burgh court that was presided over by the provost and bailies, who were officers chosen by the wider community of burgesses. Entry into this privileged group of burgesses was normally achieved through family connections – more specifically through being the son of a burgess or the husband of a burgess’s daughter – and through payment of a fee. In the early years of Scottish burghs, many adult males would have been burgesses, and women and children acquired some of the privileges of burgess-ship through their husbands and fathers, though very few of a town’s female inhabitants were actually burgesses themselves. As immigration from the surrounding countryside increased in the later Middle Ages, so too did the number of non-burgesses, who lived and worked in the town but lacked the privileges accruing to burgess status.4 Although early town settlements grew up informally around suitable nuclei such as natural harbours, crossroads of trade, or religious centres, the official founding of burghs usually included the planning of streets and burgage plots. A typical Scottish town plan featured a single main street divided into frontages of between 6 and 7 metres, with burgage plots extending back from the frontages in a herringbone pattern. To the rear of these plots were back lanes, which over the years sometimes evolved into larger thoroughfares. In many cases the main street of a town widened at the market place, where the market cross, the tron or weigh beam, and the tolbooth were located. This last structure served many functions, including the collection site for tolls, the town gaol, and the meeting place for the burgh council, and therefore it tended to be conspicuously placed and sturdily built. The ground floor of the tolbooth at Peebles, for example, was made of stone and covered

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at least 12 metres by 5 metres, and its upper floor was occupied by public rooms such as the council chamber.5 If the importance of commerce gave prominence to the market places of Scottish towns, the importance of religion conferred distinction on their ecclesiastical buildings. Parish churches were located either centrally within the townscape or on sites of special religious significance, such as the burial place of a saint, and were usually relatively large in scale and built of stone. Only one large Scottish town, Aberdeen, was also a cathedral city. In other Scottish towns, the high-ranking ecclesiastical officials attached to cathedrals – the bishops themselves, but also their deans and chapters – were largely absent from urban politics. Houses were set facing the street along the fronts of burgage plots, with a long stretch of property extending to the rear. These backlands could be used for vegetable gardens, livestock pens, servants’ living quarters and middens. Most domestic buildings were made from wooden posts, wattle walls daubed with clay, and thatched roofs, though by the sixteenth century some of the larger houses of the more prosperous burgesses may have had roofs of tile and windows of glass. The houses that fronted on to the main street often combined a workshop or commercial shop at street level with living quarters above or behind. As towns expanded, houses were also built on the vennels or closes that ran perpendicular to the main street. In areas of higher population densities, especially near the market, backlands were sometimes subdivided into smaller plots and filled in with additional houses. A few towns dealt with population pressure by building houses upwards, with the tallest examples in Edinburgh reaching five or six storeys.6 Some aspects of urban life in Scotland were similar to conditions of local rural life. Towns had landscape features connecting them to rural areas, such as green spaces, gardens, and livestock pens. Many urban inhabitants came originally from the countryside, and wealthy burgesses acquired property outside the town in which they were living. Towns had symbolic boundaries, most notably the gates, but most were not walled and easy access and egress could be had from the backs of burgage plots. In spite of these links between urban and rural areas, towns differed from the countryside in significant ways, too. They were more crowded than their rural hinterlands, and they were locations where people

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of different classes, occupations and places of origin lived in very close proximity with one another. Although towns housed only about 5–10 per cent of the population of Scotland, they nonetheless played important roles in the country’s economy and culture. Towns exported animal products such as raw wool, hides, and fish, along with increasing quantities of salt, coal, and cloth, and they imported a wide range of manufactured and luxury items. Towns were also centres of formal education. Three universities were found in Scottish towns by the end of the fifteenth century (at St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen), as well as many song schools and grammar schools.7 Towns had some distinctive features, but they were still part of a larger nation. Two languages were widely spoken in late medieval and early modern Scotland, with Scots, a northern dialect of English, predominant in the south-east and Lowlands, and Gaelic, a Celtic language with many dialects and a Common form understood by the literate elite on both sides of the Irish Sea, the principal language of the Highlands and Islands. International relations centred on Scotland’s ‘auld enemy’, England, and its partner in the ‘auld alliance’, France. As with most European states, Scotland’s system of government was a monarchy, and from 1371 it was under control of the Stewart dynasty. This control was highly dependent on the cooperation of subjects, however, because the kingdom was relatively decentralized and its most important ties were personal ones based on lordship, kinship, and friendship. Many kings of the Scots came to the throne while still children, and political factions were often jostling for power during the minority government. Nevertheless, crown and magnates were usually able to cooperate, in spite of short periods of friction.8 Scotland was connected in many ways with other parts of Europe. The St Giles bell itself came from the same place as the Scottish queen at the time of its forging, Mary of Gueldres, who had married King James II in 1449. Her uncle, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, sent the huge cannon Mons Meg with an escort of 50 men-at-arms to the Scottish king in 1457. When James died three years later, Mary founded Trinity College Church in Edinburgh, and commissioned Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes to paint its altarpiece. Mary was also responsible, possibly at the request of merchants, for bringing to Scotland the order of

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Observant Franciscans, who founded nine Scottish houses during the later fifteenth century.9 The Low Countries, including Flanders, had especially close trading connections with Scotland during this time but it was not the only part of Europe to leave its mark. Books came to Scotland from France, Germany, and England, as well as the Netherlands.10 Even the built heritage of Scottish towns reflected Scotland’s alignment with developments abroad. In the fourteenth century, English styles influenced Scottish architecture quite heavily. Then, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Scottish architecture turned more to continental models and a revival of older, indigenous Scottish traits. King James IV’s statement in a letter to the Prior General of the Dominican order in 1506 that Scotland was ‘almost the most remote region in the world’ was obviously something of an exaggeration.11 Scotland was in fact very much part of Europe, and tied in with wider European events.12 The most calamitous of these was the plague of the mid-fourteenth century that brought death to hundreds of millions in Eurasia within the space of a few years. Regardless of whether or not its impact on Scotland was as severe as in more densely populated regions, the Black Death was the greatest demographic crisis that Scotland had ever experienced. Introduced to Scottish soldiers by English forces in 1349, it quickly spread through the country and killed at least a quarter, perhaps a third, of the population in a matter of months. For the survivors of the first wave, reduced population pressure led to lower prices and rents alongside higher wages and a concentration of capital, which in turn brought generally higher standards of living.13 Following the first wave of plague, the Scottish economy experienced a boom that lasted from the late 1350s to the early 1380s, by which time Scotland had become the second biggest exporter of wool in Europe. At the end of the fourteenth century, however, a European-wide recession caused a serious slump in Scottish trade, and in the fifteenth century wool exports averaged only about a quarter of what they had been at their height 100 years earlier. Scotland’s economy continued to suffer, with a balance-ofpayments deficit, bullion shortage, and devaluation of coinage, all of which contributed to a sharp rise in the prices of basic commodities. The inhabitants of towns felt this change most keenly, since they had to purchase so much of their food and other basic goods at market.

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As prices rose, landlords responded by ‘feuing’ their lands and granting them to ‘feuars’, who paid a large entry payment and life leases in order to become heritable proprietors. The landlords were able to make money quickly in this system, but suffered financial losses in the long run because inflation shrank the real value of money made on the leases. Scottish trade started to grow again in the 1530s, only to contract once more with the English invasions of the 1540s. Whatever the overall extent of economic expansion in the sixteenth century, it did not keep pace with population growth, and unemployment and vagrancy became increasingly destabilizing forces from the mid-sixteenth century on.14 Political and economic conditions in Europe at large clearly had an impact on Scotland, but so did that aspect of society that is central to this study, religion. At the beginning of the period covered in this book, virtually every person in Scotland was Christian. In 1350, Western Christendom had not yet shattered along lines of confessional difference, and most of its inhabitants would likely not have thought of their religion as anything more specific than ‘Christian’, though modern readers are inclined to identify it more precisely as Catholic. Different kinds of religious attitudes and activities coexisted, from the sophisticated theology of the university-trained intellectuals to the everyday rituals of illiterate farmers who made use of charms and spells along with the prayers they offered in their parish church. Important features of this system that were more or less uniform across western Europe included an acknowledgement in principle of the spiritual authority of the papacy; a belief that the saving power of God was located in the rites of the Church and the concomitant belief that nobody was saved outside this Church; confidence in the helping power of saints; and faith in an afterlife whose characteristics depended largely on a person’s beliefs and actions while alive but also on the prayers of others after death. New developments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to laypeople in much of Europe taking a greater role in their own spiritual affairs. One popular movement in parts of north-west Europe was the devotio moderna. Originating in the Low Countries, it included an adherence to the vita apostolica, the apostolic life in imitation of the original followers of Jesus, and a stress on the inner life of the pious individual.

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Although, as this book will discuss, the religious culture of Scotland was broadly in line with the rest of Europe, there were nevertheless a few structural elements of the Scottish Church that set it somewhat apart. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the ecclesiastical province of York (in England) claimed supremacy over the entire Scottish Church. The papacy for some time supported York’s claim, as shown by papal bulls from the first half of the twelfth century that repeatedly demanded the obedience of Scottish bishops to York. That constant repetition of the demand was needed strongly suggests a steadfast refusal among Scottish bishops to obey, though it was not until the middle of the century that papal attitudes shifted, likely in reaction to the Becket controversy. In 1164, the Pope reversed his office’s earlier position that Scottish bishops had to be consecrated by or with the permission of archbishops of York, and instead consecrated the Bishop of Glasgow himself. In 1175, the Pope described the church of Glasgow as his ‘special daughter’ with no intermediary, and in 1192, to make matters absolutely clear, he declared in the bull Cum universi that the entire Scottish Church was the special daughter of the Pope with no intermediary. This meant that the Pope himself would carry out those supervisory functions performed elsewhere by archbishops, and that all Scottish dioceses (except for Galloway, which was under the Archbishop of York) were exempt from any local metropolitan authority and were instead equal administrative units, each answerable directly to Rome. Although exempt dioceses could be found elsewhere in Europe, it was only in Scotland that they were so numerous as to form virtually a national Church with no local archbishop. The Scottish Church therefore had secured its independence from English claims, but this arrangement presented it with its own particular organizational and pastoral difficulties that were thrown into especially sharp relief following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. One of this council’s decrees was that archbishops were to hold yearly provisional councils, and that the bishops in attendance were to enforce the rules decreed within their own dioceses. With no archbishops, the Scottish Church was facing serious challenges of how to implement these efforts at reforming discipline and order, not to mention pastoral care. The solution proposed by the Scottish bishops was to hold regular provincial

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INTRODUCTION

councils themselves. The Scottish Church remained without a provincial head until 1472, when St Andrews was elevated to an archbishopric, followed by the elevation of Glasgow in 1492. Though this arrangement did set Scotland apart from the rest of Europe in terms of its ecclesiastical organization, at the same time its status as ‘special daughter’ of the Pope quite possibly also helped this kingdom, geographically so distant from Rome, increase its sense of connection to the organizational centre of religion in Europe.15 The basic religious beliefs and symbols of Catholic Europe were international. Scottish churches contained images of Christ and saints in familiar iconography, and they held services that would have been recognizable throughout western Europe in their essentials. Scottish clergy regularly attended general councils of the Church, with more than sixty Scottish representatives attending the Council of Basel, for example, between 1431 and 1449.16 Scotland had over a hundred monasteries by the later Middle Ages, and while most of these monastic houses had already been founded by the mid-fourteenth century, some were established later, including the Carthusian house at Perth, founded by James I in 1429, and the female Dominican house of St Catherine of Siena, founded in Edinburgh in 1517.17 A more popular type of new foundation in the later medieval period was the collegiate church, where secular clergy were gathered into a college. There were 42 of these institutions in Scotland by the mid-sixteenth century.18 Late medieval Catholic religious culture has been characterized in a wide variety of ways over the years. Some historians have portrayed it as intense and degenerate, an overripe autumn excessive in its irrationality, its sentimentality, and its emotional drive.19 Historians focusing on popular expressions of religion in particular have often been inclined either to dismiss lay understandings of Christianity altogether, or to concentrate on exceptional individuals who were thinking and acting outside the mainstream.20 Since the later twentieth century, alternate interpretations have arisen that rehabilitate late medieval religion somewhat, presenting it as a coherent system ultimately shared by clerics and laypeople, even if the different groups articulated this system in their own way. On the whole, according to this interpretation, the religious culture of late medieval Europe was a rich and

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diverse form of Catholicism that allowed believers more scope for personal direction in belief and practice than would normally be the case in later centuries.21 The Protestant Reformation shattered religious unity in western Europe, though historians continue to debate the speed and depth of change wrought by the series of movements that began with Martin Luther in 1517.22 In many ways the basic structures of society remained intact. Continuity in religious personnel was often maintained as Catholic priests became Protestant ministers, and traditional Catholic practices sometimes persisted for years, even generations, beyond a region’s official Protestant Reformation. Nevertheless, significant changes to official religious beliefs and practices undeniably occurred in many areas. Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century generally used the Bible as the primary authority, sometimes as the only authority, in matters of belief and practice, and they rejected the authority of the papacy along with many traditional practices of medieval Europe. They came to see popular medieval rituals such as praying for the souls of the dead as being at best futile, at worst blasphemous, and in many regions they stripped church services of Latin, images, elaborate music, prayers to saints, and the practice of confession, while designing instead simple services focused on the reading of the Bible in the vernacular and a sermon. Perhaps most significantly to believers, Protestant reformers radically changed the way to salvation. In the Catholic system, belief was essential to salvation but good works and penance, both in life and after death, also influenced whether a soul would go to hell or through purgatory into heaven. Protestants, by contrast, eliminated the doctrine of purgatory and focused on faith alone as a means to justification; followers of Calvin in particular insisted on the sovereignty of God, rather than on the efforts of humanity, to bring about salvation, and maintained that God had preordained every person either to eternal life or to eternal damnation. The Catholic Church underwent its own transformation at this time as well, called sometimes ‘Catholic reform’ or ‘Catholic Reformation’, sometimes ‘Counter-Reformation’. This movement had several features in common with Protestant developments, such as its emphasis on internal facets of religion, the importance of faith, and the desire to return to ancient texts; a theologically unbridge-

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able chasm opened between Protestant and Catholic beliefs, however, about whether salvation was purely the result of the unearned grace of God, or a combination of grace and good works on the part of the sinner. Scottish history remains largely absent from the dominant historical narrative of religion in later medieval and early modern Europe, as can be demonstrated by a quick survey of commonly cited books in the field. Several of the most influential works focus on particular regions other than Scotland, such as Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580 and Robert Scribner’s For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda in the German Reformation, and in these one should not expect to find much, if any, mention of Scotland. Even among works whose scope is ostensibly all of Europe, however, Scotland remains for the most part beyond consideration. To give but a few examples, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215–c.1515 by R. N. Swanson has only one reference to Scotland, a single sentence about St Andrews as a pilgrimage centre; Carter Lindberg’s The European Reformations devotes barely four pages to the Scottish context, while its companion sourcebook has a single Scottish primary text – on the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots; Edward Muir’s Ritual in Early Modern Europe mentions Scotland a total of five times, but never discusses it in any sustained way; and no consideration whatsoever is given to Scotland in R. W. Southern’s Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, in John Bossy’s Christianity in the West 1400–1700, in Richard Kieckhefer’s Magic in the Middle Ages, in André Vauchez’s The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and Devotional Practices, or in Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. Scotland is clearly not a conspicuous presence in the field of medieval and early modern European religion. While it is, of course, perfectly reasonable for works on European history to focus on non-Scottish areas, it does come as something of a surprise to realize that the 1,600-word entry entitled ‘Popular Religion in England and Scotland’ in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation actually makes not a single reference to Scotland. If historians of later medieval and early modern Europe generally have largely ignored the Scottish context, their scholarship has nonetheless had some impact on historical understandings

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of Scotland. The same interpretive spectrum of religion in Europe generally is also apparent in the case of Scotland in particular, where historians have repeatedly focused on a lack of lay religious understanding, but begun a re-evaluation of later medieval or preReformation religion.23 In spite of this reassessment, the Protestant Reformation still continues to cast its shadow rather darkly over the preceding years (or even centuries) of Scottish history, making the period of 1350–1560 sometimes appear as little more than the prelude to something more important, perhaps even suggesting an inevitability to the forthcoming Reformation.24 This book offers a reappraisal of lay religious culture in Scottish towns from 1350 to 1560 by drawing upon a variety of documentary sources for religious practice and by placing this evidence in the context of religion in medieval and early modern Europe more broadly. The focus on towns is largely for the reason that civic sources such as the records of town governments, courts, guilds, and burgh churches are sufficiently rich to support an investigation into late medieval and early modern change as well as continuity, and also because an urban focus allows for a good comparison between Scottish examples and other parts of Europe. Although this book will likely be read mostly by those interested in the history of pre-Reformation Scotland, it has the potential to interest others as well. Historians of early modern Scotland, for example, may find that a study of lay religious culture of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries on its own terms, rather than as background to the Reformation, helps to shed light on the religious environment out of which the Protestant Reformation arose, thereby establishing a pre-Reformation baseline of popular piety against which Reformation and post-Reformation piety can be measured, while scholars engaged in the robust area of urban Reformation studies on the Continent or in England may find that information on religious practice in urban Scotland enriches their understanding of geographical complexity. The structure of the book is directed by the inscription on the St Giles bell: ‘defunctos plango: vivos voco: fulmina frango’. Part I, ‘Lamenting the dead’, examines how urban Scots tried to influence the deceased, and how the living felt themselves influenced by the dead in return. It shows that the living and the dead shared a reciprocal relationship of obligation and assistance, material claims,

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and supernatural intercession, and that the bonds between the two groups were especially strong when they involved blood or guild kinship. Part II, ‘Summoning the living’, considers the religious opportunities in Scottish towns that brought people into corporate bodies and overlapping communities. Through an exploration of various forms of corporate and individual religious expression, including an examination of the specific case of the founding of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital in Edinburgh, it establishes that people in Scottish towns could pursue both communal and individual religious practices that were not only complementary, but also mutually reinforcing. The people of Scottish towns could personalize religious expression in a meaningful social context by asserting their individual desires and needs within a variety of groups. Together, Parts I and II present an overview of mainstream lay religion in Scottish towns and show that Scottish townspeople participated in a religious system that was coherent in broad terms, so that even when people had conflicting interests they could act according to a shared set of rules and assumptions. Considerations of geography and chronology have been muted in these sections, and readers who would like to know more about the development of religious cultures in specific towns, or who would like to consider more closely questions of regional difference, may wish to turn to the rich and growing collection of regional studies of medieval and early modern Scotland.25 The question of change over time is addressed more explicitly in Part III, ‘Subduing thunderbolts’. Church bells were rung in medieval Europe to ward off the dangers of thunderstorms, but here the bell’s statement is here taken on a more allegorical level: the period between 1350 and 1560 was one of serious challenge and disruption to traditional forms of religion in Scottish towns. Part III looks first at weaknesses in the Scottish ecclesiastical structure and at forms of religious dissent, and then considers the Scottish Church’s response to these weaknesses, dissenters, and grievances from within and without the Catholic fold. While acknowledging that the challenges faced by the ecclesiastical leadership were serious, it also proposes that the religious culture of Scottish towns was beginning to shift in order to meet these challenges. By placing this religious shift in the context of wider

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European currents of reform, it reveals how changes to lay religious practices in Scottish towns were part of a deeper social movement in the early modern world. Two main arguments run through the book. The first is that most laypeople in Scottish towns continued to participate in orthodox Catholic practices right through to the mid-sixteenth century. Although some Scottish townspeople were clearly curious about Protestant teachings by the 1520s, and a few were even embracing Protestant beliefs and practices with public conviction, nevertheless, the vast majority continued their involvement with traditional Catholic practices either out of a commitment to the theology that underlay them, or due to the inertia of conservative behaviour. The second major argument of the book, and one that emerges most plainly in Part III, is that Catholic religious practices in Scottish towns underwent a significant shift in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries through a combination of lay-led initiatives and elite-driven repressions. This shift, which is most easily perceived when Scotland is considered as part of the broader European transition from the medieval to the early modern period, brought with it a kind of pre-Reformation reformation in religious practice, making Scotland the only country in Europe where Catholic Reformation preceded Protestant Reformation.

Notes 1 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, xix. 2 Gemmill and Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland, 9–10. 3 ‘Introduction’, in Lynch, Spearman, and Stell, Scottish Medieval Town, 11. 4 Ewan, ‘Townlife and Trade’; MacQueen and Windram, ‘Laws and Courts in the Burghs’, 208; Ditchburn and MacDonald, ‘Medieval Scotland, 1100–1560’, 145. 5 Hall, Burgess, Merchant and Priest, 34. 6 Ewan, ‘Townlife and Trade’; Dennison, ‘Urban Settlement’; Hall, Burgess, Merchant and Priest, 10. 7 Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe; Ewan, ‘Townlife and Trade’; Lynch and Ditchburn, ‘Economic Development’; Lynch, ‘The Social and Economic Structure of the Larger Towns, 1450–1600’. 8 Boardman, Early Stewart Kings; Grant, Independence and Nationhood; Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community; Brown, James I; Macdougall, James III; Macdougall, James IV.

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9 MacDonald, ‘Low Countries’; Strauch, ‘Royal Connections’. 10 Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560; Campbell, ‘A Romanesque Revival and the Early Renaissance in Scotland, c. 1380–1513’. 11 Letters of James the Fourth 1505–1513, 22. 12 Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe. 13 Jillings, Scotland’s Black Death. 14 Campbell et al., ‘Economy’; Gemmill and Mayhew, Changing Values in Medieval Scotland; Whyte, Scotland Before the Industrial Revolution. 15 Barrell, Papacy, Scotland, and Northern England, 1342–1378, 5; Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 90; Webster, Medieval Scotland, 62–8; Watt, ‘The Provincial Council of the Scottish Church 1215–1742’. 16 Watt, ‘Scotland: Religion and Piety’. 17 Cowan and Easson, Medieval Religious Houses. 18 Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560, 142–81. 19 Huizinga, Autumn of the Middle Ages; Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls; Mâle, Religious Art in France. 20 E.g. Delumeau, Catholicism from Luther to Voltaire; Schmitt, Holy Greyhound; Gurevich, Medieval Popular Culture. 21 E.g. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages; van Engen, ‘Multiple Options’; Kaminsky, ‘From Lateness to Waning to Crisis’. 22 Walsham, ‘The Reformation and “the Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’. 23 E.g. McRoberts, ‘Some Sixteenth-Century Scottish Breviaries and their Place in the History of the Scottish Liturgy’, 33–48; Winning, ‘Church Councils in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, 311–37; Donaldson, Scottish Reformation, 15, 20, 27; Fitch, Search for Salvation; Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation 1534–61; Kellar, Scotland, England, and the Reformation. 24 Lynch, ‘In Search of the Scottish Reformation’, 82; Boardman and Lynch, ‘The State of Late Medieval and Early Modern Scottish History’, 44–59; Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community, 76; Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 5. 25 Dennison, Ditchburn, and Lynch, Aberdeen Before 1800; Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland; Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation; Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation; Verschuur, Politics or Religion?; Torrie, Medieval Dundee; Bardgett, Scotland Reformed; Devine and Jackson, Glasgow.

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Part I

Lamenting the dead

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1 How the living influenced the dead

The dead were the first concern of the St Giles bell. ‘Defunctos plango’, it said, lamenting those who had completed their earthly lives. The people of Scottish towns mourned the dead, but they also believed that death was not the end of a person: while the body was part of this world and therefore material and apt to decay, the soul was eternal. Thus when Elizabeth Gledstanis was dying in 1533, she said she was fearful. But turning her eyes to the salvation of herself, her children, and other faithful people, she gave a donation of money and an image of the Cross ‘for the service, care and ministry’ at the altar of the Holy Rood in her town of Selkirk.1 Nearing the point of death, this Scottish townsperson felt apprehensive in the face of profound uncertainty associated with her soul’s final destination. She did not, however, feel powerless. She took measures while still alive to improve the position of her own soul – through a good work in the form of a donation in cash and kind to her parish church – and she also extended the benefits arising from the good work to the souls of others – her children and other faithful people. The basic anxieties, hopes, and actions of Elizabeth Gledstanis were widespread among the inhabitants of Scottish towns. They feared death, but they did not despair. Rather, they made arrangements for their own souls to pass as painlessly as possible into a blessed eternity, and they attended to the souls of those already deceased, especially to the souls of their blood kin and their civic brethren.

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Fear of death ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ (‘the fear of death distresses me’) is the haunting line that ends each of the 25 verses in a poem written by William Dunbar around the turn of the sixteenth century.2 The poem is often known today as ‘Lament for the Makars’ because in its second half Dunbar mourns a series of named poets, or ‘makaris’, who have recently died. Its deeper message, however, is both more individual and more universal. The poem opens with a personal reflection on the poet’s declining health to the point of ‘greit sicknes’, and it concludes with the recognition that death will not leave the poet alone. The poem moves beyond Dunbar’s individual awareness of his own mortality to a more universal scope when it emphasizes that death is the great leveller that takes people of all estates, both rich and poor of all degree. While the refrain ‘timor mortis conturbat me’ may at first appear to be a personal message and something to be spoken by the poet alone, it actually adds to the poem’s wider resonance, for this line was not composed originally by Dunbar himself, but taken from the Office of the Dead, a liturgical ritual common in Europe from at least the tenth century and heard in Scottish churches right up to the Protestant Reformation. In Dunbar’s poem, where it locks each verse into place with a regular metre and rhyme, it provides a poignant, pulsing echo of anxiety, individually felt but universally acknowledged, concerning the inevitable end of life. Some of this anxiety arose from a fear of the pains associated with dying, described rather coldly in the fifteenth-century ‘The Craft of Deyng’ as hard and ‘rycht horrebile to mony men’.3 Such fear might have been sharpened by artistic representations of death found in churches, such as the skull covered with worms on the ceiling of the Blackadder aisle in Glasgow Cathedral, the skeletal and living forms participating in the Dance of Death at Rosslyn Chapel, and the clerical vestments ornamented with death’s heads at Aberdeen.4 Yet apprehension surrounding the dreadful hour of death reached beyond the physical trials of dying and into the inability to know with certainty where the soul would spend eternity. Ancient and early medieval Christian thinkers had wrestled with heterogeneous passages from the Bible in addition to Greek and Roman writings in their attempts to assemble a

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coherent picture of what happened to the soul after death, and by the fourteenth century theologians, writers, and artists in the Christian West were describing three possible destinations: ‘purgatory, hell, [and] ioy celistiall’.5 Hell was the most feared of the three, a place of unrelenting and everlasting physical, mental, and spiritual torment. It was thought to lie in the lowest part of the earth or somewhere underneath, a ‘pitt obscure’.6 Souls in hell were condemned to eternal suffering in three forms: the privation of grace, the privation of glory, and the feeling of pain by the senses.7 While for theologians the worst aspect of hell may have been deprivation of the sight of God, most people were likely more strongly affected by descriptions of physical pain. In the poem ‘The Contemplacioun of Synnaris’ by the fifteenth-century Franciscan author William of Tours, hell is described as a place of ‘dedlie dollour’, of pain that no words can express. It is ‘maist vile venomus’, a dark dungeon for damned creatures, and a hole of horrible darkness and intolerable stink. Souls could neither defend themselves against nor flee from its pains, which lasted for a ‘thouusand mulyeoun yearis’.8 In Sir David Lyndsay’s poem ‘The Dreme’, hell contained sinners suffering eternally in ‘flame of fyre, rycht furious and fell’. They had hunger and thirst rather than meat and drink, and toads and scorpions for their clothing. Their dwellings were covered with stink, they saw only horrible visions, they heard only scorn and derision, and they felt only unsupportable pains.9 If authors could sometimes show a sense of humour when depicting hell – Dunbar wrote of Gaelic speakers in that infernal place mounting a Highland pageant so offensive to the ears that even the Devil himself had to smother the revellers10 – this carnivalesque and grotesque appreciation did not erase the theological certainty that there was simply no escape: once in hell, a soul would suffer its torments for all eternity. The very bad sink at once into its depths, according to The Golden Legend, a text read widely in Europe and found in several Scottish libraries including that of a Dominican house in Edinburgh and those of chaplains at Glasgow and Aberdeen.11 They cannot be freed from pain, their punishment cannot be lessened, and their damnation cannot be suspended even for a moment. Nor can they be strengthened to bear their suffering more lightly. In short, ‘in hell there is no

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redemption’.12 When Dunbar and his contemporaries feared death, part of what they really feared was the destination of the damned. Heaven, by contrast, was the destination that people most longed to reach. It was located somewhere above the earth, a glorious port ‘quhair we sall rest the schip of our nature in perpetual tranquillitie and securitie of bayth bodie and saul’.13 Some poets described heaven in courtly terms, as a ‘palice of licht’, a ‘Court Celestial’, complete with princes in armour of burnished gold inset with precious stones.14 Though Gavin Douglas insisted that only virtue mattered to those in heaven, not the pomp and might of earthly estate, this chivalrous vision was likely appealing to aristocrats if not to burgesses or the urban poor. Perhaps Sir David Lyndsay’s heaven of ‘myrth and infinite plesuouris’ was closer to popular hopes for the afterlife. It was characterized both by an absence of pain and also by the presence of pleasure. Neither fire, nor sword, nor heat, nor cold, nor wind, nor rain could cause any pain in heaven; it was a place of ‘sensuall plesouris delectabyll’ delighting the senses with heavenly sounds, celestial bright colours, a beautiful smell surpassing by far the scent of any earthly flower, and a taste of ‘sweit and Supernaturall Sapowris’.15 Heaven may have been desired by a great many, but only a very few were thought to go directly there after death. It is difficult to imagine that very many would have shared the optimism of poet Robert Henryson’s old man who sang, ‘the more of age, the nerar hevynnis blisse’.16 Most people expected that they would be prevented from entering heaven immediately after death because they bore on their conscience the stain of at least some sin, however minor, however long since its committal. Heaven was opened only for those who had completed all penance and committed no venial sins, or whose venial sins had all been consumed by the fervour of their charity.17 Entry into heaven was not forever to be denied to the rest, but it would have to be delayed until their souls were pure. The necessary purgation or satisfaction due for sins would take place in purgatory, the third possible destination in the afterlife according to the beliefs of later medieval Scots. Purgatory may never have been all that clearly or authoritatively described by theologians, yet it was a defining doctrine of late medieval Catholicism and a very creative idea for the imaginations of

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believers.18 Popular lay responses to the doctrine of purgatory drew upon two main understandings. First, purgatory was a thoroughly unpleasant place where a soul could spend a long time but not eternity, since all the souls in purgatory were moving towards heaven. In the words of the Scottish catechism of 1552, ‘thair is in Purgatorie privatioun of glore, and also sensibil payne for a tyme, but nocht privatioun of grace, for all the saulis quhilk ar in Purgatorie, ar in the favour of God and hais his grace’.19 Second, the living could relieve some of the pains of the dead who were in purgatory. The unpleasantness of purgatory plus the belief in the power of agency to speed one’s progress through its torments were among the most significant considerations that inspired urban Scots to seek a good death and long remembrance.

A good life and a good death People’s desire for salvation (and their associated fear of damnation) is critical to explaining much of lay religious practice in late medieval and early modern Europe.20 They believed that while God did not determine any soul to be damned, once a person was dead nothing that could influence whether that person’s soul went to purgatory and on to eternal salvation in heaven, or instead directly to eternity in hell. Each individual chose his or her own eternal destination through his or her own beliefs and actions while alive. As Dunbar advised in the final verse of his ‘Lament for the Makars’, since there is no remedy for death, it is best that people prepare themselves while still alive so that they may have life after death.21 Adequate preparation was not an easy task, but it was not an impossible one either. A human was a ‘synfull creature’ whose many sins against God repeatedly endangered his or her soul. According to Scottish poet John of Ireland’s ‘Of Penance and Confession’, written in the second half of the fifteenth century, there was a sure remedy and medicine against all the sins, and this was penance.22 Penance had three steps: contrition, which had to be genuine and heartfelt; confession, which was to be made in secret to a priest at least once a year at the beginning of Lent (though more often was recommended) and was to be a complete telling of sins, including those of action, speech, and thought, both

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against God and against neighbour; and satisfaction, which could take several forms, including pilgrimage and other good works. In giving penance, a priest was supposed to take into account several factors regarding the offence (such as what it was, where it happened, when it happened, what caused it to happen) and the offender (his or her level of devoutness and signs of contrition). He was to ask questions, if necessary, in order to determine the best remedy, though he was to be especially careful when asking about lechery, in order to avoid inducing pleasure in the sinner when hearing the particular circumstance of the sin, and even the danger of teaching the sinner ways to sin previously unknown.23 A clear confession was so important to Scots, that certain among them petitioned the Pope in the mid-fifteenth century saying that many merchants travelled to and stayed in Bruges, where they were seldom able to find priests to whom they could confess. They asked that a chaplain in a local house of Carmelites be able to serve as confessor, since he could understand the language of the Scottish merchants. Their request was granted: the Scots-speaking chaplain could hear confession of the Scots in Bruges, absolve them of sins, and administer the sacraments to them.24 The records from late medieval and early modern Scotland are silent on whether townspeople were truly contrite penitents and on what exactly they said in confession, but they clearly show that many pious Scots took to heart the connection between penitential good works and salvation. A charter from mid-fourteenth-century Aberdeen explained that ‘by the keys of good works, we may be able to open for ourselves the door of the heavenly kingdom, forasmuch as by wicked works, as by so many bolts and bars, the door of life is shut against us’.25 Many charters by individual Scots endowing their parish churches similarly emphasized the connection between good works in this life and salvation in the hereafter. Andrew Mowbray’s charter of 1478 founding a chaplainry at the altar of St Ninian in St Giles, Edinburgh, said that just as water extinguishes fire, so alms extinguish sin.26 In 1489 David Symsoun, burgess of Aberdeen, founded an altar in his parish church noting that ‘whereas we shall all stand before the judgmentseat of our Lord Jhesus Christ to receive as we have done in time, whether it be good or bad, therefore it is expedient to anticipate that day of final doom by works of mercy, so that we may be able to reap in

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heaven with manifold fruit what we have sown on earth’.27 When John Arthur, another burgess of Aberdeen, donated six volumes of books by Nicholas of Lyra to the church of St Nicholas, he was ‘turning his mind to, and considering beforehand, the shortness of this present world and the length and duration of that which is to come, joyous indeed to those who in their lifetime have done good works, but full for ever of anxiety and sadness for those who do the opposite’.28 Good works of many different forms could grow from similar motivations. When Robert Adamson, burgess of Glasgow, was ‘moved with the zeal of charity, and for the weal of his soul’ as well as for the weal of all the faithful in 1491, he made a donation to the leper hospital in his town.29 Thomas Pearson, burgess of St Andrews, made a donation in 1476 for the salvation of his soul, but he also ensured a measure of social security for his sister at the same time with his donation of pure and perpetual alms for the maintenance of beds called the ‘cuche beddis’ in the alms booth for poor and disabled persons. His sister, if she survived him, was to be placed in the booth for her lifetime in preference to others.30 Donors to hospitals might have hoped that the resonance of their good work would be magnified by the inmates’ prayers, such as the 20 Pater Nosters, 4 Creeds, and 50 Hail Marys that were supposed to be said every morning by the poor in the chapel of St Leonard, Edinburgh.31 Some good works carried the promise of the relaxation of a specific amount of enjoined penance in purgatory. As of 1379, those who annually visited and gave alms to the fabric and chapel of the poor hospital of St John the Evangelist in the diocese of St Andrews were granted a relaxation of a year and 40 days; those who in 1381 visited and gave alms to the fabric of the church of St Andrews could gain a relaxation of more than four years.32 In 1420 the faithful were exhorted to help in building a bridge on the road between Edinburgh and Linlithgow for want of which many people were drowned or exposed to danger, and donors to this project were promised the relaxation of three years and three quarantines (each quarantine being 40 days) of enjoined penance.33 In 1436, five years and five quarantines of enjoined penance were relaxed for those who visited and gave alms for the repair of the church of the Dominicans’ house in Inverness on the feast day of

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St Anne.34 And in 1473 a plenary indulgence and remission of sins – that is, a remission from all temporal punishment – was granted to those penitent and confessed who visited the church of St Andrews on the feast and throughout the octave of St Michael and gave alms for the conservation of the building.35 Clearly, inflation in indulgences was occurring in Scotland as in other areas of Europe.36 Indulgences came under attack by some of the reform-minded thinkers of Scotland. David Lyndsay, for example, depicted a pardoner as ‘Sir Robert Rome-raker’, a greedy man with a taste for obscenity and the selling of dubious pardons to the gullible poor. 37 But indulgences need not be interpreted as merely a way for unscrupulous churchmen to profit from a credulous and frightened underclass. More sympathetically, indulgences can be considered among the ‘strategies for eternity’ that laypeople employed when negotiating the complex economy of salvation taught by the Church.38 Though some pardoners and many religious institutions unquestioningly made money from their sale, not all indulgences were bought with cash. Many were purchased with prayers, such as that promised in an early sixteenth-century rubric claiming that a Pope had granted 300 days of indulgence to anyone saying the accompanying prayer in honour of the Virgin Mary.39 Leaders of the Church may have taught that all one’s life was preparation for the afterlife, but most laypeople were especially concerned with what was done by them and for them immediately before, during, and after dying, for the duration of that period of time lasting from the deathbed through to burial.40 While the specific options available to individuals varied according to location and social status, two widespread concerns can be discerned among the laypeople living in pre-Reformation Scottish towns: they wanted to die a good death, which included standard and religiously effective rites performed at their deathbeds, and they longed to be remembered in prayers immediately following death as well as throughout the years, even generations, thereafter. The importance of dying a good death was taught in ghost tales throughout Europe, including one found in the northern English Chronicon de Lanercost in which a monk near Paisley had died while excommunicate on account of ‘certain acts of sacrilege’. After burial, his body returned to vex those living in his monastery

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during the night and those in the house of a local knight during the day. It took the shape of a ‘hideous, gross, and tangible’ black monk and settled on high parts of buildings, defied its attackers by burning to ashes whatever arrows or forks were driven through it, and savagely beat anyone who struggled with it, ‘as well-nigh to shatter all their joints’, even killing a knight’s son.41 Like other European revenants, the monk in this story had been a person who projected strong ill will, whose malicious life-force remained in his body after death, and who both lived and died badly.42 Sudden death was widely considered to be a bad death. Although it would not in principle deny a person the possibility of true repentance towards God or the right to be buried in consecrated ground,43 sudden death was nevertheless widely feared because it would deprive a person of the opportunity to receive extreme unction and set their affairs in good order one last time in the full knowledge of imminent death. Or, in the words of Robert Henryson’s poem ‘Ane Prayer for the Pest’, to die suddenly was to be ‘haistely put doun’ to die ‘as beistis without confession’.44 One way to avoid the worst consequences of sudden death was to be always prepared, so that death, however unexpected, would not catch a soul in a state of unreadiness. David Lyndsay advised that since nobody knows the hour nor the day of Christ’s coming, people should always pray and be penitent for their sins.45 Most people, however, were not so worried about the general judgement or ‘domysday’ as they were about particular judgement, their own personal day of judgement, which came not at the end of the world but at the time of their physical death. The frequency of statements about the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its hour in Scottish wills is not surprising when considering how often people would have experienced close encounters with death through famine, war, and disease.46 If they did not want the constant pressure of living every moment as if they were about to die in the next, Scots could try warding off a sudden death. One tactic was prayer, such as the one in ‘The Jesus Psalter’ as recorded in the sixteenth century requesting to God that ‘quhen I haue offended thee smyt me nocht with suddane dethe’.47 Another tactic was the celebration of the Mass of the Name of Jesus in the hope that, as the rubric included with the fifteenth-century Arbuthnott Missal claimed, hearers would not die without true contrition, confession,

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satisfaction, communion, and extreme unction; in other words, the promise was that people would not die without due preparation.48 Individuals who suspected they would soon be facing death often underwent preparation while still healthy and capable – ‘abill baith in mynde and toung’,49 as Dunbar put it – lest they run out of time or become incapacitated near to the moment of death. Thus women were supposed to confess and receive the body of Christ in the ninth month of their pregnancy, as was anyone in peril of death in sickness or in battle or at sea.50 People with the forethought to undergo such preparation ensured that death did not overtake them spiritually ill-equipped; they ensured that they could have the chance to die a good death. A good death was one that allowed time to settle affairs. Sometimes, these affairs were worldly matters. In the presence of a notary and witnesses, the curate of the parish church of Stirling inquired in 1476 of Alexander Cosour, burgess, lying in extremis and with eyes shut, if he was obliged in any debt of money or goods to Robert Colly or Alexander Legat, for contracts of marriage between them and his daughters. The dying man answered with a low voice, ‘no’.51 This Stirling cleric was probably asking such pecuniary questions as part of someone’s attempt – maybe the daughters’ fiancés – to settle outstanding debts before the debtor’s death, as the presence of the notary and witness suggests. The deathbed could also be an important opportunity to clear from one’s name or the name of another, the stain of dishonour. Robert Spettal, resident of Stirling, came to the deathbed of Gilbert Johnson and reported the rumour he had heard of Gilbert complaining about Robert having done him great wrongs by begging upon his ground; Gilbert answered that he had said no such thing but rather that Robert was a good neighbour.52 More prominent than the settling of worldly affairs concerning money or reputation in the records of deathbeds is the settling of religious affairs. John Murray, burgess of Aberdeen, made a charter on his deathbed in 1529 in which he donated various lands to the curate and chaplain of the choir of St Nicholas and arranged that they sing masses for his soul and for the souls of others, including the faithful dead, in purgatory.53 Purgatory was presumably on the minds of many close to death, and a commonly sought deathbed rite was extreme unction, the sacrament offered by the

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Church to assist in cleansing the soul of a dying person through a priest’s solemn anointing. The thirteenth-century synodal statutes of the diocese of Aberdeen directed that priests were to exhort sick parishioners of 14 years of age and above to extreme unction, and that they were to administer this sacrament freely to all who asked for it and were penitent. The priests were, moreover, to explain that this sacrament could be repeated in any sickness when the fear of death was present, and that after receiving this sacrament a person could return to other lawful acts, as before.54 This last instruction was presumably designed to counter the popular belief that receiving extreme unction conferred behavioural prohibitions on the recipient, including sexual intercourse, walking barefoot, or eating meat.55 Whatever the popular reluctance, extreme unction was an effective ritual for the end of life, as William Hay explained in one of his lectures to the University of Aberdeen in the 1530s, for it ‘blots out venial sins not removed by confession, as well as mortal sins forgotten after careful examination of conscience’.56 It would also bring ‘spiritual blythnes’ of the mind, and even the possibility that God would deliver the recipient from bodily sickness and restore them to health.57 The time immediately around the moment of death was considered of especially great significance for the fate of the soul, which was then standing precariously between a few short years on earth and forever in the afterlife. It was therefore very important to be correctly disposed in mind and spirit; yet this was not easy. William Hay said that ‘as experience often shows, the devil tries with all his might to tempt the dying man to despair’. A Catechism from two decades later provided further detail. ‘For of al tymes of our lyfe the tyme of our departing is maist perrillous, because that the devil our ennymye (specially at that tyme) gangis about lyk ane ramping Lyon seiking quhom he may devoir and swally.’ The time of departing was the time when the Devil redoubled his efforts to slay the soul, the time when the Devil was most diligent and busy to bring people from their faith and stop their entrance to heaven.58 Similarly, the fifteenth-century ‘Craft of Deyng’ warned that ‘the deuil tempis a man in his deing’, sending many falsehoods and despair of God’s great mercy. This text also gave concrete advice on how to resist. Rather than give in to the Devil, a person on his deathbed should strive to die a good death. He should have

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his heart firmly set on what the Bible says and what his priest teaches him. Furthermore, he should have someone to rehearse for him the points of truth as well as the great faith and patience of the martyrs and other holy men. He should remember that God has redeemed the trespass of humanity and with much mercy sent his only son. He should be asked if he be happy that he dies in the faith of Christ and the holy Church, if he allows that he has not lived righteously as he ought to have done, and if he has the will to amend his misdeeds. He should next be asked if he knows that Christ died for him and all sinners and if he thanks God for this with all his heart. Then he is to be bid to be strong in that faith, forgive men, and ask forgiveness of God and men.59 At death, therefore, a person was to remember both heaven and earth. The moment of death was sharply liminal: the dying person was perched on the threshold between this world and the next. Like other liminal spaces, this one was fraught with danger and uncertainty, and in this particular liminal space the stakes could not be higher, for the friends, family, and spiritual care-givers fought against the Devil himself for influence over a departing soul about to spend the rest of time either saved or damned. The general advice and assistance offered to the dying in Scottish towns was in no way unusual: forethought and preparation, charitable donations, and the sacrament of extreme unction were recommended in towns and countryside throughout western Europe. Options available to people for remembrance after death, however, were more particular to specific conditions within Scottish towns.

Remembrance Knowing that death would come sooner or later to all, and believing that the living could assist the souls of the dead who were in purgatory, people took measures while still alive to encourage others to remember them after their death. For most people, postmortem remembrance began with a funeral. At the core of the funeral service was the Office of the Dead performed by priests wearing sombre clothing such as the black vestments for the dead possessed by Glasgow Cathedral in the fifteenth century, or the black vestments ornamented with death’s heads (‘signata capitibus mortuorum’) at Aberdeen.60 The first part of the Office of the

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Dead, also called the ‘Placebo’ after the first word of its opening psalm, took place in the afternoon or evening before burial of the body. The second part, also called the ‘Dirige’ after the opening word of its first anthem, took place the following morning. Next would sometimes come a particular mass, such as a Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, then a Requiem Mass, and during the week after burial a set of 30 requiem masses, called a trental.61 The popularity of having multiple masses said shortly after death can be explained at least in part by the belief that the masses were of immediate assistance to the newly dead in purgatory. ‘The Vertewis of the Mess’ assured its readers that souls in purgatory felt no pain during the time when a living person with clean heart and good devotion heard a mass for that soul.62 The rubric for the Mass of the Name of Jesus included with the Arbuthnott Missal went further, and said that if a priest celebrated this mass on 30 Fridays for a soul in purgatory, that soul would be liberated.63 Beyond the core of the Office of the Dead was considerable scope for elaboration that combined the prescribed liturgy with what have been called ‘paraliturgical celebrations’ or ‘pararituals’. These could vary widely in form according to popular custom, availability of resources, staffing and equipment of the church, and the spaces available for burial,64 but the more common examples of paraliturgical celebrations found in records of Scottish funerals aimed at increasing attendance. Handbells were often rung through the streets to inform the townspeople of a recent death and ask for their prayers, and sometimes the larger bells in the church would be rung as well. The bell of St Giles in Edinburgh was tolled three times during requiem masses, as the cartulary of the church tells us, in order to summon the people, but one Edinburgh burgess’s charter of 1478 called for a whole series of bells: a handbell rung through the city, bells at the Dirige and larger bells later in the evening and again in the morning, and finally single pulses with medium intervals in order to incite the people to pray for all the dead in Christ.65 Guilds stressed the importance of community attendance at burials of their members and fined brethren who neglected to come.66 More will be said about the guilds of Scottish towns in Chapter 3, but for now the example of the Dunfermline guild’s regulation of 1443 will serve to demonstrate the importance of attending funerals. It stated that

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whenever any member died, the sergeant of the guild was to warn all the guild members on the night before the funeral that they were to attend, and that each guild member was to hear a mass for the soul that same day or within eight days at the latest. If any member were to leave this undone, then the dean was to charge him 12d.67 Some people had access to luxurious items that would have raised the level of sumptuous display at the funeral. The great golden or silver candlesticks at St Giles, Edinburgh, provided deluxe lighting for the funerals of those who paid the fees ranging in the 1550s from 4d to 9s 6d, depending on the number of candlesticks used.68 The guild of hammermen in Edinburgh provided for its members a special covering for their coffins as they lay in front of the altar. It comprised a hearse, which was a framework of wood or metal and spikes to hold candles, over which was spread a cloth at least partially of velvet with fringes of silk and featuring two images of St Eloi, the patron saint of the guild, as well as six crowns and hammers of fine gold and silver. The cost of this luxurious mort cloth was substantial – more than £30 – and yet there is no indication that guild members or their families were ever charged for its use.69 In Perth, the mort cloth of the merchant guild was used not only by members of this guild, but also by their wives, children, and other townspeople as well.70 Paraliturgical celebrations did have their theoretical limits, though these were sometimes stretched in practice. Church statutes forbade singing and dancing at funerals, ‘since it does not become us to laugh at the weeping of others, but in a case of this kind rather to grieve as they do’, but children could make a game of funerary practices, such as the two boys who in 1558 carried their friend through the town of Edinburgh as if he were dead.71 Quick burial of the body was common for reasons of basic sanitation, but the ceremonies and material accompanying the burial varied considerably according to social class and personal preference. For most people, interment was in a shroud or bag of leather, linen, or other material fastened with drawstrings, though some bodies in more prestigious sites were buried in wooden coffins. Almost all were buried supine with their head to the west and feet to the east; the few cases of opposite orientation were probably the result of error due to heavy shrouding or coffining of the corpse.

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The arms and hands were usually placed at the sides, across the chest, or over the pelvis, though in one case of an especially wellpreserved body the hands look as if they were arranged in an attitude of prayer.72 ‘Honest’ burial with dignity and in the presence of others was considered very important. The thirteenthcentury Statuta Gilde ordered that if a guild member died and did not have enough money to be buried or to have a mass sung for his soul, the other members were to ensure that his body ‘be honestly layd in erde’.73 The Seal of Cause granted to the wrights and masons of Edinburgh in 1475 said that if any craftsman of either craft were to die with ‘na guds sufficient to bring him furth honestly’, the wrights and masons were to bring him forth and give him honest burial.74 The geography of burial for the dead in Scottish towns was patterned along lines of socio-spiritual status during life. Its most fundamental distinction was that between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. The basis for this distinction goes back at least to the fifth century and remained in force throughout the medieval period. The thirteenth-century Scottish episcopal constitution articulated the reason for the distinction as being one of community: ‘for with whom in life we are in communion, with him also in death ought we to be in communion’.75 Therefore, the most obvious category of those theoretically excluded from burial in consecrated ground was those who, like the revenant in the Chronicon de Lanercost, died excommunicate. The fourteenthcentury statutes of St Andrews directed that no one in charge of Christian burial was to admit into the churchyard anyone known to have been excommunicated by canon law unless he have sufficient evidence of this person having been absolved by someone with the proper power to do so.76 The efforts of Church authorities to keep the bodies of excommunicates out of consecrated ground sometimes extended to exhumation and reburial. Andrew Forman, Archbishop of St Andrews, wrote a supplication to the Bishop of Durham in the early sixteenth century requesting the exhumation of a Border reiver who had been buried in sacred ground although he died excommunicate.77 At other times, Church authorities relaxed the rule forbidding the burial of excommunicates in consecrated ground. The same Archbishop of St Andrews wrote to the curate of a parish church in his diocese directing that

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a layman who had died excommunicate should be buried in his parish church since he had been truly Catholic and also gave a sign of penitence and contrition while dying.78 Formal excommunication, therefore, though theoretically a reason to prevent burial alongside others in consecrated ground, was in practice sometimes put aside when the excommunicated person, inwardly and while dying, came fully back into communion with the society of the living. Suicides made up another category of people potentially excluded from burial in consecrated ground, though here both theory and practice were ambivalent. The general approach of jurisprudence was to regard the suicide as a person whose memory ought to be disgraced, denying him or her burial in the usual place and with the usual ceremonies. The theologians’ approach from at least the sixth century was to exclude those who deliberately killed themselves from burial in sacred ground, though they showed some latitude to those they considered as mentally deranged, and they regularly admitted the possibility that the suicide had experienced remorse immediately before death.79 At least one Scottish source followed this more lenient direction: as ‘The Craft of Deyng’ said, even if a man had committed as many sins as there are drops in the sea yet had never been shriven before the hour of his death, if he then had sufficient contrition he would be saved, for God would not deny his mercy if truly asked.80 Medieval society’s ambivalence towards the act of suicide makes it very difficult to know how widespread the practice of self-slaughter really was. An examination of records from England, France, Germany, and Italy from about 1000 to 1500 found only 560 cases of reasonably certain suicide, though this rate of slightly more than one per year is probably a serious under-representation of the true number, since most people intent on killing themselves likely did so in private, and since their families and others around them would have wished to conceal the nature of the death in order to avoid the social and religious stigma attached to suicide.81 An inquest in Stirling from 1527 demonstrates that authorities thought the possibility of suicide sufficiently important to look into the cause of death when suicide was suspected. In the end, it determined that the late David Wilsoun ‘slew nocht him selfe’, but rather was an old and sick man who had died from a fall.82 Rules concerning the

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burial of suicides were sometimes bent or broken by Scottish priests who read evidence selectively or who privately did what they thought best even when suicide was clear. A papal letter from 1447 accused a local vicar in Glasgow diocese of having buried in the cemetery of his church the body of William Ade, ‘a parishioner of his, who had hanged himself with a rope in his own barn’.83 This small number of cases involving suicide or suspected suicide is admittedly not much to go on, but does nevertheless suggest that the general medieval dilemmas about burial of the bodies of those who had killed themselves was felt in Scotland too. Yet another category of people officially denied burial in consecrated ground was the unbaptized.84 Virtually everybody in Scotland at this time was baptized soon after birth (see Chapter 4), so the only unbaptized people in large numbers were newborn babies. By the later Middle Ages theologians tended to believe that the souls of unbaptized infants were in Limbo, a region at the very top of hell where souls suffered no physical torments or only slight physical pain, but where they were denied grace and glory.85 Such unfortunates appear in Sir David Lyndsay’s vision, where they are described as a ‘myrthless menye’, making dreary moan because they were not baptized.86 One final category of individuals forbidden burial in sacred ground was that of relapsed or unrepentant heretics. In the thirteenth century Pope Alexander IV not only excommunicated anyone who knowingly buried a heretic in consecrated ground, but he also ordered them publicly to dig the corpse up with their own hands and throw it out of the cemetery.87 Specific cases of the burial of heretics in consecrated ground have not been found in Scotland – perhaps in part due to a generally low concern with heresy in the later Middle Ages (see Chapter 5) – but the papal decree would theoretically have held there. Those who were outside the Christian community in life – as excommunicates, suicides, the unbaptized, or heretics – were outside it in death as well, but distinctions arose even among the ‘insiders’ granted burial in consecrated ground in Scottish towns.88 Interment beneath or within the church building itself was attractive because it offered proximity to altars where masses were celebrated as well as placement in the midst of a community at worship, thus assuring that one would remain both close to the performance of holy mysteries, and also in the centre of remem-

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brance of the still living members of the parish community.89 People buried in front of a particular saint’s altar were often the founders of that altar, such as with a number of burgesses from Aberdeen. In 1355 William de Leith was buried in the church of St Nicholas before the altar of Sts Lawrence and Ninian, which he had founded, adorned with images of its saints, and endowed with a mass book and breviary ‘well lettered and musically notated’, along with priestly vestments and other things necessary for divine service. This Aberdonian was an important patron of his church, for in addition to founding the altar of Sts Lawrence and Ninian, he lengthened the choir by 16 feet, and gave two ‘great bells of great price’ to the church, as well as a complete priest’s vestment of blue velvet embroidered with gold, along with other things fitting for divine service.90 Alexander Williamson was buried before the altar of St Nicholas that he had founded and adorned with an image, gilt chalice, mass book, and other items used in divine service.91 William de Chalmers of Fyndon was buried before the altar of St Katherine, which he had founded and supplied with an image of the saint, a gilt chalice, and other holy vestments.92 William de Strabrok was buried in front of the altar he had founded in honour of St James the Apostle in the church of St Nicholas and adorned with an image of St James, holy vestments for the priest, a gilt chalice, a breviary, a missal, and other vessels suitable for Divine service.93 The privilege of being buried next to a favoured altar was sometimes extended beyond the founder to those who had made especially generous gifts to the altar. Thomas Mersere, a burgess and alderman of Aberdeen, was buried in front of the altar of St Nicholas that he had adorned with a large tabernacle of the Passion of Christ.94 In 1504 Robert Gray, burgess of Edinburgh, arranged to be buried under a flat gravestone before the altar of St Cuthbert in the church of St Giles. He also donated space under the same gravestone to Master Thomas Anderson, chaplain at the altar of St Cuthbert, as a reward for his services and for the singular favour which he bore to him.95 Burial spots were sometimes marked for remembrance, as the flat gravestone in the previous example may indicate. The burial place of Janet Swift, daughter of burgess Thomas Swift, was marked by a stone adorned with brass in the aisle of St Mary the Virgin, St Giles, and burial plots in Glasgow

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Cathedral may have been marked by inscribed slabs.96 Some people who chose to be buried in the church arranged to be laid to rest close to their kin, usually in a patriarchal pattern. Men were simply listed under their own name, with the exception of a servant, ‘James Curllis servand’. Women were sometimes listed under their own names, such as ‘Issobell Boyis’, and sometimes as wives of named men, such as ‘Andro Symsonis wyff’. Children were listed either as offspring of a father, such as with ‘Robert Lumis barnis layer’, or, rarely, as just a child, as with ‘ane barnis layer’.97 Burial within or underneath the church building may have been limited to those of high status by social custom, but its basic cost would have been within the reach of many. Burial in St Giles, Edinburgh, cost 2s for a child and 6s 8d for an adult – the standard sum in London too – at a time when masons working in St Giles were paid 3s to 4s per day, and when the daily summer wage for a workman could reach almost 1½d per day, not including food and drink.98 Burial in the parish church of Dundee in the fifteenth century was financed in a variety of ways. Several men paid for the burial of themselves and their wives with a donation of lead for the choir, often 20s- or 30s-worth. Others paid similar amounts to go towards the roof of the church or a new aisle. Some were granted burial as thanks for their services to the church and town. The provost and council granted the burial of John of Caralis, for example, for his ‘mendyn of the glassyn wyndowis’, and that of William Aitkyn and his wife Katherine Lawson for his travel on town errands to Bruges (in Flanders) at his own expense.99 Churchyards were on the whole less desirable as burial places than the insides of churches, probably because they were farther removed from the liturgical centre of the high altar. They were generally treated with less reverence than the interior of churches, as shown by the regular presence of animals within them, along with games and somewhat riotous behaviour (see Chapter 3). But churchyards were nevertheless still sacred ground, and moreover a less expensive option for burial than within the churches themselves. The town of Dundee set charges for gravedigging in the churchyard at 12d for an old man, less for a child, and free for the poor.100 Even within this more popular area for burials, degrees of desirability could be found, and the Catechism of 1552 condemned

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those thinking ‘that thair is mair halynes or vertew on the South side than on the North’.101 Burial-place preferences indicate that Scots cared enough about burial location to make specific and sometimes costly arrangements while still alive to ensure a favoured spot to rest their earthly remains after death. Even after burial, a person was not believed to be cut off from influence by the living, and the most significant kind of influence was generally thought to be that from the living to the dead in purgatory. The Golden Legend outlined the theological basis for this connection by saying that those who died before completing their penance and who lacked sufficient contrition, as well as those whose satisfaction was not sufficient due to the ignorance or carelessness of the priest who imposed it, are ‘punished most grievously in the fire of purgatory’ unless the living take some of the satisfaction upon themselves through prayer and other good actions.102 The dead as a group were prayed for at the time around Hallowe’en, when bells were rung in churches, sometimes the whole night through.103 In Edinburgh, not only were the great bell and the ‘deid bell’ rung on this night, but boys bore torches and the choir performed a soul mass and a dirge as well.104 Prayers were frequently also offered to ‘the faithful departed’ in general, who appear regularly as a group throughout charters founding altars and chaplainries in burgh churches. For some Scottish townspeople, inclusion within a general remembrance for the dead was insufficient. When they wished for more personalized remembrance, they could arrange to be remembered individually and prayed for at specific intervals after their death, such as on the seventh day, the thirtieth day, or after one year.105 This kind of personalized, regular remembrance was accomplished by setting up a chantry, which was a foundation and endowment of a mass recited at an altar for the soul of the founder, often with prayers for others included as well. Chantries were supposed to be perpetual and continually self-funding through the monies either owed in rents to the founder or, in some towns on the coast, fishing. These funds were directed to the upkeep of the chaplain who would celebrate masses at a newly built altar or at one already in place. When the chantry took the form of an anniversary, this was usually celebrated on or near the exact anniversary of the founder’s death, though it could also take place

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on a specific saint’s feast day, which may or may not have been proximate to the founder’s death date.106 Gender may have influenced the scheduling of anniversaries, for one study has shown that when women established foundations, they tended to do so soon after the deaths of their husbands, whereas most married men waited until their own death drew near. Moreover, though most women chose the death of their husband for the anniversary, most men directed that it should be celebrated on the anniversary of their own death.107 It is not clear, however, whether these patterns were due primarily to women and men taking unequal roles in planning for their remembrance, or more simply to the tendency of women to outlive their husbands. The core of an anniversary service was much like a funeral: Placebo and Dirige followed by the Mass of the Dead on the following day. Also like a funeral, this core could be augmented and supplemented by a variety of paraliturgical rituals to function as a statement of memory both of the individual’s soul and also of the social status of the living relatives.108 Parts of the service could be sung rather than said, supplementary prayers could be requested, and specific instructions could be given regarding the liturgical equipment to be used. Margaret Rynd of Edinburgh left the considerable sum of £5 for her anniversary in August 1505, along with detailed directions on how she wanted this sum divided: 5s 8d were to go to the cross, candles, torches, and singing boys; 15s to the 30 chaplains who were not in the choir; 3s for the ringing of the great bells; 12s to pay for the candlesticks and the clerk; 4d to the bellringer; 52s to doles for the poor; 6s for the grey friars; 4s to the hospital in St Mary Wynd; 16s to the canons, and 32s to the collectors.109 Such itemization was somewhat unusual, though some additions to the most basic anniversary service were probably quite common, since they are described in the charters as being customary. The anniversary of the late Margaret Waus and John Menzies of Aberdeen, for example, included the direction that the curate place ‘the accustomed table, covered, on their monument, find the accustomed lights, and perform all other things requisite for anniversaries of this kind as the custom is’.110 Other aspects described in charters as customary include a trental of masses following burial or on a specific saint’s day, specific vestments for the priests, wax lights, and the ringing of church

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bells three times at the obsequies and at the sung mass at the anniversary.111 As at the funeral, one of the reasons for ringing the bells was to summon people to pray for the soul of the anniversary’s founder. George Crag of St Andrews, acting as procurator for his father William, gave money to the chaplains of the choir in the parish church of his town to celebrate a sung anniversary mass with requiem on the day of the death of William. Bellmen were to go through the town on the preceding day and exhort people to pray for the souls of William, Margaret Wemes his spouse, their parents, brothers, sisters, friends and benefactors.112 The connection between bell-ringing and summoning people to the anniversary service is made especially clear in the anniversary charter of Thomas Nele, burgess of Ayr, and Agnes Wischart, his spouse, for a yearly sung mass at the altar of the Holy Blood in their parish church. They directed that the great bell and the small bells be rung, and that the chaplains remain in place long enough so that a man or a woman could come from the furthest place of the town to the mass. The charter added the unusual stipulation that when everyone had arrived, the priest was to exhort the people to pray not only for souls of Thomas and Agnes and the king’s grace, but also for temperate weather.113 Another way to encourage people to attend an anniversary was to provide an incentive in the form of alms.114 One fairly common manner of distributing anniversary alms was to have the celebrating cleric select a certain number of poor people to come to the service in prayer, and then to provide them with food, perhaps also money and cloth, after the service’s conclusion. The anniversary charter of John Broun, burgess of Ayr, and Mariota Petheid, his spouse, directed that before the service the choristers and priests were to cause the small handbells to go through the town to exhort people to pray for the souls of John and Mariota, and to urge all the poor, with a high and intelligible voice through each street, to come to the mass and receive alms. The charter then went on to describe the distribution of alms in unusually great detail, including the amounts of bread, ale, cheese, and fish to go to different categories of poor such as the elderly, scholars, and lepers.115 The impoverished recipients of alms at anniversaries like this one were expected to pray for the deceased benefactor.

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At the anniversary of Robert Blinsele, Provost of Aberdeen, and his wife, Elizabeth Wod, the collector was to place near the tomb of Robert a table and cover it with a cloth of linen or wool, and was to choose 13 poor people to come and pray throughout the Office of the Dead for the salvation of Robert and the souls of his wife, children, parents, and all faithful departed. The collector was also to place 13 twopenny loaves on the table along with certain pieces of uncooked meat and 2d for each of the poor people. He was to distribute all this and give the aforesaid cloth to one of the poor.116 The distribution of alms to the poor not only enacted a good work through charitable donation to the needy, but also encouraged a larger number of prayers to be said for the deceased than would be the case if only the chaplain were present. Some townspeople arranged for commemorative masses to be celebrated more frequently than once per year. In 1478 Patrick Baroun, burgess of Edinburgh, with the consent of Margaret, his spouse, gave the large annual sum of £10 5s to pay a chaplain celebrating at the altar of St Andrew in the church of St Giles to say mass on Sundays and major feast days. At the beginning of each mass he was to exhort the people to say the prayer ‘Our Father’ and an ‘Ave Maria’, and after the mass he was to proceed to Patrick Baroun’s tomb and there say the Psalms ‘Miserere mei Deus’ and ‘De profundis’, and sprinkle the tomb and those standing around it with holy water.117 In order to ensure that the founder’s anniversary proceed exactly as arranged, some people required that the charter be read out annually in the church where the celebration was to be performed. In 1493, Andrew Mowbray, burgess of Edinburgh, stipulated that his charter was to be read in the burgh church of Edinburgh immediately after mass in the presence of the people and the deans of the church.118 Even when donors did not stipulate that their charters were to be read aloud, they might have presumed that the church would keep a written record of their donations. In Aberdeen’s St Nicholas church, these records were kept, and at least some of them in a chest on the porch. Such a collection may have been useful in enforcing the terms of the charter. The church of St Nicholas in Aberdeen passed a series of statutes in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries directing

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that chaplains absent from offices with sufficient reason had to pay a monetary penalty.119 As important as care for the soul in the afterlife was for the townspeople of Scotland, uncertainty about the years remaining in the earthly life made founders sometimes decide to protect their interests in this world as well as the next in case of a significant change in fortune. In 1462 Alexander Ramesay, burgess of St Andrews, founded a chaplainry in the town’s parish church with the consent of his wife, Elizabeth Rede. They included the clause that if the granter or spouse should become reduced to poverty, they could sell the annual rents for their sustenance. Concerns over money notwithstanding, this couple’s determination to make a religious foundation was durable. A charter by Elizabeth Rede in 1476, by then a widow, says that Alexander Ramesay had died before his intention of founding a chantry had been carried out; she completed the foundation for him.120 Even though foundations often included prayers for all the faithful departed, and even though this same group was theoretically prayed for each year at the feast of All Souls, the frequent inclusion of specifically named beneficiaries in foundation charters suggests that people valued being prayed for individually and specifically in accordance with the declaration in The Golden Legend that ‘if [prayers] are offered for particular persons, they are more beneficial to those persons than to others’.121 When Robert Adamson, burgess of Glasgow, made a donation to the city’s leper hospital in 1522, he did it for the health of his soul, the souls of his children, parents, benefactors, and his blood kin (consanguineorum).122 Scottish townspeople did not expect to pray for everyone equally, and when they prayed for or arranged to have prayers said for specific individuals, it was their kin who were the foremost beneficiaries. Patrick Baroun, mentioned earlier, founded his chantry for the souls of the late king and queen and their children, the current king and queen, the souls of all the burgesses and community of the burgh of Edinburgh, the souls of all those to whom he owed a debt, and the souls of all the faithful departed, but also for the souls of his father and mother, his own soul, and the soul of his wife, Margaret.123 In 1513 Alexander Lawdere de Blyth, provost and burgess of Edinburgh, founded a chantry in honour of the Virgin Mary and St Gabriel for his soul and the soul

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of his wife Jonet Paterson, and for the souls of their fathers and mothers, antecessors and successors.124 In the charters from the church of St Giles in Edinburgh and the church of St Nicholas in Aberdeen made between the years 1350 and 1560, kin were among the most frequent beneficiaries. Of those foundations whose charters name specific, individual kin members among those to be prayed for, about 70 per cent – like that of Patrick Baroun – mention only blood kin (in addition to a spouse, when the founder was married) and about 30 per cent – like that of Alexander Lawdere – mention both blood kin and kin by marriage as well. When clerics, who did not marry, are taken out of consideration from this latter group, then about 42 per cent of laypeople included kin by marriage along with blood kin among those being prayed for in their religious foundations. In short, then, most people founding chantries used their foundations to help the souls of their blood kin specifically, while slightly under half of laypeople also tried to help the souls of their kin by marriage. Further prosopographical study of medieval and early modern Scottish towns would shed more light on the significance of these kinship connections, but at this point is appears clear that blood kinship was the connection between living individuals most likely to lead to a continuing connection between a living person and a dead person believed to be in purgatory.125 Remarriage after the death of a spouse meant that a founder had additional kin by marriage to consider, and the souls of these kin were sometimes included in the foundations as well. William Futhes, burgess of Aberdeen, made a donation in 1500 to the vicar and chaplains of the choir at St Nicholas for his soul and the souls of Agnes Auchneif, his first wife, and of Elizabeth Crage, his second wife, as well as for the souls of their children and parents.126 Adam Ottirburne, burgess of Edinburgh, made a donation to the altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1535 for the soul of the late Michael Frog, whose relationship to the founder is not clear, as well as for the souls of the late Jonet Rynd, his first wife, and of Euphemia Mowbray, his second and current wife.127 The anniversary of John Broun, barber and burgess of Ayr, and Margaret Craufurd, his wife, was founded in 1492 when both spouses were still alive, for the souls not only of John and Margaret, but also of John Hakheid, Margaret’s first husband.128

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When Walter Chepman, burgess of Edinburgh, had a charter drawn up in 1513 to care for the soul of his deceased wife, Mariota Carkettill, he was currently married to another woman, Agnes Cokburne. Agnes was not forgotten by her husband in her turn: 15 years after his first foundation, Walter Chepman made a donation to the altar of Jesus the Saviour in the cemetery of St Giles for a group of souls that included those of the king and his predecessors and successors, the souls of all the noble and faithful men who had died with the king at Flodden in the battle against the English, as well as his own soul, and the soul of Agnes.129 Prayers for this family were continued and even strengthened by Walter’s nephew, John Chepman, burgess of Edinburgh, who in 1537 made a donation to the altar of St John the Evangelist for his own soul and the souls of his wife, Isobelle Hendersoun, his father and his mother, his sisters and his brothers, and his uncle the late Walter Chepman, founder of the altar, and of all his friends, predecessors and successors.130 Several founders included a more extended network of blood kin among those whose souls would be prayed for. James Colisoun, burgess of Aberdeen, in 1519 made a donation to the curate and chaplain of the choir in St Nicholas for his own soul and the souls of his wives, children, parents, benefactors, and for Sir Andrew Colisoun, his brother.131 John of Dalrymple founded a chaplainry at the altar of St Giles in 1477 for the souls of the late Adam of Dalrimple, goldsmith (presumably related to the founder), as well as John of Dalrimple, his grandfather; Elizabeth, his grandmother; David, his father; and Isabelle, his mother.132 Archibald Napier in 1494 made a donation to the altar of the Holy Saviour in St Giles for his grandfather, Alexander Napier; his grandmother, Elizabeth Lauder; his father, John Napier; his mother, Elizabeth Menteith; as well as his own soul and the soul of Katherine Douglas, his wife.133 Very few of these foundations were made by women acting alone, but an examination of the roles of kin in such cases is highly suggestive of a somewhat gendered appreciation of the importance of kinship connections. Only one of the women included prayers for her blood kin but not prayers for her kin by marriage (other than her deceased spouse) in her charter. This was Isobel Bras, widow of Thomas Williamson, who in 1489 founded a chaplainry

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at the altar of St Lawrence in St Giles, Edinburgh. Her foundation was for her own soul and the souls of her father and mother; although the soul of her deceased husband was also to be prayed for, no mention is made of his parents or other kin.134 Such silence is especially noteworthy, given that Isobel Bras was one of the very few married women at the time who was known by her husband’s surname during her working life as a merchant. Perhaps she used her natal surname of Bras in this foundation because it was concerned with the spirit, rather than with worldly business.135 Marjory Redschaw’s foundation of 1493 at the altar of St Katherine’s in St Giles, by contrast, included both her own blood kin and her husband’s blood kin among those whose souls would be prayed for, the kin grouping chosen by the majority of women.136 These cases do not sound as if they belong to the model of kinship proposed for Scotland where the kin-group was a bond between male relatives to which females were added or from which they were removed by marriage.137 In contrast, they seem to indicate a model of kinship in which a married woman retained connections to her own natal kind and did not become completely assimilated into her husband’s kin.138 Such was the pattern in fifteenth-century Florence, where women founding commemorative masses positioned themselves at a nexus not just within their own families but also between families, showing their connections both to natal and to married kin by including both their fathers’ families and their husbands’ in their foundations.139 These charters from Edinburgh and Aberdeen suggest that the links established through blood kinship were important to Scots, even in towns, where social bonds based on commonalities other than kinship – e.g. occupation, neighbourhood – would have claimed more attention than in the rural areas. Moreover, these links do not seem to have been weakening as the years progressed, in apparent contrast to the Highlands, where the significance of blood kinship was diminishing as clan chiefs turned to fictive bonds of kinship in the form of client clans and their allies.140 The relationship between marriage and kinship identity in Scottish towns was complex for both men and women, where individuals showed considerable diversity in choosing beneficiaries of their endowments, and where many people felt a sense of kinship

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identity that encompassed both blood relatives and relatives by marriage, though married men were perhaps more likely to remain with their blood kin-group whereas women gained a second kingroup after marrying. This strong link of blood kinship is consistent with the pattern found in commemorative clauses from Scottish charters issued in favour of ecclesiastical beneficiaries that show the importance of lineage in medieval identity, and with the pattern found in Yorkshire where members of noble families interceded on behalf of others in the lineage.141 More broadly, it supports John Bossy’s theory that in medieval Europe the bond of blood kinship was believed to be ‘the most effectual means of securing mutual support in salvation, one’s chance of eternal life, as well as one’s welfare in the present’.142 Fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury authors themselves confirm such a theory. John of Ireland said that among those in purgatory, people are most obliged to pray for their fathers and mothers, and William Hay declared that ‘blood relations love each other more than outsiders, both affectively and effectively’.143 The question of which motivation was more keenly felt – obligation or love – will be considered in the next chapter.

Conclusion However carefully laid out and well financed their arrangements, many people did not achieve eternal remembrance in the way that they had planned. They underwent what Jean-Claude Schmitt has called ‘a triple progressive disappearance’: their physical remains disappeared in the grave, their souls disappeared beyond purgatory, and their memory disappeared in the minds of the living.144 Schmitt was speaking of medieval Europe generally, but for the inhabitants of Scotland in particular a fourth disappearance should perhaps be added: a theological disappearance at the time of the Protestant Reformation when the doctrine of purgatory was erased and all formal memorials designed to assist the progress of souls came to an official end. Until that profound religious change happened, however, and indeed right up through the middle of the sixteenth century, Scottish townspeople maintained a strong belief in their ability to influence the dead. They prepared good deaths, burials, and

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commemoration for themselves, and they arranged for and partici-pated in effective prayers on behalf of loved ones already deceased. The basic features of these efforts were consistent with wider European patterns, but some of the details were specific to local conditions and customs. So, for example, burial near altars was desired as elsewhere in Europe, but the saints to whom these altars were dedicated were as likely to be local ones like Ninian or Kentigern as they were to be more internationally recognizable figures. Good works could be undertaken as part of penance, in accordance with the Catholic theology that guided belief throughout western Christendom, but the specific works themselves often benefited local landmarks such as churches, bridges, and hospitals. The Office of the Dead was the same as that heard elsewhere in Europe, but the paraliturgical options available at any given church were particular to that specific church’s resources, whether candlesticks, mort cloths, or musically trained clerics. The most universal and most local way in which the inhabitants of Scottish towns attempted to influence the dead was through their kin. The important role played by kinship in the formation of social identity was widely recognized in Europe, and it is interesting to see in the Scottish context that kinship, and especially blood kinship in particular, remained strong even in towns, where kinship bonds might be expected to loosen in the midst of the complexities of urban society, and even among women, for whom the bonds of marriage might be expected to overtake those of blood. While the many efforts to achieve a good death and a lasting remembrance seen in this chapter can be understood, at least in part, as ways to secure and enhance social status within Scottish towns, they still more directly and more simply reflect belief in an eternal afterlife and in the living person’s agency in helping to determine the fate of the dead. The desirability of such agency was based in the certainty of death, but also in uncertainty about the manner and timing of its coming. Such unsettling ambivalence is articulated in the penultimate verse of William Dunbar’s ‘Lament for the Makars’, where the poet speaks of his inevitable and approaching death:

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Sen he has all my brether tane, He will naught lat me lif alane; On forse I man his nyxt pray be: Timor mortis conturbat me.

Other writers insisted on a more positive approach to death as the gateway to the afterlife, at least for those who have made sufficient preparation. ‘The Craft of Deyng’ speaks of the relief and comfort of death, saying that for a good man death is a return from banishment, the offloading of a heavy burden, the end to all sickness, the eschewing of all dangers, the breaking of all bands, the coming again to the kind land, and the entrance into perpetual joy and wellbeing.145 Hope for such a happy afterlife stirred people to arrange for themselves and their loved ones a good death and remembrance for as long as possible, actively calling back into the consciousness of the community the identities of the dead through prescribed rites and actions. When these arrangements were successful, the dead formed a new social group, ‘the ecclesia dolens’ of souls in Purgatory.146 This group’s impact on the living is a subject of the following chapter.

Notes 1 Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 159. 2 Dunbar, Selected Poems, 105–10. 3 ‘The Craft of Deyng’, in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, 166. 4 Fitch, Search for Salvation, 27. 5 ‘The Contemplacioun of Synnaris’, in Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 108, ll. 660–1. 6 Dunbar, ‘None may Assure in this World’, in Dunbar, Selected Poems, l. 68. 7 Catechism of John Hamilton, 157. 8 ‘The Contemplacioun of Synnaris’, in Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 108, ll. 1165–7, 1193–4, 1217–21, 1230–1, 1246–7. 9 ‘The Dreme of Schir Dauid Lyndesay’, in Lyndsay, Works, ll. 166, 323–9; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 46–51. 10 Dunbar, ‘The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’, in Dunbar, Selected Poems. 11 Durkan and Ross, Early Scottish Libraries, 96, 122, 135, 138, 158. 12 de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 288. 13 Catechism of John Hamilton, 124.

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14 Dunbar, ‘None may Assure in this World’, l. 68; Douglas, Shorter Poems, ll. 1918–20, 1990–98. 15 Lyndsay, ‘Ane Dialogue betuix Experience and Ane Courtier, off the Miserabyll Estait of the Warld’, in Works, I, ll. 6023, 6116–17, 6130– 61; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 43. 16 Henryson, ‘The Praise of Age’, in Poems, 165–7. 17 de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 280, 288. 18 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 338–76; Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory; Burgess, ‘“A fond thing vainly invented”’; Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 57–8. 19 Catechism of John Hamilton, 158. 20 Burgess, ‘“Longing to be prayed for”’, 44–65; Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England. 21 Dunbar, Selected Poems, 110, ll. 97–100. 22 John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 3, 7, 58–9, 79. 23 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 3; Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 33–4; Catechism of John Hamilton, 217–18; John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 1–80. 24 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. IX (1431–1447), 578. 25 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 10. 26 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 139. 27 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 72–4. 28 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 71–2. 29 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow Vol. II A.D. 1649–1707, with Appendix, A.D. 1484–1648, 471–3. 30 NAS B65/22/72. 31 Liber Cartarum Sancte Crucis, 239. 32 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. IV (1362–1404), 238, 244. 33 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. VII (1417–1431), 152. 34 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. VIII (1427–1447), 601. 35 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XIII (1471–1484), 203. 36 Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, 136– 43. 37 Lyndsay, ‘Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis’, in Works, II, 202–22, ll. 2038–289. 38 Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England, 224. 39 ‘Orisouns’, in Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 279.

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40 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England, 13. 41 Chronicle of Lanercost 1272–1346, 118–19. 42 Caciola, ‘Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Medieval Culture’, 26–9; Caciola, ‘Spirits Seeking Bodies’. 43 ‘The Craft of Deyng’, in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, 166–74; Statutes of the Scottish Church 1255–1559, 122–63. 44 Henryson, Poems, 167–9, ll. 19–21. 45 Lyndsay, ‘Ane Dialogue betuix Experience and Ane Courtier, off the Miserabyll Estait of the Warld’, in Works, I, 386, ll. 5550–4. 46 Houston, Population History of Britain and Ireland 1500–1750, 17– 18, 21; Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England, 1480–1750, 10–11; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 32. 47 ‘The Jesus Psalter’, in Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 197. 48 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 410–11. 49 Dunbar, ‘The Maner of Passyng to Confessioun’, in Dunbar, Selected Poems, l. 66. 50 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 48; John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 9, 19. 51 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 259. 52 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 29–30. 53 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 143–4. 54 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 36. 55 Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion’, 42. 56 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 3. 57 Catechism of John Hamilton, 230. 58 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 3; Catechism of John Hamilton, 227–8. 59 ‘The Craft of Deyng’, in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, 167–74. 60 Dowden, ‘The Inventory of Ornaments, Jewels, Relicks, Vestments, Service-books, &c, Belonging to the Cathedral Church of Glasgow in 1432’, 314; Registrum Episcopatus Aberdonensis, 11, 190. 61 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 112–14, 148–50, 160–1, 197–8. 62 ‘The Vertewis of the Mess’, in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, 192. 63 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 410–11. 64 Scribner, ‘Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation’, 53; Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 193; Harding, Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670, 179; Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England. 65 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow Vol.

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66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

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II A.D. 1649–1707, with Appendix, A.D. 1484–1648, 441–4; Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow A.D. 1175–1649, Part II, 101–5; Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 112–14, 148–50, 160–1; Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 117, 131–5. Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland Vol. 1 1124–1424, 70. Gild Court Book of Dunfermline 1433–1597, 16. Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 7–9. Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, lvii–lviii, 4, 7, 13–14, 19, 24, 26, 33, 38, 57, 109. Perth Guildry Book 1452–1601, #318. Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 42; Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume One, 279. Collard, Lawson and Holmes, ‘Archaeological Excavations in St Giles Cathedral Edinburgh, 1981–93’; Stones, Three Scottish Carmelite Friaries, 115; Hill, Whithorn and St Ninian, 551; Driscoll, Excavations at Glasgow Cathedral 1988–1997, 43–4. Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland Vol. 1 1124–1424, 70. Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, xiii. Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion’, 54; Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 63. Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 73–4. St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume I, 257–8. St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume I, 276–7. Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion’, 56; Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, II, esp. 10–53, 454–82. ‘The Craft of Deyng’, in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, 168. Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, I. Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 31. Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. X (1447–1455), 320–1. Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion’, 54–5. Catechism of John Hamilton, 157. ‘The Dreme of Schir Dauid Lyndesay’ in Lyndsay, Works, 351–7. Finucane, ‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion’, 56–7. Harding, ‘Choices and Changes’, 386–98; Harding, Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670, 205–6; Dinn, ‘“Monuments Answerable to Mens Worth”’. Harding, Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670, 119–46.

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90 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 13–15. 91 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 15. 92 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 12–13, 15, 16. 93 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 12–13. 94 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 13. 95 Protocol Book of John Foular 1503–1513, #34. 96 Protocol Book of John Foular 1503–1513, #80; Driscoll, Excavations at Glasgow Cathedral 1988–1997, 159. 97 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume One, 6, 21, 35, 51, 85. 98 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 6, 21, 35, 51, 66, 85; Harding, Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670, 122; Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume One, 1544–1566, 77, 78, 80, 81; Dennison, ‘Robin Hood in Scotland’, 178–9. 99 Maxwell, History of Old Dundee, 563–7. 100 Torrie, Medieval Dundee, 93. 101 Quoted in McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 264. 102 de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 280–90. 103 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 25, 75, 78, 83; Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 11, 29, 38, 54, 69, 86. 104 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 146. 105 de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 288–9. 106 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 78, 108–10, 154–5, 164–6, 172–4, 216, 227–8, 231–4, 237–40, 240–1. 107 Fitch, Search for Salvation, 88. 108 Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 16. 109 Wood, ‘An Addition to Laing’s Chartulary of St Giles’, 55. 110 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 199. 111 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 97–9, 112–14; Obit Book of the Church of St John the Baptist, Ayr, 35; Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 131–5. 112 NAS B65/22/99. 113 Obit Book of the Church of St John the Baptist, Ayr, 36–7. 114 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 131–5, 160–4; Wood, ‘An Addition to Laing’s Chartulary of St Giles’, 55 115 Obit Book of the Church of St John the Baptist, Ayr, 21–2. 116 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 192–3. 117 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 124–7. 118 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 160–4. 119 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 211–12, 224–36. 120 NAS B65/22/41; NAS B65/22/67.

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121 de Voragine, Golden Legend, II, 289. 122 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow Vol. II A.D. 1649–1707, 491–3. 123 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 124–7. 124 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 199–203. 125 Cowan, ‘The Spiritual Ties of Kinship in Pre-Reformation Scotland’. 126 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 39–40. 127 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 234–6. 128 Obit Book of the Church of St John the Baptist, Ayr, 27–8. 129 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 203–7, 227–32. 130 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 240–5. 131 Cartularium Ecclesie Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 112–14. 132 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 119–20. 133 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 171–3. 134 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 154–7. 135 Ewan, ‘Williamson, Isobel’, in Ewan. Innes and Reynolds, Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, 378. See also Chapter 2. 136 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 164–9. 137 Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community, 30. 138 Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland, 79, 82. 139 Strocchia, ‘Remembering the Family’. 140 Cathcart, ‘“Inressying of kyndnes, and renewing off thair blud”’, 127; Oram, ‘Continuity, Adaptation and Integration’, 65–6. 141 Neville, ‘Finding the Family in the Charters of Medieval Scotland, 1150–1350’, 17; Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, 12. 142 Bossy, ‘Blood and Baptism’, 136–7. 143 John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 47; Hay. William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 187. 144 Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 200. 145 ‘The Craft of Deyng’, in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, 166–74. 146 Koslofsky, Reformation of the Dead.

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How the dead influenced the living

According to Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, an influential history of Scotland written in the 1440s, the earthly remains of St Andrew were transmitting miracles virtually from the moment they landed on Scottish soil: ‘For sight was given to those who were blind from birth, speech to the dumb, walking to the lame, and on all who piously sought the apostle’s support, no matter with what infirmity they were afflicted, healing was immediately bestowed through the compassion of God.’ Such miracles attracted pilgrims who came ‘from all the nations bearing gifts, clapping their hands, and as suppliants raising endless hymns of praise to God for such a patron’.1 This account was part of an ongoing effort at high political levels to support the cult of Andrew as Scotland’s national patron saint, but it nonetheless also conveys something of the everyday importance of the dead in Scottish towns. For here the dead were very much present among the living both as physical and as metaphysical presences, a source of both anxiety and comfort. Chapter 1 investigated how the connection between the living and the dead influenced people’s preparations for their own deaths and their sense of responsibility towards those who had already died. This chapter examines the other side of the reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead in Scottish towns by considering how the dead were thought to intervene in the world of the living both by making material claims and also by providing supernatural intercession.

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Burial Western society had not always been comfortable living in close proximity with the dead. When the graves of saints came to be seen as religiously privileged places in early Christianity, however, the bodies of the dead began to be buried in the midst of the living.2 Such was the plan of Bessete Boill, inhabitant of Irvine, who in her testament of 1547 entrusted her soul to God and the celestial court, and directed that her body be buried in the dust of her parish church.3 That dust would have been deep by the time of Bessete Boill’s testament, for the churches of Scotland’s burghs accommodated a large number of dead. More than five tonnes of bones have been unearthed in modern times from the south transept and adjoining aisles of St Giles, Edinburgh, and archaeological excavations show such intensive use that many graves here and in the nave of Glasgow Cathedral had to be intercut for new burials.4 Burials in and around burgh churches – though highly desirable, as shown in Chapter 1 – also had the potential to arouse ambivalent responses among the living. Positively, they were thought to serve as inspiration for good behaviour. A document drawn up by the officials of the church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, in the middle of the fourteenth century, speaks of how it is right and just that the living should remember the identities and accomplishments of the deceased patrons of the church ‘whose names are in the book of life in heaven, but almost forgotten on earth’, so that ‘from their good work and their devotion those who are to come may take example’.5 In this way, the dead were teachers to the living, guides for socially appropriate and spiritually effective religious belief and practice. The buried dead also served the useful moral purpose of memento mori, the reminder that everyone would die. They were physical equivalents of the literary skulls in Robert Henryson’s poem ‘The Thre Deid Pollis’ who invite the reader to look upon them and be mindful of death.6 Not all reminders of the dead were socially approved and didactic, however, and the buried dead of Scottish towns also inspired negative feelings among the living. They created tension by encroaching on physical and spiritual space claimed by those still alive, such as James Tennand, who argued

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to the bailies of Stirling in 1522 that George Symson had buried his wife in the burial place that had been granted to James, and that James’s own wife and children were already buried there.7 In spite of territorial disputes, however, for the most part Scottish townspeople walked and worshipped at ease over generations of dead. Burials under the floor of a church may have caused some tension in so far as they limited the space available for any future such burials, but they would not have disrupted movement through the building or the sightlines of the parishioners. Also minimally disruptive were burials in churchyards, where the convivial living, even the Lords of Bonaccord who were in charge of civic revelry, gathered over the resting dead.8 Moreover, control over burial space could be much sought after for potential profit, as seen in an agreement reached in 1440 between the abbot and convent of Dunfermline on one part, and the provost and bailies of Perth on the other. They decided that burial under the choir of St John’s Church should be granted to the burgh magistrates, since they had rebuilt and maintained the choir and vestibule and upheld the vestments and ornaments of the same, and also paid the abbot a yearly sum and the vicar a stipend. From this arrangement, the magistrates would receive not only an annual surplus, but also whatever sums they might receive from the right of granting burial ground in the choir.9 Not surprisingly, burial in places of high status were likely closely regulated. In the nave of Glasgow Cathedral, burials were tightly grouped and carefully placed, especially at the highly desirable east end.10 The dust in parish churches may have been made deep with the bones of the dead, but this was not usually cause for concern among the living.

Remembrance The dead’s call upon the living for remembrance started immediately after death and continued, in theory, forever. Attendance at funerals brought prayers for the deceased (see Chapter 1), but sometimes the dead claimed a much longer-lasting period of remembrance. Chantries were set up to run in perpetuity; in order to ensure continuation of service, however, oversight and sometimes intervention were required. The main religious service provided at chantries was the mass. Theologians stressed that the

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spiritual power of a mass was ex opere operato (by the work itself) and not ex opere operantibus (by the person doing the work),11 but founders often stipulated particular behaviours required of the serving priest, such as that the he must be resident in the town and not living with a concubine, suggesting that the moral behaviour of the celebrating priest did matter to a founder when that priest was going to be looking after the founder’s soul.12 Charters by Glaswegians in particular are unusual for adding often that the chaplain be also the son of a Glaswegian burgess and citizen of Glasgow.13 Foundation charters frequently stipulated a chain of responsibility for caretaking: someone was responsible for staffing the foundation immediately after the decease of the original founder, and in case this person should fail someone else was to take responsibility, and so on. The final designates on the list were frequently local civic authorities – provost, bailies, ‘community of the burgh’ – but often the list would pass through individuals specifically chosen for the job. These people were not accidental or random choices, and most charters from Edinburgh and Aberdeen that name specific people to act as caretakers for the foundation favoured blood kin. For example, care of the foundation made by Richard Rutherford, burgess of Aberdeen, was to belong to him and his wife Marion, to whichever of them should live the longer, and after their deaths to their cousin, Andrew Rutherford, and his heirs. Matthew Fechat, burgess of Aberdeen, wished the chaplain of his foundation to be descended from him through his daughter, Agnes, and her husband David Colisoun. Thomas Blinseill of Aberdeen was very careful to treat his two sons equally with respect to caring for his foundation after his death: his charter of 1456 states that patronage would first go to Alexander Blinseill, his first-born, for one turn, then to William Blinseill, his second son, for the next turn, and so pass in alternate turns to their heirs forever.14 Another way of including blood kin among caretakers, and one that provides especially strong evidence for the importance of blood kinship in determining religious responsibility, was to designate that the chaplain serving the altar be chosen from among the general category of blood kin. Robert Auldhoch, burgess of Edinburgh, directed that the chaplain be from his parentage and

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bloodline when suitable (‘de parentela et de sanguine meo cum fuerit ydoneus’). The presentation of the chaplain to the altar founded by Patrick Baroun in St Giles was to belong to Patrick’s heirs (unnamed), and if they failed to present a chaplain within eight days then the presentation was to go to the community of the burgh. But Patrick did not leave the decision of chaplain entirely in the hands of those with the right of presentation: he stated that a suitable chaplain from his own parentage or bearing the surname ‘Baroun’ should be chosen before all others for the position. Walter Chepman directed that when his chaplainry fell vacant, it should be conferred on a suitable chaplain of good condition and honest conversation of his parentage (‘de parentela mea’). The family connections to this altar were continued and even strengthened by Walter’s nephew, John Chepman de Schelis, burgess of Edinburgh, who directed that the donation be under his control and after his death under the control of his male heirs, and after their deaths his male heirs with the name ‘Chepman’, or with all of them dead to his senior female heir. John Chepman also directed that the chaplain be suitable and have the name of Chepman, and if that person fail, any other chaplain of good life and from his parentage.15 A similar pattern of blood kinship and spiritual responsibility could be found in Perth, where Alexander Tyrie, dean of guild and provost, founded at least three altars in his parish church before his death in 1527, and where the chaplains at these altars tended to share a surname with the founder.16 It is possible that women were more likely than men to feel double bonds of kinship, both to their kin by blood and to their kin by marriage. Of the two women in Edinburgh who founded chantries and designated specific caretakers, one chose her blood kin, the other her kin by marriage. The woman who chose her blood kin was Isobel Bras, whose foundation was for the souls of her own blood kin (see Chapter 1), and she directed that a suitable chaplain from her parentage be preferred before others. The woman who chose both blood kin and kin by marriage was Marjory Redschaw, who wanted the presentation to go to her children, then to her late husband’s brothers and their heirs, and she directed that the chaplain be from the parentage of her spouse and bear his last name of Kerkettill.17 The priests who served in the churches of Scottish towns also looked to blood kin as caretakers for their

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religious foundations. Patrick Leiche, who founded the altar of St Machar in Glasgow Cathedral in 1459, for example, directed that after his death the right of presentation should go to the Bishop of Glasgow, and that the chaplain should be a son of a Glasgow burgess as well as a near-kin relation, especially one of his nephews.18 The connection between spiritual caretaker and blood kin can be found in another part of Edinburgh’s religious culture as well. In 1455 the provost, bailies, council, and community of the burgh of Edinburgh decided that whenever the church’s main relic, the arm bone of St Giles, was publicly carried about, preference should be given when selecting the carrier to choose someone with the same surname and who was the ‘nearest of blood’ to William Preston, the person who had first brought the relic from France.19 As with beneficiaries of religious foundations (see Chapter 1), so with the caretakers: kin feature prominently among those who are supposed to look after the founder’s spiritual welfare, and blood kin are especially well represented. Kinship, and blood kinship in particular, was clearly a bond that people believed would endure beyond death.20 Perhaps the living did not simply have the ability to help the dead, but also the obligation to do so.21 When Walter Stewart founded a chaplainry at the new altar of St Kentigern in the high church of Glasgow in 1460, he was ‘moved with feelings of pious devotion’ to praise, glorify, and honour God, the Virgin Mary, and all the saints, but his stated reasons for doing so were to increase worship of God and bring salvation for his soul, the soul of his wife Jonet, the souls of their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, and benefactors ‘for whom we are bound in life or death to pour forth prayers or make intercession’.22 Some people took strong measures in an attempt to ensure that their wishes be carried out after their death. Henry Scheves, burgess of St Andrews, made provision for what should happen if members of his family did not heed directions for the care of his foundation. Janet Ramesay, his wife, John Scheves, his eldest son, and Robert Scheves, his younger son, all swore that they would never quarrel or impugn this donation, and that if any of them should act contrary they would pay the sum of £100 to the altar of St Mary Magdalene in the parish church.23 Matthew Fechat, burgess of

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Aberdeen, warned that if any of his heirs were to withhold the annual rents from the altar he founded, it would be lawful for the bishop to compel the withholder to make full payment, ‘and so far as it is committed to human nature to curse let them be cursed, and inherit in that malediction which a father ought to have in power against his son’.24 Several other charters contain a similar clause, which would seem, on the surface, to imply an unwanted duty, since the founder felt that the threat of a curse was necessary to ensure his wishes be carried out.25 These clauses may also indicate an insecurity that comes not from a place of authority, but rather from one of anxiety that the living would choose to ignore the commands of the dead. This did sometimes happen. In about 1422 the provost and bailies of Aberdeen sent a petition to the Pope asking for help after the heir to the founder of a chaplainry in the parish church took the revenues meant for the chaplainry to himself.26 Though the dead evidently mattered a great deal to urban Scots, and though the living often felt they owed the dead certain obligations, especially remembrance,27 it is not clear that religion in Scottish towns should merit the characterization of being ‘a cult of the living in the service of the dead’.28 The dead had a place among the living, and the living recognized this place.29 The dead claimed the attention of the living in Scottish towns metaphysically through prayers as well as physically through their bodies in churches and churchyards, and for the most part the living honoured this claim. The maintenance of religious foundations might sometimes have become burdensome for heirs, but they nevertheless usually appear to have undertaken their duties with little or no overt resistance. Moreover, some particular individuals from among the dead were believed to exert an especially strong positive influence over the living: the saints.

Saintly intercession Christians across later medieval Europe believed saints to be an especially powerful group of dead with great influence over the living, functioning both as conduits of supernatural power and also as models for ideal human behaviour. These ideas were neatly summed up in a 1499 charter wherein James Crawfurde of

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Kylwynnat, burgess of Paisley, and Elizabeth Calbrayth, his spouse, founded a chaplainry at one of the altars in their parish church, and referred to the saints as ‘higher citizens’ (‘superiorum civium’).30 The saints’ special holiness and sacred power were indicated by signs and miracles, and their lives of exemplary Christian virtue were commemorated in text and image.31 Scottish townspeople would have learned about the saints from several sources. Biographies of saints, collectively known as the genre of hagiography, were popular throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages and disseminated not just among the literate through books, but also among the unlettered through sermons. Glasgow Cathedral had a Life of St Kentigern and St Serf ‘in a small volume’ as well as several copies of the Golden Legend, a collection of saints’ lives originally compiled in the thirteenth century by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine and among the most popular books of the later Middle Ages.32 The Aberdeen Breviary, published in Edinburgh in 1510 at the direction of Bishop Elphinstone and intended to replace the Sarum Use, gave Scotland a ‘large-scale national hagiography’.33 Its calendar substituted Scottish saints for English ones, and moved the Scottish saints into higher rank. Its featured Scottish saints included those of international renown as well as those more connected to a particular diocese, and it showed flexibility in giving major feasts only for the diocese where a saint was best loved, so that the feast of St Machar, for example, was to be celebrated as a major feast only in the diocese of Aberdeen.34 Lives of saints would also have been known through local oral tradition. In his prologue to the Life of St Kentigern, Jocelin of Furness tells the Bishop of Glasgow how he has undertaken his research. ‘According to your command’, Jocelin says, ‘I have wandered through the streets and lanes of the city seeking a record of the life of S. Kentigern.’ What Jocelin found was not just a record of the life of St Kentigern (or Mungo, as he was popularly called), but several records, including two written versions and the oral traditions of Glaswegians. Jocelin was not equally accepting of all that he read or heard in his local sources, and in some instances he appears at least uncomfortable with, if not hostile to, local tradition and calls his informants ‘foolish and stupid’ (‘stultus et insipiens’); nevertheless, he recorded a variety of

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traditions and thereby gave them written authority housed within a cathedral church.35 Jocelin of Furness was writing in the late twelfth century, but the local popularity of St Kentigern continued for centuries thereafter. An inventory of Glasgow Cathedral taken in 1432 mentions an assortment of relics associated with St Kentigern, including pieces of his clothing, his combs, and oil distilled from his tomb, as well as bones of both Kentigern and of his mother.36 His tomb in Glasgow Cathedral was maintained and repaired for the rest of the pre-Reformation period, and seems to have been adorned at one point with a great cloth of Arras featuring depictions from the life of St Kentigern.37 A bell of St Kentigern was used during requiem masses of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,38 and this bell may even have survived the Protestant Reformation, for ‘Sanct Mungowis Bell’ was still being rung through Glasgow at the burial of the dead in 1577, and was provided with a new tongue one year later.39 St Mungo’s bell was an example of a relic, the most direct kind of physical presence that saints had in churches. A relic was an object materially connected to a saint, either a piece of the saint’s physical body (a primary relic) or something that had been in physical contact with the saint during life (a secondary relic), or something that had been in direct or indirect contact with the saint’s earthly remains after the saint’s death (a tertiary relic). Popular understanding of the power of relics stemmed from the belief that the saints, in compensation for their merits and their suffering, had been rewarded by God with a certain force that stayed in their remains after death. Relics maintained a vital power and so, in some sense, continued to live and to intervene in worldly events. Their power was often undetectable by human senses, though it could sometimes take a more concrete form, such as oil seeping from the stones or tomb around where the saint was buried.40 Larger churches could amass an impressive collection of relics. The inventory of Glasgow Cathedral taken in 1432 lists an assortment of relics both from local saints and from those with international cults. Their collection included primary relics such as hairs and milk of the Virgin Mary, the skin of St Bartholomew, and bones of St Ninian, St Blaise, St Kentigern, and St Theneu; secondary relics such as a piece of the manger in which Jesus was

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laid, two pieces of wood from the cross on which Jesus was crucified (each housed in a silver cross ornamented with precious stones), part of the girdle of the Virgin Mary, pieces of the clothing of St Kentigern and St Thomas of Canterbury, combs of St Kentigern and St Thomas of Canterbury, and some of the cloak of St Martin; and tertiary relics such as a piece of the tomb of St Katherine the virgin, and oil distilled from the tomb of St Kentigern.41 The Cathedral of St Machar, Aberdeen, recorded that they had in the mid-fifteenth century the bones of St Helen, St Katherine, St Margaret, St Duthac, and the patriarch Isaac contained in one reliquary, and some clothes of the Virgin Mary, the bones of Sts Peter and Paul, St Brigid, and St Edmund in another, as well as a silver arm reliquary containing the bones of St Fergus. By the late fifteenth century they recorded in their possession fine gold bags containing relics of saints, and by the mid-sixteenth century the relics of St Triduana and St Ternan, in addition to those of St Pelladius, all contained in monstrances of silver.42 These cathedrals’ collections were extensive and impressive. Some burgh parish churches may also have had relics of their own, though with a few exceptions, such as St Giles, Edinburgh, which had the arm bone of St Giles, and the parish church of St John in Perth, which had a relic of St Eloi, they seem not to have had many relics, or at least few that have left traces in the records.43 Among the most sought-after properties of relics was their power to heal. Although libri miraculorum, books containing accounts of miracles performed at saints’ shrines, do not survive for later medieval Scotland,44 some indications of healing traditions nonetheless do appear in Scottish records concerning local saints. St Triduana was believed to treat diseases of the eye. According to the lessons for her feast day found in the Aberdeen Breviary, Triduana had been among the group that brought the relics of St Andrew to Scotland from Greece. Intending to lead a holy life of chastity, she nonetheless attracted the unwanted attention of a local pagan king. When told that what most attracted the king to her was the beauty of her eyes, Triduana sent her eyes to him – plucked out by her own hands and impaled on a stick. A chapel devoted to her and housing her relics was constructed in the fifteenth century at Restalrig, near Edinburgh, and her cult was established here by the late fifteenth century.45 A

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cross reputedly erected by St Kentigern in Glasgow was believed to cure people of madness. David Lyndsay listed it among ‘superstitious pylgramageis’ where people would bring ‘mad men, on fuit and horse, / And byndis thame to sanct Mongose crosse’.46 A bone of St Columba was apparently dipped in water by a bishop of Dunkeld, who then blessed the water and sent it to the sick to drink.47 A shirt of St Margaret – likely Queen Margaret of Scotland, by this time a saint, or possibly Margaret of Antioch, commonly regarded as the patron of pregnant women, or perhaps even an amalgam of the two – was regarded as an aid to childbirth. The Exchequer Roll for 1451 tells us that when Mary of Guelders was giving birth to James III, Margaret’s shirt was brought to her.48 In 1512 another Queen Margaret also used this relic to help her with the birth of her son, the future James V, when a man named ‘Luke of the wardrobe’ was given 8s ‘to feche Sanct Margaretis sark to the Quene’.49 Ane Dialogue betuix Experience and an Courteour suggests that women beyond the royal family called upon the saint too, saying that ‘Sum wyffis sanct Margret doith exhort / In to thare byrth thame to support’.50 According to the Scottish writer John of Ireland, when people honoured relics of the saints, the saints prayed for the people and helped them ‘richt gretly’.51 All forms of relics were believed to be repositories of or conduits for sacred power, and as such they attracted people into their presence. Some had a reputation sufficiently impressive to draw people from hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. The most famous of these among medieval Europeans were in various sites associated with Jesus in Jerusalem, the early church at Rome, and St James at Santiago de Compostela, and Scottish townspeople travelled to all three.52 Among the pilgrims to Compostela was John of Levington, burgess of Edinburgh, granted a licence in 1501 to go on pilgrimage to St James.53 The two scallop shells of St James found in Perth suggest that people from this town also made the pilgrimage to Compostela.54 Scottish pilgrims to Rome left a still more durable record of their journey when they inscribed their presence into the catacomb of San Callisto with the phrase, ‘MCCCCLXVII quidem Scoti hic fuerunt’, that in 1467 certain Scots were here.55 The journey to Jerusalem could be especially challenging, as a Scottish servant at Venice on his way there found when he encountered

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difficulty because he spoke only Scots, which nobody could understand, though those planning a voyage to Jerusalem could find some guidance in the volume called De Passagio ad Terram Sanctam, available at Aberdeen Cathedral, and in other texts circulating in the fifteenth century about Palestine.56 Regardless of linguistic skill and quality of guidebooks, the shifting political map of Europe meant that Scots travelling to Rome or Jerusalem would likely be passing through dangerous territory. Travel could take months, even under the most favourable of circumstances, and return home was always uncertain. Patrick Fendune, burgess of St Andrews, took the cautionary measure of having a notarial instrument drawn up in 1451 that recorded his solemn declaration, under oath, that he had long ago made a donation of lands to the Dominican friars in his town, and that he had never given or sold these lands in whole or in part to any other person. He was moved to make this statement, he said, because he intended to depart the country and visit holy places.57 In addition to being dangerous, travel to distant locations could also be very expensive. While not every pilgrim to Rome would have to spend the £200 that Alexander Sutherland calculated it would cost for his son to go in 1456, expenses for distant travel would have been beyond the means of many. By the later fifteenth century, the journey by sea to Compostela cost about £1 2s 6d – almost as much as what an urban labourer could earn in a month. Travel to the eastern Mediterranean would be more expensive still. Passage on a galley going from Venice to Jaffa in the 1520s cost the equivalent of almost £40, and this did not include travel between Scotland and Venice.58 Perhaps it is not surprising that some people arranged to deflect or break a promise to go on long-distance pilgrimage. In the early sixteenth century, for example, a layman of St Andrews vowed in the presence of many to go to the house of St John of Jerusalem, the Hospitallers, at Rhodes, though he in the end did not go because of debilitation to his body and mind, and he was granted a dispensation for the commutation of his vow by his archbishop.59 Because of the expense, the inconvenience, and even the danger of travel, the number of Scots who visited overseas pilgrimage sites was probably quite small. Many more were affected by the draw of pilgrimage destinations within Scotland, either as pilgrims them-

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selves or as inhabitants of the towns through which the pilgrims passed. A papal letter of 1406 granted an indulgence to those who contributed alms towards the completion of a bridge across the River Blathnach, ‘leading to the church of St Ninian in Galloway . . . which is a major place of devotion in Scotland’. Another papal letter of 1408 testified further to the popularity of Ninian’s shrine when it provided a mandate to compel the prior and canons of Whithorn to pay half of their collective fruits and rents for ten years ‘to help repair the church of Whithorn, a popular place of pilgrimage where the Blessed Ninian is buried’. In 1434 a Frenchman donated a silver ship to St Ninian’s shrine in thanksgiving for being saved during a storm at sea through praying to the saint. In 1473 King James III and his queen set out together on pilgrimage to St Ninian’s shrine to give thanks for the successful birth of their son. In 1506 a safe-conduct was granted to an English knight and 16 Englishmen travelling with him to go on pilgrimage to St Ninian’s shrine, and ten years later another safeconduct was granted to all people from England, Ireland, or the Isle of Man going to Candida Casa in Galloway to honour St Ninian.60 James IV went regularly to Whithorn, and the official government records of his journey show that his pilgrimages were elaborate affairs that involved employees travelling ahead of the King to make sure of sufficient comforts worthy of a monarch, numerous cash offerings, musical entertainment, and the diversions provided by a jester. By the early sixteenth century there were several holy sites at Whithorn for pilgrims to visit, including Ninian’s relics themselves as well as an outer church, a rood altar, a high altar, an Our Lady altar and a ‘chapell on the hill’, and tokens were available for purchase.61 The popularity of Ninian’s burial place as a pilgrimage destination was once again attested by James V, who wrote letters to the pope informing him of the constant stream of pilgrims to St Ninian’s shrine, and emphasizing its international drawing-power by saying that pilgrims flocked yearly to Whithorn from England, Ireland, the Isles, and adjoining countries.62 James’s claim, combined with the other records of pilgrimage traffic to visit Whithorn, suggest that the shrine of St Ninian did indeed possess a significant reputation as a pilgrimage site. The Scottish pilgrimage destination of greatest national and

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international renown was St Andrews.63 According to Walter Bower, who used the story in his Scotichronicon to demonstrate that the Scots had been converted to Christianity centuries before the English, the relics of St Andrew arrived in Scotland from Greece in the fourth century and by the will of the saint himself. He explains that when Christ was entrusting the world to his disciples, he gave the region of Scythia to Andrew. Since the Picts had originated in Scythia, it was Andrew’s design to convert them, and if he could not accomplish this while alive, he would do so after death. So an angel appeared to the guardian of Andrew’s relics, instructing him to take three fingers of the right hand, an arm bone, one tooth, and a kneecap to ‘the western regions under the west-north-west at the world’s end’, and there build a church destined to be an important religious site, ‘because it will come to pass that, just as the east was for a long time adorned by the sound of his preaching while he was alive . . . so . . . the whole of the west will also be adorned for ever with the miracles worked by his relics’. Scotland was thus becoming the true home of a sainted apostle in the afterlife. The site would also be a healing site, where ‘crowds of the faithful frequently coming there’ from the opposite ends of the world to receive bodily and spiritual health would ‘miraculously receive what they have requested’. Bower reports miracles associated with the relics immediately upon their arrival in Scotland, and a wide variety of people coming from distant lands in order to be close to the bones of St Andrew.64 The essential points of Bower’s account are maintained in the 1512 foundation charter of St Leonard’s College, St Andrews, though by then the miracles associated with the relics were described as being a distant memory.65 Regardless of whether people believed that the miracles associated with the relics of St Andrew had ceased by the sixteenth century, in earlier years Scots made considerable efforts to ease the way for pilgrims travelling to St Andrews. In the eleventh century Queen Margaret provided free ships for pilgrims crossing from Lothian to Fife and had buildings erected on either side of the crossing for the pilgrims’ comfort.66 Thereafter, the number of pilgrims to St Andrews was high enough both to create a need for architectural changes to the church, and also to provide the means of financing them. Disaster struck the cathedral in 1378 when it

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was ruined by fire, but its community was quick to rebuild it and fortify its foundations ‘on account of the exceedingly grave danger to the fabric of the cathedral from the incessant pounding of the sea’.67 Additional aid came in May 1381, when the Pope granted a concession ‘for the rebuilding of the cathedral of St Andrews which has been accidentally destroyed by fire almost to its very foundations’.68 The following month, he granted an indulgence of four years and four quarantines ‘to all who visit the cathedral church of St Andrews and contribute towards the repair of the fabric on the principal feasts of the year, the feast of St Andrew and the feast of the Dedication’, and an additional indulgence of 100 days during the octaves of these feasts and on the six days following Pentecost.69 Resources were also invested by the Crown, which hired masons for the cathedral’s repair in 1381 and 1384.70 These repairs did more than merely strengthen and safeguard the edifice: they highlighted the relics. New windows in the east gable were installed to direct more light on to the shrine, now placed on a raised floor making it easier to see; wall cupboards were built to store the relics and other treasures such as the crystal cross that had been present at the Battle of Bannockburn; and the area around the high altar was further embellished with painted and gilded statues, embroidered wall hangings, and tomb effigies.71 Though St Andrews was no doubt already a pilgrimage destination of some renown by the later fourteenth century, these efforts were probably at least in part designed further to enhance the prestige of a site associated with the saint who had by this time become Scotland’s patron.72 From the later thirteenth century, the great seal of Scotland showed an image of the saint with his distinctive cross, and Andrew was credited with helping the Scots defeat the English both at Stirling Bridge in 1297 and at Bannockburn in 1314.73 After these significant and famous victories, the Scots continued to credit St Andrew with helping them in military endeavours. In 1385 Scottish soldiers and their French allies were ordered by an Act of Parliament to wear the white cross of St Andrew on their fronts and backs, and at the Battle of Otterburn in 1388 they were said to have called on ‘Sent Androwe’.74 The growth of the cult of St Andrew in Scotland was closely tied to politics, in particular with the Scottish Church’s struggle for independence from England,75 but St Andrew acted as

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an official symbol for the realm in a variety of ways. He appeared on Scottish coins during the reigns of Robert III (1390–1406), James II (1437–50) and especially James IV (1488–1513),76 and international recognition of the these numismatic appearances are shown in a French document from the mid-sixteenth century that says of Scotland, ‘St Andrew is their patron saint, and their kings are wont on their money to have a thistle flory crowned, and a St Andrews cross, which they use in war.’77 Although St Andrews may not have held a significant place in the devotions of most Scots – he did not figure in religious pageants and miracle plays, nor was he present in folk plays alongside characters from south of the border such as St George and Robin Hood, and most dedications to him were churches rather than chapels or altars, largely founded by the professionally religious rather than by lay people78 – nevertheless, his relics were a popular draw for people from a variety of social levels. Several royal visitors came to St Andrew’s shrine, including the Scottish kings, who regularly made offerings, and Edward I of England, who gave a jewel in 1304 – perhaps as penance for the lead he had stripped from the cathedral’s roof during his campaign to conquer Scotland, or perhaps as a pointed symbol of the English king’s right to rule.79 Pilgrim badges from St Andrews have been found in Perth, London and St Andrews itself, moulds for which have been found in North Berwick and Kinross,80 and the relics attracted international visitors from England and France.81 It is possible that pilgrimage traffic to St Andrews was drying up in the sixteenth century. The foundation charter for St Leonard’s Hospital of 1512 says that the miracles at St Andrews had ceased, as had the pilgrimages inspired by these miracles, though it goes on to say that this was not due to lack of piety, but rather because Christianity had become ‘firmly rooted’ there and no longer needed support.82 This charter may be providing more than merely an excuse for declining success; it may be indicating a changing pattern of devotion. By the later medieval period, devotion to saints could extend across increasing distance from where the relics were physically located, accomplished in large part through intermediaries of word and image. Even though their eternal home was in heaven, saints nevertheless were believed capable of hearing and responding to the prayers

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made by people on earth, even if these postulants were a great distance from the nearest relics.83 Images of saints were not themselves intended to be worshipped, but were instead supposed to act as a way to teach the faithful as well as a means of focusing the attention of those in prayer. Not everyone, however, was confident that practice aligned with theory. Sir David Lyndsay, in ‘Ane Dialog Betuix Experience and Ane Courteour’, included an attack on saints in the section ‘Off Images Vsit amang Cristin Men’, saying that the people hoping for the saints’ help fall on their knees, worship and make offerings to the images of saints. On the question of whether this is idolatry, the speaker ‘Experience’ echoes contemporary theologians, saying that there is licence to make imagery, which serves as the books of the unlearned, for when people look on the images it brings them to remembrance of the lives of the saints; but when people kneel before and pray to the images, this is no different from idolatry.84 It is difficult to know exactly what role the images played for the people viewing them. At least one record seems to suggest an idolatrous approach. William Patten, a minor English official who was part of a military expedition to Scotland in 1547, wrote disparagingly of people ‘gadding a pilgrimage, worshiping of idols oblacions & offerings, of otes, images of wax’, ‘setting vp candels to sancts in euery corner’ in order to find a lost key, ‘charmes for euery diseas, and Suffrain suffrages for euery sore’, but it is not clear whether he was simply recording Scottish customs that he witnessed or rather disparaging Catholic traditions from the perspective of a foreign Protestant.85 Burgh churches and cathedrals contained many images to serve as visual reminders of the sainted dead, and also as aids to devotion. Most visual evidence of the pre-Reformation cult of the saints in Scottish towns has disappeared, though analysis of traces left in the written records can provide some sense of what effect these images would have had on the appearance of churches. The written traces evoke a rich visual culture in the churches of Scottish towns, similar to other urban centres in Europe in terms of the general conventions observed, but distinct to Scotland in exactly which saints were represented. Dunkeld Cathedral had a retable behind the high altar showing 24 miracles from the life of its patron saint, St Columba. Columba had been the first abbot at the

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monastery on Iona, in the sixth century, and Scottish devotion to him was geographically linked to the monastery. It was located within the diocese of Dunkeld, and though a chantry was founded to the Virgin Mary and Columba in the church of St Giles, Edinburgh, in 1477, the founder was the Bishop of Dunkeld.86 Many altars devoted to specific saints had images of these saints on or above them. In Aberdeen the principal image of St Nicholas, the church’s patron saint, was placed in the middle of the high altar, and an image of St Duthac was placed with St Duthac’s altar in the same church. When a burgess founded the altar of St Katherine, he provided an image of the saint to go above it. Such images were cared for over the years through repainting and repairing.87 St Ninian’s image adorned the burgh seal of Whithorn in particular, which is not surprising given the popularity of Whithorn as a pilgrimage destination as discussed earlier, but Ninian’s cult was popular far beyond this town. Accounts of his life can be found in a fourteenth-century Middle Scots text that tells of miracles reported during the author’s own lifetime; several Scottish liturgical sources, including the Aberdeen Breviary; and in quite frequent appearances in Books of Hours written for Scottish patrons.88 The large number and wide geographical distribution of church dedications to Ninian in Scotland further attest to his widespread popularity, and Ninian even appears to have been the saint of choice for Scots living abroad. In 1444 the town council of Aberdeen appointed a chaplain to the chantry of St Ninian’s altar in the church of the Carmelite friars in Bruges, Flanders, and financial support for this chaplaincy was the price of a quantity of wool from every ship sailing from Aberdeen to Flanders and Zeeland.89 There were also altars to St Ninian in Copenhagen and Bergen-op-Zoom, and a chapel of St Ninian at Roscoff in Brittany, each connected to a Scottish community in the area.90 This saint was so closely connected to Scots abroad that in the writings of Rabelais, characters swear by ‘Sainct Treignan’ in what is probably meant as a characteristic Scottish oath.91 While Ninian’s cult was popular among the powerful in church and state, most notably with James IV, and while this would certainly have added to the popularity of his cult more widely, Crown and Church were not pouring great resources into what might be called the infrastructure of St Ninian’s cult: they were not building cathedrals in his

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name, sponsoring editions of his vita, publicly praising his role in nationalist causes, or making any efforts to have his saintliness recognized internationally. Ninian’s popularity grew from popular groundswell. Saints had a conspicuous presence in Scottish towns even when they were not seen to be performing any obvious miracles. In some cases, they acted like the root from which the town grew, their location determining the future centre and growth pattern of the town around them. This was probably the case with Glasgow, where the cathedral’s awkward and inconvenient placement on steeply sloping ground can best be explained by a tradition of its site being the burial place of St Kentigern’s remains.92 Aberdeen was closely associated with its patron, St Nicholas, and celebrated this association each year on the feast day of St Nicholas when all neighbours of burgesses, sons of burgesses, merchants and craftsmen able to ride would go through the streets to decorate and honour the town in their array. This was to be done ‘for the vphaldin and preseurans of the auld louabile honor, consuetude and rit’ of the burgh, ‘in the honor of thar glorius patroun, Sanct Nicholes’. Any able to ride but failing to do so without just cause would have to pay fines to the St Nicholas work (that is, to the upkeep of the fabric of the church), and to the bailies.93 The feast day of St Nicholas was also celebrated more widely in the towns of Scotland through the festivities of the boy bishop, elected each year on the saint’s feast day of 6 December. The King often gave money to boy bishops; when he did so with the Queen in 1511, it was ‘eftir their commandes and the auld bukis’,94 suggesting that the custom was well established and perhaps well recorded in texts now lost. In Aberdeen, all free persons of the burgh were to receive the boy bishop, along with the master of the grammar school, within their houses and give the master their wages, and boy bishops could also be found in Linlithgow, Canongate, Edinburgh, and Leith. Although these festivities featured some subversive elements, they also included the participation of many authorities. At St Andrews in 1540, Cardinal Beaton’s chamberlain gave 27s to the St Nicholas Bishop and his attendants. Not all authorities were equally accommodating. In 1415 the Faculty of Arts at the University of Aberdeen transferred the festival from St Nicholas’s Day in December to the Translation of St Nicholas on 9 May, and

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‘drastically curtailed’ the door-to-door collection of money. In the 1540s, the Aberdeen town council ordained that the money collected for the St Nicholas Bishop should instead be used to supplement the salary of the schoolmaster.95 St Nicholas was a patron saint of children, but others were devoted to him as well, such as the mariners who often appealed to St Nicholas at altars and chapels in ports along the east coast.96 People could call on specific saints for specific favours. Each guild had its own patron saint (St Luke for the fleshers, St Eloi for the metalworkers), as did each town (St Giles for Edinburgh, St Kentigern for Glasgow). John of Ireland recommended that people make the Virgin Mary their advocate, and that they look also for intercessors among the saints that they were named after and others to whom they showed devotion.97 Scots looking for saintly intercession had a wide selection from which to choose. Altars at St Giles, Edinburgh, for example, included by the midsixteenth century those for saints of international repute such as John the Baptist, Nicholas, and Anne; those with cults centred in Britain, such as Columba and Cuthbert; and those who were more locally Scottish, such as Ninian, Duthac, and Kentigern; as well as new cults, such as that of the Holy Blood.98 A similar range of choice could be found in the parish church of Perth, which contained about 40 altars by the end of the fifteenth century, and the parish church of Aberdeen, which contained at least 30 altars to saints.99 Not many descriptions of these altars survive, but the unusually full records of the hammermen of Edinburgh can give us some idea of what an altar looked like as well as a sense of the extent to which townspeople were willing to care for their saint’s altar. The Edinburgh hammermen had had patronage of St Eloi’s altar in St Giles’ church since at least 1494. The altar itself was made from wood and covered with a red and green cloth, but also had both a daily frontal and a separate green frontal embellished with silver armorial bearings. A tabernacle sat on top of the altar, with carved angels standing at each corner. Its ornaments included silver vessels gilded with gold, resting on fabric of Holland cloth or Bruges satin decorated with red silk and a cloth of gold; a silver chalice; and three earthenware jars, probably to hold flowers and holly, which was brought from Roslin. It also featured a statue of St Eloi, who

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was provided in 1510 with a hammer to hold. The altar was lit by various candles and by a lamp suspended by a pulley in front of the tabernacle, and also by two large torches standing near the altar. The hammermen built a wooden ceiling above the altar and covered its underside with red and yellow buckram bordered by a fringe which hung down all around. Three iron rods were attached quite high up, from which curtains were suspended (on no fewer than four dozen rings) to cover the sides and back of the altar. One of these curtains was black and fringed, and another was of red taffeta. In front of the altar was a lectern for reading or praying, beside which were three or four movable pillars upon which were hung votive gifts. Rushes were strewn on the ground, and above the altar was an iron rod from which were suspended hammers, crowns, and a triangle, the insignia of the craft of hammermen, likely an aid to help people find the altar quickly among the many in the church.100 This altar may not have been in all respects typical – it was, after all, under the care of the wealthiest guild in Scotland’s wealthiest town – but its records do nonetheless provide an evocative impression of lavish provisions made for urban devotion to a saintly intercessor, and some suggestion of the rich and even ornate visual culture that devotion to the saints brought into the parish churches of Scottish towns. Saintly patrons of guilds and towns remained popular through the later Middle Ages, but the cults that grew most dramatically in Scottish towns during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were those associated with Jesus and his human family. When Master Robert Schand founded a mass in 1542 at the altar of St Ann in the church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, it was these figures on whom devotional energy was to be focused. On Sundays, the mass was to be the one appropriate to whatever feast day it happened to be and on Mondays the mass was to be a requiem, but the mass on Tuesdays was to be that of St Ann, mother of Mary; on Wednesdays that of the Holy Spirit; on Thursdays that of the Body of Christ; on Fridays that of the Five Wounds of Christ; and on Saturdays that of the Virgin Mary.101 The cult of the Virgin Mary was very popular in Scotland, as elsewhere.102 An office of nine lessons for the Compassion of the Blessed Virgin, or ‘Our Lady of Pity’, is found in the first four folios of the Protocol Book of John and Ninian Brydin and Other

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Notaries, 1526–36, from Selkirk, suggesting private devotion.103 In Scots poetry she was described using conventional Marian imagery: a Rose of ‘wertewe virginale’ in whom Jesus rejoiced to dwell, a root of refuge and a well of mercy.104 She was even a redeemer of women, according to John of Ireland, who said that now man had nothing of which he might complain against woman, ‘for this haly lady has mendit all’.105 She was a ‘mediatrix for man’, to whom a wide range of prayers could be addressed, including requests for wisdom, piety, virtue, patience, grace, obedience, abstinence, and finally salvation.106 John of Ireland reassured his readers that Mary is ‘thyn aduocat and moder of mercy’, there to ‘help thee evere redye’.107 Many Marian dedications were found among Scotland’s town churches and altars, including the parish church of St Mary ad Nives in Aberdeen, and the altar of ‘St Maria libera nos a penis inferni’ (‘St Mary, free us from the pains of hell’) in Dunkeld Cathedral.108 In 1491, Robert Chalmers, burgess of Perth, and Catherine de Kinnaird, his wife, founded or re-founded an altar in honour of the Presentation of the Virgin in the parish church of Perth. That same year, a chamberlain of Dunkeld Cathedral also founded an altar to Our Lady of Consolation in Perth’s parish church, and commissioned for it a reredos, antemural, and ceiling.109 Images of Mary often adorned burgh churches. John de Anstroyer, a burgess of Aberdeen, donated one in 1352 to go above the high altar in the church of St Nicholas. In 1359, another burgess, William de Merenez, gave a large image of St Mary to go above the altar of St Leonard.110 David Lyndsay approved of the common people looking upon images of ‘blyssit Marie, Uirgin pur, / One bony Babe vpone hir kne’, if when they did so they remembered ‘the wordis quihilks the Propheit said, / Quhow sche suld be boith Mother and Maid’. He was much less in favour of pilgrimage to Marian sites, however. His character Experience speaks of having seen a ‘maruellous multytude’ of young men and women, under the form of feigned sanctitude, going to adore ‘one Image in Loreit’, really coming to meet their lovers and commit foul fornication.111 Images of the Loreto could be found in several Scottish towns, including one obtained by the goldsmiths of Edinburgh in 1526, and a Loreto in Perth by 1528.112 The journey to which Lyndsay was referring was that to the popular pilgrimage site at

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Musselburgh, where the hermit Thomas Doughty had brought a statue of Our Lady of Loreto from Italy and where the bailies, burgesses, and community of Musselburgh gave him land in 1534 on which to build a perpetual chapel, cell, and garden. King James V himself visited the shrine, walking on foot from Stirling in 1536 after surviving a storm at sea. He was not the only one to connect Our Lady of Loreto with safety upon the sea: she was the patron of the mariners of Leith, who founded a church in her honour in 1483, and the burgh seal of the town of Leith shows Mary and the infant Jesus in a galley.113 The feast of the Sorrowful Compassion of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as celebrated on the Wednesday after Palm Sunday in the church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, emphasized Mary’s emotional torment. ‘Never did mother bear such anxious griefs, as Mary when contemplating the paleness of her Son’, the celebrant explained, and ‘there was no sorrow like unto her sorrow’. Those in attendance were invited to share in Mary’s grief, to ‘sing to the Mother in whose Son’s blood we are washed’ and ‘mingle heartfelt lamentations’ with her, ‘watering our faces with tears’. Then they called upon Mary’s intercessory powers by asking her to pray to God on behalf of her guilty human supplicants. ‘Holy Mother of God, sweet and comely: pray for us to the King (whom we) gave over unto death.’114 Mary’s intercessory role was often connected to her own humanity, and in particular her mothering. A Scottish missal’s text for the feast of the Purification of Mary describes her as ‘virgin genetrix of god’ and praises her for feeding Jesus from her milk-filled breasts. But Mary was also perceived as being very close to, if not actually part of, the divine. She was associated with the Trinity, as a ‘tempill of the trinite’.115 Christocentric cults also made their way into Scotland. The cult of the Holy Name of Jesus had some impact in Scottish devotions, as seen by a handful of dedications during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries such as those in Glasgow Cathedral, the church of St Nicholas in Aberdeen, and the parish church of Perth.116 Of greater consequence were the energetic devotions focusing on the Passion of Jesus.117 The suffering humanity of Jesus is apparent in devotional literature, such as ‘Ane Dewoit Exercicoun in the honour of the croun of thorne’, 16 prayers in vernacular prose meant to be said every Sunday in commemora-

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tion of the sufferings of Christ, and ‘Remembrance of the passion’, vernacular prose meditations dwelling on the details of the suffering and death of Jesus.118 Visual reminders of the suffering of Christ could be found in many urban Scottish churches, with perhaps the most elaborate being the large tabernacle of the Passion of Christ in the church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen.119 Sir David Lyndsay approved of people seeing the image of the cross, for he thought that then people should remember the blood which Christ, in his Passion, shed for their salvation.120 Pilgrims came to Peebles to visit what they might have thought was a piece of the True Cross itself, the cross on which Christ was crucified.121 And in Edinburgh the Fetternear Banner showed Christ surrounded by representations of the instruments of the Passion. The prominence given to the image of blood in the banner probably means that the banner was intended to serve the cult of devotion to the Holy Blood, which would have reached Scotland from Bruges not long before the banner was created in the early sixteenth century.122 This cult became well established in Scotland, particularly in the east-coast ports and other trading centres, and was often associated with merchants’ guilds.123 Whether through reading devotional literature, gazing on images, or worshipping the True Cross or Holy Blood, the residents of Scottish towns were enthusiastically devoted to the humanity of Jesus through his own body and through his human family.

Conclusion The later medieval period was a golden era for saints. They were, in the phrase of André Vauchez, ‘keystones of human relationships with the divine’.124 The cult of saints as expressed in Scottish towns had the same basic form and function as in Europe more broadly. Here, as elsewhere, the saints comprised a diverse group of ancient and recent, foreign and local; here, as elsewhere, saints were bridges between earth and heaven, mediators, intercessors, sources of help and comfort in this world and the next. The distinctiveness of the cult of saints in Scottish towns came not from what the saints did, not from the variety of saints available, and not even from the changing patterns of devotion; what made the cult of

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saints in Scottish towns distinct were the particular saints represented. Some of these saints, of course, would have been familiar throughout western Christendom: the family of Jesus, the apostles, and Nicholas are all examples of figures to whom devotions were offered all over Europe. But the inhabitants of Scottish towns also had local holy people to whom they could appeal. Foremost among these were Ninian and Kentigern, largely unknown outside Scotland and Scottish communities abroad, but warmly familiar to Scottish townspeople. The dead, whether sainted or not, maintained both a physical and a metaphysical presence in Scottish towns. Their bodies lay under and immediately around the main centres of religious activity, and their names – for a price – were remembered from year to year through commemorative masses, charters, and even inscriptions on church furnishings. Through both burial and remembrance, the dead remained present in Scottish towns, enmeshed still within networks of kin, class, and occupation, as they had been during life. Of these networks, the most important for many people was that of kin. The bond of kinship brought the responsibility of remembrance, since it was kin to whom the dead called, through their religious foundations, for help in the afterlife. Townspeople seem to have felt both obligation and love towards their dead, and they kept the deceased very much part of their communities. These communities, and the corporate approach to religious practice they offered, are the focus of the next part of the book.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Bower, Scotichronicon, I, 315–17. Brown, Cult of Saints, 1–22. Fitch, Search for Salvation, 24. Collard, Lawson, and Holmes, ‘Archaeological Excavations in St Giles Cathedral Edinburgh, 1981–93’; Driscoll, Excavations at Glasgow Cathedral 1988–1997, 40. Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 12. Henryson, Poems, 182–4. Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 14. Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, I, 160, 234, 274.

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9 Fittis, Ecclesiastical Annals of Perth to the Period of the Reformation, 34–5. 10 Driscoll, Excavations at Glasgow Cathedral 1988–1997, 42–9. 11 John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 46. 12 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, passim; Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, passim; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 169–72. 13 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow Vol. II A.D. 1649–1707 with Appendix, A.D. 1484–1648, 447–52; Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow A.D. 1175–1649, Part II, 101–5. 14 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 84–5, 79–82, 99–102. 15 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 117–19, 124–7, 227–32, 240–5. 16 Verschuur, Politics or Religion?, 20. 17 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 154–7, 164–9. 18 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow Vol. II A.D. 1649–1707, with Appendix, A.D. 1484–1648, 447–52. 19 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 106–7. 20 Dawson, Scotland Re-Formed 1488–1587. 21 Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, 42. 22 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow A.D. 1175–1649, Part II, 45–52. 23 NAS B65/22/50. 24 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 79–82. 25 E.g. Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 28–30. 26 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. VII (1417–1431), 234–5. 27 Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, 2. 28 Galpern, ‘The Legacy of Late Medieval Religion in Sixteenth-Century Champagne’, 149. 29 Harding, Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670, 6, 46. 30 Charters and Documents Relating to the Burgh of Paisley (1163–1665), 52–6. 31 Le Goff, Medieval Imagination; Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages; Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country. 32 Dowden, ‘The Inventory of Ornaments, Jewels, Relicks, Vestments, Service-books, &c, belonging to the Cathedral Church of Glasgow in 1432’, 323, 324. 33 Macquarrie, ‘Scottish Saints’ Legends in the Aberdeen Breviary’, 146.

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34 Macquarrie, ‘Scottish Saints’ Legends in the Aberdeen Breviary’; Dawson, Scotland Re-Formed 1488–1587, 70; Nicholson, Scotland, 560; Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland 1431–1514, 232–8. 35 Jocelin of Furness, ‘Vita Kentigerni’, in Lives of S. Ninian and S. Kentigern. 36 Dowden, ‘The Inventory of Ornaments, Jewels, Relicks, Vestments, Service-books, &c, belonging to the Cathedral Church of Glasgow in 1432’, 298–9. 37 Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, 2, 329–39. 38 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow Vol. II A.D. 1649–1707, with Appendix, A.D. 1484–1648, 441–4; Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow A.D. 1175–1649, Part II, 101–5. 39 Burgh Records of the City of Glasgow, 87, 104. 40 Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 425–43. 41 Dowden, ‘The Inventory of Ornaments, Jewels, Relicks, Vestments, Service-books, &c, belonging to the Cathedral Church of Glasgow in 1432’, 298–9. 42 Registrum Episcopatus Aberdonensis, 143–4, 166–9, 185–6. 43 Hall, ‘Burgh Mentalities’, 214. 44 Texts recounting miracles reported at or near the shrines of St Æbbe of Coldingham and St Margaret of Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have been printed in Miracles of Saint Æbbe of Coldingham and Saint Margaret of Scotland. 45 Brown, ‘St Triduana of Restalrig?’. 46 Lyndsay, Works, I, 269, ll. 2361, 2374–5; Ditchburn, ‘“Saints at the Door Don’t Make Miracles?”’; Dingwall, History of Scottish Medicine, 30. 47 Rentale Dunkeldense, 311. 48 Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, V, 447. 49 Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, 1473–1566 (henceforth TA), IV, 324. 50 Lyndsay, Works, I, 269, ll. 2379–80; Bawcutt, ‘Two Cases of Mistaken Identity’, 192–4. 51 John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 50. 52 Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland, 158–9. 53 Registrum Secreti Sigilli Regum Scotorum, I, 97. 54 Hall, ‘Burgh Mentalities’, 214. 55 Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe, 1. 56 Ditchburn, ‘“Saints at the Door Don’t Make Miracles?”. 57 NAS B65/22/34. 58 Ditchburn, ‘“Saints at the Door Don’t Make Miracles?”.

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59 St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume I, 275–6. 60 Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland, 39; TA, I, xlv, cx–cxi, cxiv, clx–clxi, 29, 44 172, 182, 284, 356, 385; II, 442; III, 73, 152, 193, 291–2, 245; IV, 34, 349, 532–3; Registrum Secreti Sigilli Regum Scotorum, I, #1291. 61 TA, III, 291–2. 62 Calendar of Papal Letters to Scotland of Benedict XIII of Avignon 1394–1419, 156, 173; Dilworth, Scottish Monasteries of the Late Middle Ages, 61; Records of the Priory of the Isle of May, xlix. 63 Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland, 53–74. 64 Bower, Scotichronicon, I, 311–17; IV, 149; Mackinlay, Ancient Church Dedications in Scotland: Scriptural Dedications, 203; Ash and Broun, ‘The Adoption of St Andrew as Patron Saint of Scotland’, 16–17. 65 Mackinlay, Ancient Church Dedications in Scotland: Scriptural Dedications, 206; College of St Leonard, 128. 66 Turgot, Life of St. Margaret, Queen of Scotland, 59–60. 67 Calendar of Papal Letters to Scotland of Clement VII of Avignon 1378–1394, 58. 68 Calendar of Papal Letters to Scotland of Clement VII of Avignon 1378–1394, 58. 69 Calendar of Papal Letters to Scotland of Clement VII of Avignon 1378–1394, 61–2. 70 Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, III, 70, 674–5. 71 Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland, 67; McRoberts, ‘The Glorious House of St Andrew’, 99. 72 Ash and Broun, ‘The Adoption of St Andrew as Patron Saint of Scotland’, 18–21. 73 Hall, St Andrew and Scotland, 107–8; Bower, Scotichronicon, VI, 91, 351, 353; Liber Pluscardensis, X, 183. 74 Hall, St Andrew and Scotland, 127–8. 75 Ash and Broun, ‘The Adoption of St Andrew as Patron Saint of Scotland’, 21; Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland, 55; Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, 118. 76 Hall, St Andrew and Scotland, 127. 77 Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary,Queen of Scots, 1547–1603, 205–6. 78 Hall, St Andrew and Scotland, IX, 128, 130. 79 The Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland 1473–1566 show that they were made in 1494, 1495 (twice), 1496, 1497 (twice), 1504, 1506 (twice), and 1508 (passim); Calendar of documents relating to Scotland, IV, 487. 80 Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland, 60–1. 81 Hall, St Andrew and Scotland, 152.

80

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82 83 84 85 86

87 88

89 90

91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

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Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland, 69–70. Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, 444–53. Lyndsay, Works, I, 198–386, ll. 2279–708. Patten, The expedicion into Scotla[n]de. Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, xciv, 121; Database of Dedications to Scottish Saints in Medieval Scotland at http://webdb.ucs.ac.uk/saints/; Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560, 73. Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 12, 16–18. Printed in Metcalfe, Legends of SS Ninian and Machar; Higgitt, ‘From Bede to Rabelais’, 188, 195–7; Brooke, Wild Men and Holy Places, 182. Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 26, 80–1. Hay, ‘A Scottish Altarpiece in Copenhagen’, 5–10; Stevenson, ‘Notice of an Early Sixteenth-Century Scottish Colony at Bergen-op-Zoom and an Altar There Once Dedicated to St Ninian’, 50–2. Higgitt, ‘From Bede to Rabelais’, 190. Shead, ‘Glasgow‘, 116. Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 432, 444. Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 186; TA, III, 175, 356; IV, 87, 88, 179. Acta Facultatis Artium Universitatis Sanctiandree 1413–1588, Volume 1, 3–4; McRoberts, ‘The Boy Bishop in Scotland’, 80–2; Lynch and Dingwall, ‘Elite Society in Town and Country’, 182–3. Ditchburn, ‘The “McRoberts Thesis” and Patterns of Sanctity in Late Medieval Scotland’, 189. John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 47. Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, xciv–xcv. Hall, ‘Of Holy Men and Heroes’, 72; Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, lv–lvi. Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church; Lees, St Giles’, Edinburgh, 313–33. Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 217–20. Fitch, Search for Salvation, 113–50; Hall, ‘Wo/men only?’. Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 41. Asloan Manuscript, I, 271, ll. 1–5. John of Ireland, Meroure of Wyssdome, I, 144. Asloan Manuscript, I, 272, l. 33; ‘The Lang Rosair’, in Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 322–34. John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 58. Ditchburn, ‘The “McRoberts Thesis” and Patterns of Sanctity in Late Medieval Scotland’, 180.

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109 110 111 112

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113 114 115 116

117 118

119 120 121

122 123 124

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Hall, ‘Wo/men only?’, 115. Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 16–17. Lyndsay, Works, I, 268, ll. 2337–42; 278, ll. 2661–8. Ditchburn, ‘The “McRoberts Thesis” and Patterns of Sanctity in Late Medieval Scotland’, 181; Hall, ‘Wo/men only?’, 118–19. Fitch, Search for Salvation, 147. Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 431–43; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 116. Fitch, Search for Salvation, 126–30. Fawcett, ‘The Blackadder Aisle at Glasgow Cathedral’; Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560, 60–74; Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 144; II, 128–9; Fittis, Ecclesiastical Annals of Perth to the Period of the Reformation, 316. Ditchburn, ‘The “McRoberts Thesis” and Patterns of Sanctity in Late Medieval Scotland’, 178–9. Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 182–93, 213–37; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 151–83; MacDonald, ‘Passion Devotion in LateMedieval Scotland’. Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 13. Lyndsay, Works, I, 268, ll. 2333–6. Ditchburn, ‘The “McRoberts Thesis” and Patterns of Sanctity in Late Medieval Scotland’, 180; Yeoman, Pilgrimage in Medieval Scotland, 46–9. McRoberts, ‘The Fetternear Banner’; Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin de Moyen-Âge, 259–67. McRoberts, ‘The Fetternear Banner’, 79, 82–3. Vauchez, ‘Saints and Pilgrimages’, 324; see also Mâle, Religious Art in France; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars.

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Part II

Summoning the living

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Communities of religion

After its lament for the dead, the bell of St Giles summoned the living. Those who heeded its call of ‘vivos voco’ often performed their religious activities in groups, gathering themselves together to participate in corporate Christianity. The groups into which people gathered were not entirely separate or divergent. Stirling’s incoming Dean of Guild, for example, was promised reimbursement in 1524 for whatever expenses he would make within the parish church ‘for the honor of God and the weill of the toune’.1 As for this Dean of Guild, who was included in at least three communities of corporate devotion (guild, parish, and town), so for most Scottish townspeople different religious communities and their various goals tended to be complementary in principle. Even if there were in practice certain areas of tension and occasional instances of outright hostility between different religious groups, devotion within the parish and the guild was, nonetheless, generally seen as intrinsic to the welfare of the town.

Parishes In Scotland, unlike most of Europe, every town contained only a single parish (with the possible exception of Edinburgh, which had parishes centred both on St Giles’ and on St Cuthbert’s).2 Norwich, which was roughly the same size as Edinburgh, had at least 46 parish churches in the later medieval period, and Durham, with a population of about 4,000, had six.3 Farther afield, Paris had over 40 parishes and London almost 100 within its walls.4 Scotland was unusual in the uniparochial make-up of its towns, and this feature of Scottish society would seem to have had paradoxical implica-

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tions. On the one hand, it would likely have given parishioners, who all shared coterminous parochial and urban boundaries, a double bond of shared interests. The relatively small geographical extent of the single-parish Scottish town made it reasonable to hope that any townsperson could get to their parish church and attend a service in a fairly short amount of time, as Thomas Nele and Agnes Wischart did in their anniversary charter of 1529, where they directed that after their deaths bells be rung to summon people from the farthest reaches of Ayr to hear their anniversary mass (see Chapter 1).5 Parishioners could not have hoped for the same in much of rural Scotland, and especially in the Highlands, where parishes were often so large that parishioners had a difficult time getting to their parish churches at all. In the mid-fifteenth century the abbot of Jedworth asked the Pope for permission to found a chapel near a group of inhabitants in ‘high and woody places’ who were distant from their parish church and who, on account of many severe storms and great distance, could not easily get there to hear divine offices and receive the sacraments and whose children therefore sometimes died without baptism and whose sick sometimes died without confession. At the end of the century a nobleman in the diocese of St Andrews, concerned about similar spiritual dangers, asked the Pope to erect a parish church on an island distant about two miles from the mainland whose inhabitants, particularly when the sea was swollen, could not easily get to the nearest parish churches and receive the sacraments.6 In Gaelic-speaking areas of the country, even when parishioners arrived at their parish churches the priests sometimes did not speak their language. Sometimes they worked to find a priest who would understand,7 but other times they did not. In 1441 the Pope granted the archdeacon of Sodor his position even though he ‘cannot speak intelligibly the language of the city and diocese of Sodor as regards preachings and other public acts, although he speaks it somewhat, even intelligibly’. In 1454 the Pope mandated the presentation of a priest to a vicarage in the diocese of Argyll who, ‘although he is a native of Scotland, he does not perfectly speak nor understand the language of the place’.8 The uniparochial structure of Scottish towns, therefore, likely gave them a greater sense of unity than was the case either in multiparochial towns elsewhere in Europe or in the vast parishes of

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parts of Highland Scotland. On the other hand, having only one parish in a town and therefore also only one parish church must surely have presented some basic spatial challenges if thousands of town residents all tried to fit into the parish church building at once. While this may have been possible in the largest structures such as the cathedrals of Glasgow and St Andrews, it is hard to imagine adequate capacity in some of the other burgh churches. Whether all parishioners gathered there regularly or not, the most obvious centre of communal religious experience in a Scottish town was its parish church, which stood out both because of its geographically conspicuous location along a main street or near the centre of settlement, and also because it was usually among the few stone buildings in towns where most dwellings were made of wood. Fifteenth-century Scottish theologian John of Ireland gave additional reasons why people should pray there. Perhaps most simply, Holy Scripture advises it. But people should also pray in their parish churches because it brings them into contact with divine powers and protects them from evil (through the help of angels and saints), and renders prayers more speedy and more worthy (due to the proximity of the host, of relics, and of images and books).9 Towns invested heavily in their parish churches, and in so doing provided for themselves structures impressive in scale and architectural sophistication. Most imposing were those parish churches that were also cathedrals, seats of bishops. St Andrews was Scotland’s greatest cathedral, whose alterations following a fire in 1387 and collapse of the south transept in 1409 were closely connected to the prestige of its relics of St Andrew, as discussed in Chapter 2. Much work was undertaken at Glasgow Cathedral both in order to ensure basic structural soundness, threatened on an ongoing basis by the building’s placement on a steeply sloping site and more intensively by a lightning strike at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and also to augment the beauty and dignity of the building in keeping with the elevation of Glasgow to the rank of archbishopric in 1492. Under the auspices of Glasgow’s first archbishop, Robert Blackadder (1483–1508), improvements were made to the vaulting, new aisles were built, and canopies were constructed over choir stalls. Blackadder also personally founded an altar to Our Lady of Pity, re-established an altar to the Name of Jesus, and contributed to construction in the crossing.10

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Even parish churches below the rank of cathedral could reach considerable size and structural complexity. The parish church of St Mary’s, Dundee, was about 286 feet long and over 174 feet wide at the transepts, making it the widest recorded in Scotland.11 By the early sixteenth century the parish church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, was more than 200 feet long and 100 feet wide at the transepts, and contained about 30 altars. A minimum of 12 choristers were to sing during the High Mass, and these boys would have been joined in the choir by a significant number of priests, if the 34 choir stalls ordered in 1507 are a reliable indicator. Upkeep of this impressive building was undertaken by the burgesses of Aberdeen, whose council made regular payments from fishing and taxes to the masters of the church work.12 Since one of the most active periods in the building and rebuilding of burgh parish churches coincided with the beginning of a sustained recession, it would appear that even serious economic hardship did not dissuade towns from spending money on their churches.13 Late medieval improvements to the church of St Giles in Edinburgh, for example, included the building of additional aisles, chapels, and a new tower. Parish churches were also completely or largely rebuilt during the fifteenth century in Haddington, Linlithgow, Stirling, Dundee, and Perth, with many showing considerable influence from styles fashionable in the Netherlands.14 Payment for the maintenance and repair of churches often came from a combination of wealthy individuals and the burghal community more broadly. In the years following the large-scale damage to Aberdeen by the English in 1336, the parish church of St Nicholas underwent a great deal of expansion and repair funded both by William de Leith, a provost of Aberdeen who used £40 of his own money, and also by the wider community. Similarly, the installation of squared stones in 1358 was paid for partly by the elected ‘masters of the church funds’ (a chaplain and a successful burgess), and partly by the community of the burgh.15 The relocation of churches and the founding of new parishes were also undertaken at the initiative of the burghal community. Shortly before 1429 the burgesses of Cupar in Fife decided to move their church from outside the town to inside the burgh.16 In 1498 the Scottish king and the residents of a growing settlement just outside Aberdeen but still within the bounds of its parish church petitioned

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the Pope for an additional parish church to accommodate them so that people could hear mass and other divine offices ‘to the welfare of their souls with increase of divine worship’.17 The increase of divine worship was taken seriously by the lay townspeople, who devoted so much of their energy and their resources to their churches. From the outside, the parish churches of Scottish towns proclaimed wealth, generosity, and currency with European fashion; from within, they moved people with rich displays of sensual religious refinement. Aberdeen Cathedral had among its holdings a chalice of pure gold decorated with rubies and another chalice of silver gilt for daily use; a great silver cross on a painted staff for carrying in procession and a foot for standing on the altar; three banners; a monstrance (for holding the consecrated host) made of silver gilt with three angels bearing the titles of the cross in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; two silver cruets (for holding Eucharistic wine); two silver candlesticks and one brass candlestick; a brass lamp for use of the choir; two vessels and a sprinkler for holy water; two ampullas for holding chrism and holy oil and a third for holding oil of the sick; a book of Epistles for the High Mass and a lectern on which it could lie featuring a brass image of Moses with the Ten Commandments; a silver-plated Gospel book; several sets of vestments and a vestment press with drawers; cushions of gold cloth for the high altar; and an engraved iron chest for holding the jewels of the church.18 This cathedral was especially well appointed with expensive and luxurious equipment, but even the more humble parish churches were provided with the necessary things for communal worship. The new parish church erected in 1498 in the parish of St Mary ad Nives, just outside Aberdeen, was to have a bell tower, bell, cemetery, place for holy objects, baptismal font, and ‘other things proper’ to a parish church.19 Statutes of the Scottish Church, echoing canon law more broadly, directed that parishioners hold considerable responsibility for the building and maintenance of their parish churches, and particularly the naves.20 Parishioners in Scottish burghs followed and exceeded these directions, showing a sense of responsibility for all physical areas of their church buildings. In about 1440, the provost, bailies, and community of the burgh of Perth agreed to restore, rebuild, and repair the walls, roof, doors, windows, and

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other parts of the choir in their parish church, and to provide the church with books, chalices, copes, chasubles, albs, and all the other things required for worship. To help support these initiatives, the provost, bailies, and community of the burgh would receive fees for burial within the choir, adding them to their previous fees for burial within the nave of the church and in the churchyard.21 In 1484, the aldermen, bailies, council, and community of the burgh of Aberdeen appointed John Grey, mason, as master of work for the parish church of St Nicholas. He was to labour himself as well as oversee the work of other masons and workmen, to the best of his ability and for all the days of his life.22 Some of the details of ongoing responsibility are provided in the Ayr Burgh Accounts, which show that the townspeople of Ayr took care of their parish church between 1536 and 1557 by repairing and improving its organ and providing candles for its loft in the winter; repairing its glass windows; caring for its bells; building its door; mending its pillars; binding its mass book; providing its altar clothes; repairing its steeple; making a stair to its pulpit; mending its chalices; repairing its roof; purchasing its books; paving its floor; providing locks and bands for its baptismal font; and repairing its lectern, chandelier, and stalls.23 These parishioners were clearly taking upon themselves a responsibility for many, if not all, material aspects of their parish church. From floor to steeple, they undertook to maintain and improve the church and did not shy away from contributing to the more clerical – as opposed to lay – items, as their work with mass books and altar equipment shows. In fact, townspeople regularly provided the altars in their parish churches with equipment for the mass, a donation that would have been visible to the parish community at large. In the case of the altar of St Thomas and St George in the parish church of Aberdeen, founded by the burgess Thomas Prat in 1491, this equipment consisted of a chalice of silver gilt; two complete vestments for the priest; a missal; four linen cloths fitted for the altar as well as an arras featuring St George to go on the altar front; two cruets (to hold Eucharistic wine or holy water); two large candlesticks above the altar, and eleven smaller ones for a stand.24 The walls of some churches may have been decorated with painted images, as they were in Denmark and the Netherlands as well as at Foulis Easter in Scotland, though the regular payments

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for painting St Giles, Edinburgh, with lime suggests a whitewashed appearance for much of the church, possibly with painted decoration in some areas such as in the choir.25 Interiors were regularly cleaned, for example at Yule, Candlemas, Easter, Pentecost, St Giles’ Day and All Hallows’, as well as on all Sundays during the summer at St Giles, Edinburgh.26 The illumination needed to see all this was provided by bringing sunlight in through glazed windows as well as from lanterns and the many candles in chandeliers, on decorative iron stands, and on altars.27 Extra candles were set up at Yule, the darkest part of the year and the time to celebrate the coming of light into seasonal and human darkness.28 At Easter, the high point of the liturgical calendar, everyone with property was to contribute a penny for the Easter candle.29 The influence that laypeople had over their parish churches even extended to the selection and oversight of clerical personnel. In 1447 the Aberdeen town council decided that the chaplains who were paid an annual fee and chaplains who served an infeft benefice (i.e. one invested with heritable property) would be ruled, governed, and even corrected by the alderman and council. The following year the council used their authority to order that the chaplain David Lichton receive his fee of 18 merks only if he performed his offices each holy day and the Lady Mass every day; for each missed office, the chaplain was to pay 4d.30 The expectations of a chaplain at St Nicholas, Aberdeen, were laid out in more detail in a later entry: he was to come daily and do divine service, which was to say matins, High Mass, and evensong. If absent from three of these offices continually he was to be ‘excludit and expellit’ so that he not sing mass within the church for a year unless he had a sufficient excuse reasonable to the alderman and the ‘correctour of the queir’.31 The control that lay patrons had over clerical personnel was shown through the role they played in inducting clerics. In one such ceremony in Glasgow, a parishioner gave the new cleric the holy water stoup and sprinkler before presenting him to the vicar.32 In another in Stirling, the provost, bailies, councillors, and community of the burgh gathered together and unanimously conferred the Holy Rood altar and chaplainry on the chosen priest. One of the bailies then went with the cleric to the altar and invested him with the chaplainry by touching and delivering to him

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the book, chalice, ornaments, and horns of the altar.33 These induction ceremonies sent a clear message: the laity had control over space in their parish church, and the clergy were there at the pleasure of their lay patrons. The laypeople had the power to give to their chosen cleric the objects necessary for him to perform his duties, and laypeople had the power to bring the cleric physically to the place where he would carry out his work. Once in their offices, clergy in parish churches remained under considerable control by the laity. Town councils could, and did, dismiss the chaplains they had engaged in case of breach of contract. By the middle of the sixteenth century most of the altars in the parish church of Irvine and all eight altars in the parish church of Ayr were under the patronage of town magistrates. In the town of Linlithgow, the council approved the hours of church services, the number of lights to be placed on the high altar, and the regulations for dress in the choir.34 In 1532, the ‘hale tounn’ of Aberdeen in one voice discharged all the singers of their choir for their misdeeds except for one, Sir Andrew Coupar, an old man and servant to the town.35 This lay power was not without occasional resistance on the part of clerics, though such resistance appears to have been grounded in particular local circumstance rather than a more theoretical objection to lay control over ecclesiastical matters. In 1520, it was the provost, bailies, and council of Stirling who chose the priest to serve in the choir of their parish church. Ten years later, these lay leaders obliged themselves and their successors to assign the clerkship of their parish church in future ‘to the maist cunning chaiplane that can be had to syng in the choir’; the current chaplain, however, refused his assent unless the clerkship were to go to his son after his decease.36 The townspeople wanted the best chaplain in their choir, and the current chaplain wanted to secure employment for his close blood kin. Neither, it would appear, contested the townspeople’s theoretical authority to select their priest. For the laypeople of Scottish towns, the church as both a building and a parochial institution was endowed, maintained, and even to some extent regulated by their own efforts.37 While the edifice, ornaments, and personnel of parish churches were largely managed by the laity, the religious rituals tended to remain under the leadership of the clergy. The central religious

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ritual inside parish churches was the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was the part of the mass when it was believed that Christ himself became present on the altar through the miracle of transubstantiation. Following the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, all parishioners were supposed to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist at least once a year, at Easter.38 Normally, this occurred in the parish church, though the Eucharist could be brought to parishioners in their homes using a vessel specially designated for carrying the sacrament to the sick, such as that found in Aberdeen Cathedral.39 Even though receiving the Eucharist was an individual act, thought to increase grace in this life as well as uniting the receiver to God,40 it also had the important communal function of knitting the receiver into the social body of Christ. As the 1552 Catechism explains, this sacrament was called ‘communion’ because by receiving it ‘al trew chritin men and women are joynit all togiddir to our salviour Christ, heid of the same mistik bodye’, and it brought ‘unitie, concord, and peace’ among those who faithfully received it. The body of Christ in the Eucharist was thought to create and reflect the body of Christ in society, so that ‘we that are mony in number are one breid spiritually, and ane body spiritually, quhilk are participant in the sacrament of the Altare’.41 Thus by receiving the Eucharist a person took the body of God into his or her own body, but also joined his or her body to the larger body of the Christian community. Since many laypeople ingested this sacrament only at Easter, they would have attended many masses in their parish churches without receiving the Eucharist. This does not mean, however, that they were ‘mere spectators’ to the mass, as some have claimed.42 Even if they were not eating the host, and even if they could not understand or even clearly hear the words spoken by the officiating priest, the laypeople in attendance at mass could nevertheless feel that they were participating in the ritual: they were in the presence of the transubstantiation from bread and wine into body and blood of Christ, they followed a series of ritual gestures, and they received the priest’s blessing at the end of the ceremony.43 Furthermore, somewhat like receiving the Eucharist by mouth, this more frequent participation in mass was a communal experience of an individual coming into closer proximity with the divine, for parishioners attended mass as one single body, whatever the differ-

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ences in age, social status, and gender among them,44 and did so in a church that was, as discussed earlier, significantly under the care and control of the lay parishioners themselves. This space of the parish church could also be lush with music, which would have provided an additional unifying force. Sound has the ability to create a shared experience by all present in its midst, whatever their focus of attention. Whereas each person in attendance at the mass might have been looking at a different sight (for example one at the rood screen and another at a side altar), by contrast, all present would have heard the same music at the same time. Most of the music from pre-Reformation Scotland has been lost, but ‘The Carver Choirbook’, a manuscript compiled in the first half of the sixteenth century by the Scottish composer Robert Carver, contains music by Flemish and English composers as well as five masses and two motets by Carver himself, all technically demanding and likely heard in the Chapel Royal and at other major centres such as Edinburgh and Aberdeen.45 Less wealthy churches also provided music. Several had trained choristers to perform liturgical music. Some would have studied at the song school at Inverness, which taught organ as well as plain singing and pricked singing (from written music), descants, counterpoint, and improvized polyphony.46 An especially important form of participation for laypeople at mass was through seeing the host elevated in the priest’s hands. In case they were lost in the other sensual splendours of the ceremony, this exact moment of elevation was indicated by the ringing of a bell such as the small silver one kept at the main altar of Glasgow Cathedral.47 Seeing the consecrated host was a real form of involvement because, according to medieval understandings of vision, to see something was to be profoundly affected by it. A learned perspective was that everything susceptible to human vision belonged to a complex semiotic system whose signs pointed to a hidden reality. Popular traditions also gave vision a central role in apprehending the sacred, as is clear from the common custom of laypeople coming to church only to see the elevation of the host because they regarded this moment as the essential part of the rite. This ‘sacramental gaze’, to use the phrase of historian Robert Scribner, was understood to be a pious action that created a connection between the viewer and the sacred object being

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viewed, for not only was the visible world a sign of the invisible, but the physical sense of seeing also involved direct personal contact between the viewer and the viewed either through a substance emanating from the object being viewed and touching the viewer or – the theory changed over time – through a substance emanating from the viewer and touching the object viewed.48 In this way, the visual experience of the sacred played a central role in lay devotion to such an extent that the sense of vision became a means for bodily participation in the divine, and parishioners in Scottish churches during mass were therefore not only joined to one another through the shared experience, but also to divine power through the envisioning of the transubstantiated host.49 The mass may have been theologically the most important ritual in the parish church, but it was not the only one. The first religious ritual for most people would have been baptism, for while adult baptism had probably been common among the earliest Christians, infant baptism was the norm by the late medieval period in Europe.50As articulated in the charters from the church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, baptism was seen as transformative and spiritually life-giving to people born into a fallen world. The rite of baptism was believed to wash away the taint of original sin so that a person ‘passed from sin to life, from guilt to grace, from defilement to sanctification’. The first birth, the birth of the flesh, brought people forth unto death; baptism was the second birth, the birth of the spirit, which called people back to life.51 For William Hay, lecturing at Aberdeen University, it changed the recipient from ‘a child of wrath and hell’ into ‘the child of the Kingdom of God’.52 So necessary was baptism for the soul’s salvation that if a baby seemed likely to die before a priest arrived to administer the sacrament, the father and mother were to baptize their child themselves in Latin or in English (though curiously, the Scottish statutes say nothing about Gaelic), and therefore priests were supposed to teach laypeople the form ‘I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen’.53 Most of the time, however, the ceremony of baptism would have been conducted by the parish priest in the parish church. The directions for the rite given in the Catechism of 1552 include several stages, each of which was designed to bring the child further from sin and closer both to God and to the parish community. The child

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was first to be brought to the church door. Here, the priest performed an exorcism that included blowing on the child to expel evil, making the sign of the cross upon the child’s brow and breast, placing salt in the child’s mouth, reading from the Gospel of St Matthew, having the godparents lay their hands on the child and say the Creed and the Our Father, and anointing the child’s nostrils and ears with saliva. After this exorcism was concluded, the child was to be brought to the baptismal font. He or she was named, asked through the godparents to renounce the Devil and all his works, and anointed with holy oil. Then a catechism was to take place, with the godparents answering on behalf of the child, and the child was either dipped into the water or the water was poured over the child three times. Finally, the child was to be anointed with chrism, clothed in white linen, and given a lit torch or candle.54 Thus starting at the door of the church and ending at the font, the child was cleansed of evil and exposed to the essentials of the Christian faith; given a name and brought into the Christian community; and provided with outward signs of purity and light to represent the inner transformation of cleansing from sin and turning to God. The infant, of course, was not expected to understand the significance of what was happening. Understanding was undertaken on behalf of the infant by the godparents, participants who were to act as spiritual parents at this spiritual birth. One godparent was sufficient, though it may have been the custom to have two male sponsors and one female for the baptism of a boy, and two female sponsors and one male for the baptism of a girl.55 Like baptism, marriage was a sacrament that did not strictly speaking require a church setting or clerical participant, but that usually did take place in the parish church. The three things necessary to make a marriage valid according to canon law were that the two people be capable of contracting the marriage lawfully, which meant both that they were each free to marry in general and that they were eligible to marry each other in particular; that they mutually consented to give their bodies; and that there be an outward sign in which this consent was expressed.56 Each of these conditions was further elaborated in theory and in practice. By law, a person was free to marry in general if he or she had attained the sufficient age – 12 for females and males alike –

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and if he or she were not currently married already or in holy orders. Canon law concerning the eligibility of a particular pair for marriage was more complex, and included a fairly long list of impediments that would either prevent the legal contracting of marriage or nullify a marriage previously contracted. These impediments included the error of person (when someone is thought to be one individual, but in fact is another), the error of condition (when someone is thought to be free, but in fact is a slave), and the error of consent (when someone pretends to give consent but in fact does not); the taking of sacred orders by one of the partners; the lack of baptism in one partner when the other is a Christian; the contracting of marriage because of just fear; and certain conditions of impotence.57 Probably the most common impediments to marriage were those caused by consanguinity, affinity, or a spiritual relationship. ‘Consanguinity’ was present when there was a blood relationship because of a common ancestor within four generations; ‘affinity’ when one person had sexual intercourse with someone related to the other person within four generations; and a ‘spiritual relationship’ when one person had baptized, confirmed, or received the other at baptism or confirmation.58 Some couples who wished to marry although related within the prohibited degrees sought dispensations. Most people who requested a dispensation directly from the papal curia were nobles, but in 1415 Thomas Corrour was granted papal dispensation to marry Isabelle, daughter of John Goldsmith, burgess of Perth, who was spiritually related to him because the father of Thomas was also the godfather of Isabelle.59 If Thomas’s surname was the same as his occupation, then this couple presumably had considerable funds upon which to draw for obtaining their dispensation. A less costly method was through a Scottish Church official who had been granted a licence to dispense couples. Among the 19 such licences requested between 1506 and 1535 were examples by the treasurer of Dunblane, who petitioned for one to dispense 12 couples, and by the provost of St Giles, Edinburgh, and the Archbishop of Glasgow, who each petitioned for one to dispense ten couples.60 One way of trying to avoid couples marrying within the prohibited degrees in the first place was by having banns read in church. Announcing the forthcoming marriage publicly like this did

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sometimes elicit objections. When the banns of John Rutherford and Christian Hopperingill were read out in their respective parish churches, for example, a burgess of Jedburgh declared them ineligible to marry because they were related within the prohibited bounds of the third and fourth degrees of consanguinity. A relative of the bride-to-be then showed a dispensation from the apostolic see that had been procured by the chancellor of Aberdeen and provost of the college of the Holy Trinity near Edinburgh, signed and sealed with an oblong seal of red wax in an iron box, whole and not erased but sound and not spoiled. After the dispensation was made public, the curate of John Rutherford’s parish solemnized the marriage.61 When David Brydine and Janet Trumbill of Selkirk wished to marry, a relative of David announced an impediment, saying that ‘the father of the said David had raised the said Janet over the holy font’, meaning that he was her godfather. The chaplain announcing the couple’s intent to wed then presented a dispensation from the apostolic see, which was handed to the notary and read aloud before the couple were married.62 For creating the marriage contract itself, canon law held that it would be sufficient for both partners to state the intention to marry in words of the present tense.63 The necessary verba de presenti would be something like ‘I consent to take you as my spouse’, rather than words of the future tense such as ‘I shall consent to take you as my spouse’, which indicated an intent to marry some time in the future. Church authorities reluctantly accepted this simple process into wedlock, though they encouraged a more formal and public ceremony in order to avoid the disputes that could arise from a private or ‘clandestine’ marriage conducted without witnesses present. Among the problems with clandestine marriages were that they could lead to the dissolution of valid marriages if one or both partners denied having contracted the union, and they could lead to the children of the marriage being declared illegitimate if the married partners were within the forbidden degrees, whether the parents knew this or not.64 When a wedding ceremony took place, it was usually held just outside the church building, ‘in face of kirk’, though a carefully undertaken marriage ceremony could have two parts: one at the notary’s, the other at the church. In the morning of 14 November 1475, Duncan Aquhonam and Agnes McAlpin came to the

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notary’s chamber in Stirling and, in the presence of the notary and other witnesses, contracted marriage per verba de futuro (indicating that they were planning to wed in the future) and gave oaths on the Gospels that they had not previously contracted marriage with others. The following day, the marriage was solemnized by the curate in the face of the church, and then the partners went inside the church building and made the same oaths as on the previous day. The groom may have been unusually young, for two men swore an oath that he was of lawful age to contract marriage.65 The exchanging of vows in front of witnesses, as in this case, fulfilled the third and final canonical requirement to make a valid marriage, namely, that consent be expressed by an outward sign. In their care for the fabric of the church and equipment for divine service, and in their participation in rituals of baptism, marriage and mass, the laypeople of Scottish towns showed a strong sense of belonging in their parish churches. Parishioners took advantage of the fact that much of their community would be present at Sunday High Masses to disseminate news by making public announcements or by affixing letters to the church’s doors.66 They used the buildings themselves for many things beyond religious services and prayer, employing the space at various times as meeting site, court, parliament house, and even a place to store guns.67 They also frequently chose altars or aisles within the parish churches for the closing of business deals. In 1482 a payment was ordered to be made on the altar of St Michael in St Andrews parish church at the time of High Mass, and in 1496 money was ordered to be paid in the parish church of St Giles, Edinburgh, on the altar of St Sebastian.68 Although religious and worldly concerns could coexist quite comfortably in Scottish parishes, religious and civic authorities occasionally attempted to establish firmer rules around what they considered appropriate uses of the parish churches’ physical space. A thirteenth-century synodal statute from the diocese of Aberdeen ordered that no dances ‘or low and indecent pastimes such as provoke to lasciviousness’ take place in churches or churchyards, and that no secular causes be conducted there, ‘particularly any in which a judgment of blood is involved’. Moreover, churchyards were to be ‘decently enclosed round about’ to prevent access by

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‘unclean animals and brute beasts’.69 Livestock were indeed sometimes a problem in churchyards. In Peebles, the parish clerk was empowered to impound animals found wandering in the churchyard, and in Aberdeen a special ‘pvndler’ was appointed for that same purpose.70 The church statutes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries proscribe festivals within the church or churchyard, though it seems to be not so much these gatherings themselves that worried the writers of the statutes as the unseemly behaviour that could arise at the meetings. A fourteenth-century synodal statute of St Andrews made this distinction quite clear when it forbade anyone ‘from daring in the future to have dances, or to hold wrestling matches, or to hold or engage in any other kind of unseemly sports in churches or in churchyards at any festivals or seasons whatsoever, since the occasion of profaning churches or churchyards has been wont to arise from such causes’.71 Civic authorities were also active in maintaining the purity of the parish church, especially in the sixteenth century. The provost, bailies, council and community of the burgh of Aberdeen ordered in 1512 that no walkers (cloth-workers) were to hang their cloth upon the walls, dykes, or in the yard of the church under penalty of 8s for first and second offences, and confiscation of the cloth for the third. And in 1530, John Anderson was convicted of being in the wedding door of the church, ‘quhilk was hallowit place and kirk’, with his bonnet on his head.72 Laypeople in Scottish towns clearly felt that they had custody over their parish churches. They contributed to their building and maintenance, they selected and disciplined their personnel, they participated in their religious rituals, and they used the buildings for their own purposes both religious and secular. Parish churches were a centre of community for Scottish townspeople, and not the only ones: guilds and the town itself also provided opportunities for communal religious expression.

Guilds Although everyone in Scotland belonged to a parish by accident of residence, some chose to join additional religious organizations. The most popular of these were the guilds, voluntary mutual-aid societies that relied on affective bonds reinforced by oaths and

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maintained by collective jurisdiction.73 Among the most oftenstudied forms of corporate Christianity in medieval Europe, guilds were found in at least 13 Scottish towns by the year 1400, though the terminology used in the Scottish context, and perhaps in some ways the actual organizations themselves, were somewhat different from other areas of Europe.74 The first guilds to appear in Scottish records were called ‘merchant guilds’, though in practice they actually included people of many different professions. By the fifteenth century, various incorporations of single-profession craft guilds could also be found in Scottish burghs, but the older type of ‘merchant’ guild persisted alongside craft guilds for centuries. The merchant guild of Perth in the early sixteenth century, as one example, included not just merchants, but also textile workers, baxters, fleshers, tailors, dyers, cobblers, skinners, wrights, and goldsmiths, along with vicars and rectors from local parishes.75 Similarly the guild of Aberdeen, sometimes referred to as a ‘merchant guild’, was actually composed of craftsmen, notaries, graduates, clerics, and members of noble families, in addition to the merchants themselves.76 So the merchant guilds of Scotland were not necessarily guilds for merchants alone, but rather multi-occupational voluntary societies. Another kind of religious organization whose name may cause some confusion in the Scottish context is the confraternity, a society open to membership beyond any one given trade and focusing on religious matters to the exclusion of (or at least to a much greater extent than) commercial concerns. There certainly were organizations called confraternities in Scotland – the confraternities of the Holy Blood that emerged in some eastern burghs from the late fifteenth century are the most conspicuous examples – but it is not clear whether they actually were confraternities in the sense historians usually mean. In some cases at least, these organizations were undoubtedly linked to merchant guilds; some of the evidence suggests that perhaps they even were the merchant guilds. The deacon and brethren of the merchant guild of Perth, for example, decreed in 1504 that all guild brothers within the town should gather together each Thursday when they heard the bells ringing to attend the Holy Blood mass and follow the Eucharist though the church, and that for each day of absence they were to

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pay a penny to the Holy Blood light. The Holy Blood altar was under the care of the merchant guild, not only in Perth, but also in Dundee and St Andrews.77 In these towns, the confraternity of the Holy Blood and the merchant guild appear to have been overlapping or even identical, perhaps not surprising given that the cult came from Bruges, an important centre of trade for Scottish merchants. In other towns, the organization associated with the cult of the Holy Blood included membership wider than that of the guild merchant. Although the Holy Blood altar and aisle in St Giles, Edinburgh, were under the care of the guild of merchants, membership in the town’s confraternity of the Holy Blood also included individuals from the royal court and even King James IV himself, who purchased satin cloth for his hood when he ‘wes maid brodir to the Haly Blude’ in 1505.78 The Dean of Guild’s Accounts from Edinburgh make further reference to what at first look like confraternities among groups that rented silver candlesticks, including the fraternities of St Ann, St ‘Cristell’, Sts Crispin and Crispinian, St Blaise, St Hubert, St John, St Giles, St Anthony, and St Mungo.79 Though their names may make them look like confraternities, it is more likely that these groups were actually craft guilds recorded under the names of their patron saints. So the fraternity of St Ann was actually the tailors, of St Anthony the taverners and vintners, of Sts Crispin and Crispinian the cordiners, of St Cuthbert the baxters, of St Giles the hammermen, of St Mungo the barbers and surgeons.80 The Holy Blood confraternities that appeared in early sixteenth-century Scotland were probably the closest thing Scottish towns had to other European confraternities, though the scarcity of references to anything else in the country that might be a religious confraternity makes it extremely unlikely that such organizations had the social importance that they did in other European centres, like in Bologna, where by the middle of the sixteenth century they gathered possibly 20 per cent of adults into their ranks.81 Given the historical significance of confraternities, which John Bossy has called ‘the most characteristic expressions of late medieval Christianity’, it is somewhat surprising that no clear evidence exists for their widespread popularity in Scottish towns beyond those confraternities of the Holy Blood.82 Lay urban Scots looking for voluntary religious communities beyond this one option could turn instead to guilds.

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Membership in Scottish guilds could normally be obtained in several ways. In Dunfermline, it could be inherited from a father or grandfather or through marriage to the daughter or widow of a guild brother, awarded as a result of good deeds done for the guild or town, recommended by an influential intermediary, or bought for a sum along with a donation in cash or kind of spice and wine. So long as one of these conditions was met, a burgess could become a member of the Dunfermline guild if he swore to obey the guild rules and keep the guild secrets.83 It would seem that in most cases, membership was gained through a kinship connection. In Aberdeen, the largest category of new guild members obtained their membership primarily or solely on account of their fathers having been members. Some became members because of other family connections, such as having an uncle or brother who was already a member, or through marriage to the daughter of a member. A few obtained admittance at the request of a prominent noble or high-ranking royal administrator or ecclesiastic.84 The Charter of Incorporation of the bakers of Edinburgh, written in 1456, indicates that burgess status was not a necessary condition for joining the guild, but that such status was still desirable by stating that the provost, bailies, and counsel of the town had granted that no man of that craft be made burgess without the advice and consent of ‘the maist part of the worthiest of the craft’.85 Although guild membership was overwhelmingly male, a few guild members were women who had inherited membership through their fathers.86 In looking at guilds as voluntary communities, and before turning to the benefits of belonging, it is important to consider how many people really did obtain membership. Dunfermline is one town where membership numbers have been calculated. Here, in the 1430s, a town of a little over 1,000 had approximately 140 burgesses and about 50 guild members.87 While this means that only a small proportion (about 5 per cent) of the inhabitants of the town were members, it also means that more than a third of burgesses, and therefore probably considerably more than a third of eligible candidates, joined the guild, suggesting a fairly widespread appeal. Moreover, the communities of Scottish guilds extended beyond the membership proper at least to the members’ immediate families. The hammermen of Edinburgh on St Eloi’s

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Day in 1543 paid for a trental of masses ‘for ye brother & sisters’, the latter likely referring to wives of guild members.88 Guilds provided economic support for their members in the form of financial assistance for those who had fallen on hard times, and such financial support in times of hardship would undoubtedly have helped not only the members themselves, but also their families who depended on the member’s income. The Statuta Gilde, probably first written in the mid-thirteenth century for Berwick’s guild of merchants but soon adopted by guilds throughout the burghs of Scotland, ordered that if any brother should become decrepit, poor, or ill with an incurable sickness, and if he had nothing of his own by which he might be sustained, then he was to be relieved by the guild.89 The hammermen of Edinburgh gave such relief to its members, for instance in 1494 when they paid 5s to a sick member, and in 1519 when they paid 5s to a member dying of hunger.90 Guilds also provided for survivors. The Statuta Gilde ordered that if a brother died leaving a daughter lawfully born to his wife, and if this daughter had nothing of her own by which she could marry or enter into a religious house, then the guild was to help provide her with the means to do so.91 In 1555 the Edinburgh hammermen paid 40s to the poor widow of a deceased brother.92 Although official membership in a guild was usually quite restricted and comprised only a small minority of a town’s inhabitants, nevertheless at least some aspects of membership clearly extended beyond the members themselves. The catchment area of a guild’s community, therefore, should not be restricted just to its official membership. A conspicuous feature of the Scottish guilds’ sense of community was the high priority they placed on creating and maintaining a sense of internal ‘unity and concord’.93 Much of this was done through the conviviality of the feast, an annual event that gave guilds visible definition and allowed for the expression of companionship at a dignified and prestigious occasion.94 Or so these occasions have been described in the English context; in Scotland, alcohol usually played a prominent role at these events. In 1495, the Edinburgh hammermen spent 16d for wine at their joint feast with the goldsmiths, and a further 3s 2d that same day for their own feasting.95 Nearly three-quarters of the Dunfermline guild’s expenses in 1443 went to pay for alcoholic drinks, which

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remained the most expensive aspect of the feast 60 years later when they spent 14d on wine, 30s on beer, and 3s on ale.96 In spite of the theoretical framework of harmony and conviviality among the brethren, guild members did sometimes fall into disputes with one another. A rule in the Statuta Gilde stated that no brother of a guild was to trespass against another by word or physical strike, and guild masters did take action against those who broke this rule.97 When such disputes arose, the governors of the guilds worked quickly to settle the dispute and restore good internal relations through a public acknowledgement of wrongdoing and payment to a centre of religious devotion. In 1550 the Dunfermline guild court found that James Dwly ‘was the causar of the ewill langagis’ between himself and Thomas Dalgles, dean of the guild, because James had come to the booth of Thomas and there ‘gaif the iniuorius vordis’. James was ordered to ask Thomas for forgiveness and to pay one pound of wax to the Holy Blood altar, and to abstain from such things in the future under pain of loss of his freedom.98 The same pattern of public acknowledgement of wrongdoing followed by donation to a religious centre can be found in a case from Perth, which began in 1547 when the hammermen ordered that Johne Lufrent, because of his despising and admonishing of the deacon, should come the following Sunday at mass with one pound of wax in each hand and, in the presence of the deacon and the whole craft, ask forgiveness of the deacon and the guild. Each of his two servants was also to pay a pound of wax and ask forgiveness. If they failed in this, they were each to pay a stone of wax to St Eloi’s light. ‘And this we do’, the guild officers added, ‘for observing and keeping of gud rewle.’ The following year, the deacon and most of this guild were once again convened for the reformation of faults done by the same Johne Lufrant to the masters of the guild, and they ordered that he ask forgiveness of the deacon and whole guild upon his knees on the Bridge of Tay, where the fault had taken place, and obliged him never to do such a fault again under pain of loss of his freedom. He was also to pay to the guild’s altar two pounds of wax.99 The Edinburgh hammermen’s minutes for 3 July 1495 record the guild’s authority in settling an ongoing conflict between two of its members. The two men agreed to abide by whatever decision was reached by ‘honourable counsellors’ of the guild, and to take one

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another by the hand and ask each other’s forgiveness and to forgive all bygone malice and rancour. In time to come, they were to live and show charity to one another and nevermore have any strife between them. In case this was not enough to inspire them to live together peacefully, they agreed that if either should hurt the other, or the other’s servants or children, he should pay within 20 days two stone of wax to St Eloi’s altar.100 Of course, guilds in medieval Europe had important commercial functions as well as religious ones, such as the protection of monopolies and the ensuing of quality control in manufactured goods though insisting that a prospective member present a ‘masterpiece’ of work for inspection by the masters before admittance. The hatmakers of Edinburgh had it written into their Seal of Cause in 1473 that if any foreigner or stranger of the same craft came to Edinburgh, he was to make a piece of work for the masters to inspect or he was to work in the service of a master of the craft for a year and a day before making two pieces of sufficient work, and obtaining freedom of the town (i.e. burgess status).101 Commercial functions of guilds still had communal religious implications, especially when disagreements arose, such as the protracted dispute over quality of work between the cordiners of Edinburgh and the cordiners of the neighbouring town of Canongate. The bailies of Edinburgh wrote a warrant in 1479 saying that the Edinburgh craft of cordiners had complained of insufficient work defrauding the residents of their town. The bailies therefore ordered that certain persons of the Edinburgh craft were to search for insufficient work on market day, mark it, and produce it to the provost and bailies, who would punish the offenders. In 1493 the cordiners of the Canongate complained that when their work was brought into Edinburgh to be sold, it was being searched as to its goodness, fineness, and workmanship, and that they were being charged a penny each week for the reparation of the Edinburgh craft’s altar of St Crispinian and its divine service; the Edinburgh cordiners replied that they were doing nothing wrong but what was profitable, honourable, and customary. It was decided that on market days in future a master from the Canongate cordiners would accompany the deacon and searchers of the Edinburgh cordiners, examine the work, and take inadequate examples to the provost. Payment of the weekly penny was to continue as before. In spite of this decision, which

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would seem bilateral and eminently fair, this dispute festered for some 40 more years. The Edinburgh cordiners continued to complain of inferior work done by their counterparts in the Canongate, and the Canongate cordiners continued to complain about fees paid to the altar in Edinburgh.102 Scottish guilds, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, served not just commercial and economic functions for their members, but religious ones as well. The overlap of commercial and pious can clearly be seen in an entry in Dunfermline’s guild book that speaks of choosing a market day both ‘for plesaur of God Allmichti’ and also for ‘commone profit of the said burgh’.103 Similarly, the altar of the webster craft of Glasgow was founded ‘for the loving of God, augmentation of the burgh of Glasgow, and their own profit, and to the honour of St. Serf their patron’.104 A visible symbol of the guild’s commercial identities within a religious context was ordered in 1484, when the aldermen and council of Aberdeen decreed that all craftsmen in that town bear the tokens of their craft upon their breast at the offering on Candlemas Day.105 This perceived compatibility between the love of God and the profit of the guild was a hallmark of merchant and craft guilds, though there were limits to exactly how far commercial interests could or should extend. The Aberdeen guild court declared in 1449 that no merchant in the burgh was to open his booth or buy or sell merchandise on a Sunday; anyone disobeying was to give a pound of wax or its equivalent to the dean of the guild, who was to give it to the kirk work.106 Most of the time, however, a guild’s commercial interests and its religious activities were mutually compatible, if not mutually reinforcing. The seal of cause granted to the masons, wrights, carvers, coopers, slaters, and painters of Aberdeen outlined how membership funds payable to the guild went directly into the apparatus of divine worship. Every brother of the crafts entering into the burgh for the purpose of work was to pay the guild half a silver merk, every master was to pay half a merk at the entry into the crafts of a new apprentice, every feed man working for meat and fee was to pay one pound of wax yearly, and every master was to pay a weekly penny. These sums were to be gathered by masters and ‘truly spent in the decoring, upholding, and repairing’ of the altar of their patron, St John the Evangelist, in the parish church of Aberdeen.107

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Guilds in Edinburgh similarly collected funds from members for their religious duties, such as when apprentices to the cordiner craft were to pay at their entry 6s or 8s for the reparation and upholding of divine service at the craft’s altar in St Giles. If masters of this craft failed to attend the quarterly meetings, they were to pay two pounds of wax to this altar.108 The goldsmiths of Edinburgh paid considerably more when joining the guild, a reflection of their higher status and greater wealth. An apprentice to the craft was to pay 10s to the altar of St Eloi upon entry and 50s when made master if he was the legitimate son of a master, but 40s upon entry to the apprenticeship and £5 upon becoming a master if he was a master’s illegitimate son.109 The privilege of monopoly granted to the smiths of Stirling included a means of fund-raising for the parish church, for any person bringing any stuff pertaining to their craft to sell within the burgh had to pay a penny on market day ‘for help of Goddis service to be doune in the said parocht kirk, in honor of God, the blissit Virgin, Sanct Loye, and all sanctis’.110 The Dunfermline guild linked the commercial interests of its members with material support of its religious responsibilities when it licensed David Blakwod to buy and sell Danzig ware for one year, and he in return agreed to give one pound of wax to the Holy Blood altar under the patronage of that guild.111 Guild members’ business ventures could be channelled into repair of church buildings, such as in 1449 when the Aberdeen town council, with the consent of the merchants of the burgh, ordained that every merchant sending goods to Bruges give four groats for each sack of wool, four groats for each parcel of skins, one groat for each barrel of kippered fish or pork, one groat for each dacre of hides, and one penny for every barrel exported to the Firth of Forth or any other place to help pay for the building of a new choir.112 Starting with their entry into the guild, and continuing with their subsequent profitable commercial exchanges, the members of Scottish guilds were encouraged and even ordered to link individual business success to communal religious devotions. One of a guild’s most conspicuous religious functions was the maintenance of its altar. The first craft officially to incorporate and endow an altar and chaplainry in St Giles, Edinburgh, was that of the masons and wrights, who obtained their grant from the burgh council in 1475. Others followed, and by 1522 every craft guild in

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the town had its own altar and chaplain in the church. A guild’s control over its altar was considerable, with rights of presentation and dismissal of the chaplain, the ability to regulate hours of devotions, and care of the dues given by members in order to furnish the altar and support the priest serving there.113 The association between guild and altar was so close that the saint in whose honour the altar was dedicated sometimes stood in for the name of the craft whose guild looked after it, as discussed earlier regarding the fraternities in St Giles, Edinburgh. Guilds could devote a great deal of attention to their altars (see the description of the Edinburgh hammermen’s altar in Chapter 2), but their devotion to their saintly patrons did not end here. The hammermen’s guild of Edinburgh spent considerable sums each year for the celebration of St Giles’ Day, the feast day of their town’s patron saint. Their expenses for that day in 1515 included money spent on a choir, on bells and organs, on incense, on cleaning their hearse, on grass to strew before the altar, on a trental of masses, on a pair of torches, and on three candles for the altar.114 The hammermen of Perth had a ‘stok’, a collection box, to collect money during the display of their relic of St Giles on feast days associated with the saint and on Good Friday. They used this and other monies collected for the upkeep of priests and their vestments, choristers, candles and lamps, towels, bread and wine, and the altar itself, which included images both painted and dressed.115 Just as the social welfare concerns of the guilds could extend beyond their membership, so too could the religious devotions of guilds reach into the broader community. A 1512 ordinance from the magistrates of Aberdeen said that every craft in the town was to have a pair of torches made of four pounds of wax to decorate and worship the sacrament on Corpus Christi, Easter, and Christmas, and at all other times ‘quhen neid is to the honor of the town’.116 In Dunfermline, a significant proportion of guild money went directly to the support of the parish church, and the guild supervized the collection of ‘light silver’, a fund used for the lighting of the parish church with candles.117 Although some historians have suggested that guilds acted in competition with the parish and drew away its revenues, these donations to parish churches suggest quite another kind of relationship: Scottish guilds complemented or even strengthened the

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parishes in which they found themselves.118 With their care of individual altars and parish churches as a whole, their contributions to religious festivities, and their general efforts for the honour of the town, simply put, guilds enriched the urban parishes of Scotland. Among the most spectacular of religious displays in towns were the processions. The hammermen of Edinburgh may have been especially fond of processing, or perhaps their records in this matter are more complete than most, but they were often to be found decked out and walking through the town. They carried their banners on Corpus Christi Day and the octave of Corpus Christi Day, on St Giles’ Day, at the beginning of summer, and at the birth in 1542 of the king’s youngest son. On St Christopher’s Day in 1495, the guild had four men bearing four standards, two men bearing candle-hooks, and two minstrels riding with them in procession.119 By the later medieval period, the day most closely associated with processions was the feast of Corpus Christi. First celebrated at Liège in 1246, promulgated as a feast of the universal Church in 1264, and elevated in 1389 to the status of a major feast, this celebration of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist fell each year in the late spring or early summer, an ideal time for outdoor celebrations. Starting in the second half of the fourteenth century, town councils and crafts in various parts of Europe became increasingly involved with Corpus Christi processions, and instilled into them local political meanings.120 The feast was known in Scotland by 1327, and within a century and a half it was the occasion for processions and plays.121 The earliest certain reference to a religious play in Scotland is to a Corpus Christi play of ‘haliblude’ held at Aberdeen in 1440.122 The hammermen were part of the Corpus Christi procession in Edinburgh from at least 1494, when four of their number bore their standard, two a candle, and four torches especially made for that day’s festivities. Their banner was luxurious, made from eight ells of taffeta with silk fringes, and they were accompanied by musicians and bearers of bread and ale. The play of the hammermen for this day had in its cast Herod, his two daughters, five knights, and four wives.123 Other towns in Scotland also mounted Corpus Christi celebrations. Processions also took place at Perth, whose guild of hammermen carried spears, signets, and banners, and put on a

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play with characters including Adam, Eve, St Eloi, ‘The Marmadin’, the Devil and the Devil’s man, the Angel and the Angel’s clerk, St Erasmus, and the King.124 In Dundee townspeople made use of a colourful variety of props for their Corpus Christi procession, including crowns, angel wings, mitres, Christ’s clothes, 31 swords, St Katherine’s wheel, St Andrew’s cross, and a cradle with three children made out of cloth.125 Ayr cleaned its streets in the 1530s on the eve of Corpus Christi ‘for honour of the sacrament’, so presumably they had a procession as well.126 In at least some towns, processions also took place at the much less meteorologically friendly time of Candlemas. This festival, which came at the beginning of February, was the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary and of the Presentation of the Infant Jesus at the Temple. Aberdeen had processions on both Corpus Christi and Candlemas, and these could involve considerable numbers of participants. In 1443 the listers were to provide the emperor and two doctors and as many squires as they could; the smiths and hammermen the three magi and as many squires as they could; the tailors the Virgin Mary, St Bride, St Helen, Joseph, and as many squires as they could; the skinners two bishops, four angels and as many squires as they could; the websters and waulkers Simeon and his disciples and as many squires as they could; the cordiners ‘the messyngear’ (perhaps the archangel Gabriel) and Moses and as many squires as they could; the fleshers two or four woodmen and as many squires as they could; the brethren of the guild the knights in harness and squires; the baxters the minstrels and as many squires as they could.127 The ordering of processions was carefully considered so that the arrangement of crafts would reflect the relative status of each: the craft with the highest status was most proximate to the Eucharist (and therefore at the very end of the procession), whereas the crafts of lower status were at or near the start. In 1505 the fleshers began the procession in Aberdeen, their distance from the Eucharist reflecting the relatively low status of their work with its unpleasant tasks. Next, in ascending order of status, came the barbers, then the skinners, the cordiners, the tailors, the dyers, the weavers, fullers and bonnet-makers, the wrights, masons, slaters and coopers. Last of all, and nearest to the Eucharist, came the hammermen.128 This order was theoretically a proper sense of

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precedence, and conflict arose when one group jostled for a more prestigious position against others who fought to maintain their place in the line-up. When the skinners complained about their placement relative to the cordiners in the 1505 arrangement, the provost and bailies of Aberdeen decreed that the order would be reversed for future processions. In 1510, however, the earlier statute of 1505 was re-enacted and the skinners were restored to their old place. In 1538 a different group initiated a grievance when the deacon of the hammermen complained to the bailies that the armourers had done them wrong ‘in usurping of their place in the processioun of Corpus Xri, this day, and ganging behind thame, agains the comond ordinance and statute of this nobill burght, and all the borrowis within this realm’. Yet another dispute arose in 1554, when the wrights, masons, coopers and slaters complained that the smiths and hammermen were not keeping their proper place in the procession.129 Disputes about the proper ordering of the hierarchy within processions, even the very fact that there was a hierarchy at all, can be interpreted as meaning that such processions were more forces for division than they were forces for unification in Scottish towns. Their display of ‘structured stratification’, in this view, is ‘a vivid enactment not of oneness but of exclusion’. The non-burgesses, even if they were inhabitants of the town, were, at best, passive participants, and ‘not genuinely involved’.130 While stratification is undeniable, as are occasional disputes over proper ordering, nonetheless the processions that wound their way through Scottish towns can also be read as genuine community expressions of religious identity. They were not signalling homogeneity or equality, but medieval society knew many instances of hierarchies that were, in theory, supposed to combine to form a harmonious whole. Most fundamentally, this was found in the system of the ‘three estates’, where those who pray, those who fight, and those who work were theoretically to function in mutually beneficial ways in order to create a smoothly running society. Processions, like other heterogeneous groupings, were not simply either divisive or cohesive; rather, they demonstrated both individual identity and corporate unity.131 The guilds that walked in procession showcased their particular identities through their banners and dramatic presentations, and they emphasized and reaffirmed their status

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through their position relative to the Eucharist. They were operating within a well-known system of a structured and stratified society, and when grievances arose, their initiators were not criticizing the principles of precedence and hierarchy in these processions, but instead specific details of precedence within the hierarchy. Such a pattern of disputes suggests that these processions, in the language of modern anthropology, were strategies for constructing ‘a limited and limiting power relationship’, producing both ‘negotiated appropriation’ and also ‘redemptive reinterpretation of the hegemonic order’.132 They were not devoid of power differential, but they were not fully exclusive either. As for the argument that those people not marching in procession were excluded from it, considerations ought to take into account a pre-modern sense of what constitutes participation. For example, processions were vehicles for carrying sacred objects into the midst of the laity. They moved people and the objects they carried around to different parts of the town, bringing the sacred Eucharist to the laity even outside the confines of a church, and the laity reciprocated this bestowal of spiritual power by offering deference to the objects.133 Furthermore, as with the mass, late medieval optical theories suggest that the activity of watching the procession was actually a means of participating in it. Viewers were brought under the influence of material and spiritual emanations radiating from the procession, and also became in some sense interchangeable with the processors themselves, since the spectators were viewing the marchers at the same time as the marchers were viewing them.134 Thus did the distinction between ‘participant’ and ‘observer’ become at least blurred, if not effaced, in the visual culture of Scottish towns, and the beneficial effects of processions reach beyond the processors themselves. Processions also had obvious didactic potential to teach people about the Eucharist, the saints, and the membership of various guilds, and processions in general were believed to have an effective aspect as well. In 1456 parliament required processions twice a week by Scottish prelates to help assuage the plague, and in 1523 the Lords of Council demanded that general processions be made praying for the state and prosperity of the governor.135 The processions demonstrated in clear fashion how the guilds wound their way through the culture of Scottish towns. Whether

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the towns themselves were possessed of a sense of communal religious identity is also worthy of consideration.

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Burghs The bailies and council of Aberdeen, with the advice of their neighbours, ordered in 1546 that St Nicholas bread silver be given to sustain people sick with plague for the duration of their disease and the town’s will.136 Thus monies collected for Eucharistic devotion in the parish church went to the care of sick parishioners and would continue to do so for as long as the town wished. A prominent question arising from the study of religion in Scottish towns in the pre-Reformation period concerns whether there was a sense of religious community at the town level: was the Scottish burgh a single corpus christianium, or body of Christians, or was it a series of distinct worshipping units?137 Towns undeniably had religious identities. Connections between political fortunes, patron saints, and improvements to church buildings have already been examined for St Andrews and Glasgow. Perth was so closely associated with the patron of its church, St John the Baptist, that it was often called St Johnstoun.138 Edinburgh celebrated the feast day of St Giles, the town’s patron saint, in part through funds provided by the guild of hammermen, as described above, but also with minstrels and bull-baiting paid from the expenses of the town.139 Some of the implications of the uniparochial nature of Scottish towns have already been discussed, but it is worth noting further that towns often bore considerable responsibility for the fabric of their parish churches. In 1440, the provost, bailies, and community of Perth accepted 200 merks from a monastery in Dunfermline in order to build and maintain the choir of their parish church.140 By 1443, the burgh of Dundee had agreed that it would take over responsibility for the choir of St Mary’s. This responsibility, traditionally that of the rector, included ‘constructing, sustaining, reforming and repairing the choir in its walls, windows, pillars, window-glass, wood-work, roof and covering’, as well as the ‘vestments, books, chalices, palls, and cloths of the great altar, and other ornaments’ in the choir.141 Important as they were, parish churches were not the only centres of worship within many towns. Edinburgh had three colle-

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giate churches and several private chapels as well as a poor hospital, a Franciscan friary, and a Dominican friary within its bounds. Aberdeen had houses of Dominicans, Trinitarians, Carmelites, and Franciscans, while Perth had houses of Dominicans, Carmelites, Franciscans, and Carthusians. Tensions sometimes arose between these religious houses and the laypeople who were their neighbours. In 1375, the prioress and Benedictine monastery of North Berwick petitioned for perpetual enclosure, ‘they being much molested by the neighbourhood and visits of nobles and other secular persons’.142 These religious women did not offer further reasons for their request, but other disagreements left additional details in the records. A disagreement between the Dominicans and the burgesses of Ayr began in 1400 when the friars protested the king’s granting of royal customs of the burgh to the burgesses. The case was argued on one side by Robert of Linlithgow, prior of the Dominicans, and on the other by Reginald of Fenwick, alderman of Ayr, and William Nelson, burgess of Ayr. The decision handed down by Robert, Duke of Albany, was that the community of Ayr was to pay £20 annually to the friars. Half of this sum would come from the revenue of the burgh, and the other half would come from handing over various mills and dams to the Dominicans, who would maintain them at their own expense and allow the burgesses and shopkeepers to have their cereals ground at 3d per boll.143 A dispute over a more obviously religious contention broke out in the mid-fifteenth century when the bailies and inhabitants of Peebles sent a petition to the Pope in which they explained that a piece of the True Cross that had long been in their care became damaged while under the care of the friars. Moreover, because they feared that the friars might steal the relic away, they expelled the friars from the town with the intent of preserving the relic and governing the chapel where it was housed themselves. The pope took the side of the townspeople and approved the petition.144 The residents of Perth normally got along well with their local house of Carthusians, the austere and silent monks whose church housed the elaborate tomb of King James I, but not always. The king had granted to the monks a conduit of water from the mill dam on the River Almond to their monastery, but in about 1471, while the prior was away in Edinburgh, the civic leaders of Perth ordered that the conduit be broken, thus

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stopping the Carthusian house’s supply of water. The monks complained to the King, who judged the case in their favour and ordered the town council to restore the conduit to its earlier condition at their own expense.145 In spite of occasional disputes like these, relations between Scottish towns and urban-based religious orders were on the whole quite smooth. They were so cordial in Linlithgow that the prior of the Carmelite house there was made a burgess of the town in 1531 without having to pay the usual fee. This arrangement had some reciprocity to it, for shortly thereafter the Carmelite convent was used as a meeting place by the burgh court.146 Urban laypeople on the whole had an especially close relationship with the Dominicans.147 Among this order’s most noted contributions to Scottish history is the first written record of the distillation of whisky, dating from 1495, when the friar John Cor was given 8 bolls of malted barley by the Crown to make ‘aquavite’.148 The Dominicans were well established in several Scottish towns. They ministered to townspeople of all social levels, and their biggest financial supporters as a group were the burgesses. The number of townspeople of Ayr who founded anniversaries in the Dominican house there provides some measure of their popularity. They included Adam de Boure, who founded an anniversary for himself, his wife Ellen, his parents, and all the faithful departed in 1423; Allan White, who founded one for himself and his wife Jonet Hill in 1469; Matthew M’Nedyr, who founded one for himself and his wife Katherine in 1471; William Noble and Isabella Coupland, his wife, who founded one in 1488; William Bell and Agnes Mure, his wife, who founded one in 1505; Mariota Cury, who founded one with consent of her husband, John Lang, for the souls of her father and her mother in 1507; John Crawford and Jonet Marshall, his wife, who founded one in 1508; and John Maknedon and Mariota Martin, his wife, who founded one in 1515.149 If, as seems likely, these people founding anniversaries with the Dominicans were also planning on being buried within this order’s chapel, some competition may have arisen between parishes and religious orders over burial of well-to-do laypeople and the revenues they brought.150 No direct evidence, however, points conclusively to any hard feelings. The Dominicans’ most prominent function was burial of the

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dead, but their good education and multifaceted local connections also made these friars valuable members of the community in other ways. They tended the lawns at Stirling Castle and fixed the town clock of Aberdeen when it broke. Their houses and churches in various towns were sites for the regular signing and witnessing of important documents, and sometimes also for carrying out the business of the exchequer, providing a residence for the royal family, and serving as a meeting place for guilds.151 The Dominicans were clearly well integrated into the wider life of Scottish towns, which is not surprising considering that throughout western Europe their basic mission was so closely tied to preaching, and also considering that in Scottish towns their members came from local families.152 Towns were certainly not free from disagreement or dispute. In just one month during 1398, the first year of Aberdeen’s council records, 14 people were charged with assault; subsequent records reveal dozens of convictions each year.153 In the 1530s, the small burgh of Selkirk struggled to restrain control by local lairds over one of its parish church’s altars.154 The settlement of disputes often involved religious rituals to heal the rifts and restore harmony. The provost and bailies of Stirling heard a case in 1525 in which Willie Fiddler, alias Ednom, had used violent and impertinent language against James Crag, chaplain. They ordered that Willie was no more to bother Sir James, and that if he did he was to pay 40s to the Roodwork (in the parish church).155 A more detailed account of reconciliation comes from Perth when, in 1502, the provost, bailies and council of Perth gathered in the tolbooth to advise on what should be done to remedy the ‘gret offence’ committed by Jhone Brison and his man ‘Hieland’ (perhaps a Gaelic name unpronounceable by the scribe) against the bailie William Crawfurd. The town officials decided that Jhone Brison and Hieland should come into the church the next Sunday or another solemn day thought expedient by the provost and council. Before the High Mass and in front of the high altar, in the presence of the council and their neighbours, Jhone Brisone was to take off his hat and his bonnet and recognize that he had greatly offended the bailie. He was to seek of the provost and council that they should ask William to forgive him ‘the rancur of his hart’, and to promise that in time coming he would stand William in great stead, and ‘do him als

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mekle honour and plesance as he hes done him displesance’. Jhone was also to promise that his man Hieland would come hatless and bonnetless, with his knife drawn in his hand, kneel on one knee upon the ground before the high altar, and recognise that he had greatly faulted and offended William. He was then to seek that the provost and bailies and council ask William to take him into favour and to ‘forgif him the rancour of his hart’, and to promise him service all the days of his life. Hieland was to deliver his knife out of his hand to William to ask him forgiveness, and then go to the stocks at the market cross or to the tolbooth, as it pleased the provost and council, and to remain there eight days.156 This ceremony of reconciliation was connected with pious concerns both by occurring at a particularly holy time – on a Sunday or other solemn day and before the High Mass – and at a holy place – in front of the high altar in church. It demanded that forgiveness be sought not just for damaging actions, but also for hostile feelings, and it required assurance that the offended party would be held in high regard by the offenders both in the present and in the future. Care was taken to heal the rift in the community, to acknowledge past faults, and to cleanse the actors’ moral sense for the future well-being of the community. When a court ordered an offender to ask forgiveness in church, they probably hoped that the entire community would witness the act, and that the location would encourage or pressure the petitioner to speak with genuine contrition. William Sadler and his wife Elizabeth Sutherland called Master Thomas Gaderar on the high street of Elgin, in the presence of ‘diueris strangeris’, such things as ‘javell prest, crukit carlis get, thief carle and cumm of carlis and siclik vtheris iniurius vordis’. William was ordered to come to the parish church on the following Sunday and at the time of the High Mass, ‘thair in the presens of the haill parochine beand present for the tyme’, to ask Thomas for forgiveness, to say ‘that he falit in the saying of the aboune writtin iniuris’, and offer to Thomas a quarter-pound wax candle.157 This candle was likely meant to be given to an altar, as in 1551 when Andrew Boyne was found to have wronged James Gardin, bailie, by striking him. He was ordered openly to ask the bailie for forgiveness in the parish church at the time of the High Mass and also to offer him a wax candle weighing three pounds to be burnt before the altar of St

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Giles.158 Similar reparations for injuries were made in churches throughout the burghs of Scotland. Davy Patrickson, burgess of Aberdeen, when found to have rebelled against an alderman, was ordered to come on Sunday at the time of High Mass to St Nicholas church barefoot, in a loose gown, and with a one-pound wax candle in his hand. There he was to offer the candle to the altar and ask the alderman and council for forgiveness. From that day forward, Patrickson was to give a pint of wine to the church each week for a year.159 A man and a woman who were brought before the burgh assize in Aberdeen in 1544 for breach of the peace were sentenced to time in the pillory, and afterwards were to march before the procession of clerks and priests at the beginning of the High Mass clad only in shirts and each carrying a one-pound candle for the church, then to fall to their knees and seek forgiveness.160 In 1526 Besse Birs was in court for the ‘strublance and mispersoning’ of a chaplain from whom she was to ask forgiveness upon her knees. She fulfilled her sentence, but the court ordered that if ‘ever she faltit to him in tymes cuming’ she was to pay two pounds of wax to the Holy Blood light and be banished from the town.161 For all their symbols of unity, of being civic examples of a corpus christianum, the people of Scottish towns were nonetheless apt to disagree with one another, sometimes sharply and with undignified public invective. And sometimes these disagreements were even over access to religious sites and profits derived from church property. When the townspeople of Scotland looked to resolve their disputes, however, or when the civic authorities arranged a resolution, they used the symbols of local communal religion.

Conclusion Corporate forms of Christianity were available to Scottish townspeople at various levels, most commonly through parishes, guilds, and the burghs themselves. Membership in some – such as the parishes – was universal, involuntary, and determined by accident of location, while membership in others – such as the guilds – was selective, elective, and influenced by a number of factors that could include status, occupation, and ceremonial preference.

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Membership in the burghs remains somewhat uncertain, depending on whether one interprets the ‘community of the burgh’ as applying to all the inhabitants of a town or merely to the urban elite. What is clear is that each of these groups employed religious symbols to express a sense of community and each deployed religious mechanisms to strengthen communal endeavours. One possible effect of the presence of multiple religious communities within towns is the weakening in a sense of urban unity: as burgh churches in larger towns were granted collegiate status, and as craft altars for individual groups proliferated, ‘the notion of the burgh as a single corpus christianum gave way to a mélange of civic and occupational piety’.162 But such diversification of options need not have led to a fracturing of community so much as to a richer array of choice and a relieving of population pressure on the main altars of the parish churches. The parishes and towns were mostly coterminous, an arrangement that may, in fact, have strengthened for each their sense of unity as a corpus christianum. And although in some of the larger towns this situation would have made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for all the town’s inhabitants to fit inside the parish church at the same time, such an inconvenience would have been offset by the availability of other gathering places for corporate religious devotion, including various chapels and houses of religious orders, perhaps also by the multiplicity of side altars in parish churches that allowed for a temporal and spatial staggering of masses. The biggest challenges that Scottish townspeople faced in their efforts at forging and maintaining religious communities were conflict within the groups themselves and competition between the different groups vying for support. Regarding relations within a group, the people of Scottish towns appear to have been like other medieval and early modern Europeans who accepted that their communities did not necessarily have to be socially homogeneous, and that that they could instead include difference and tension among members working for the good of the group and in pursuit of common goals.163 Regarding relations between groups, in spite of the instances of friction between different religious organizations in Scottish towns as each pursued its goals, perhaps most obviously when religious orders sought to preserve what they saw

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as their rights against townspeople who tried to maintain what they saw as their own, the various religious communities in Scottish towns functioned predominantly in ways that were more complementary than competitive. In 1532, for example, the provost and council of Aberdeen assigned all debts owed to St Nicholas to go to the ministers of the kirk work and to be used for artillery, gunpowder, fortifications and other instruments required for war, ‘for the defence of the guid tovne, and resisting of our auld ennemies of Ingland’.164 During times of need, one community could certainly help another and the welfare of the town remained linked at many levels to the communities of the kirk. The smooth and harmonious unity within and between groups that was espoused in theory was sometimes punctured in practice by conflicts arising from the messy realities of day-to-day life. When this happened, however, Scottish townspeople sought to heal the rift through reconciliation and compensation enacted in religiously significant space. The extent to which individual townspeople expected or insisted that their personal desires take precedence over the conventions of the group will be a subject of the following chapter.

Notes 1 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 20. 2 Lynch, Spearman, and Stell, Scottish Medieval Town, 11; Dennison, ‘Power to the People?’ 112–13; Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560, 183. 3 Tanner, Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532, 2; Harvey, Lay Religious Life in Late Medieval Durham, 1–2. 4 Harding, Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670, 35. 5 Obit Book of the Church of St John the Baptist, Ayr, 36–7. 6 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. IX (1431–1447), 412–13; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XIII (1471–84), 489–90; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XV, Innocent VIII, Lateran Registers (1484– 1492), 379–80. 7 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. VIII (1427–1447), 470.

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8 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. IX (1431–1447), 152–3; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. X (1447–1455), 697–8. 9 John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 49–50. 10 Fawcett, ‘The Blackadder Aisle at Glasgow Cathedral’; Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560, 60–74. 11 Torrie, Medieval Dundee, 62. 12 Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland, 141–2; Lynch, DesBrisay and Pittock, ‘The Faith of the People’, 291–4; Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 260–2. 13 Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560, 182–5. 14 Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560, 185–215. 15 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, xxii, 8–16; Ewan, Townlife, 44. 16 Cowan, ‘The Emergence of the Urban Parish’, 93; Cowan, ‘Church and Society’, 119. 17 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XVII, part 1, Alexander VI (1492–1503), 37–8. 18 Epistolare in usum Ecclesiae Cathedralis Aberdonensis, 95–103; Registrum Episcopatus Aberdonensis, 179–99. 19 Records of Old Aberdeen 1498–1903, 266–75. 20 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 10. 21 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. IX (1431–1447), 267. 22 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398– 1570, 41. 23 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 19–21, 72, 73, 75, 79, 83, 84, 86, 96, 105, 107, 109, 112, 115, 118, 120, 126. 24 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 36. 25 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 25, 40, 58; Fawcett, Scottish Medieval Churches, 321. 26 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 29, 37. 27 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 37, 54, 57. 28 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 118; Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 149. 29 ‘Ecclesiastical Statutes of the XIIIth Century’, in Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 47. 30 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 28–9, 111, 120.

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31 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 29, 148. 32 McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 96–7. 33 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling, 1519–1666, 261–2. 34 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 28–9, 111, 120, 148; McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 96–7; Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 15; McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland 1500–1560’, 97. 35 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 143. 36 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling, 1519–1666, 5, 39. 37 Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 22. 38 ‘Synodal Statutes of the Diocese of Aberdeen, XIIIth Century’, in Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 33. 39 Epistolare in usum Ecclesiae Cathedralis Aberdonensis, 100. 40 Hay. William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 3. 41 Catechism of John Hamilton, 203, 210–11. 42 Donaldson, Faith of the Scots, 46. 43 Bossy, ‘The Mass as a Social Institution 1200–1700’, 35–6. 44 Reinburg, ‘Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France’. 45 Purser, ‘Early Modern Music’, 212–24; Purser, Scotland’s Music, 97–106; Preece, Our Awin Scottis Use, 101–28, 151–68; Ross, Musick Fyne, 3–64. 46 Shead, ‘Medieval Glasgow’, 34–43; Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 26; Murray, ‘The Parish Clerk and Song School of Inverness, 1538–9’, 107–15. 47 Dowden, ‘The Inventory of Ornaments, Jewels, Relicks, Vestments, Service-books, &c, belonging to the Cathedral Church of Glasgow in 1432’, 305. 48 Scribner, ‘Perceptions of the Sacred in Germany at the End of the Middle Ages’. 49 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages, 3, 133–49. 50 Cowan, ‘The Spiritual Ties of Kinship in Pre-Reformation Scotland’, 176–9. 51 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 8–10. 52 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 221. 53 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 30–2, 62. 54 Catechism of John Hamilton, 189–92. 55 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 225. 56 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 17. 57 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 49–119. 58 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 87, 211, 221; Cowan,

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‘The Spiritual Ties of Kinship in Pre-Reformation Scotland’, 116–18. 59 Calendar of Papal Letters to Scotland of Benedict XIII of Avignon 1394–1419, 324. 60 Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 5, 6; Furneaux, ‘Pre-Reformation Scottish Marriage Cases in the Archives of the Papal Penitentiary’. 61 Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 72–3. 62 Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 153. 63 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 27–9. 64 Hay, William Hay’s Lectures on Marriage, 29–33. 65 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 256. 66 St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume I, 27–8; McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 262. 67 McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 237; Ayr Burgh Accounts, 96. 68 NAS GD3/1/4518; Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 34; NAS GD4/34. 69 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 40. 70 McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 264; Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, I, 149. 71 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 42, 76–7. 72 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 82, 137. 73 Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300, 68, 77–8. 74 Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, 58; Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland, 58. 75 Perth Guildry Book 1452–1601, iv–xi. 76 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 17. 77 Perth Guildry Book 1452–1601, #261; McRoberts, ‘The Fetternear Banner’, 77, Burgh Laws of Dundee, 93–4. 78 McRoberts, ‘The Fetternear Banner’, 77, 81–2. 79 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 8, 9, 36, 37, 52, 53, 58, 66, 67, 75, 82, 83, 84. 80 Hay, ‘The Late Medieval Development of the High Kirk of St Giles, Edinburgh’, 254. 81 Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna, 132. 82 Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, 58. 83 Gild Court Book of Dunfermline, 1433–1597, xxiv, 45, 53, 68, 71, 86, 89. 84 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 10–15. 85 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, xi–xii. 86 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 64; Ewan, ‘Mons Meg and Merchant Meg’, 132.

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87 Gild Court Book of Dunfermline 1433–1597, xviii. 88 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 111. 89 Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland Vol. 1 1124–1424, 69. 90 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 5, 70. 91 Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland Vol. 1 1124–1424, 69–70. 92 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 159. 93 Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland Vol. 1 1124–1424, 64. 94 Rosser, ‘Going to the Fraternity Feast’. 95 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 6. 96 Torrie, ‘The Guild in Fifteenth-Century Dunfermline’, 257. 97 Ancient Laws and Customs of the Burghs of Scotland Vol. 1 1124–1424, 67. 98 Gild Court Book of Dunfermline 1433–1597, 93. 99 Perth Hammermen Book (1518–1568), 62, 66. 100 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, p. 8. 101 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, xi–xii. 102 NAS GD 348/3, 4, 6, 8, 9. 103 Gild Court Book of Dunfermline 1433–1597, 18–19. 104 Fitch, Search for Salvation, 102. 105 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 413–14. 106 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 126. 107 Bain, Merchant and Craft Guilds, 239. 108 NAS GD 348/7. 109 Edinburgh Goldsmiths’ Minutes 1525–1700, 206–8. 110 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 3. 111 Gild Court Book of Dunfermline 1433–1597, 71. 112 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, xxviii–xxix, 327; Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 25–6, 125. 113 Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, 28–9. 114 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 57–8. 115 Perth Hammermen Book (1518–1568), 3, 5, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19–20; Hall, ‘Of Holy Men and Heroes’, 73. 116 Bain, Merchant and Craft Guilds, 52. 117 Gild Court Book of Dunfermline 1433–1597, xxi, 55. 118 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 149; Rosser, ‘Communities of Parish and Guild in the Late Middle Ages’, 29–55; Brown, Popular Piety in Late Medieval England, 157–8, 177–9; Kümin, Shaping of a Community, 153–4; French, People of the Parish, 22. 119 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 3, 7, 9, 18, 19, 23, 32, 37, 43, 53, 56, 65, 68, 78, 82, 83, 84, 89, 108, 114,

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123, 136, 144, 154. 120 Rubin, Corpus Christi, 213–87. 121 Ditchburn, ‘The “McRoberts Thesis” and Patterns of Sanctity in Late Medieval Scotland’, 179. 122 Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 61. 123 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St Giles Church, 3, 40, 41, 47–8, 60. 124 Perth Hammermen Book (1518–1568), 2, 3, 10, 18, 19, 26, 33. 125 Maxwell, History of Old Dundee, 562. 126 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, p. 20. 127 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 68–9. 128 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 450–1. 129 Bain, Merchant and Craft Guilds, 57–9. 130 Dennison, ‘Power to the People?’, 113. 131 Zika, ‘Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages’, 41–2. 132 Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. 133 Muir, ‘The Eye of the Procession’, 131–2, 150. 134 Muir, ‘The Eye of the Procession’. 135 Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs 1501–1554, 186; Fitch, Search for Salvation, 101. 136 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 244. 137 Lynch, ‘The Social and Economic Structure of the Larger Towns, 1450–1600’, 26; Dennison, ‘Power to the People?’, 113. 138 Hall, ‘Of Holy Men and Heroes’, 74–6. 139 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume One, 77, 110, 174, 176, 209, 241. 140 NAS B59/28/3. 141 Torrie, Medieval Dundee. 142 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. IV (1362–1404), 212. 143 Munimenta Fratrum Predicatorum de Are, 35–6, 38–42. 144 Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, 26; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XII (1458–1471), 168–70. 145 Fittis, Ecclesiastical Annals of Perth to the Period of the Reformation, 212–64. 146 Stones, Three Scottish Carmelite Friaries, 54. 147 Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland. 148 TA, I, 176. 149 Munimenta Fratrum Predicatorum de Are, 47, 51–2, 53, 60–1, 71–2, 73, 74–5, 78–9. 150 Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland, 96, 177–98.

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151 Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland. 152 Lynch, DesBrisay and Pittock,’The Faith of the People’, 294; Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland. 153 DesBisay, Ewan and Diack, ‘Life in the Two Towns’. 154 Symms, ‘A Disputed Altar’. 155 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 21. 156 Perth Guildry Book 1452–1601, #254; see also Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 40–1; Ewan, ‘“Tongue, you lied’”; Miscellany of the Spalding Club, Volume 5, 30; Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, I, 24, 46, 282. 157 Records of Elgin 1234–1800, 75. 158 Records of Elgin 1234–1800, 109. 159 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 24. 160 Aberdeen Burgh Records, 212, quoted in McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 265. 161 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 358. 162 Lynch, ‘The Social and Economic Structure of the Larger Towns, 1450–1600’, 261. 163 French, People of the Parish, 21–5. 164 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398– 1570, I, 145.

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When Margaret Craufurd established an anniversary in 1508 at her parish church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, she began her foundation charter with a clear statement of individual spiritual responsibility. ‘We shall all stand before the judgment-seat of our Lord Jesus Christ to receive according as we have done in the body whether it be good or whether it be evil’, the charter asserted, expressing the conviction that each individual person would be held accountable after death for his or her actions during life. Then the charter went on to explain the belief concerning how works of mercy would benefit the soul come judgement time, ‘so that we may reap in heaven with multiplied fruit the things which we have sown on earth’. Therefore, the charter continued, Margaret Craufurd gave an annual rent of 20s to the choir of the parish church for the singing of an anniversary for the salvation of some specific individual souls (including her own along with those of her late husband and their parents), as well as some groups of souls (including those of benefactors and all the faithful departed). Margaret Craufurd’s foundation was designed to assist certain individual souls in particular within the much larger group, and it was a work of mercy that was believed to help the individual soul of the founder above all others. Yet it was also a foundation that would lead to communal lay religious behaviour. For on the day of the anniversary each year, the crier was to go through the whole town with the small bell ‘to incite people to pray for the salvation of the souls aforesaid’.1 The foundation may have been initiated by an individual, but its functioning depended on participation by a wider group. Margaret Craufurd was not alone in believing that she

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possessed free will to act with or against God’s will, and that she would be held to account after her death for the actions that she undertook during her life. A fifteenth-century Scottish prayer echoes her sense of spiritual accountability by asking for help directly from God – ‘Thy power defend ws, thy wisdome direct ws, thy fathirly piete correk ws; and send ws ane gracius life and ane blissit ending’ – but also for God’s help in the self-direction of a good life – ‘Iesu, gif ws grace to ordour our life and the werkis of our saule and body with actual entent.’2 People in the towns of Scotland ordered their individual religious lives and works in a variety of ways. They personalized their religious practices to suit individual circumstances, and they sometimes struggled to ensure that their particular plans were carried out as they had directed. Their practices and plans do suggest a fairly widespread interest in forms of religion that emphasized the internal and the individual, but they do not contradict the public and communal forms discussed in the previous chapter; for the most part, individual religious practices in Scottish towns drew from the larger religious communities. Thus Margaret Craufurd believed that she would be judged as an individual after her death but she founded an anniversary so that others would pray for her, and the fifteenth-century prayer asked for God’s help in living an individually good life but made the request in the first-person plural. The personal and the particular were important for many in the towns of Scotland, but individual religious responsibility was undertaken in the context of the wider religious society.

Religious exclusion The importance of the wider society’s role is shown by the stark separation imposed, at least in theory, by religious exclusion. The vast majority of people in Scotland were initiated into the community of Christians shortly after birth in the ceremony of baptism and only a few, such as the Russian slave sold in the early sixteenth century and some of the Moors in the royal court, likely remained unbaptized as adults.3 Baptism brought people formally into Christian society (see Chapter 3), but even after their baptismal initiation people could be excluded from some or all aspects of corporate Christianity. A few were simply banished

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outright from their town. Thomas Gray, a tailor in fifteenthcentury Aberdeen, was convicted of making a disturbance in the church, night walking, and other misdeeds, for which he was ordered to undertake a ritual of public penance in his parish church and warned that if he were ever to be convicted again of such offences, he was to be banished from the town without delay.4 As in this case, banishment was usually reserved for repeat offenders. If the threat of banishment was thought insufficient, still harsher penalties could be applied. Ellen Ranaldson and her mother Elsbeth Meldrum, also inhabitants of Aberdeen, were banished in 1539 for opening neighbours’ doors and robbing them under silence of night, and for breaking some other law. If either were ever found within the town again, she was to be branded with iron on the cheek.5 Banishment meant exclusion from a particular town, but not from Christian society as a whole. As such, it was likely regarded as primarily a civic, rather than religious, form of exclusion. The most severe religious form of ostracism was excommunication, which theoretically meant separation from the whole community of Christians both in life and in death. Sometimes, excommunication was enacted as a response to violence against religious personnel or the despoiling of religious goods. In 1469, for example, the abbot of Dryburgh Abbey was granted the faculty to excommunicate by name those who committed theft, rape, murder, or arson in his monastery, or who removed its goods or did violence to its canons or servants.6 Excommunication could also be enacted in response to a much broader range of behaviours. A General Excommunication used in Aberdeen diocese in the fifteenth century was to be published in churches four times a year and was written in Scots, presumably so that its meaning and implications would be clear to laypeople as well as clerics. It provided a long list of people who were to be cursed, condemned, and shut out ‘fra the fredome of Haly Kyrk’. By and large, these were people who were in some sense anti-social and who behaved in ways inimical to the smooth functioning of society, as shown by the inclusion of the general category of disturbers of the peace. Agents of more specific wrongdoings were included as well, such as thieves and those who interfere with marriage or inheritance laws, as well as more violent malefactors such as those who take

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life or limb (or honour or goods) because of malice or greed, those who abandon or murder children, and poisoners. Also to be excommunicated were people engaging in dishonest business practices, such as false assessors, usurers, counterfeiters and clippers of money as well as employers of false weights and measures, along with people unfairly dishonouring others, such as libellers and slanderers. Probably not surprisingly, heretics, witches, and those who trust in witches were included among those to be excommunicated, and those who harm or threaten harm to church personnel or church property, such as those who conspire against bishops, those who disrupt the proper placement of holy objects, those who interfere with the property rights of the church, and those who forge papal bulls. Those of a more combative inclination who burn churches or lay violent hand on clerics are singled out for particular attention. Even those who negatively interfere with ecclesiastical business, such as false teithers, are included. The curse that was to be spoken against the excommunicates was as comprehensive as the list of those who were to receive it. They were told that they were cursed when sitting, standing, riding, walking, sleeping, eating, and drinking, in and out of their houses. They were cursed ‘fra the crowne of the hede to the soile of the fute’, to be cast out of the dwelling places of Christian men, and to lose their possessions. They were to have no helpers, and they were to be taken out of the book of life. At the end of the cursing came a dramatic ritual punctuation mark, when a candle was cast on the ground and extinguished and, a bell was rung.7 This General Excommunication sounds extensive in its coverage and very harsh in its execution, but in actual practice excommunication could take on different levels of severity. The case of Sir Robert Wemys, vicar of the parish church of Stirling, shows how escalation could take some time and several stages. In 1531 he was denounced as excommunicated at the time of High Mass on Ascension Day in his own church. A few weeks later, he was formally denounced in the parish church as excommunicated with aggravation, and a few weeks after that, denounced as excommunicated with double aggravation, this time with candles cast down to the ground and bells rung.8 Sometimes a sentence of excommunication was simply disregarded or even explicitly rejected. In

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1524, four burgesses in Ayr defied the curate who had ordered them to leave the church because, they said, the letters read out were unlawful since the curate had proceeded with them before their trial had taken place.9 The religious ritual of excommunication was supposed to be a medicinal rather than a punitive sanction, temporarily casting people out of the community in order to heal both the community as a whole and the offenders individually.10 In this sense, it had a salutary function similar to that of penance. Perhaps in such a spirit, some people took the ritual seriously enough that they made considerable efforts to bring themselves back into the fold. In 1516 William Smith sought absolution in Glasgow, and in 1532 William Leslie appeared at the court of the Dean of Christianity in the Garioch, offering to obey the mandate of the church and asking that the Dean give him absolution ‘that he may dwell among the faithful of Christ’.11 Not all forms of exclusion were intended as didactic and temporary. A diagnosis of leprosy could lead to a more permanent form of exclusion undertaken not as a corrective measure, but as a protective one. Later medieval attitudes towards leprosy were paradoxical and even contradictory: affliction was a punishment for sin and a metaphor for sin, but also an opportunity for Christlike suffering and redemption. Given such ambiguity and ambivalence, it is not surprising to see a variety of social and religious responses to those diagnosed with the disease.12 In Scottish towns lepers were neither completely shunned nor fully accepted; they were sometimes removed to the margins, but still acknowledged as having a claim on membership in society. Thirteenth-century Church statutes from Aberdeen capture something of the range of attitudes. The general practice, according to these statutes, was to separate those with leprosy from society, but when the lepers went to ‘lonely places’ they were still connected to their parishes: they were to continue to donate to their parish churches if possible, and they were not to be further constrained if they refused, for ‘affliction should not be added to the afflicted, but rather pity should be shown to their miseries’.13 Physical exclusion from society may have been an ideal, but not full spiritual or affective exclusion. Other Scottish records make it clear that physical exclusion was

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not a reality either, and that lepers were not all confined to remote areas. A parliamentary act of 1427 ordered that no ‘lipper folk’ were to enter into any burgh except on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10 to 2, thus essentially granting permission for lepers to come into towns three times per week, though their activities while in the burghs were somewhat limited: they were not permitted to beg in the church or churchyard nor in any other place except at the hospital, at the port of the town, or outside the town.14 Lepers sometimes lived together in their own communities, but these were not necessarily far removed from the rest of society. A well-known literary description of a leper hospital is that in Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, where it is located ‘at the tounis end’, suggesting geographic marginalization, though not complete geographic separation.15A leper hospital located near the bridge of Glasgow in the fifteenth century was not only geographically close to the town, but socially close as well. Its procurator, actor, factor and special messenger was John Elphynstoun, a burgess of Glasgow, and it received numerous gifts from Glasgow burgesses in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries for the ‘needy poor and leprous persons’ to pray yearly and daily for the donors.16 That the prayers of the inmates should be thought valuable indicates that the inmates themselves were considered connected both to God and also to the wider human society, perhaps even that they were especially holy and akin to residents in monasteries. Not all lepers or suspected lepers went to hospitals. A chaplain in a parish church in the St Andrews diocese was still in place long after contracting the disease, and when he became unable to minister in person a coadjutor was appointed to furnish the sick man with all the necessities of life; the same was to be done for a leprous rector in the diocese. Although in both cases the affliction was described as a scandal to the people and to the priestly office, nevertheless, care was taken for the maintenance of the sick men, and no mention is made of having them separated from society.17 A series of inquests from Stirling demonstrates how a chaplain afflicted with leprosy remained in his community for many years, in spite of some sense that this was improper according to old custom. An inquest from 1528 found that the chaplain Sir John Hountter was a leper, and that he had been charged as such in

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three or four head courts before. It ordered that he was to be ‘put to ane desert without the burgh, as lypir men wsit to be demanit in tymis bypast’. The sentence was evidently not carried out immediately, however, since he was found to be a leper once more in January 1529 and again in April 1529, at which time he was declared not fit to remain with healthy people. In October 1529 he was found yet again to be a leper, and this time the inquest ordered that the bailies go with some neighbours to examine various people possibly related to Hountter to see if they, too, were infected. In January 1530 he was found to be a leper once more, along with one of the people examined the previous October. The records are missing from April 1530 to December 1544, but in January 1545 an inquest ordered men of understanding to consider whether Cristian Huntair, presumably a relative, was a leper. If so, she was to be put ‘solitair’, and in the meantime she was to be forbidden to go to the market.18 This series of inquests, with its repeated decision that John Hountter be separated from society, demonstrates that although a diagnosis of leprosy could trigger an order for separation, it did not necessarily result in actual exclusion and that those diagnosed as lepers could in reality live for years in the same company as before. The 1545 inquest’s investigation of whether an afflicted person’s kin had been contaminated may have been a very sensible measure, for archaeological evidence is emerging to suggest that leprosy was much more common than previously thought. Virtually all the bodies buried in the cemetery of the leper hospital at Odense, Denmark, show signs of leprosy. Such a figure is perhaps not surprising and can be attributed to skilled diagnosis. However, rates of leprosy appear to have been significant in the general populace as well. Between 14 per cent and 17 per cent of people buried in nonleprosarium cemeteries in Odense also suffered from leprosy, and the prevalence of leprosy among adults in the Danish village of Tirup from around 1150 to around 1350 was possibly as high as 26 per cent.19 In theory grounds for physical exclusion or at least marginalization, leprosy was in practice an affliction that raised concerns of contagion in the wider society while simultaneously inspiring a degree of mercy, compassion, and even spiritual respect.

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Personalizing religious practices One of the most important ritual actions for medieval Christians was receiving the Eucharist (see Chapter 3). Though normally this took place in a parish church while surrounded by fellow parishioners and was thus a corporate act, some nobles heard mass at portable altars where the Eucharistic rite could be celebrated privately.20 Regardless of whether the taking of the Eucharist was experienced privately or publicly, people about to participate were expected to undertake appropriate individual and inward preparation. First, they were to perform a self-examination to ensure that their intentions were good. Specifically, they were to take the Eucharist not for glory nor for the appearance of holiness, for that would be hypocrisy, and not only because the ritual is the custom or command of the Church, for that would be compulsion. Rather, they were to receive the Eucharist for God’s love and the health of their own souls, to be more perfectly incorporated into Christ, to grow in faith, hope, and charity, to remember and give thanks for Christ’s passion, to live in perfect unity and concord with Christian people, and to have eternal life in heaven. A person’s preparation was also supposed to include coming to the perfect faith in this sacrament, including having a belief in the true presence of Christ’s body and blood, and arriving at a clean conscience by making confession to a priest and doing the imposed penance. The final stage before receiving the Eucharist was to say devout prayers.21 Preparation, therefore, was to include intention, understanding, faith, conscience, and prayer, all individual, internal, and unmediated spiritual actions, and all appropriate to a religious system in which people had a high degree of personal responsibility for the state of their soul. Laypeople were also supposed to take personal and individual responsibility for their penance, the spiritual medicine for the spiritual sickness caused by sin. God helped with this – ‘suffer me nocht to leif in syn, bot call me sone to pennance quhen I haue displesit the’, says a fifteenth-century prayer – but a person had to answer the call.22 As Dunbar asked in his ‘Maner of Passyng to Confessioun’, ‘Quha kennes thi synnes better na thi sell?’23 Penance was thought to work by turning a person’s heart away from their sins and towards God with an inward sorrow and

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hatred of the sin, and though it was normally made through confession to a priest, laypeople were reassured that God would accept a person’s good will privately in cases where no priest was to be found.24 Some Scots chose their own confessors. Those who did were mostly clerics, but occasionally laypeople too. Andrew de Stallis of Edinburgh did so in 1350, and in 1558 William White, a burgess of the Canongate, his spouse Helen Harte, and five other people were granted an indulgence that gave them the right to have a confessor from the secular or the regular clergy.25 In between Andrew de Stallis choosing his own confessor in the mid-fourteenth century and White and others choosing theirs in the mid-sixteenth, the practice had become more common. In 1436, the papal nuncio to Scotland was given the faculty to grant to 15 persons the right to choose their own confessors,26 and in 1473 all those in Scotland who were penitent and confessed, and who contributed between half a florin and five florins (according the value of their means) for defence of Christendom against the Turks were given the right to choose their own confessor.27 Even a ritual as widespread and personal as fasting could be tailored to meet individual circumstances. Fasting was thought to be of spiritual benefit to all, though some groups were freed from the obligation either as a concession to perceived physical weakness or perceived social hardship. Therefore people under 21, the elderly, pregnant and nursing women, poor labourers without enough sustenance, beggars, and servants who had to obey their masters were not required to fast.28 Among those who did fast, the precise dietary restrictions could vary. In 1451 the people of the dioceses of Glasgow and St Andrews were granted papal permission to alter their Lenten fast: since olive oil was expensive and rare in those regions, whereas butter and other milk products abounded, the Pope allowed them to eat butter and other milk products in Lent and other fast days without any scruple of conscience.29 Interestingly, rare and expensive olive oil was used to care for parish church bells at Ayr.30 The bells of a parish church were evidently deserving of care at considerable expense. In order to help with their individual spiritual responsibilities, people sometimes sought private, or at least personal, religious assistance. Books, and especially printed ones, are often associated with growing individuality in spiritual outlook among later

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medieval Europeans. However, a native print culture came relatively late to Scotland, where the first printing press was that of Walter Chepman and Andro Myllar, set up in Edinburgh in 1507– 10. Moreover, the licence for this press, granted by James IV, makes it clear that it was supposed to be printing mostly books for public use, such as ‘the bukis of our lawis, actis of parliament, croniclis,’ in addition to ‘mes bukis and portuus [breviaries] efter the use of oure realme’.31 The printing movement was slow to gain momentum in Scotland, where even by the 1550s there were probably fewer than ten book printers and sellers to be found in the whole country. Though perhaps not enthusiastic printers, Scots were nonetheless reading printed material. Most of their books came from the Continent, obtained through networks of personal contacts who were studying and travelling abroad, and many of these books were texts at the cutting edge of religious developments. In one sample, Erasmus the Dutch humanist reformer and satirist was the most frequently owned author. The popularity of the Quiñones Breviary as a privately-owned liturgical book also suggests an interest in current trends on the Continent, in this case interest in private devotion with unusually high concentration on biblical texts.32 Networks of readers not only brought the books to Scotland in the first place, but also continued to circulate the books once they reached Scottish shores as owners loaned their books to friends. One such lending network emerges from the records of a dispute over ownership of a copy of the New Testament, which was circulating among the burgesses of Perth by the 1540s. It was probably first purchased by the merchant John Chalmer on the Continent. David Schang, a wright, acquired it from him, but when Chalmer died, Chalmer’s heir wanted the book for himself. Schang claimed that it was lawfully his and that he had paid 28s for it, but the court ordered Schang to pay 40s if he wanted to keep the book.33 Chalmer and Schang may have been somewhat unusual in that most owners of books were clergy, lawyers, and doctors, while merchants and craftsmen show up in records less often.34 Literacy rates were likely on the rise for all these groups in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scotland, though they did not reach very high levels, even in towns, if the ability to sign one’s name is any indication of basic literacy. In 1561, burgesses of Perth were

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required to sign their names: 49 did so, while the rest – 20 members of town council, 3 deacons of crafts, and a further 215 others – could not sign without assistance.35 The written word was also used by some urban Scots to assert their individual identities concretely in a public centre of devotion. The silver rood chalice in the parish church of Haddington was inscribed with the phrase ‘John of Crumye and his spouse had me made’. Also in this same church was a silver chalice upon which William Kempt and his wife had inscribed the request that they be prayed for.36 In 1455 the provost, bailies, council, and community of the burgh of Edinburgh promised that within six or seven years they would build an aisle in the parish church in which there was to be a brass for the burial of William Preston, who had brought the relic of the arm bone of St Giles to the parish church. Above this was to be a table of brass with a writ about the bringing of the relic, and William Preston’s arms were to be on this brass and in other parts of the aisle.37 For all his celebrity due to the import of the parish church’s most renowned relic, Preston was not the only parishioner whose name decorated St Giles. Various people had their arms placed upon brass pillars in the 1550s,38 and in 1557 the provost, bailies, and council of Edinburgh thought it expedient that the Dean of Guild make an aisle in St Giles to which people could give pillars or other ornaments and into which they could place their arms.39 Benefactors of the parish church were writing themselves into its very fabric. Over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at least some of the wealthier inhabitants of Scottish towns were engaging in notably individual and personalized forms of piety. They were choosing their own confessors, reading devotional material, even having their names inscribed in their parish churches, and such efforts can certainly be seen as evidence for a growing sense of individualism in lay religion, if not also for a growing sense of individual identity publicly displayed. The juxtaposition of the individual and the public serves as a reminder not to overlook the fundamentally complementary nature of the relationship between the individual and the group in religious behaviour. Individual efforts did not necessarily diminish the popularity of corporate efforts of the type discussed in Chapter 3. That corporate forms of Christianity continued to exist alongside

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individual expressions of religion has already been shown by historians of late medieval Europe.40 Less recognized, perhaps, is that seemingly individualistic religious behaviours were often predicated on a continuing belief in the importance of social religious practices. Books may sometimes have been read alone, but they were in the first place a means of communicating from one person to another and in the next place a way of sharing ideas by being passed through a network of contacts. People having their names inscribed in their parish churches were engaging in a still more social behaviour by asserting their identity within a public sacred space with the explicit hope that other people would pray for them. That individuals could establish their own personal religious priorities while remaining connected to others within corporate religious structures is well illustrated in the founding of the Magdalen Chapel, Edinburgh, and in the actions of its co-founder, Jonet Rynd, who asserted her own individual preferences while maintaining close connections with several religious communities.

Jonet Rynd and the Magdalen Chapel The Magdalen Chapel on the Cowgate, Edinburgh, was a religious foundation maintained by group efforts and of benefit to a group of poor inmates. Its foundation and original direction, however, were shaped by the specific instructions of two individuals: Jonet Rynd, and Michael McQueen. Jonet Rynd was born sometime near the end of the fifteenth century into an Edinburgh family that was well established in business and civic religion. The Rynds were successful merchants and craftsmen and included among their members several goldsmiths, a tailor, and a cloth merchant.41 Some chose to enter the religious life, including Edward Rynd, who was a monk at the monastery of Paisley in 1551,42 and John Rynd, who was a chaplain of St Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle,43 while others were actively involved in the spiritual well-being of Edinburgh as laypeople who donated considerable funds to St Giles.44 Several Rynds were also closely involved in burgh politics, such as William Rynd, who was a bailie of Edinburgh in 1478, Henry Rynd, who was treasurer of the burgh in 1498, and a

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second William Rynd, who was a bailie in 1528.45 The Rynd family was a respected and publicly active group whose members made important contributions to civic life in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Edinburgh. By 1516 Jonet Rynd was married to Michael McQueen, a burgess of Edinburgh.46 The McQueens were perhaps not so well established and influential as were the Rynds – at least they are not so well documented – but Michael himself has left his mark quite frequently in the records. He appeared in 1501 as a witness for a land transfer on the Cowgate, Edinburgh,47 and during the late 1520s and early 1530s he was selling to the royal household various items of considerable cost, including glass, satin, taffeta, and velvet.48 Whatever his family’s origins, Michael McQueen rose not only to be a successful merchant, but also to hold a position of considerable political esteem in Edinburgh, acting as treasurer, adviser on the welfare of the kirk and town, customer of the burgh, and keeper of the tron.49 Michael McQueen was thus an Edinburgh burgesses of high status when in the 1530s he began the procedure to found the Magdalen Chapel, a procedure outlined in the chapel’s confirmation charter, signed by Jonet Rynd and dated 1547.50 While labouring under a grave illness and weighed down by old age, this charter reports, Michael McQueen was thinking of his eternal life and wished to carry out some pious work that would remain in perpetuity. And so he bequeathed £700 for the building of a chapel and the foundation of other buildings, as well as for the sustenance of a chaplain and seven poor men who in that place would pour out their prayers to God.51 Before these plans could be completed, however, a serious problem arose: Michael McQueen died, and certain people who had promised to help in the project failed to carry through with their responsibilities. It was the widow Jonet Rynd who oversaw and even expanded on the realization of Michael McQueen’s original designs. She added the further sum of £2,000 to her late husband’s 700 and, in praise and honour of God, the Virgin Mary, and St Mary Magdalen, she erected the chapel and added a hospital, wherein the chaplain and seven poor inmates would pray to God for the salvation of the souls of Mary, Queen of Scots, of Michael and Jonet, of their fathers and mothers, of all who had helped in this work, of the patrons – the guild of

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hammermen, as becomes clear later in the charter – and of the souls of anyone from whom Jonet had received anything that she had not returned.52 Jonet Rynd would have supposed her donation to bring spiritual rewards through the prayers of the hospital’s inmates, but she also expected to receive a tangible, worldly advantage from it, namely, a house in Edinburgh for her private use.53 Her struggles to occupy this house are described, though sometimes obliquely, in the records of the Edinburgh hammermen. In 1547, the year when the hammermen officially became patrons of the Magdalen Chapel and hospital, Jonet received a valuation of the house in Niddry’s Wynd.54 This house was not ready for Jonet to move into, however, for it was still occupied and its inhabitants had to be warned ‘to remof & flit’.55 They must not have complied, for in the following year, after Jonet had come to see the deacon ‘for certain business’,56 the hammermen once again paid officers ‘to wairn ye tennants of Nedris Wynd to flit’.57 The final entry in the hammermen’s records to mention Jonet Rynd is from 1550, when she came to the deacon’s house to meet with him concerning the stubborn tenants. This entry reports that the expense associated with the visit was 20d for wine; it does not, unfortunately, reveal whether this substantial amount of drink was sufficient to appease Jonet, who had by this point been waiting three years to move into her promised house.58 The house in Niddry’s Wynd was clearly important to Jonet Rynd, but the records do not explicitly state why this was so. Rynd’s persistence in the matter might simply have been a manifestation of the same determination that had made her a shrewd and competent businesswoman who had owned her own booth and sold iron to no less a client than the King.59 It is also possible that Rynd wanted the house as a comfortable place wherein she could spend her final years, for her repeated attempts to secure her property took place not long before her death in 1553.60 Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, she likely had no children on whom she could rely for support. Some historians have assumed that Isobel Mauchan, who gave £1,000 to the Magdalen Chapel in 1555, was the daughter of Jonet Rynd and Michael McQueen.61 ‘Mauchan’ and ‘McQueen’ are distinct names, however, and Isobel’s surname is never spelled with any form resembling

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Michael’s.62 Michael McQueen did have a son named Patrick, who in 1539 sold land in Wigtown to Jonet.63 Some historians have taken Patrick to be the son of Jonet and Michael,64 but Patrick is only described as the son of Michael, and never as the son of both Michael and Jonet. The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, for example, records that in 1539 the King confirmed the charter of Patrick McQueen, son and heir of the late Michael McQueen, burgess of Edinburgh, in which he sold land to Jonet Rynd, relict of the said Michael.65 This would be a strange way to describe the relationship between Jonet Rynd and Patrick McQueen if they were mother and son; it looks rather to be a description of a somewhat more distant relationship, such as that between stepmother and stepson. Patrick McQueen was probably a child of Michael McQueen’s earlier marriage to a woman named Marion.66 When Jonet Rynd took over the founding of the Magdalen Chapel, therefore, she was likely a childless widow and possibly in declining health. Although this situation might appear to have placed her in a precarious social and economic position, she was not altogether without family, and it was to her kin that she turned for support in her plans. Specifically, Rynd ordered that upon her death patronage would go to the hammermen of Edinburgh,67 a guild to which she was linked through numerous kinship connections. Several Rynds were metalworkers by profession, some very successful. Thomas Rynd was a goldsmith who sold his work to the King on several occasions, including in 1538 when the King purchased his chains of gold, gold rings, and other golden work to give as New Year’s gifts,68 and John Rynd was a pewterer who became deacon in 1556.69 A Thomas Rynd was deacon of the guild in 1526, another Thomas Rynd was deacon in 1536, and Michael Rynd was deacon in 1551.70 By giving patronage to the hammermen, therefore, Jonet Rynd was also giving patronage to a group so closely connected to her blood kin that she was, in effect, keeping the foundation in her family. Furthermore, Jonet ordered that if the hammermen were to fail in their duties, patronage of her foundation should pass to specific members of her natal family, namely William Rynd (probably Jonet’s brother) and his male heirs, whom failing to Thomas Rynd (probably Jonet’s nephew), whom failing to public officers of the burgh of Edinburgh.71 In spite of their struggles to honour their agreement with Jonet

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Rynd concerning the house in Niddry’s Wynd, in other respects the hammermen turned out to be very responsible patrons of the foundation. Their regular payments to the inmates of the Magdalen Hospital go back to 1544, three years before their patronage was officially confirmed in Jonet’s charter.72 They made a further payment to the inmates in 1547,73 and in the same year they paid 38s for seals, writing, and other necessities belonging to the hospital.74 Additional payments by the hammermen to the inmates of the hospital were made in 1548, 1549, 1550, 1551, 1554, 1556, and 1557.75 Numerous entries also attest to the hammermen’s care in the upkeep, and even improvement, of the buildings and grounds of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital. They had stones removed from the yard in 1549; they purchased and transported four poles from Leith in 1550, which they placed in the hospital’s garden along with stones and thorn; they built benches and a stone dyke in 1551; and they hedged the thorn in the yard in 1552.76 Although Jonet Rynd may well have pressured the guild to keep up their end of the bargain during her life, the hammermen’s care for the buildings extended beyond Jonet’s death. In 1554 they repaired the chimney and made more benches and turfs in the yard; in 1555 they mended the Magdalen Chapel’s locks; in 1556 they painted the chapel; and in 1557 they built a little house for ‘keping of some tabells & other things’.77 These efforts by the hammermen were not without a certain practical advantage for the guild, since starting in 1548 they were using the chapel as a gathering place. On some occasions, their meetings must have been quite jolly, such as in 1549 when two members making a deed in the hospital were entertained by an assortment of minstrels including harpers, pipers, and fiddlers.78 Moreover, the guild’s free use of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital facilities would cease if they neglected their responsibilities there: as the foundation charter says, they were bound to take care of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital or else lose control to Jonet Rynd’s heirs or the officials of the burgh. In part, therefore, the hammermen may have been caring for the chapel, hospital, and inmates out of concern for their own guild. But the fact that they did care for the foundation and its inmates, regardless of the reasons, indicates that Jonet Rynd’s decision to make them patron was a good one.

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Jonet Rynd put a great deal of energy into directing the establishment and maintenance of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital. She spent a large sum of her own money in the initial foundation, produced a detailed charter for how the institution was to be run, and had the foresight to choose patrons who would take good care of her institution after her death. The importance of her natal family in all this is striking. Jonet Rynd entrusted the patronage of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital to a guild with which she was connected through her natal family, not her husband’s; she stated that if the hammermen should fail, responsibility would fall to members of her natal family, again not her husband’s, even though Patrick McQueen, Michael’s son, would presumably have been an obvious candidate for the job; and she directed that the spiritual beneficiaries of the inmates’ prayers were to be her kin both by marriage and also by blood. The founding of the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital was ostensibly started by Michael McQueen and completed by Jonet Rynd, but it was actually in very large part brought to fruition through her individual efforts as a widow. Her foundation illustrates a close relationship between individual preference and community identity where the founder had a strong say in the beneficiaries and the caretakers, both individuals and groups, many of whom were connected to her by bonds of blood kinship, guild membership, and burgh residency. Jonet Rynd’s sense of individual religious responsibility was interconnected with her group identities at several levels. Given the mixture of the personal and the corporate in the establishment and care of her foundation, perhaps it is fitting that the only marked tomb in the Magdalen Chapel today, located immediately to the south of where the altar once stood, is that of Jonet Rynd.79

Conclusion Many of the wealthier inhabitants of Scottish towns were taking a growing interest in individualized, private religious practices in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. They read books of religious devotion. They accepted individual responsibility for being properly and inwardly prepared for receiving the Eucharist and sometimes, through the hearing of private masses and the confessing of sins to personally chosen confessors, they took

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measures to privatize the experience as well. They even marked their churches with their individual identities on pillars, plaques, and devotional vessels. But the increasing importance of individualization in late medieval Christianity ought not to be used simplistically as evidence for a breakdown in corporate Christianity of the kind discussed in Chapter 3; rather, during this period in Scotland as elsewhere in Europe, Christians joined their individual welfare to that of the wider society so that personal efforts and communal forms of devotion converged in pursuit of salvation.80 Guilds allowed for reflective personal and individual devotion supported by corporate observance, while parishes encouraged individual and communal religious interests to coexist and even reinforce one another.81 Such a close intermingling of selfinterest and community interest becomes even clearer when considering that the community included both the living and the dead. In such a context, individuals’ religious works met their own needs – for example, being prayed for – while also serving the needs of others – for example, beautifying the parish church and increasing religious devotion therein.82 Indeed, good works by individuals did not merely contribute to the religious experiences of the community; their worth actually depended on there being a community willing and able to respond appropriately. A chantry’s spiritual effectiveness was predicated on there being people in attendance at mass to pray for the deceased – the cleric at the very least, but ideally others too, as founders making provision for the poor in attendance knew very well. And a religious foundation’s survival after the death of the founder was dependent upon others carrying out the founder’s wishes. Jonet Rynd understood this clearly and therefore took great care to ensure that the Magdalen Chapel and Hospital remain a strong centre of civic religion and good works. To do so, she entrusted her foundation to several overlapping groups, all connected to her through kinship. The later medieval trend of increased individualization in lay piety is evident in Scottish towns, but it did not beget a weakening of the bonds of communal lay piety. In fact, several religious initiatives of a seemingly individual character benefited the spiritual welfare of kinship networks, guilds, and parishes while simultaneously drawing support from these same groups. For most people, individual preference and communal devotion were fundamentally

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compatible, even symbiotic, in the religious culture of Scottish towns.

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Notes 1 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 208–10. 2 ‘The Jesus Psalter’, in Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 200, 203. 3 St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume II, 304–5; for Moors, e.g., TA, II, 97, 106, 415, 465; III, 122, 197; IV, 338; V, 328. 4 Miscellany of the Spalding Club, Volume 5, 30. 5 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 163. 6 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XII (1458–1471), 674. 7 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 5–7. 8 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 266. 9 Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 32. 10 Helmholz, Spirit of Classical Canon Law, 375. 11 Protocol Book of Gavin Ros, #147; Protocol Book of John Cristisone, #90, both quoted in McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 266. 12 Touati, Maladie et société au Moyen Âge; Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England; Demaitre, Leprosy in Premodern Medicine. 13 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 41. 14 Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, II, 16. 15 Henryson, Poems, 111–31, l. 382. 16 Charters and Other Documents relating to the City of Glasgow Vol. II A.D. 1649–1707, with Appendix, A.D. 1484–1648, 465–73, 491–3. 17 St. Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume I, 66–7. 18 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 33–4, 37, 38, 39. 19 Boldsen, ‘Leprosy and Mortality in the Medieval Danish Village of Tirup’; Boldsen and Mollerup, ‘Outside St. Jørgen’. 20 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. VIII (1427–1447), 291; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. X (1447–1455), 9–10. 21 Catechism of John Hamilton, 211–15. 22 ‘The Jesus Psalter’, in Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, 198. 23 Dunbar, Selected Poems, 171, l. 52. 24 Catechism of John Hamilton, 215–16, 226. 25 Fitch, Search for Salvation, 83.

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26 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. III (1342–1362), 400; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. VIII (1427–1447), 290–1. 27 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. XIII (1471–1484), 204. 28 John of Ireland, ‘Of Penance and Confession’, in Asloan Manuscript, I, 37–41. 29 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, Vol. X (1447–1455), 85, 174. 30 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 75, 86, 112, 115. 31 Registrum Secreti Sigilli Regum Scotorum, I, 223–4, #1546. 32 Mann, Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720, 71–2; Ford, ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’. 33 Mann, Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720, 7–8, 219–23; Ford, ‘Importation of Printed Books into England and Scotland’, 179–201; Ford, ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’, 205–28; Verschuur, Politics or Religion?, 83–4; van Heijnsbergen and Royan, ‘Introduction’, in Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland. 34 Ford, ‘Private Ownership of Printed Books’, 205. 35 Durkan, ‘Education in the Century of the Reformation’; Dennison, ‘Urban Society and Economy’, 153. 36 Newton, ‘Altar-Plate of the Collegiate Church, Haddington’, 58. 37 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 106–7. 38 Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two, 65. 39 Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, cv. 40 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; Kümin, Shaping of a Community. 41 Protocol Book of John Foular 1503–1513, #50; Edinburgh Goldsmiths’ Minutes 1525–1700, 13–14. 42 Protocol Book of Alexander King, II, fol. 163. My thanks to Elizabeth Ewan for this reference. 43 Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, 9, 285. 44 E.g. Alexander Rynd in 1543. Registrum Cartarum Ecclesie Sancti Egidii de Edinburgh, 193–6. 45 Protocol Book of James Young 1485–1515, #1391; NAS B/22/1/7, II, fol. 68; Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, XI, 129. 46 TA,V, 60; Protocol Book of John Foular, 1528–1534, #78. 47 Protocol Book of John Foular, 1500–1503, #40, 123. 48 TA, V, 326. 49 Protocol Book of John Foular, 1514–1528, #253; Extracts from the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh A.D. 1589 to 1603, 208; Exchequer Rolls of Scotland, XVI, #152. 50 Ross and Baldwin Brown, ‘The Magdalen Chapel, Cowgate,

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Edinburgh’, 1–78. 51 Ross and Baldwin Brown, ‘The Magdalen Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh’, 5. 52 Ross and Baldwin Brown, ‘The Magdalen Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh’, 5–6. 53 Present in charter, mentioned in Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, lxxvii. 54 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 134. 55 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 134. 56 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 138. 57 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 138. 58 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 145–6. 59 TA, VII, 348; Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume One, 102. 60 The date of her death inscribed on her tomb within the Magdalen Chapel is 4 December 1553. 61 E.g. Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, 30. 62 E.g. NAS GD 135/1333, 1345. 63 Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum, Vol. 3, #1965. 64 Ross and Baldwin Brown, ‘The Magdalen Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh’, 97. 65 Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum, III, #2262; see also #2663. 66 Protocol Book of John Foular, 1503–1513, #264. 67 Ross and Baldwin Brown, ‘The Magdalen Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh’, 7–8. 68 TA, VII, 123; see also V, 421; VIII, 58. 69 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 161, 163. 70 Edinburgh Goldsmiths’ Minutes 1525–1700, 20, 21, 22. 71 Ross and Baldwin Brown, ‘The Magdalen Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh’, 7–8; Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum, III, #2508; Protocol Book of John Foular, 1528–1534, #888; NAS B/22/1/16, III, fol. 84. 72 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 119 73 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 132, 134. 74 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 134. 75 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 136–7, 138, 140, 144, 150, 156, 160, 162, 164, 165. 76 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 142, 147–8, 150, 154. 77 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 156, 160, 162, 165.

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78 Hammermen of Edinburgh and Their Altar in St. Giles Church, 138, 139–40, 172. 79 Ross and Baldwin Brown, ‘The Magdalen Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh’, 51–60. 80 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 131, 141. 81 Rosser, ‘Communities of Parish and Guild in the Late Middle Ages’; Kümin, Shaping of a Community. 82 Burgess, ‘“A fond thing vainly invented’”.

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Part III

Subduing thunderbolts

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Religious dissent

The final statement on the St Giles bell, ‘fulmina frango’ (‘I subdue thunderbolts’), likely had a literal meaning. The Golden Legend explains that during some processions bells were sounded ‘to make the devils flee in terror’, and church bells in particular were rung when storms were brewing so that ‘the demons who stir up the storms should hear the trumpets of the eternal King and flee aghast, letting the storms die down’.1 But atmospheric storms were not the only kind of disturbance in sixteenth-century Scotland. In June 1559 the chaplains of St Nicholas’s Church in Aberdeen, sensing another kind of storm in the air, came before the provost and bailies of the burgh in the town’s tolbooth to present a supplication. The chaplains mentioned that, as surely the authorities knew, certain persons in the south of Scotland were destroying churches, religious places, and the ornaments of the same, and they requested that the burgh authorities take charge of the church’s vestments and altar-plate until the ‘uproir and tumilt war put to tranquilite be the antient and wyse counsell of the realme’.2 The personnel of St Nicholas were not alone in their concern over the tumult of their times or in their determination to safeguard materials of Catholic worship. Relics of St Duthac at Tain were placed in safekeeping with a local laird, and the ‘jewels’ of St Giles itself were handed over to the Edinburgh town council.3 As at least some inhabitants of Scottish towns could see, a storm of religious and social upheaval was coming. The religious culture of Scottish towns as presented in Parts I and II of this book was vibrant, engaging, and popular in the sense that it attracted people from many points along the urban social spectrum to participate in its rituals and customs. As participants

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knew full well, however, the flourishing religious culture was not without challenges from within and from without. This chapter will assess the extent and the depth of these challenges. It will examine the most serious troubles confronting the Scottish Church in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, including the movement made up of those who would break away from Catholicism. It will thus provide the necessary background for the subject of Chapter 6, how the religious culture of Scottish towns responded to the challenges of its age.

Clerical unsuitability Historians of Reformation Scotland often point to the moral corruption and inadequate training of Scottish priests as having been a severe problem in the pre-Reformation period, though it should be noted that local concern over the moral misbehaviour and insufficient education of clergy was not new in the sixteenth century. Scottish statutes from as early as the thirteenth century directed that clergy ‘lead a pure and honourable life’, that they be ‘becomingly clothed . . . not wear red or green striped clothes nor clothes conspicuous for too great shortness’, and that any clerics publicly keeping concubines should be suspended from office and benefice unless they put away their concubines within a month and promise not to keep them after. Clerics were supposed to guard against lust, abstain from drunkenness, stay out of secular business, and avoid taverns unless driven there by necessity while on a journey.4 Although concerns over clerical behaviour were not first introduced in the sixteenth century, they did grow more pressing at that time. The provincial council of 1549 blamed the spread of heresies on inadequacies of clerics, and in particular on the lewdness of their life and their ‘crass ignorance of literature and of all the liberal arts’.5 Sir David Lyndsay was more pointed in his criticism, and wrote that churchmen who ignored their responsibilities by failing to instruct the ignorant and provoke them to penance would languish in the ‘painefull poysonis pytt of hell’.6 Many Scottish priests would have had difficulty in finding training sufficient to meet the high standards of a humanist like David Lyndsay. Scotland had no seminaries, and so most urban parish priests received their formal training only in the song

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schools and grammar schools, as well as through service in the Church, before being ordained.7 Though most parish priests appear to have had at least a basic level of literacy, few were university graduates.8 Musical literacy was also a struggle for many, yet if they sang the music of Scottish composer Robert Carver (see Chapter 3), then their repertoire demanded a high degree of skill in order to perform the florid style and rich embellishment. John Mair said in his 1521 book A History of Greater Britain that ‘bishops admit to the priesthood men who are quite unskilled in music’,9 and one historian has suggested that music performed in the pre-Reformation Scottish Church was neither vibrant nor well developed.10 Others have argued for a more robust culture of church music, even at the parish level. Song schools in cathedrals, monasteries, collegiate churches, and parish churches throughout the country trained boys for their musical role. A fifteenth-century bishop of Glasgow had a special house built for the vicars choral at the cathedral, inset with a stone reading ‘these buildings Bishop Andrew caused to be created for the priests who serve the flourishing choir of Glasgow’, and Glasgow Cathedral doubled the salaries of some of its choristers in 1480.11 Some laypeople, at least, were concerned with maintaining certain standards in religious musical performances. When John Mackison, burgess of Perth, founded an anniversary in 1514 at the chapel of St Anne in that town, he directed that the chief chaplain should perform the mass if he was a good singer, along with three of the chaplains who were choristers in the parish church.12 And some towns were actively involved in musical education. The town council of Aberdeen granted clerkships to choirboys at the parish church of St Nicholas to fund them through the schools, and at least one of these choristers, John Marr, appointed a deputy to sing in his place while he was away for his studies.13 Perhaps even more than a failure to attain literacy skills, what has struck historians looking at the pre-Reformation Scottish clergy is their failure to maintain celibacy. There can be no doubt that Scottish clerics frequently breached the rules of sexual behaviour attached to their office. The long-term relationship between Archbishop Hamilton and Lady Grisel Sempill was well known at the time, and William Gordon, Bishop of Aberdeen, was petitioned by the chapter of his cathedral to rid himself ‘of the

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gentlewoman by whom he is greatly slandered’. Meanwhile, his half-brother, Alexander Gordon, was the Bishop of Galloway and living with Barbara Logie.14 It was not only among the leaders of the Scottish Church that the rule of celibacy was so often breached. The high frequency of ordinands in the papal letters seeking dispensation because they were the sons of priests confirms the widespread practice.15 But although clerical concubinage was condemned in church councils,16 it is not clear whether ordinary parishioners were so bothered by it. Contracts for chaplains serving at specific altars and the foundation documents for these altars do regularly stipulate that a priest must live without a concubine (see Chapter 3), but it may be that under most circumstances the lay community at large was quite accepting of priests’ domestic partners and children as being part of his family. This seems to have been the case elsewhere in Europe, where people often regarded clerical concubinage as no more of a moral problem than other kinds of fornication, provided that the domestic partners behaved in socially acceptable ways and did not try to rise above their station.17 Probably of more concern to parishioners was the non-residence of priests. The care of souls was officially the responsibility of the rector of the parish church. However, out of approximately 1,000 parish churches, over 900 were appropriated, meaning they had been gifted to a monastery, cathedral or collegiate church. That appropriating institution received the parish’s teinds and was regarded as the parish rector. Since the institution could not serve the parish in person, it appointed a vicar to serve and shared the teinds with him. While some non-resident rectors took an active interest in their parishes, the practice of appropriation must often have led to disinterested rectors who rarely, if ever, saw the people of their parish.18 Even the vicar was sometimes absent, and had to appoint a deputy in his place.19 While there was some benefit from this system for the Scottish Church as a whole, since it allowed for staffing the cathedrals with large numbers of priests and enabled clergy to offer a variety of professional services beyond the care of souls, such as working as administrators, lawyers, and teachers,20 this system of appropriations left the parishes generally underserviced, struggling with underpaid priests and understaffed foundations.21

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The challenges faced by parishes trying to find and retain welltrained and committed priests were compounded by an additional financial stress on their resources in the form of feuing of church property. Starting in the fifteenth century and peaking in the midsixteenth, benefice holders turned away from leasing church lands for rent, and instead granted a feu in perpetuity in return for a single cash payment and perpetual but fixed duty. Over time, and with the rapid devaluation of coin, the real value of the fixed feu fell, and churches were left with considerably diminished revenues from which to draw when looking after buildings and paying clerical personnel. Burgh chaplains and choristers were usually paid with an annual sum derived from burgh property, though this may not have amounted to much. At Ayr they received from £5 to £13 each year, and until the 1540s the standard annual stipend for a parish priest was just under £7 Scots at a time when other professionals were making more than ten times that amount.22 Some clerics were paid in kind, such as the chaplains at an altar in Elgin, whose appointments were made by the town council providing ‘honest board’ in the houses of somewhere between eight and fourteen neighbours, and the chaplain-chorister from the parish church of St Nicholas in Aberdeen, who dined at the provost’s house on Mondays, at the houses of various burgesses on Tuesdays to Thursdays, and at the house of the parish priest on Fridays.23 Some priests tried to increase their earnings by holding several offices, and others made additional money by trading in spite of the fact that a priest was forbidden from engaging in trade, and many practised as notaries.24 Parish priests may have been distracted from their parochial duties to care for souls because of such occupations, but their worldly abilities also made them valued members of the community, able to take on jobs requiring a high level of skill or literacy and act as witnesses to deeds executed in the parish church.25 The urban laity, who had considerable authority over their parish clergy (see Chapter 3), appear to have been quite accepting of their priests’ worldly connections. So, if the clerics of pre-Reformation Scotland appear unsuitable to some modern eyes, it is not at all clear that they were regarded this way by most of the laypeople of Scotland in their own time.

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Religious indifference The 1552 General Council spoke of ‘the greatest neglect of the divine mysteries’ prevailing in recent years, ‘so that very few indeed out of the most populous parishes deign to be present’ at mass on Sundays and other major festivals. This council made additional mention of those who acted irreverently or impiously at the time of the sermon, and those who mocked or engaged in bargaining in the church porches or churchyards.26 Sir David Lyndsay’s last and longest work, ‘Ane Dialoge betuix Experience and ane Courteour’, written about the same time (1554), presents a possible reason for laypeople’s absences and misbehaviours: a lack of understanding about what was happening during church services: ‘Unlernit peple, on the holy day, / Solemnitlye thay heir the Euangell sung, / Nocht knowing quhat the preist dois sing nor say.’27 Lyndsay, an educated and Latinate writer, may have been conflating ignorance with indifference. The long-favoured sentence of excommunication was still being proposed in frightening terms, and it was still to be passed against a wide variety of transgressors, including not only those who damaged the church, but also those who engaged in dishonest business practices (see Chapter 4).28 Some of the offences that actually drew the sentence of excommunication in practice look much like petty vindictiveness in retaliation for personal harm to a churchman, such as when the Archbishop of Glasgow excommunicated several persons for removing some of his march (boundary) stones and trespassing on his lands.29 The 1552 council in Scotland admitted that excommunication, the severest of all the church’s censures, had in many places ‘become almost of no account’, and so took measures that it might have its proper awe restored to it by decreeing that the names of all excommunicates be recorded in books and read out loud every Sunday. Anyone remaining under the sentence of excommunication for 20 days was to be placarded as an ‘abominable person’ by the curates on the chancel-rails of parish churches and in other places, their names to remain there until absolution was obtained. Moreover, the curates were to warn publicly and generally before divine service all excommunicates to withdraw from the divine rites.30 The complaints of churchmen against what they saw as

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inadequate piety on the part of laypeople should not, perhaps, be taken as a straightforward or highly reliable measure of religious indifference. At worst, they may be examples of griping by people in authority about being underappreciated by those whom they think they are helping. Other evidence from the mid-sixteenth century, however, seems to confirm the clerics’ worry about lay indifference. The decline in traditional Catholic phraseology in Scottish wills may indicate that laypeople with sufficient means at their disposal to make wills were growing less interested in external aspects of medieval Catholicism.31 Meanwhile, the minutes of the hammermen of Perth cease mention of any upkeep for their altar to St Eloi in the parish church in the mid-1550s, and the Dean of Guild accounts for Edinburgh show very few donations to the shrine of St Giles at that same time.32 It is difficult to ignore the clear dropping-off of charitable bequests to parish churches from the mid-sixteenth century. Even the popular order of Dominicans suffered a decline in foundations for prayers for the dead at this time, and especially after 1540, though whether this was due to a rising resentment against clerical wealth and profit from spiritual services, economic hardship, or a decline in the belief in purgatory itself, is hard to know.33 Declining donations to parish churches and care for the altars therein should not be taken simplistically as direct evidence of declining devotion. As Michael Lynch has pointed out, the days of large capital investments had largely ended by the 1520s, if not the 1450s, and by the 1550s most of the revenue for the upkeep of churches and their shrines came from long-established rents and annuals collected on property as well as from a ‘bewildering ad hoc system of fines, entry fees and weekly contributions’ rather than from conspicuous acts of pious generosity.34 Perhaps laypeople’s general religious attachment to traditional forms was neither hostile nor cold but rather lukewarm in the sense that it was comfortable, accepting, and even complacent in the knowledge that institutions for religious devotion, from entire parish churches right down to individual chantries, were secure in their funding and able to run on their own momentum, it would appear, perpetually. Any such sense of security, as anyone looking back from the other side of 1560 would know, was, of course, misplaced. But confidence in the long-term viability of religious foundations was very reasonable from the perspective of towns-

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people living during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and even first half of the sixteenth century, when public and organized religious dissent was actually very rare.

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Later medieval dissent Scottish records from the twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries are conspicuously silent about heretical groups, though it is difficult to know how to interpret this silence. One possibility is that Scotland simply did not experience organized religious dissent during this time. Many features connected with organized heterodoxy in other regions were lacking or were undeveloped in Scotland – for example, Scottish towns were small by most European standards, literacy rates were quite low, and political stability was quite high – but Scotland’s linguistic diversity and geographic hindrances would likely have contributed to heterodoxy, if not to ordered groups of outright religious dissenters. Later centuries bring clearer records, and there can be no doubt that by the fifteenth century some Scots were critical of, even hostile towards, various aspects of official theology, clerical practices, and popular lay piety. Among the most famous of late medieval European dissenters were the Lollards. With roots in England as followers of John Wycliffe (d. 1384), an academic at Oxford University, the beliefs of the Lollards were derived from their reading of the Bible in the vernacular and included the rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation and the need for baptism and confession; the devaluing of pilgrimages, saints, religious fasting and prayers for the dead; the conviction that oaths are nonbinding; and the disparagement of holy water, bells, and even church buildings themselves. The movement in England during its first few decades was sufficiently wealthy to generate an impressive book production and sufficiently powerful to count among its members knights at the court of Richard II, but Lollardy grew increasingly feeble through the first half of the fifteenth century and, after the English introduction of the death penalty for heresy in 1401, a combination of highprofile trials and popular opposition caused it to lose its political force. Persecutions were especially severe up to the 1430s and again between about 1480 and 1520, though the Lollard

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movement did survive into the sixteenth century and likely contributed to the receptiveness of Protestant ideas in some areas of England.35 It is not known precisely when Lollard ideas first reached Scotland. Some of Wycliffe’s followers may have crossed the border by the end of the fourteenth century, but the first solid evidence of his ideas in Scotland come from 1400, when the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle was stationed with the English garrison at Roxburgh Castle, and 1401, when a handful of Lollards fled north from England. These English Lollards and their compatriots may have made some native Scottish converts, for James Resby, an English disciple of Wycliffe who was executed for heresy in Perth in 1407, claimed that he had sympathizers in Scotland and that he had provided some of them with literature. It did not take long for reports of a Lollard presence in Scotland to travel abroad. ‘News of Scotland’, likely written by Quintin Folkhard, the first named Scottish Lollard, was sent to Prague in 1410 and told of how the author rode about the country and preached in the vernacular to all who supported him. Information on Scottish Lollards reached the Council of Constance, whose delegates condemned Wycliffe’s teachings as heretical and also made mention of the spread of heresies into Scotland in 1414, as well as an envoy of the University of Paris who was preaching to the Pope the following year. It was also at about this time that ecclesiastical and secular authorities in Scotland itself started taking stronger measures to uncover and uproot heresy generally, and sometimes Lollardy in particular. In 1417, graduates of the recently founded St Andrews University were obliged to swear to defend the Church against heresy, and in 1424 the Scottish parliament passed an act giving civil support to Church authorities in combating Lollard and other heresies. At least one execution was soon carried out – that of the Hussite missionary Pavel Kravarˇ, who came to Scotland and was burnt at the stake in 1433.36 This combination of reports abroad and concern domestically suggests that the early fifteenth century was a time of at least some localized occurrences of identifiable heterodox movements in Scotland. It was the very late fifteenth century, however, that was the time of the most famous Scottish Lollards, the so-called Lollards of Kyle. This small group of people from Ayrshire was put on trial at

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Glasgow in 1494 before Archbishop Robert Blackadder and in the presence of King James IV. According to John Knox, writing much later, of course, but likely in possession of written records from the time of the trial, these people were charged with 34 articles of heresy. Thirteen of the articles challenged the spiritual authority of the Church by declaring excommunication non-binding and by identifying the Pope with the Antichrist who had no power to forgive sins and whose bulls, pardons, and indulgences were deceptions. Four of the articles dealt with the role and authority of priests, saying they had no power to consecrate, that they should be allowed to marry, that tithes should not be given to them, and that every man and woman is a priest. Some articles attacked basic points of Catholic theology, including a denial of the efficacy of prayers for the dead and the doctrine of transubstantiation. Others maintained that worship did not have to take place in a consecrated building, that the role of the monarch was deprived of sanctity, that the Church had no authority to dissolve marriages, that both crusades and the indulgences sold to pay for them were wrong, and that faith should not be defended by force of arms.37 In short, the charges point to a characteristically Wycliffite belief system among a group of native Scots. These Lollards of Kyle were not condemned at their trial, probably due both to the intervention of the King and also to their abjuring (swearing formally that they no longer held those heretical beliefs of which they had been accused), though it should be remembered that the public abjuration by the Lollards did not necessarily mean that they had actually changed their beliefs: it is difficult or impossible to know if any public abjuration made under threat of violence or death is sincere, and this is perhaps especially the case with Lollards, who after all placed no value on the taking of oaths. Genuine adherents, therefore, could lie under oath without violating their conscience in such a situation as that faced by the Lollards of Kyle.38 It is also not clear how exactly to interpret the influence of the Lollard movement on the late medieval and early modern development of Scottish religion more broadly. Knox was confident that Scottish Lollards had an important role to play in his Reformation narrative and wrote in his History of the Reformation in Scotland, first published in 1587, that the Lollards and their beliefs were

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evidence that God had looked mercifully upon Scotland, ‘retaining within it some spunk of his light, even in the time of greatest darkness’.39 Modern historians, though notably less confessional than Knox, still tend to place the Lollards in a line of religious dissenters stretching through the fifteenth century and flowing right into the Protestant Reformers of the 1550s. At the very least, the Lollards likely did help condition people to question the Church and to denounce practices with no biblical authority, and a good case can be made for a more direct link between fifteenthcentury Lollards and sixteenth-century Protestants in the form of a ‘tradition of dissent’ among certain families in Ayrshire that connected the Lollards of Kyle brought to trial in 1494 with religious dissenters in the 1520s and 1530s, as well as with some prominent reformist families of the 1550s.40 Such a link between kinship and religion would be consistent with the theory, presented elsewhere in this book, that blood relatives were deemed the most spiritually responsible among a person’s acquaintances.

Iconoclasm and attack Instances of iconoclastic violence, meaning here the wilful destruction of religious art, are easy to find in the middle decades of the sixteenth century.41 It is not easy, however, to discern whether particular instances of iconoclasm were motivated primarily by religious dissent, or by something more secular such as personal dispute or economic grievance. Religious concerns were presumably behind the iconoclastic action of Walter Stewart, son of the first Lord Ochiltree, who in 1533 appeared before the Archbishop’s court in Glasgow on the charge of ‘casting doun ane image in the kirk of Ayr’. Further investigation led the court to conclude that Stewart was guilty of heresy; Stewart recanted, but was drowned in the Water of Calder on his way home.42 Motivations are less clear in an incident from Haddington and Merse, probably from the 1530s, in which a group of people entered a church one morning at sunrise, broke open some locked chests, carried off various objects, robbed the vicar (who was in the church at the time) of clothes, beds, and £20, and despoiled him and the tenants of goods worth more than £100. Though the monition by the Archbishop against these people accused them of

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committing sacrilege knowingly and voluntarily, the money and goods stolen suggest the possibility of a more mundane and monetary motive.43 An Act of Parliament was passed in 1540 for the protection of images, perhaps in response to growing iconoclasm motivated by religious dissention.44 It was not entirely effective, for in 1544 two burgesses of Aberdeen were imprisoned for hanging a statue of St Francis, something they may have done in imitation of a similar incident in Perth.45 That they chose to hang the statue, rather than simply remove it, is surely significant: possibly a strong message of rebellion against the cult of saints, possibly an angry reaction against the Church and its teachings more broadly, the hanging of a statue was a targeted rejection of the old religious order and one that would convey a clear message of violence to anyone seeing the hanged saint’s image.46 Beyond the message of rejection, iconoclasm could also have influenced religious understanding in a deeper, more subtle way. Participating in the violent destruction of religious art, maybe even just watching such destruction, would have given people direct and personal experience in desacralization of the physical world, showing that such statues were in reality not conduits of sacred power but rather just material things.47 Images were not the only targets of religious violence in the midsixteenth century. Assaults both direct and indirect against religious personnel were also taking place and, like the instances of iconoclasm, may or may not have been primarily religious in motivation but were almost always religious in consequence. In 1543 a group attacked the Dominican house in Perth and took the friars’ pot, which they proceeded to carry with them through the town. While this may have been a statement against religious orders in principle, it may also have been a public criticism of the wealth and gluttony – and therefore of the hypocrisy – of these local friars in particular. A group of townspeople attacked the Dominicans in Perth again in 1551, this time by sowing wild seeds among the planted ones so that weeds would overrun the friars’ garden. Perhaps moved by the loss of income from the crop, perhaps growing impatient with what was turning into a long dispute, the horticultural friars were prepared to retaliate. They charged 11 burgesses with intruding upon their croft and destroying their crop. The friars were clearly not intimidated by the high political

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status of their adversaries, for six of the 11 named in the suit were sitting on the burgh council and eight were merchants. In the end, the town supported the intruders against the friars.48 These instances of destruction of sacred objects and attacks on religious personnel were likely motivated by a combination of factors, with some incidents more strongly religious in their origins than others. Of course, even if these instances were sharply anticlerical, they were not necessarily Protestant in inspiration. As Chapter 6 will show, it was perfectly possible to criticize and object to Catholic religious practices from within the Catholic fold even as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, Protestant sympathies must also be seriously considered among the possible motivations behind the incidents of iconoclastic riots in sixteenth-century Scottish towns, as must the incidents’ effects on the acceptance of Protestantism in the longer term.

Early evangelicals When heretics appear in statutes from thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century Scottish Church councils, they are mentioned as only one group among many to be avoided or condemned along with witches, usurers, and clippers of money.49 By 1549 this perception had changed and the decrees of the provincial council were demonstrating a much more detailed, particular, and immediate concern with heretics. They listed a series of articles upon which inquisitors into heresies ought especially to found their inquiries, and against which preachers in their sermons should inform and instruct their people (though in those districts where the presence of heresy had not been ascertained the preachers were to beware of mentioning heresies as yet unknown). These articles covered a variety of beliefs and practices. One – denying the immortality of the soul – would have been objectionable to all sixteenth-century Christians, but most of the beliefs and practices listed would have been familiar to early Protestants on the Continent. They included challenges to traditional Catholic ritual and practice, such as railing against the sacraments themselves or against the ceremonies, rites, and observances used in their administration and disparaging Church feasts and fasts; showing refusal to accept the authority of the Catholic Church by

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denigrating its censures and defying the authority of a General Council to define dogmas; and opposing Catholic theology on salvation by denying that the souls of saints currently reign with Christ, denying the efficacy of prayers and intercessions of saints, denying the existence of purgatory and the reward for good works. The formulators of these provincial decrees demonstrated not only an awareness of Protestant positions on a variety of issues, but also an understanding that such beliefs were transmitted largely through the written word. They declared that ‘every ordinary shall diligently inquire within his own diocese what persons have in their keeping any books of rhymes or popular songs containing calumnies and slanders defamatory of churchmen and church institutions, or infamous libels, or any kind of heresy’, and that any such texts were to be prohibited, confiscated, and burnt. Moreover, to make the force and scope of the decrees absolutely clear, ‘the use, sale, printing, and reading of the same shall be universally interdicted under the like penalties’.50 It is true that the Scottish provincial councils followed the same broad pattern as councils from elsewhere in Europe, and so perhaps do not directly reflect the particular situation in Scotland. It is also true that the purpose of church councils was to eliminate obstacles to the Church’s mission, not to record progress, and so it would be rash to use this legislation simply as evidence for widespread abuses condemned therein or for success in eradicating these abuses.51 Nevertheless, the way in which the Scottish Church statutes described heresies in ever increasing detail by the end of the 1540s signals a shift in awareness among religious authorities in Scotland. Heretics had gone from being just one group, and a rather ill-defined group at that, among several troubling underminers of good social order, to being a much more carefully delineated group with specific beliefs, practices, and networks of communication. By the time the Church council arrived at this classification in 1549, ‘heretics’, known broadly now as ‘Protestants’, had already been in Scottish towns for a generation. Not much is known about the earliest waves of sixteenth-century continental reform to reach Scotland, though it is clear that by the mid-1520s the Scottish government was becoming worried about it. In 1525 the parliament was sufficiently concerned about the spread of ideas from

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Luther and his disciples that they passed an enactment against ‘ony opunyeounis contrare the Christin fayth’ and forbade the import of Lutheran books under the penalty of imprisonment and confiscation of goods and ship.52 The King was aware that the ideas came from the Continent, and at first concentrated his efforts on stopping the import of Lutheran texts and warning the native Scots about the danger of these foreign notions. James V wrote to the sheriff of Aberdeen and his deputies in 1525 that strangers and others had books of ‘that heretik Luthyr’ and favoured his false opinions in contravention to the Act of Parliament. He charged that they publish that act in all necessary places and make an inquisition into whether anyone within the diocese of Aberdeen had such books or favoured the opinions of Luther.53 For a while, the King felt quite confident in the success of his measures. In January 1526, the pope praised James V’s ‘preservation of his country from Lutheran heresy, though it flourishes hard by’, and one year later James wrote to the Pope of his ‘detestation’ and ‘strength of his opposition’ to the Lutherans, promising that he would ‘strive to follow his predecessors in defending the catholic faith and ecclesiastical liberty’, adding that ‘neither Lutheranism nor any other heresy will be suffered to invade Scotland’.54 Three years later, James reiterated his opposition to Lutherans who, he feared, sought ‘to destroy churches, abolish monastic institutions, and profane all sacred rites’.55 Parliamentarians and the King were likely correct in their suspicions that the entry points for Lutheran ideas were with the Scottish intellectuals who had studied on the Continent and the merchants who traded there.56 In 1527 an English agent in the Low Countries reported that Scottish merchants were buying heretical books and shipping them to Edinburgh and St Andrews.57 It took political leaders several years, however, to discover or admit that a native Scottish tradition of Lutheranism was taking root. Towards the end of 1532, James acknowledged that ‘the doctrine of Luther gains strength’, but even as late as 1537, the Scottish king spoke of Lutheran ideas as being imported from Germany with the merchandise that reached his shores.58 So far as the Scottish king and Parliament were concerned, Lutheranism in Scotland was ultimately a foreign import and a phenomenon of the towns, brought to their country along the same channels as commerce from

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abroad. But some awareness of Lutheranism’s domestic reach was beginning to grow. By 1535, when Parliament ratified their original enactment form a decade earlier against Lutheran ideas and the importation of Lutheran books, they had become concerned not just with spread of ideas into Scotland, but also with the spread of ideas within Scotland. The use, possession, or selling of Luther’s works were forbidden, and anyone found with these texts had 41 days to hand them over to the local bishop.59 The rate of compliance cannot be known, but it was not universal. In spite of bans and admonitions, some Scots did take up, and maintain, an evangelical position. The most famous early evangelical Scot is Patrick Hamilton. Like many Scottish evangelicals of this period, Hamilton probably first encountered Protestant ideas abroad, in his case likely in Paris where he earned a Master’s degree in 1520 and where Luther’s theology was being openly discussed. Upon his return to Scotland and admittance to the Faculty of Arts at St Andrews University in 1524, Hamilton was likely a reforming Catholic in the tradition of Erasmus, whom he may have met also while abroad and studying at Louvain, rather than a Lutheran Protestant. Or at least such would have been his outward identity as someone who progressed very quickly through the university’s ranks and even composed a nine-part mass. Hamilton’s transition from Erasmian humanist to Lutheran Protestant seems to have taken place during the years 1525–26, perhaps after reading more of Luther’s works that were making their way into Scotland, perhaps also after reading Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English. His transition was soon noted. Cardinal James Beaton launched an inquiry into Hamilton in 1527, and Hamilton fled to Germany with two friends and a servant. While at the new Lutheran university in Marburg, he wrote a collection of theses for public debate. Known in English as Patrick’s Places, this was a set of Latin commonplaces summarizing his Lutheran understanding of justification by faith alone: it maintained the Protestant position that humans were powerless in the face of sin and dependent entirely on God’s grace and that works make people neither righteous nor unrighteous, that they neither save nor condemn. This text was translated after Hamilton’s death and read in England, though there is no evidence of its presence in Scotland until the late 1540s. Hamilton’s most

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famous writing, therefore, did not have any obvious impact on the earliest years of Protestant growth in Scotland. His personal presence, and especially his ministry in Scottish towns, by contrast, had a strong influence on local Protestant culture. Hamilton remained in Germany for a short time – not more than six months – and then returned to his family estate in Scotland. When he began to preach in and around Linlithgow, Cardinal Beaton issued a summons against him. Hamilton returned to St Andrews for examination and was at first allowed not only his freedom but also the right to teach openly in the university. After about a month, however, Hamilton was recalled on a series of charges, among them his Lutheran position on the roles of faith and works in justification and his rejection of both purgatory and the mediation of saints. Hamilton’s response was a Protestant one: an appeal to the authority of Scripture and the mediation of Christ alone. It did not persuade his judges, who condemned Hamilton and had him brought to the stake for execution. If the trial and passing of the sentence were rushed, the execution itself certainly was not. Due perhaps to the wet weather preventing the wood from lighting properly, it took about six hours. An eyewitness reported that Hamilton was more roasted than burnt. News of the execution spread far and wide, and with it a new figure for Scottish Protestantism: a man born in Scotland from a noble family with royal blood, a scholar of international repute, a university lecturer and an abbot, and only 23 years of age when he died a martyr’s death resolute in his beliefs and composed in his manner.60 Records mention a scattering of Scottish evangelicals over the next couple of decades following Hamilton’s death, mostly nobles rather than townsfolk.61 One Scottish Protestant active in the 1530s who appears not to have been from noble stock but rather from an urban merchant family was John Gau. In 1533 Gau produced a Danish Lutheran text as the Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine, the first Protestant work known to have been translated into Scots. This catechetical work offered Lutheran explanations of the Ten Commandments, the Twelve Articles of Belief, the Paternoster, and the Magnificat in a language that could be understood by the (Scotsspeaking) Scottish people: ‘Thairfor now the richt and chrissine doctrine is heir contenit in this present buyk that al quhilk onderstandis the Scotis tung ma haiff vith thayme and reid and wss it

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Dailie.’ Although this text could have been useful as a manual of Protestant household devotion, it is difficult to know how widely it was read in Scotland since no direct reference to the work appears in any other text, and only one copy survives.62 Whatever the short-term popularity of Gau’s book, the 1530s do seem to have been a decade of rising Protestant book trade to Scottish towns generally. In 1534 James V denounced new books made by Luther’s followers in Latin, Scottish, English, and Flemish, as well as tracts and books translated by heretics from Latin into Scots and arriving in Leith, Edinburgh, Dundee, St Andrews, Montrose, Aberdeen, and Kirkcaldy.63 In March 1537 four Scots from the town of Ayr were in Carlisle, complaining that they were being harassed at home for holding the opinion that the Bishop of Rome ought not to be called pope and for possessing the New Testament in English.64 Perhaps not coincidentally, The 1530s were also a decade of rising arrests of Protestants in Scottish towns. By 1538, 14 people in Dundee were convicted of heresy, and by 1539 so were two more from Dundee, one from Perth, one from Edinburgh, and four from Stirling or nearby.65 Lutheran books were not the only means by which the Protestant message was disseminated, and more popular and performative methods began to appear in the towns of Scotland. By 1540, plays with a reforming message were being composed by James Wedderburn, son of a merchant, and performed in Dundee. The playwright was evidently from a family of early Protestants, for one of Wedderburn’s brothers would later acquire an Englishlanguage Bible, and two others would compile the Gude and Godlie Ballattis, a collection of hymns, songs, and metrical psalms published in the 1540s and derived in part from German Lutheran sources. Examples from this book may have been among the ‘sclanderous billis, writings, ballatis, and bukis’ that the Privy Council ordered destroyed in 1543, and among the ‘books of rhymes or popular songs containing calumnies and slanders defaming the churchmen and church institutions’ that the provincial council of 1549 wished to inquire about, as well as among the ‘bukis, ballattis, sangis, blasphematiounis, rymes or Tragedies’ that Parliament prohibited in 1552, or even among the ‘certane odious ballettis and rymes’ about which the Queen Regent complained to the bailies of Edinburgh in 1556.66

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The King’s response to early evangelicals was uneven, informed by a desire to put the growing religious crisis in Europe to his own political advantage as well as by a piety that may have been ‘conventional’ rather than ‘convictional’.67 Such an ambiguous and even ambivalent response would have done little to settle the minds of spiritually curious townspeople weighing the different confessional options opening up before them. On the one hand, James V supported the Catholic establishment, especially when he could manoeuvre into a more favourable position on the international scene. He used the example of the English Reformation as leverage in his negotiations with other countries, and he won from the papacy a substantial income as well as the notable honour of the Blessed Sword and Hat. On the other hand, James also showed a willingness to overlook religious nonconformity among his favourites. His physician, his master of the household, and his treasurer’s clerk were all at least sympathetic to evangelical beliefs, while his confessor, when charged with heresy for preaching the denunciation of clerical corruption and supporting justification by faith alone, was allowed to escape to England. Whatever his designs, which may have included genuine interest in humanist reform of the Church, such wilful blindness on the part of James V likely helped legitimize Protestant thought in his kingdom.68 James died unexpectedly in 1542 at the age of 30, leaving as his only surviving heir the infant Mary. This situation was destabilizing for the political realm as a whole, since Mary’s eventual marriage could have caused the kingdom to be absorbed into the realm of her spouse. In the meantime, however, it initiated a new and more hopeful era for Scottish evangelicals. The first governor of Scotland during Mary’s minority was James Hamilton, Earl of Arran. Arran’s policies at first favoured Scottish Protestants both diplomatically, through his support for the marriage of young Mary to Edward Tudor, Prince of Wales, and domestically, through his support for evangelical reform, also known as Arran’s ‘godly fit’. The year 1543 appears to have been unusually iconoclastic, perhaps as evangelicals celebrated this seemingly providential turn of events.69 These attacks, however, were not supported by the townspeople at large. Although the assaults on the Dominicans in Perth discussed earlier attracted some popular support, townspeople in Edinburgh came forward to protect the friars when Arran’s

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forces attacked the Dominican house there. ‘This towne is gretely commoved,’ reported one witness, ‘and stoutely they have defended theyr freers here.’ The townspeople also threatened with such vigour to drive off those who wished to ‘put downe the Kyrke’ that the attackers were afraid to go out of doors, and Edinburgh townspeople opposed so aggressively the evangelical preachers protected by Arran that the preachers needed armed guards to protect them.70 Edinburgh was not the only town to show resistance to the ‘godly fit’. When a friar denounced the evangelical activities in Ayr and as a consequence was summoned to Edinburgh to face trial, the Ayr burgh council supported him with a horse, board, clothing, and cash, and paid for an escort to accompany him.71 If the year 1543 seemed auspicious to committed evangelicals who saw an ally in power and felt they could now pronounce their beliefs more publicly, it did little to increase broad popular support for the evangelical cause; if anything, Arran’s attempt at evangelical reform, and the associations that this kind of reform had with England in the minds of Scots, stoked the fires of Catholic religious opposition to Protestantism and patriotic opposition to an English alliance. Then, in December 1543, when Scotland repudiated the treaty arranging a marriage between Mary Queen of Scots and Edward Tudor, England tried to enforce its terms by military force and inaugurated several years of devastating warfare known as the ‘Rough Wooings’. As English forces caused considerable destruction of Scottish property, the evangelical cause suffered by being closely linked with sympathy for the English enemy, and Scotland’s eventual defeat of the English (with the help of considerable French intervention) discredited Scottish evangelicals and Protestantism in the short term. Over the longer term, the war also weakened the Catholic Church in Scotland by draining away many resources in taxes, and by destroying much of its property.72 Meanwhile, after the end of Arran’s ‘godly fit’ and the reassertion of Catholic orthodoxy, the character of Scottish Protestantism was thrown into sharper relief. At least some Protestants took an increasingly assertive stance. Some were caught buying, selling, or eating meat or eggs during Lent,73 while others continued to engage in more concrete attacks against the old order, for example by breaking images in Ayr parish church in 1544.74 A few spoke

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out publicly about their Protestant beliefs. Robert Lambe of Perth interrupted a sermon about purgatory by leaping to his feet, waving an English language Bible, and warning the preaching friar that the Bible would bear witness against him at the Judgement Day. He was reported to have explained his actions by saying that ‘the work of the Lord must needs be wrought openly, for it will not lurk long’. This was an unusually dramatic and public declaration of confessional allegiance. Among the other actions carried out by Lambe and the residents of Perth tried with him in 1544 were eating meat on a Friday, desecrating a statue of St Francis, and, in the case of Helen Stirk, the only woman in the group, refusing to pray to the Virgin Mary during childbirth. Their sentences of execution were officially based on the charge of disputing upon Scripture, though an additional motivation may have been political, specifically the desire on the part of local merchants to curtail the power of the craftsmen in the burgh and to punish them for a demonstration the previous year when the craftsmen had attempted to force the town council into accepting one of their number as magistrate. The fight may therefore have been as much about politics as it was about religion, but it nevertheless showed that there were townspeople willing to challenge religious beliefs and practices openly.75 The Perth trials of 1544 further suggest the importance of kinship in confessional identity. When James Hunter was executed, his escheat was granted to his widow Christian Piper and their daughter Violet Hunter. Christian Piper had important kinship connections with other Protestants, for she was the daughter of Walter Piper, burgess of Perth as well as councillor and even bailie at one point, who was hanged in 1544, and presumably kinswoman to Walter Piper the younger, a flesher in Perth, one of those who broke into the Dominican house in 1543.76 Like with Catholic religious practices in Scottish towns (see Chapters 1 and 2), it would appear that Protestant affirmations ran along kinship lines. In total, about 20 people were executed for heresy in Scotland between 1528 and 1546. A greater number likely recanted or paid fines, such as Robert Anderson, burgess of Dundee, who was accused of heresy but then abjured and bought his own escheat in 1538, and Martin Balcaskie, merchant of Edinburgh, who was accused of having English books and bought his own escheat in

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1539, only to be imprisoned in England two years later. John Brown, a burgess of Edinburgh, fared better across the border. After being convicted of heresy in 1547, he fled to England and was still living there in 1556. James Rollock, a merchant from Dundee, made even more of his time in exile. After being convicted of heresy in 1539, he set up as a merchant in the Low Countries, where he bought Protestant books from an English printer and likely had them exported to Scotland.77 By the 1550s, Scottish Protestants were coalescing into organized groups. In Edinburgh, and possibly elsewhere too, they began to form ‘privy kirks’, which were networks of secret, or at least underground, house churches. Even in Edinburgh their membership was small, measuring only in the dozens; outside Edinburgh, most Protestants read and discussed the Bible in much less formally organized groups. Knox was advocating that they separate themselves from the Catholic Church and make public their religious commitment, but Protestants were not heeding his instructions in large numbers during most of the decade, and they remained a minority in every region in Scotland. Then, in 1557, the burgh council of Ayr began to reduce its financial support for the Catholic Church and instead initiated support for a preacher whom it termed, notably, ‘minister’.78 Even at this time, a religious compromise may still have seemed possible to moderate Protestants and reforming Catholics: one was actually being worked out in Mary of Guise’s proposal that included vernacular prayers and litanies in every parish church on Sundays and other holy days, and a demand that action be taken against iconoclasm and against those who use the sacraments without proper authorization. When this proposal was rejected, however, the hopes for compromise faded away. Protestants in the east-coast towns and in the south-west joined into ‘Congregations’, Knox and other reformers came to Perth and inspired the crowd into iconoclasm, and over a very short span of time Protestantism in Scotland turned into a public revolt. Protestant supporters grew substantially in numbers – about a third of the adult male population of St Andrews signed their support for the Protestant cause in July 1559 – and noticeably in zeal. Civil war erupted and drew foreign troops from England and France, until an English victory in the summer of 1560 helped realize the Scottish Protestant aim of

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creating a Protestant Scotland where religious allegiance and national allegiance went hand in hand.79

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Conclusion The spark that lit full Protestant Reformation in Scotland is hard to isolate, but one possibility occurred in May 1559, when John Knox came to Perth and preached a sermon about Christ cleansing the Temple. Some in attendance responded by ‘cleansing’ their parish church, then the friaries and Carthusian house in their burgh. Whether their motivations were purely spiritual or partly political, the end result was that Perth became an officially Protestant town. Lords of the Congregation then travelled from town to town to help other local groups of Protestants, and the Protestant Reformation of Scotland was under way. This Protestant Reformation had not been in sight for most people only a generation or two earlier,80 although it certainly has been decisively in the sight of historians for generations since. It is difficult to know how strong a link should be drawn between systemic weaknesses in the Scottish Church, religious indifference among some of its laypeople, late medieval religious dissenters such as Lollards, and the unfolding of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland. The most likely connection is an indirect one: undercommitted personnel and inadequate financial provision left the Church ill-prepared to mount a sufficiently stout defence or offence against a Protestant challenge that was growing stronger by the year. The Church’s moral authority was undermined by unsuitable behaviour by clerics at all ranks, and its ability to implement educational measures was severely hampered by a financial system that siphoned resources away from the parishes, which needed them most, and into the hands of other religious institutions. Most of the laypeople in many Scottish towns, for their part, maintained a fairly unconcerned attitude towards their religious institutions and these institutions’ fate within a changing confessional landscape in sixteenth-century Europe. Without a doubt, the Church in Scotland faced some serious challenges by the early sixteenth century. Working with the benefit of hindsight, many historians have – naturally enough – incorporated these challenges into their history of the Reformation in

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Scotland as causes for the growth and eventual triumph of Protestantism. Such an outcome, however, was by no means assured in the early sixteenth century. In fact, as the next chapter shows, the leaders of the Scottish Church began to implement a serious programme of reform to meet the challenges of their time, and in so doing became engaged in a much broader shift within Scottish society that both responded to and also caused profound transformations. As things would turn out, there would be a Protestant Reformation in Scotland, but only after the beginnings of a Catholic Reformation and a shift into the early modern world.

Notes 1 de Voragine, Golden Legend, I, 287. 2 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398– 1570, 323–4. 3 McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction Caused by the Scottish Reformation’, 428–9. 4 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 11, 12, 14–15, 36–8. 5 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 84. 6 Lyndsay, ‘The Dreme’, in Works, l. 189. 7 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 342; McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 91. 8 Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 31. 9 Major, History of Greater Britain, 30. 10 Stevenson, ‘Patrick Hamilton’s Nine-part Mass’, 29–39. 11 Purser, Scotland’s Music, 74–5, 97–106; Preece, Our Awin Scottis Use, 101–28, 151–68; Ross, Musick Fyne, 3–64; Murray, ‘The Parish Clerk and Song School of Inverness, 1538–9’. 12 Fittis, Ecclesiastical Annals of Perth to the Period of the Reformation, 282. 13 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 342; McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 91. 14 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 23. 15 Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, passim. 16 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 14–15. 17 Kelleher, ‘“Like man and wife’; Armstrong-Partida, ‘Priestly Marriage’; Hayden and Greenshields, ‘The Clergy of Early Seventeenth-Century France’, 169. 18 McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 85–7. 19 Todd, ‘The Church and Religion’, 108–9; Lynch and Ditchburn, ‘Economic Development’, 290; Watt, ‘The Church’, 368; Sanderson,

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21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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Ayrshire and the Reformation, 17–20; Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 15. Watt, ‘Scotland’, 398–400; Grant, Independence and Nationhood, 98–9. McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 85–7. Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 16. Cramond, Records of Elgin, I, 87, cited in McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 89; Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, II, 354–5, cited in McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 89. Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 92; McKay, ‘Parish Life in Scotland, 1500–1560’, 89–90; Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 16. Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland, 86. Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 138–9, 143–7. Lyndsay, ‘Ane Dialogue betuix Experience and Ane Courtier, off the Miserabyll Estait of the Warld’, in Works, I, 218, ll. 636–9. Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 5–6, 75–6. St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume II, 57–9. Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 140–1. Sanderson, A Kindly Place?, 165. Perth Hammermen Book (1518 to 1568); Hall, ‘Of Holy Men and Heroes’, 73; Edinburgh Records, The Burgh Accounts: Volume Two. Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland, 177, 199–200; Verschuur, Politics or Religion?, 21. Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, 29–30. Hudson, Premature Reformation; Aston, Lollards and Reformers. Sanderson, ‘The Lollard Trail’, 1–33; Vyšny´, ‘A Hussite in Scotland’, 1–19. Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland, 8–9. Hudson, Premature Reformation; Sanderson, ‘The Lollard Trail’, 1–33; Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 36–47. Knox, History of the Reformation in Scotland, 9–10. Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 41, 45–6. McRoberts, ‘Material Destruction Caused by the Scottish Reformation’; Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, II, 37, cap. 9; Murray, ‘The Excommunication of Edinburgh Town Council in 1558’, 26 n. 21; Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 211; Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, I, Pt 2, 335, 375, 393–4. Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 49–50. St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume II, 3–4. Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, II, 37, cap. 9; Murray, ‘The Excommunication of Edinburgh Town Council in 1558’, 26 n. 21.

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45 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 211; White, ‘The Menzies Era’, 228; Lynch, DesBrisay and Pittock, ‘The Faith of the People’, 291. 46 Kirk, ‘The Religion of Early Scottish Protestants’, 378; Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence’. 47 Walsham,‘The Reformation and the “Disenchantment of the World” Reassessed’, 507. 48 Verschuur, Politics or Religion?, 79–80. 49 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 6, 75–6. 50 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 126–7. 51 Winning, ‘Church Councils in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’. 52 Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, II, 295. 53 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, I, 110. 54 Letters of James V, 130, 134. 55 Letters of James V, 161. 56 Letters of James V, 174; Aberdeen Council Register 1844, I, 107–8, quoted in Todd, ‘The Church and Religion’, 110. 57 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 30. 58 Letters of James V, 327, 424. 59 Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, II, 342; Mann, Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720, 164; Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 48. 60 Dotterweich, ‘Sacraments and the Church in the Scottish Evangelical Mind 1528–1555’, 44–50; Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 31–3; Torrance, ‘Hamilton, Patrick (1504?–1528)’; Kirk, ‘The Religion of Early Scottish Protestants’, 369–72. 61 Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs 1501–1554, 426; Letters of James V, 276, 287, 315–16. 62 Gau, ‘The Richt Way to Hevin’; Dotterweich, ‘Sacraments and the Church in the Scottish Evangelical Mind 1528–1555’, 51–4; Kirk, ‘The Religion of Early Scottish Protestants’, 375–6; Kirk, ‘Gaw, John (d. c. 1553)’. 63 Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs 1501–1554, 422–3. 64 Sanderson, Ayrshire and the Reformation, 50. 65 Kirk, ‘The Religion of Early Scottish Protestants’, 383–91. 66 Sanderson, Cardinal of Scotland, 282–3; Ryrie, ‘Congregations, Conventicles and the Nature of Early Scottish Protestantism’, 54; Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 123; Statutes of the Scottish Church, 126–7. 67 Thomas, Princelie Majestie. 68 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 37–48; Kellar, Scotland, England, and the Reformation 1534–61, 26–32, 47–78. 69 Diurnal of Remarkable Occurents, 29. 70 Hamilton Papers, 20, #14.

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71 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 90. 72 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 53–90; Kellar, Scotland, England, and the Reformation 1534–61, 78–112. 73 St Andrews Formulare 1514–1546, Volume II, 112–14. 74 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 97. 75 Verschuur, Politics or Religion?, 75–9. 76 Sanderson, Cardinal of Scotland, 277–8, 280. 77 Sanderson, Cardinal of Scotland, 78, 270–81; Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 72–90. 78 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 117–38; Ryrie, ‘Congregations, Conventicles and the Nature of Early Scottish Protestantism’. 79 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 139–95. 80 Ditchburn, Scotland and Europe, 39–42; Kirk, Patterns of Reform.

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Catholic reform

Sir David Lyndsay, poet and herald in the court of James V, was sharply critical of the superstitions of ‘fulysche folke’ whose worship of the saints amounted to the false worshipping of images, and who needed to be taught that ‘in stok nor stone can be non holynes’. He took specific aim at the St Giles procession in Edinburgh, calling it ‘the gret Idolatrye’ and ‘manifest abominatioun’. So great was his displeasure, in fact, that Lyndsay called on his God to ‘mak one haistie reformatioun’.1 This request may at first seem straightforward enough, but what kind of reformation did Lyndsay desire? Though post-Reformation writers championed him as an early Protestant, Lyndsay’s religious allegiance was actually much more complex. He criticized abuses in the Church, and especially standards of clerical behaviour, but he accepted the intercessory role of the Virgin Mary and rejected the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone.2 In short, Lyndsay had complex views befitting a complex time. As a Catholic critic of the Catholic Church, he was not alone in early sixteenth-century Scotland. Contrary to what many books on Scottish history would suggest, religious life in pre-Reformation Scotland was not static. Lay devotional practice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries changed in a number of ways, and for the most part these changes were not early Protestant or crypto-Protestant or even proto-Protestant, but Catholic; Scotland’s religious changes in the early sixteenth century were not part of the Protestant Reformation, but part of Catholic reform. They were brought about through a combination of lay-led initiatives and elite-driven repressions, and are best appreciated when Scotland is considered

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within the context of the broader and deeper early modern currents of change in Europe. To put it another way, the ‘reformatioun’ for which David Lyndsay longed is not something historians should seek within medieval developments or Protestant trends, but in the Catholic culture particular to early modern Europe.

Religious reform in late medieval and early modern Europe Martin Luther’s famous break with the Catholic Church was still a long way off when in 1414 the Council of Constance called for the working ‘ad pacem, exaltationem, et reformationem ecclesiae’ (‘for the peace, exaltation, and reformation of the Church’). The delegates at this council were not exceptional in their desire to bring change to institutions of religion. The Catholic Church experienced a long series of reforms throughout the Middle Ages, and this spirit of reform continued into the sixteenth century when European Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, shared a desire to return to the past in order to invigorate the present.3 Historians of Scottish religion have tended to overlook or downplay Catholic reform movements prior to 1560, choosing instead to characterize the religious culture of Scotland as one of continuity from the eleventh century until the Protestant Reformation.4 A standard periodization of Scottish history takes the Reformation date of 1560 as the watershed dividing ‘medieval’ from ‘modern’, and especially among those studying the history of religion, ‘pre-Reformation’ Scotland has often been simply accepted as coterminous with ‘medieval’ Scotland.5 Some works that claim an earlier date for the conclusion to the medieval period on the surface nevertheless implicitly insist that the Scottish Middle Ages ended at 1560. The introduction to A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, for example, states that the period under consideration is around 1100–1500, but the essays on Scotland in particular still conclude the ‘Later Middle Ages’ with the year 1560.6 According to the table of contents in A History of Scottish Medicine: Themes and Influences, ‘medieval Scotland’ ends around 1500, at which point ‘early modern Scotland’ begins; the main text of the book, however, belies the periodization set out here, for many sixteenth-century examples are given in the chapter on ‘medieval Scotland’, and the early

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modern discussion is mostly post-Reformation, meaning that 1560 is still serving as the de facto ending to the Middle Ages.7 While the term ‘early modern’ can often be found in books and articles on Scottish history, it is usually applied to the century or two after the Protestant Reformation – to the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries – thus making the ‘early modern’ period entirely separate from the ‘pre-Reformation’ period in the Scottish context.8 There are some historians who begin the ‘early modern’ period around 1500,9 though this emerging periodization has barely touched the history of Scottish urban religion, where ‘medieval’ is still generally synonymous with ‘pre-Reformation’. For those seeking a recognizable term to describe the later part of the late Middle Ages and the earlier part of the early modern period, the ‘Renaissance’ has, of course, long been of service. However, this term is rarely used for the history of Scottish religion: scholars speak of a Scottish ‘Renaissance’ when focusing on high political culture, its literature, its architecture, and its music,10 but not generally about its religion. Moreover, even in its somewhat limited purview, the term ‘Renaissance’ has its detractors, including those who challenge any notion of a strong break from earlier traditions, and those who highlight instead continuity and overlap from the late ‘Middle Ages’.11 When looking at religious behaviour, most historians now reject the old picture of a helplessly corrupt Church leading ignorant or disengaged laypeople, and instead find a high degree of religious satisfaction among the Scottish laity in the century or so preceding the Reformation.12 This argument for widespread satisfaction with Catholicism before the Reformation is often connected to the argument for significant survival of Catholicism after it, and several studies have shown Catholic practices surviving for some time beyond the Protestant Reformation, longest in regions remote from the control of central government and in institutions where social and religious identities were difficult or impossible to separate. Even within less conservative parts of society, these studies suggest, the official Reformation did not beget an immediately internalized and widespread Protestantism on the part of lay Scots.13 Thus the Reformation period in Scottish history is becoming less sharply and absolutely divisive, and also less imbued with a value judgement that presumes the Protestant Reformation

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to have been an inevitable and necessary corrective. But the dominant periodization of the history of religion in Scotland nevertheless continues to make a break, albeit a somewhat soft one, at 1560 to divide both the ‘pre-Reformation’ from the ‘(post-) Reformation’ and the ‘medieval’ from the ‘(early) modern’. Not everyone fully accepts this periodization. Of particular interest to scholars of religion is the work of those historians who discern a Counter-Reformation or Catholic Reformation before the Protestant Reformation in certain proceedings of Archbishop Hamilton and his circle. James Cameron was the first to perceive a period of Catholic reform in sixteenth-century Scotland, and a few others have followed his lead.14 Clare Kellar, in Scotland, England, and the Reformation, examines the similarities between Hamilton’s and Thomas Cranmer’s ‘Erasmian-influenced approaches to the task of reform’ as they sought to eradicate abuses and improve standards of clerical education, and she points to the coalescing of Scottish and English religious goals after the accession of Catholic Mary Tudor in England.15 Janet Foggie speaks of ‘Catholic reform’ among the Dominicans in Scotland, who were publicly involved in examining doctrine and pronouncing heresy from the late 1520s.16 Mary Verschuur’s book on the Reformation in Perth discusses leaders of the Scottish Church who recognized the need for ‘reform from within’ in the late 1540s and 1550s.17 Alec Ryrie, in The Origins of the Scottish Reformation, writes of a ‘Catholic Reformation’ in 1549–59 when the Scottish Church set for itself an ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful, programme of reform.18 These arguments for a ‘Catholic Reformation’ in mid-sixteenthcentury Scotland are compelling, particularly as they go against the grain of Scottish historiography. When extended, the notion of a pre-1560 Catholic Reformation can fruitfully be applied to lay religious culture in Scottish towns as well, especially when considering this culture in the context of early modernist scholarship. Any discussion of the periodization of Scottish history should of course take into account the broad consensus among historians of Europe that there was considerable overlap between the medieval and early modern periods.19 Stretching the ‘medieval’ period in the history of Scottish religion right up to 1560, however, risks distorting an appreciation of how Scottish society in the late fifteenth and

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early sixteenth centuries fits in with larger European patterns, because it obscures developments such as changes in popular devotion, Tridentine reform, emphasis on aurality in public worship, and increasing concerns over social discipline. These developments emerge more clearly when considering that maybe there was, in some sense, such a thing as ‘early modern’ Scotland before the Protestant Reformation of 1560.

New devotional and educational trends Several of the more famous examples of lay religious enthusiasm from England and continental Europe are curiously absent from Scotland. There is no evidence of anything like the strong current of mysticism as in England. There were no beguines, laywomen consecrated to the service of God but bound by no vow and following no rule approved by the ecclesiastical authorities, as in the Low Countries. Also unlike the Low Countries, Scotland showed no sign of the Brethren of the Common Life, informal and voluntary communities established by Gerard Groote. It is not clear why such movements should be absent from Scotland, especially given the close cultural and trading connections between it, England, and the Low Countries. Scotland did import some trends in lay piety from the Continent, and in particular those drawing on increasing devotion to the Passion and to the Holy Family. As shown in Chapter 2, devotion to Christ, especially to the suffering Christ, and to his family, was growing in popularity in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scotland. The feast of the Five Wounds was in Scotland by 1491, and the feast of the Crown of Thorns by about 1520. The Holy Blood was an object of devotion in several Scottish towns, with altars in Aberdeen and Haddington, and confraternities in Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Devotional trends of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and originating in England or on the Continent therefore had a mixed reception in Scotland. Educational reform was more fully received in Scotland, where leading ecclesiastics and lay writers alike showed a typically humanist concern with improving morals and education in the Scottish Church.20 Several ecclesiastics were inspired to introduce the new learning into Scotland, including Robert Reid, Bishop of

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Orkney, William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, and David Beaton, Cardinal and Archbishop of St Andrews.21 Quintin Kennedy’s Ane compendius Tractiue . . . Declaring the Nerest, and Onlie Way, to Establische the Conscience of ane Christiane Man of 1558 takes the traditional Catholic position that the Bible requires interpretation by the Church, but also the newer humanist positions that the Church’s authority stems from early councils of the fourth and fifth centuries and that vernacular Scriptures are not to be condemned.22 Provisions for education in Scottish towns can be difficult to measure. The presence of schools is likely often masked by their inclusion into larger ecclesiastical foundations, and schoolmasters can be described in the sources simply as ‘chaplains’. According to legislation of church councils, there should have been a song school in every parish, and these were to be open to the public. Their main purpose was the training of singers for the choir, and so focused on a musical education that would have lasted about two years. In Aberdeen, burgesses’ sons learned how to sing and play. In Edinburgh, schools also taught the rudiments of Latin grammar. The burgh clerk in Inverness was to rule the town’s song school and instruct the scholars there in chant and organ playing, and his counterpart in Dundee had similar pedagogical duties. The level of musical education must have been quite high in some establishments, and could even extend to study abroad, such as when James Lauder, prebendary of St Giles in 1553, received a licence to study music in England and France.23 The boys being trained at the song schools were trebles, and so the adolescent breaking of the voice brought with it educational changes. John Kilstaris, a singer in Aberdeen, was granted a licence in 1545 to attend college in Old Aberdeen ‘to study and lerning of letteris’. He retained his pension and fee of 40s a year for continuing to sing in the choir on Sundays and holy days.24 The endowed choristers at the church of Our Lady in Glasgow had to leave when their voices broke, but they could then continue at the city’s grammar school for a further two years. Grammar schools could be found in burghs throughout Scotland, and the main goal of this level of education was the acquisition of Latin. Students at the Musselburgh grammar school in 1547 could read various classical authors, including Ovid and Caesar, in addition to the New

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Testament and the Psalter. Some schools included more linguistic variety in their curricula. Edinburgh had a special school for the teaching of French.25 The grammar school in Aberdeen, the only school in Scotland for which we have an extant sixteenth-century curriculum, shows a marked humanistic influence in its language instruction. Its students were expected to have their conversations in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, as well as French and Gaelic, but never in Scots. At the very least, this rule shows an interest in teaching urban children biblical and classical languages, and while it is not known if all of these languages were actually taught in the classroom, there is circumstantial evidence that the schoolboys learnt their ancient tongues: when King James V visited Aberdeen in 1540, he was entertained by scholars giving orations in Latin and Greek.26 One of the most important planks in Scotland’s sixteenthcentury religious education programme was the Catechism associated with Archbishop Hamilton.27 The 1552 Scottish Church council decreed that physical copies of the book itself were meant for clergy and their instruction, and were only to be loaned to certain laypeople of exceptional piety. This does not mean, however, that laypeople would not be instructed in the text: they were to hear it read by their curate for half an hour every Sunday and holy day.28 The Catechism itself instructs clerics to use the book for their own erudition, but also to read it ‘diligently, distinctly, and plainly’ to their parishioners ‘for thair common instructioun and spiritual edificatioun’. Modelled on similar works produced over the previous decades in England and Germany, this Catechism was designed to lead the people through the rudiments of Christian doctrine such as the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Seven Sacraments. The preface urges conformity in teaching, that in all matters concerning Catholic faith and Christian manners ‘ye be uniforme’, so that ‘ye concord ane with ane uthir in the forme of teeching the trew word of God’. It also warns that it is undoubtedly ‘an synfull and an damnabil thing to varie and discord’ in matters of faith. The faith to which all were supposed to conform was traditional and Catholic in many important respects. Images were permissible, so long as they were well used, because seeing them, and especially the crucifix, gave the viewer faith in Christ and gave the unlearned

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a remembrance of the Passion. The doctrine of purgatory was affirmed. The number of sacraments was maintained at seven (baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, matrimony), and they were instruments of salvation as well as spiritual conduits and wells of grace. The explanation of the sacrament of the Eucharist included the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, where it contains God ‘really and essentially’, so that there is no substance of bread and wine in the sacrament but rather the body and blood of Christ under the form of bread and wine; to think otherwise was to fall into ‘gret heresye’. The explanation of holy orders made it clear that only certain people are ordained priests; there was no priesthood of all believers here. The text is Catholic in its content, but somewhat unusual in its priorities. For example, it mentions the papacy only once, and clerical celibacy not at all. It places a great deal of emphasis on the authority of Scripture, and says nothing against reading it in the vernacular. The preface states that the work contains briefly and truly the ‘sowmme of our christian doctrin’ agreeing in all points with ‘the wordis of halye scripture’, which would have pleased the Protestants; ‘trew expositioun of the auld and catholyk doctouris’, which would have pleased the traditional Catholics; and ‘decisiouns and determinatiouns of general counsallis’, which would have pleased conciliar Catholics.29 Having seemingly Protestant traits within a document compiled by leaders of the Catholic Church may at first seem baffling. It is certainly possible that the authors included them to appease the Protestants in Scotland and perhaps even to attempt some kind of reconciliation between the different confessional groups, but a simpler way to account for seemingly Protestant traits in an ostensibly Catholic text is to regard these traits not as ‘Protestant’ at all, but rather as part of the growing European movement of humanism and Catholic reform.

The Council of Trent The most prominent aspect of Catholic reform to shape Scottish religion in the early sixteenth century was the Council of Trent, a general council of the Catholic Church held in several phases from 1545 to 1563. King James V knew something about a forthcoming

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council as early as 1530, and he learned more in 1537 while in Paris for his marriage to Madeleine de Valois. In spite of the Scottish king’s promise to papal messengers that he would do all he could to have his prelates attend the council, and in spite of Cardinal Beaton’s attempt in 1546 to raise a clerical tax to defray the expenses of Scottish representatives, no Scottish bishops were at Trent. To what extent this was due to disinterest and to what extent to travel difficulties because of English interference, as Beaton complained, is uncertain. Much more certain is that leading Scottish churchmen had access to other continental conciliar legislation and were therefore well aware of the importance of these events. Gavin Dunbar, Archbishop of Glasgow, had among the books in his possession one containing the decrees of the 1528 Council of Sens, and other ecclesiastics had copies of the decrees from the Councils of Mainz and Cologne. Moreover, even in the absence of Scottish bishops, there was a Scot in attendance at the Council of Trent. This was Robert Wauchope, a leader in several capacities at Trent and head of the group of theologians who drew up the sixth session’s decree on justification. Wauchope was in attendance as Bishop of Armagh, Ireland, rather than as the bishop of a Scottish diocese, but he nevertheless helped to get the Tridentine decrees to Scotland after the Council was prorogued in 1547. Scotland put the Council of Trent’s decrees into force in 1549, years before any other country in Europe: Portugal, Venice, Poland, Spain, and all the Italian states waited until 1564 to do the same.30 Tridentine influence is especially obvious in the Scottish provincial council of 1549, eight of whose statutes were taken directly from Trent’s decrees. These were aimed primarily at improving the education of the clergy and, through them, the religious education of the laity. Stipends were to be set aside in metropolitan and cathedral churches for lecturers in theology, who were to expound upon and interpret sacred Scripture. Churches with smaller revenues were to have a master to teach grammar to clerics and poor scholars free of charge. Preaching to the people was also given an important position in these statutes, which declared that all bishops, archbishops, primates, and all other prelates were bound personally to preach the Gospel or to find fit replacements if prevented from doing so by lawful impediments, and that all

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those with cure of souls in parish churches were to teach the people that which is necessary for their salvation, as well as the vices and virtues, at least on Sundays and solemn feast days.31 This Council even made further efforts to improve pastoral care and expanded on the Tridentine decrees to implement a means of testing the competence of curates of parish churches.32 It is likely impossible to gauge the full impact of the 1549 provincial council in the towns of Scotland. Although scraps of records indicate that at least some parishes and some dioceses put some of its measures into effect,33 the council that met in 1552 acknowledged that the Scottish clergy had not for the most part ‘attained such proficiency in the knowledge of the holy Scriptures as to be able . . . rightly to instruct the people in the Catholic faith and other things necessary to salvation, or to convert the erring’.34 Nevertheless, the efforts of the 1549 council clearly demonstrate a serious interest in meaningful reform among those in positions of power within the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and even a commitment to begin the first steps needed to implement the reforming agenda of the early sessions of the Council of Trent, that gathering so central to the Catholic Reformation in Europe.

Religion of the word Reformation scholars have discerned an important shift in late medieval and early modern Europe from public worship centred on the mass to public worship centred on the sermon. John Bossy speaks broadly of this phenomenon when he describes ‘a devaluation of image and symbol in favour of the audible or visible word’ starting in the mid-fifteenth century,35 and in a more specific context Robert Kingdon argues that worship in Geneva changed in a fundamental way over the Reformation from something based primarily in sight to something based primarily in sound.36 Edward Muir takes this idea further still, and posits that the theological placing of the Word of Scripture above the rite of liturgy was parallel to the ‘civilising process’ of the sixteenth century where the upper body gained rational domination over the festive lower body, leading to the privileging of hearing as a way to gain access to the sacred over other means such as sight, touch, and ingestion.37

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The growing importance of sound in worship as outlined by Bossy, Kingdon, and Muir can be found in Scotland as well. One might, understandably, be inclined to attribute any such shift to the Protestant Reformation, but there are in fact clear indications that it was well under way before 1560. As seen in Chapter 3, the sacrament of the Eucharist was at the centre of parish worship for laypeople in the towns of late medieval Scotland, and they received it primarily through the sense of sight by watching mass generally and the elevation of the host more particularly. The importance of sound in public worship was not entirely new in the sixteenth century, as shown by synodal statutes from thirteenth-century Aberdeen commanding that the words of the mass ‘be pronounced with a full and distinct voice’, and that ‘all the hours and all the offices be spoken audibly and distinctly, so that the words be not cut short or slurred over by too great haste’.38 But these concerns over audible comprehension grew much more marked in the sixteenth century. The Provincial Council of 1549 directed parish priests to ‘feed the people . . . with wholesome words’, and it set out what the priests were to preach: they were to devote the first half of their addresses to an explanation of the Epistle or the Gospel, and the second half to a ‘catechism’, defined here as a ‘a short instruction in the rudiments of the faith’. The rectors of parishes were to strive that the ‘word of God be expounded to their flocks purely, sincerely, and in a Catholic sense; that the true uses of the church’s ceremonies be moderately, soberly, and discreetly explained; that false opinions be prohibited, publicly denounced, and confuted’.39 Content is so closely connected to delivery in advice on religious instruction in parish churches that the two are effectively inseparable. The Provincial Council held at beginning of 1552 was even more explicit about what should be preached and how. On all Sundays and holidays when people were bound to hear mass, curates were to read the new Catechism, that is, the one known as Hamilton’s Catechism, ‘beginning at the very preface or introduction and continuing to the very end of the book, without break or omission of any passage, after silence has been imposed upon all’. Already the importance of clarity in aural communication is apparent: not only are preachers directed to read the Catechism in sequence and in its entirety, but they are also instructed to do so

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only when the optimal acoustic environment – silence – has been created. The instructions then provided about how exactly the reading was to be accomplished are more striking still in their level of detail. The reading was to be done ‘in a loud and audible voice, distinctly, clearly, articulately, and with attention to the stops; and the recitation shall be given from the book itself completely and without stammering, without addition, change, suppression or omission, just as the words stand in the text’. Again, the council shows a distinct concern with the text being read in whole and exactly as written. When it explains the purpose for such a careful and deliberate reading, the council says that it is ‘so that the people can profitably hear what has been read and recited in the manner described, and may derive edification therefrom, and drink in the knowledge of their salvation’. This last phrase about drinking in the knowledge of salvation though words, like the earlier phrase in the statutes that priests ‘feed the people . . . with wholesome words’, sounds particularly close to what has been proposed by Bossy, Kingdon, and Muir regarding the growing importance of sound in early modern public worship. Furthermore, the decree continues with additional instructions about reading. The rectors, vicars, and curates were not to attempt their reading without ‘due preparation’; they were to practise ‘by constant, frequent, and daily rehearsal of the lesson to be read’, and they were to ‘strive to read, not languidly and listlessly, but with the utmost ardour of mind, adapting voice, looks, and gesture to the delivery, that what is read may be made to sink into the minds of their hearers by the emphasis of living speech, as the Lord hath given to every one the gift [of utterance]’.40 By the mid-sixteenth century, Scottish church councils had decided that the parishioners of Scotland were to access sacred truths largely, perhaps even predominantly, through their sense of hearing; according to the Scottish provincial councils of 1549 and 1552, Catholic religious education was ideally to occur through the precisely spoken word. A similarly privileged place was given to hearing in the 1552 Catechism’s discussion of the Eucharist and transubstantiation. It says that worshippers see with their eyes the figure of bread and wine, smell with their noses the scent of bread and wine, taste with their mouths the taste of bread and wine, and feel with their touching the hardness of bread and the liquid of wine, even though

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there is no substance of bread and wine in this sacrament but only the substance of the body and blood of Christ under the form of bread and wine. ‘And thairfor’, it continues, ‘we suld nocht geve credit to our sycht, to our smelling, to our taisting and twiching, bot allenerly we suld tak tent quhat we heir.’ According to this text of religious instruction, among all the bodily senses the only reliable transmitter of truth in the most important religious ritual is the sense of hearing. Faith is received through aural channels, the Catechism continues, quoting from Paul’s letter to the Romans, not by hearing the words of man ‘bot be hering the word of God’.41 If sight had been the main sense by which laypeople were to apprehend the central sacrament of the Eucharist in an earlier time, by the mid-sixteenth century the best sense for approaching this sacred ritual was hearing. This preference for the sense of hearing, and of hearing the words of sacred texts more specifically, is also discernible beyond the carefully expressed ideals of Church councils and catechisms. Regulations from 1519 ordered that private masses in the parish church of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, were not to be said while mass was being celebrated at the high altar. Such regulations would have refocused aural attention away from the many altars placed along the perimeter and towards the one high altar, thus reinforcing a unification of the community at worship in a space where sound was growing increasingly important.42 From the artistic realm of music, Robert Carver’s final mass, dated 1546, may have been composed with special sensitivity to a clear conveying of text as a response to demands by reformers for simpler musical textures.43 Records of lay religious practice also demonstrate an emphasis on the sense of hearing. A charter confirming the foundation of a hospital for poor men in Aberdeen from 1532 directed that the inmates were to pray daily in the oratory, but that those who were too ill to go into that room were to be placed in another room nearby with a small window overlooking the oratory so that they could see and hear (‘videre et audire’) a mass.44 The role of sight in accessing the sacred had not disappeared for the laypeople of midsixteenth-century Scotland, but the role of hearing, like for their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, was growing comparatively more important.

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Social discipline Social discipline, including an increase in intolerance towards people perceived as a threat to the social order, is another characteristic that historians frequently associate with early modern Europe. Anxiety about the poor, and especially about those judged to be undeserving of charitable assistance, was growing in Scotland as elsewhere in sixteenth-century Europe, when a rising population combined with a downturn in the economy to create an especially harsh environment for the landless and the marginal. Towns faced increasingly challenging financial situations over the course of the sixteenth century, when national taxation and the ‘Rough Wooing’ by the English were particularly burdensome. In 1544 Aberdeen complained that it was unable to meet the Crown’s financial demands because it was ‘decayit and puir’, and in 1551– 52 it took the desperate step to raise ready cash by feuing its salmon fishings and common lands.45 Meanwhile, as towns struggled with their financial responsibilities, those unfortunate enough to find themselves among the disadvantaged were facing rising barriers to leaving those groups. Growth in urban populations contributed to increased diversification and stratification, which in turn led to a hardening of roles and the emergence of elitism in craft and merchant organizations as well as in the civic governments.46 In the shifting uncertainties of town economies, people could easily fall on hard times. In 1531 Roger Murray was not only a burgess of Selkirk, but also in the prestigious position of bailie when he resigned a tenement to his son ‘for the kind affection’ which Roger bore him. Two years later, he ‘showed how he was in old age, deprived of strength . . . and cast down and despoiled by thieves for which reason he was now in great penury and suffering hardship’ and so sold his tenement, goods, and annual rent to his younger son for the sum of £20 Scots ‘in order to sustain himself in his pitiful life forever’.47 In 1534 the Selkirk burgess John Curll ‘showed how he and his spouse Margaret Curll were by their old age and weakness of bodies . . . thrown into destitution and poverty’. With the consent of his spouse and ‘compelled by necessity’, he sold to another inhabitant of the burgh an iron anvil, a hammer, and a table for the sum of 47s 8d.48

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These individuals suffered not just from the day-to-day material hardships of poverty, but also from hardening attitudes towards their unfortunate state. Historians have often pointed to the early modern period, and to the sixteenth century in particular, as a turning point in Western views on poverty, which went from being a holy state shared with Christ to a block against economic usefulness and godliness.49 As part of their efforts to introduce more effective and systematic systems of poor relief, cities and states attacked what they regarded as disreputable forms of poverty such as begging, vagrancy, and idleness. In Scotland, such changes were beginning well before the Protestant Reformation. Parliament tried to force beggars to find work as early as 1425, at around the same time as individual towns began to pass laws regulating the poor – licensing beggars, providing tokens to those they permitted to beg, and expelling unlicensed beggars from the town.50 At the church of St John’s in Ayr the parish clerk locked the doors in the evening after having searched the building for beggars.51 In 1518 the council of the burgh of Edinburgh ordained ‘for the gude rewle to be had’ in the church of St Giles that the guild of the Holy Blood was to keep the choir of the church free from ‘all vile personis’ during matins, High Mass, and evensong, and that the guild was to allow no beggars to enter into the church at these times.52 In 1521, the burgh council of Dundee ordered that the serjeands were to keep the poor out of the kirk on holy days, and in 1523 they ordered the serjeands to keep the poor out on all Sundays and festival days.53 The harshest measures against the poor often coincided with outbreaks of plague. In 1545, the bailies of Stirling were ordered to call all poor folks of the town and, because of the pest, remove all the strangers.54 A similar pattern can be found in Aberdeen. In 1539 the provost, bailies, and most of the council, ‘throw occasioun of the contagius infectand pest’, after much deliberation ordered that every bailie pass through his own quarter and inspect all idle, vagabond, and poor people not native born to the town, and order them to remove themselves and their goods from the town within 48 hours. Any who disobeyed were to be branded with a hot iron on the cheek.55 In 1546, with the pest arising over parts of Scotland, all unlicensed beggars were again ordered to leave within 24 hours under pain of being burnt with hot iron on the cheek; if they were found still in the town 24 hours

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after that mutilation, they were to be executed by hanging or drowning. Moreover, any inhabitant found harbouring unlicensed beggars would suffer the same punishment.56 In 1549, also during a time of plague, the provost, bailies, and council ordered that the poor were to be kept out of the church and at the church door, and that all the poor within the town were to be gathered by the handbell in the churchyard, where the bailies would inspect them. Those who were native to the town would be given a token of the town’s arms to wear on their breast; the rest were to be removed within 24 hours under pain of burning with a hot iron on the cheek if they were ever found again.57 Civic leaders were treating the poor as a threat to good rule and good health in the burgh. Even that part of town closely associated with charity and compassion towards the poor – the parish church – was becoming more and more cut off as a refuge. Increasingly stringent measures were being taken against other marginalized groups as well. Largely tolerated during the Middle Ages, prostitution by the late fifteenth century was being met by an attitude of general hostility among the civic elite, while the prostitutes themselves faced progressively more severe punishments.58 In 1497, officially as part of an attempt to rid their town of the ‘infirmities coming out of France and strange places’, that is, syphilis, the Aberdeen city council ordered that all prostitutes were to stop their trade, and that their places of work and places of residence were to be laid low. If the prostitutes did not comply, they were to be branded on the cheek with a key of hot iron and banished from the town. When syphilis appeared in Edinburgh later that same year, all those found to be suffering from that disease were to be banished to the island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth.59 Even minstrels were suspect in this climate of distrust. In about 1548, the town of Dumfries forbade them at feasts, banquets, or meetings of the burgh unless elected by the burgh council.60 Intolerance towards various groups was on the rise in early modern Europe, and Scottish society was a full participant in this trend. The poor, the outcast, and those seen as deviant in religious or sexual practices were being more firmly and more permanently pushed to the margins. Perhaps this stemmed from a growing concern for ‘order’ among those in power, perhaps also from an increasing sense of threat from ‘outsiders’, connected at still deeper

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levels with an emerging belief in a moralized universe and the necessity of leading a more godly kind of life in order to ward off plague, war, and other dangers.61 One aspect of creating a godly community in early modern Europe was to ensure that the sacred remain uncontaminated by the secular. In Scotland, this happened in association with figures of misrule. People charged with offices of ‘unreason’ and ‘bonaccord’ were found in various Scottish towns, the most well recorded of whom were in Aberdeen, where they were elected ‘to do plesour and blythnes to the toune’.62 While the precise duties of these Abbots of Bonaccord are never explicitly spelled out, they included in various years supervising religious plays, devising dances, providing assistance in decorating the town, organizing performances for royalty, conducting ridings on various holy days, and (surprisingly and a little worryingly) acting as Masters of Artillery.63 These figures’ first appearance in the documents is on 13 May 1440, when Richard Kintor, ‘abbati de Boneacord’, received the admission fee of a burgess in order to defray his expenses in mounting a play of ‘Haliblude’.64 It did not take long for this figure of misrule to trouble the authorities, and in April 1445 the town council of Aberdeen ordered that in order to stop the ‘diverse enormities’ done in times past by the Abbots of Bonaccord, they would in future give no fees to such Abbots, and moreover there would be no Abbot that year.65 In 1478, however, the Abbots of Bonaccord were back, and by May 1496 there was once again a sense of rejoicing when ‘for vphaldin of the auld louable consuetude, honour, consolacioun, and plesour of this burghe, lik as hes bene vsit in tymes of thar worthie and honourable progenitouris’, the council of the burgh chose an Abbot of Bonaccord, and then chose a second man to be the Prior of Bonaccord. The titles could vary, but the figure was common: in Aberdeen the ‘Abbot and Prior of Bonacord’, the ‘Lords of Bonacord’, and the ‘Abbatis out of Ressoun’; in Edinburgh the ‘Abbot of Narent’ or ‘Lord of Inobediene’; in Inverness and Haddington the ‘Abbot of Unreason’.66 The common characteristic among these various titles is that each combines a sign of authority, often religious, with a purview of misrule. In May 1508 new figures of misrule made their appearance in Aberdeen, when it was ordained that all able persons within the

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burgh should be ready with their clothing of green and yellow, bows and arrows, ‘to pass with Robyne Huyd and Litile Johnne’.67 That Robin Hood and Little John were meant to replace the Abbot and Prior of Bonaccord was made explicit in November of that same year when the council ordained that all persons able to ride were to decorate and honour the town, riding with Robin Hood and Little John, ‘quhilk was callit, in yers bipast, Abbat and Prior of Bonacord’.68 Robin Hood was a civic figure in other Scottish burghs as well at around this time, working alongside or replacing earlier Abbots of misrule also in Dundee, Perth, St Andrews, Dumfries, Dumbarton, Haddington, and others.69 Edinburgh in 1493 had an Abbot of Narent, but by 1518 filled that role with ‘Robin Huid and Little Jhone’. It seems that in that particular burgh Robin Hood and Little John had some kind of earlier presence, for in 1492 the guild of the burgh gave financial assistance to ‘Robertus Hud’, joined by Little John by 1500. The years 1498–99 may have been transitional, when the burgh guild patronized both an Abbot of Narent and a Robin Hood.70 Abbots of Unreason cease to appear in the Treasurers’ Accounts from about 1505, while in 1531 the Account speaks of a King’s Robin Hood. In Peebles, burgess silver that was being paid to the Abbot of Unrest in 1472 was paid instead to Robin Hood in 1555.71 In Ayr, Robin Hood was sometimes played by a local man, but he was played by Frenchmen in 1546–47 and 1550–51.72 Historians of Scotland have looked at these figures of misrule in the contexts of upturned order and civic unity (providing a release in social tension, but monitored by the ruling group).73 Two other elements are worthy of closer attention and analysis based on features of Catholic reform and early modernist scholarship. The first is the specific choice of misrule figures, and the second is the resistance to and repression of misrule. The earlier figures of misrule in Scottish towns – the Abbots and Priors – allude to religious authorities. Later, the figures change their identities to outlaw heroes. On the surface this change looks as though it may reflect a civic identity becoming less religious as the sixteenth century progressed. Scottish literature of the time, however, presents Robin Hood as both rebellious and pious, two positive characteristics. Andrew of Wyntoun’s Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland, a Scots verse history of about 1420, says that Little

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John and Robin Hood were considered good men. Walter Bower’s Latin prose Scotichronicon from about 20 years later relates a story where Robin is devoutly hearing mass in a secluded place in the woods and refuses to flee when the sheriff and servant of the king draw near. While his men tremble in fear of death, Robin, by contrast, trusts in God, overcomes his enemies, and gives the spoils of the encounter and the ransom of the defeated men to servants of the Church. The lesson of the tale, according to Bower, is the religious one that ‘God harkens to him who hears Mass frequently.’74 The shift from Abbot and Prior of Bonaccord or Unreason to Robin Hood and Little John as figures of misrule could represent not so much a secularization of popular culture as a shift in the sense of religious appropriateness. While the titles of ‘Abbot’ and ‘Prior’ are making reference to religious figures, these figures of misrule were certainly not pious; on the contrary, they were a mockery of monasticism and of the church hierarchy. By exchanging these figures of misrule for the more secular (but pious) Robin Hood and Little John, the people of Scottish burghs could have been expressing more respect for the Church, not less. Robin Hood and Little John were, after all, pious laymen as well as heroic rebels. In south-west England, Robin Hood’s reputation for ‘tough’ charity made him especially well suited to preside over games that included giving and feasting, collective obligation and communal celebration, and a similar reputation might have been what rendered him suitable as a leader of misrule in early sixteenth-century Scotland.75 Robin Hood is a very flexible figure. Fashioned by the anxieties and desires of each generation, he can become something new for each age.76 If Stephen Knight is correct in his observation that ‘periods of increased Robin Hood activity . . . are all times when government has been overtly and consciously repressive’, we should consider the early sixteenth-century use of him in Scottish misrule events as suggestive of repression in Scotland.77 Indeed, the change in attitudes towards Robin Hood and his fellow figures of misrule itself serves as possible evidence for such repression. The people chosen to be lords of misrule at the beginning of the tradition were respectable members of burgh society occupying a high social status. The Abbot of Unrest in Peebles in 1471–72 was

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John Morchoson, a burgess of some prominence before taking up the misruling position, and a bailie a few years later.78 During these early years, civic authorities endorsed these figures of misrule. In both Aberdeen and Ayr the town council paid the Abbot to fulfil his role, while in Edinburgh and Dunfermline it was the guild merchant who provided financial support.79 By the 1530s, the figures were losing much of that support, and men chosen to play the lords of misrule started to show reluctance to take on these roles. In April 1531, Sandris Gray opposed the choice of himself and Sandris Knollis to be the lords of Bonaccord in Aberdeen. The provost responded by saying he had letters from the King insisting that none of the neighbours of the burgh refuse any office or honour they be chosen for by the community of the burgh. Knollis conceded that he had been chosen by the provost, council and part of the community, as the provost alleged, but argued that he was not able to carry out the office of a lord of Bonaccord for three reasons. First, he had not been present at the election. Second, there were many others more suitable for the office in the town with greater profit from the honour. And third, he had his own letters from the King discharging him of all such things. In spite of his enumerated objections, Knollis was willing to concede his position under one condition: he would, he said, accept the office if the town would pay him the fee that they had paid other lords of Bonaccord in the past.80 At least a partial resolution must have been reached, for Sandris Gray was a lord of Bonaccord in 1542.81 He did not, however, have an easy time in that position. A week after assuming the office, he and his fellow lord of Bonaccord suffered disturbance and insult (‘hawy strublens and vile mispersoning’) by Margaret Porter, already known to the town authorities for her public insults, who derided their financial honour by calling them ‘common beggaris and skafferis’ and saying that ‘thair meltyd wes bot small for all thair cuttit out hoyss’, along with ‘mony oder inurious vordis’.82 These men were not the only lords of Bonaccord to be harassed in Aberdeen. In 1538 Robert Arthur and his brother John were accused of the ‘strublens of my lordis of Bonacordis’.83 Holders made some attempts to restore the appeal of their office. The lords of Bonaccord in Aberdeen petitioned in April 1539 to have in their time ‘the auld lowable vse, lang vsit and kepit within this guid

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tovne . . . lyk as it hes bene in our predecessoris tymes’. In an effort to add some more authority to their position, they further asked that they be able to seize the property of those who did not assist them, ‘or ellis mony of thame will nocht obey’.84 The appeals to a memory of past practices more supportive of the Lords of Misrule may well have had a solid basis in reality, and literature confirms a pattern of disappearing misrule. In the anonymous monologue The Crying of ane Playe, written around 1512–15, the old dwarf Wealth commands the inhabitants of Edinburgh to go forth in green livery, equipped with bows and arrows, ‘And follow furth on robyn hude / With hartis coragious & gud’. The sections on Robin Hood and the traditional May festivities are found only in the earlier of the two surviving manuscripts, dated about 1515–25, while from the later manuscript of the 1560s all references to Robin Hood and Maying have disappeared. Although this editorial decision may be attributed to the changes brought by the Protestant Reformation, Alexander Scott, in his poem Of May from several years before the Reformation (about 1553), writes of a time when men went with Robin Hood and Little John to bring in the greenery, but says that in his own time all such games were almost gone, remaining only among the simple folk.85 It was not only festivals of misrule that were disappearing from Scottish towns: by 1552 the burgh council of Aberdeen was trying to restrict carnivalesque festivities more generally. In April of that year, considering that in times past the lords of Bonaccord had made many great, sumptuous, and superfluous banquets during the time of their reign which were thought neither ‘profitabill nor godlie’, and considering that such banquets harmed young men elected to the office as they always tried to surpass their predecessors in their sumptuous feasting, the council ordered that in future all such banquets would be limited to three occasions per year: the saint’s day (presumably the feast of the town’s patron saint, Nicholas), the first Sunday in May, and the Tuesday after Easter. Perhaps by this time people were still keen to participate in festivals of misrule, but were growing reluctant to take on the responsibility of leading them, for in the same document the council ordered that whosoever refused to accept the office of lord of Bonaccord would lose his privileges in the town, and never be

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admitted to office, honour, or dignity.86 One disincentive to taking on the office may have been simply that the expenses associated with taking on the starring role may have been too high, especially in years of financial stress. Haddington went through several years of procrastination and resistance in appointing its Abbot of Unreason, but the craftsmen of this town showed similar reluctance in mounting their Corpus Christi and Midsummer pageants in the 1530s and early 1540s.87 There may, however, be more to this story than just economic hard times. The civic roles of the Abbots of Bonaccord and of Robin Hood and Little John were officially terminated in 1555, when an Act of Parliament ordained that no person be chosen Robin Hood or Little John, Abbot of Unreason or Queen of May.88 It appears that by then, in the midst of rising religious, political, and social tensions in Scotland, authorities had grown intolerant of any hint of misrule among the laity. Perhaps they were also growing more eager to divide religious and secular activities into separate categories. Several historians have emphasized attempts by both religious and civic elites to control and sometimes repress aspects of popular culture deemed irreligious or otherwise inappropriate. Peter Burke uses the phrase ‘the reform of popular culture’ to describe ‘the systematic attempt by some of the educated . . . to change the attitudes and values of the rest of the population’ through efforts ‘to suppress, or at least to purify, many items of traditional popular culture’ and ‘to take the Catholic and Protestant reformations to the craftsmen and peasants’. This reform of popular culture ‘accompanied a major shift in religious mentality or sensibility’, where ‘the godly were out to destroy the traditional familiarity with the sacred, because they believed that familiarity breeds irreverence’.89 Edward Muir speaks of ‘the civilising process’ in the sixteenth century when upper classes began to adopt what they saw as ‘civilised’ or ‘courtly’ manners and attempted to reform popular culture, and especially those ritual behaviours associated with the lower body and the carnivalesque. Protestant reformers tried to abolish these things altogether, but Muir finds Catholic reformers participating in reforming efforts as well, attempting to clean up and regulate the abuses of carnivalesque behaviour.90 In Scotland, reforms of the type outlined by Burke and Muir and associated with the ‘godly’ concerns of the

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early modern elite began before the Protestant Reformation: Abbots of Unreason and Bonaccord and their successors Robin Hood and Little John, as well as the carnivalesque aspects of urban culture more generally, were restrained in the first instance by civic and church authorities who were attempting to drive a wedge of decent separation between the sacred and the secular, and who were doing this from Catholic motivations characteristic of the early modern developments in Europe.

Conclusion Shortly after the Protestant Reformation, the poet Richard Maitland of Lethington asked the question, ‘Quhair is the blythnes that hes bein?’ and lamented that ‘all merrines is worne away’.91 The Protestant Reformation certainly did change many aspects of Scottish society, but the wearing-away of merriness, as Maitland meant it, undeniably began before the traditional watershed date of 1560. In fact, upon closer inspection, many of the characteristics often associated with post-Reformation, Protestant Scotland actually surfaced in the ‘pre-Reformation’ period: educational reform along humanist lines, a shift from sight to sound as the central sense in public worship, growing intolerance towards the marginalized and those perceived as threatening the social order, the dampening and even repression of irreverent public festivities – a whole cluster of what might be termed ‘godly’ concerns that had their origins and early development in the Catholic society of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. This revised timeline, in which reforming momentum begins before the official Protestant Reformation, suggests a need to reconsider an important question of causation in late medieval and early modern Scottish history. It now becomes clear that the Protestant Reformation could not simply have caused the changes in education, worship, and social discipline outlined above, for the very simple reason that the Protestant Reformation came after these changes had already started. The Protestant Reformation could, of course, have hastened and propagated these developments, but it cannot have been their trigger. Is it possible that causation in these matters should be basically reversed? Is it possible, in other words, that currents of Catholic

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reform in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries actually helped bring about the Protestant Reformation? Among those who already appreciate the precedence of Catholic reform, explanations for the movement’s failure to halt the Protestant Reformation include that it was too little and too late, or that it released energies for change that, in the end, overwhelmed it. The laws passed by the sixteenth-century councils were essentially the same as those coming from the Council of Trent, and so ought to have provided a sound legal framework for meaningful reform; given another ten years and some additional councils, the Scottish Church might have succeeded in reforming itself from within and along Tridentine lines. With its candid self-criticism and willingness to engage with humanist movements from the Continent, conciliar efforts at Catholic reform should have found broad support among traditional Catholics, who were in the majority in the mid-sixteenth century, as well as among those who were dissatisfied with current realities in the Church yet unwilling to leave it completely.92 Alternatively, perhaps the holders of high offices in the Scottish Church would never have become sufficiently passionate in their desire for reform nor sufficiently committed to implementing its decrees. Jane Dawson has convincingly argued that a convergence of ecclesiastical and state institutions, which she calls a ‘church–crown hybrid’, created a block of vested interest endowed with enough inertia to stifle fundamental and systematic attempts at Catholic reform.93 Maybe neither of these explanations on its own is sufficient. Maybe it is too simplistic to speak of the ‘failure’ of Catholic reform in Scotland because it is too superficial a consideration of change. When the basic periodization of Scottish history is altered so that Scottish towns during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are examined through the lens of early modernist scholarship, the eddies and currents of a deeper stream become apparent. Scottish urban society was already changing in ways that made it more sensitive to the importance of a well-educated clergy, more attuned to the power of the cleanly spoken word, more suspicious of claims by the poor and marginalized, more severe in its treatment of perceived threats, and more stark in its insistence on a clear separation between the sacred and the profane. If these features sound characteristically Protestant, that may be because

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they helped condition Scots to accept and even embrace Protestant theology and its social implications when first Luther’s, then Calvin’s interpretations of Christianity reached Scottish shores. But these features were not exclusive to Protestantism in Europe at this time; they were features of the early modern period of Reformations – plural – and they were felt as deeply in Scottish towns as anywhere else.

Notes 1 Lyndsay, Works, I, 270–1, ll. 2396–412; 273, ll. 2501–8; 279, ll. 2701–2. 2 Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland, 145–204. 3 Hsia, World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770; O’Malley, Trent and All That; van Engen, ‘Multiple Options’. 4 Lenman, ‘The Limits of Godly Discipline in the Early Modern Period with Particular Reference to England and Scotland’, 124–45; Watt, ‘Scotland’, 3, 396. 5 Cowan, Medieval Church in Scotland; Barrell, Medieval Scotland; Whyte, Scotland Before the Industrial Revolution; Cowan, ‘The Medieval Church in the Highlands’; Lynch, Oxford Companion to Scottish History; Ditchburn and Macdonald, ‘Medieval Scotland, 1100–1560’; Pittock, New History of Scotland; Harvie, Scotland; Ewan, ‘“Many Injurious Words”’; McIntyre, ‘Tudor Family Politics in Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland’; Yeoman, Medieval Scotland. 6 Rigby, Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, XVI, 107–24, 396–410; see also Fradenburg, ‘Scotland’, 521–40, which also discusses events from after the year 1500. 7 Dingwall, History of Scottish Medicine, 3, 38, 46. 8 Todd, ‘Profane Pastimes and the Reformed Community’; Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland; Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland, 1573–1625; Leneman and Mitchison, ‘Scottish Illegitimacy Ratios in the Early Modern Period’; Symonds, Weep Not for Me. 9 Houston and Whyte, Scottish Society 1500–1800; Lynch, Early Modern Town in Scotland, has several essays that speak of the early sixteenth century, including Lynch’s ‘Scottish Towns 1500–1700’ (1–35) and ‘The Crown and the Burghs 1500–1625’ (55–80), Verschuur’s ‘Merchants and Craftsmen in Sixteenth-Century Perth’ (36–54), and White’s ‘The Impact of the Reformation on a Burgh Community’ (81–101). Lee, ‘Inevitable’ Union, has an essay about Mary, Queen of Scots, but mostly the collection centres on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; Harris and Macdonald

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11

12 13

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(eds), Scotland; Mann, who starts the period at the beginning of the sixteenth century in his monograph Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720; Brown and Boardman, ‘Survival and Revival’; Boardman, Exercise of Power in Medieval Scotland, c. 1200–1500; Burns, True Law of Kingship; Boardman and Lynch, ‘The State of Late Medieval and Early Modern Scottish History’. Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community; Lynch, Scotland; Mackie, King James IV of Scotland; van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Scottish Chapel Royal as Cultural Intermediary Between Town and Court’; Barrell, Medieval Scotland; Mason, ‘Renaissance and Reformation’; Thomas, Princelie Majestie; Stevenson, Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513; Jack, ‘Renaissance and Reformation (1460–1660)’; van Heijnsbergen, ‘Renaissance and Reformation (1460–1660)’, in Lynch, Oxford Companion to Scottish History; Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland; Brother Kenneth, ‘Sir David Lyndsay, Reformer’; Lynch, Scotland; Fawcett, Scottish Architecture from the Accession of the Stewarts to the Reformation 1371–1560; Elliott, ‘Carvor [Carver, Carber, Arnot], Robert’. Nicholson, Scotland, 576–77; see also Brown and Boardman, ‘Survival and Revival’, 77–106; Mason, ‘Renaissance and Reformation’; Williams, Stewart Style 1513–1542, xiv; Mapstone, ‘Introduction’, xviii; van Heijnsbergen and Royan, ‘Introduction’, in Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland, x. Lynch, Edinburgh and the Reformation, 29–30; Fitch, Search for Salvation. Todd, Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland; White, ‘The Regent Morton’s Visitation’, 246–63; Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community, 138; White, ‘The Regent Morton’s Visitation’, 246–63; Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community, 138. Cameron, ‘“Catholic reform” in Germany and the pre-1560 Church in Scotland’, 105–17; Cameron, ‘Humanism and Religious Life’, 161–77; Donaldson, Scottish Reformation, 63–4; Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland; Sanderson, A Kindly Place?; Mann, Scottish Book Trade 1500–1720; Stevenson, Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513. Kellar, Scotland, England, and the Reformation, esp. 113–48. Foggie, Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland, 35–54. Verschuur, Politics or Religion?, 17–18. Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation. E.g. Delogu, Introduction to Medieval History, 62. Cameron, ‘Humanism and Religious Life’, 164; Kirk, ‘The Religion of Early Scottish Protestants’, 362–7. Cameron, ‘Humanism and Religious Life’, 164. Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 100–1.

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23 Durkan, ‘Education in the Century of the Reformation’; Durkan, ‘Education: The Laying of Fresh Foundations’. 24 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 218. 25 Durkan, ‘Education in the Century of the Reformation’. 26 Vance, ‘Schooling the People’, 310–11. 27 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 135–48. 28 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 144–7. 29 Catechism of John Hamilton; Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 98–100; Cameron, ‘Humanism and Religious Life’, 161–3; Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community, calls this an ‘extraordinary spectacle’. 30 Winning, ‘Church Councils in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, 335–40, 357. 31 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 98–101. 32 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 110–11. 33 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 98. 34 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 143–7. 35 Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, 97–104. 36 Kingdon, ‘The Genevan Revolution in Public Worship’, 264–80. 37 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 157–8. 38 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 34. 39 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 101, 108, 124–5. 40 Statutes of the Scottish Church 1225–1559, 143–7. 41 Catechism of John Hamilton, 206. 42 Cartularium Ecclesiae Sancti Nicholai Aberdonensis, I, 260–2. 43 Purser, ‘Early Modern Music’, 215. 44 Records of Old Aberdeen 1498–1903, II, 287. 45 Lynch and Dingwall, ‘Elite Society in Town and Country’, 186. 46 Mayhew, ‘Scotland’, 109–10; Dennison, ‘Urban Society and Economy’, 145–65. 47 Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 79, 85, 154, 159. 48 Selkirk Protocol Book 1511–1547, 163. 49 Mitchison, Old Poor Law in Scotland; Pullan, ‘Catholics, Protestants, and the Poor in Early Modern Europe’. 50 Ewan, ‘Townlife and Trade’, 133. 51 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 15, 75, 91, 107. 52 Lees, St Giles’, Edinburgh, 80–1. 53 Torrie, Medieval Dundee, 93. 54 Extracts from the Records of the Royal Burgh of Stirling 1519–1666, 40. 55 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 165. 56 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, 240–1.

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57 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen, 1398–1570, I, 274. 58 Ofis, Prostitution in Medieval Society. 59 Dennison, DesBrisay, and Diack, ‘Health in the Two Towns’, 75–6. 60 Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 41. 61 Scribner, ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the “Disenchantment of the World”’. 62 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 140. 63 Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 27. 64 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 395; Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 55. 65 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 14; Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 99. 66 Aberdeen Guild Court Records 1437–1468, 121; Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 59; Dennison, ‘Robin Hood in Scotland’. 67 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 438. 68 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 439–40. 69 Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 24; Pittock, ‘Contrasting Cultures’, 351. 70 Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 24–5. 71 Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 25. 72 Ayr Burgh Accounts 1534–1624, 84, 90, 100, 102, 105, 111; Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 24; Pittock, ‘Contrasting Cultures’, 351. 73 See, e.g., Dennison, ‘Robin Hood in Scotland’; Lynch and Dingwall, ‘Elite Society in Town and Country’; Williamson and McGavin, ‘Crossing the Border’, 157–77; Pittock, ‘Contrasting Cultures’; Dennison, ‘Power to the People?’, 100–31; Dennison, ‘Urban Society and Economy’, 161–2. 74 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykile of Scotland; Bower, Scotichronicon; Knight, Robin Hood, 4–6; Dennison, ‘Robin Hood in Scotland’; Fisher, ‘The Crying of ane Playe’, 19–58. 75 Marshall, ‘Gathering in the Name of the Outlaw’, 65–84. 76 Marshall, ‘Gathering in the Name of the Outlaw’, 65. 77 Knight, Robin Hood, 207. 78 Williamson and McGavin. ‘Crossing the Border’, 163. 79 Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, 29; Dennison, ‘Power to the People?’, 114–15. 80 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 140–1. 81 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 180.

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82 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 159–60, 180. 83 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 156. 84 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 160. 85 Wyntoun, Orygynale Cronykile of Scotland; Bower, Scotichronicon; Knight, Robin Hood, 4–6; Fisher, ‘The Crying of ane Playe’, 19–58. 86 Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of Aberdeen 1398–1570, 279–80. 87 Williamson and McGavin, ‘Crossing the Border’, 163. 88 Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, II, 500. 89 Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 207–8, 211–12. 90 Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 125–6, 148, 156–9. 91 Pinkerton, Ancient Scottish Poems, 98. 92 Ryrie, Origins of the Scottish Reformation, 102–3, 108. 93 Dawson, Scotland Re-Formed 1488–1587.

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Conclusion

The bell that was installed at St Giles in 1460 with its message of lamenting the dead, summoning the living, and subduing thunderbolts must have rung out many times in mourning, celebration, and forewarning. It resonated with the townspeople’s anxieties about death and their hopes for the afterlife, with their convivial reassurance in shared experiences and their tensions in asserting their individual identities, with their frustrations in the face of systemic weaknesses and their repeated efforts at reform. This bell survived the Protestant Reformation only to be fractured and recast in the nineteenth century.1 Like the religious culture it once represented, the bell can now be heard only as through a glass, muffled; the overtones of its peals come to us in the form of scattered evidence that requires careful interpretation and a sensitivity to context in order to communicate the religious practices of the people who were living in late medieval and early modern Scottish towns. The people who first heard this bell shared a set of basic religious assumptions: the soul continued to live after the death of the body and the actions of the living could influence its destination; the bonds of kinship, and especially blood kinship, were important in forming ties of support and obligation both among the living and also between the living and the dead; and the options for religious expression available to laypeople were sometimes in tension, often complementary, and almost always overlapping. In some ways, the religious options available in Scottish towns would have been different from what people living elsewhere in Europe would have known. The single parish structure, the presence of local saints such as Ninian and Kentigern, and the comparative

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absence of devotio moderna would have struck certain travellers as being different from what they experienced in their own home towns. Most religious practices, however, like the basic assumptions underlying them, would have been familiar in urban areas across Europe. Moreover, the basic religious assumptions outlined above remained in place into the middle of the sixteenth century for the majority of Scottish townspeople; what changed was not fundamental religious belief but rather religious expression, which developed in line with deeper shifts in European society of the early modern period.

Note 1 Thoms, ‘The Bells of St Giles, Edinburgh, with a Notice of the Missing Bells of the Chapel of Holyrood House’, 95.

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Index Aberdeen bishopric of, 3 charters from, 43 education in, 185, 186 figures of misrule in, 196–7, 199, 200 guilds, 101, 107, 108, 111 iconoclasm in, 164 Lutheran texts in, 170 measures against plague, 194–5 oversight of clerics, 91 prostitution in, 195 religious orders, 115 size, 1 statutes and regulations, 27, 100, 114, 190 taxation, 193 Aberdeen Breviary, 59, 69 Aberdeen Cathedral, 61, 66, 89, 93 Aberdeen University, 4, 27, 70, 95 Adam, of Dalrimple, 42 Adamson, Robert, 23, 40 Ade, William, 33 Aitkyn, William, 35 Alexander IV, Pope, 33 Anderson, John, 100 Anderson, Robert, 173 Anderson, Thomas, 34 Andrew, of Wyntoun, 197 Andrew, St, 52, 61, 66–7 anniversary services, 37–8, 128 Anstroyer, John de, 73 Aquhonam, Duncan, 98 Arbuthnott Missal, 25–6, 29 Arran, James Hamilton, Earl of, 171, 172

Arthur, John, 23, 199 Arthur, Robert, 199 Auchneif, Agnes, 41 Auldhoch, Robert, 55–6 Ayr, 86, 90, 116, 157, 170, 197 Balcaskie, Martin, 173–4 banishment, 130 Bannockburn, Battle of, 66 baptism, 95–6, 129, 160 Baroun, Patrick, 39, 40, 41, 56 Beaton, David (Cardinal), 70, 185, 188 Beaton, James (Cardinal), 168, 169 Bell, William, 116 Birs, Besse, 119 Blackadder, Robert (Archbishop), 87, 162 Black Death, 5 Blakwod, David, 108 Blinseill, Thomas, 55 Blinsele, Robert, 39 Boill, Bessete, 53 Bologna, 102 Bossy, John, 10, 44, 102, 189 Boure, Adam de, 116 Bower, Walter, 52, 65, 198 Boyne, Andrew, 118 Bras, Isobel, 43, 56 Brethren of the Common Life, 184 Brison, Jhone, 117–18 Brittany, 69 Broun, John, 38, 41 Brown, John, 174 Bruges, 22, 69, 102 Brydine, David, 98

INDEX

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burials, 30–6, 53–4 Burke, Peter, 201 Calbrayth, Elizabeth, 59 Calvin, John, 9, 204 Cameron, James, 183 Canongate, 70, 106 Carkettill, Mariota, 42 Carmelites, 22, 115, 116 Carthusians, 8, 115 Carver, Robert, 94, 155, 192 ‘Carver Choirbook, The’, 94 Catechism (1552), 36, 93, 95, 186, 190–2 Catherine of Siena, St, 8 Catholic Reform, 9–10, 180–204 Chalmer, John, 137 Chalmers, Robert, 73 Chalmers, William de, 34 Chepman, John, 42 Chepman, Walter, 42, 56, 137 Chepman de Schelis, John, 56 Chronicon de Lanercost, 24, 31 church bells, 29, 36, 60, 136, 153 churchyards, 35–6, 99–100 clergy, 91–2, 154–7 Cokburne, Agnes, 42 Colisoun, Andrew, Sir, 42 Colisoun, David, 55 Colisoun, James, 42 collegiate churches, 8, 114–15 Colly, Robert, 26 Compendius Tractiue . . ., Ane (Kennedy), 185 confraternities, 101–2 ‘Contemplacioun of Synnaris’, 19 Cor, John, 116 Corrour, Thomas, 97 Cosour, Alexander, 26 Coupar, Andrew, Sir, 92 Coupland, Isabella, 116 ‘Craft of Deyng, The ’, 18, 27–8, 32 Crag, George, 38 Crag, James, 117 Crage, Elizabeth, 41 Cranmer, Thomas, 183

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Craufurd, Margaret, 41, 128–9 Crawford, John, 116 Crawfurd, William, 117, 118 Crawfurde, James, 58 Crying of ane Playe, The, 200 Curll, John, 193 Curll, Margaret, 193 Cury, Mariota, 116 Dalgles, Thomas, 105 David I, King of Scots, 2 Dawson, Jane, 203 Denmark, 69, 90, 134 De Passagio ad Terram Sanctam, 63 devotio moderna movement, 6 ‘Dewoit Exercicoun in the honour of the croun of thorne, Ane’, 74 Dominicans, 8, 24, 115, 116–17, 159, 164–5, 183 Doughty, Thomas, 74 Douglas, Gavin, 20 Douglas, Katherine, 42 Dryburgh Abbey, 130 Duffy, Eamon, 10 Dumbarton, 197 Dumfries, 195, 197 Dunbar, Gavin (Archbishop), 188 Dunbar, William, 18, 19, 21, 45, 135 ‘Lament for the Makars’, 18, 21, 45–6 ‘Maner of Passyng to Confessioun’, 135 Dundee, 1, 35–6, 111, 114, 170, 194, 197 Dunfermline, 54, 103, 108, 109, 114, 199 Dunkeld Cathedral, 68, 73 Durham, 85 Duthac, St, 61, 69, 71, 153 Dwly, James, 105 ecclesiastical councils Basel, 8 Cologne, 188 Constance, 161, 181 Fourth Lateran (1215), 7–8, 93

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General (1552), 158 Mainz, 188 Provincial (1549, 1552), 190–1 Sens (1528), 188 Trent, 187–9, 203 Edinburgh boy bishops, 70 charters from, 43 city, 1, 3 education in, 185 figures of misrule in, 196, 197, 199 iconoclasm in, 171–2 Lutheran texts in, 170 measures against syphilis, 195 parishes, 85 patron saint, 71 places of worship, 114–15 Edinburgh Castle, 139 education, 184–6 Edward I, King of England, 67 Edward VI, King of England, 171, 172 Eloi, St, 30, 61, 71–2 Elphinstone, William (Bishop), 59, 185 Elphynstoun, John, 133 England, 4, 32, 160, 172 Erasmus, Desiderius, 137, 168 Eucharist, 135, 187, 191–2 excommunication, 24–5, 31–2, 130– 2, 158 Fechat, Matthew, 55, 57–8 Fendune, Patrick, 63 Fetternear Banner, 75 Fiddler, Willie, 117 Flanders, 1, 5 Flodden, Battle of, 42 Florence, 43 Foggie, Janet, 183 Folkhard, Quintin, 161 Forman, Andrew (Archbishop), 31–2 Foulis Easter, 90 France, 4, 32 Francis, St, 164

Franciscans, 5, 115 Frog, Michael, 41 funerals, 28–30 Futhes, William, 41 Gaderar, Thomas, 118 Gaelic, 4, 86, 95 Galloway, 7, 64 Gardin, James, 118 Gau, John, 169 Geneva, 189 Germany, 32 Glasgow, 8, 71 Glasgow Cathedral burials, 35, 53, 54 capacity, 87 dedications, 74 furnishings, 18, 28, 94 library, 59 relics, 60–1 staff, 155 tomb of St Kentigern, 60 Glasgow University, 4 Gledstanis, Elizabeth, 17 Goes, Hugo van der, 4 Golden Legend, 19, 36, 40, 59, 153 Goldsmith, John, 97 Gordon, Alexander, 156 Gordon, William (Bishop), 155 Gray, Robert, 34 Gray, Sandris, 199 Gray, Thomas, 130 Grey, John, 90 Groote, Gerard, 184 Gude and Godlie Ballattis, 170 guilds, 29–30, 71, 100–14. See also hammermen’s guild Haddington, 138, 196, 201 Hakheid, John, 42 Hamilton, John (Archbishop), 155, 183, 186 Hamilton, Patrick, 168–9 hammermen’s guild altars, 71, 159 dispute resolution, 105–6

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funerals, 30 Magdalen Chapel and, 141, 143 membership, 103–4 patron saint celebrations, 109, 114 processions, 110 Harte, Helen, 136 Hay, William, 27, 44, 95 Hendersoun, Isobelle, 42 Henryson, Robert, 20, 25, 53, 133 Highlands, 43, 86 Hill, Jonet, 116 History of Greater Britain, A (Mair), 155 History of the Reformation in Scotland (Knox), 162–3 Holy Blood cult, 75, 101, 184 Hopperingill, Christian, 98 Hountter, John, Sir, 133–4 Huntair, Christian, 134 Hunter, James, 173 Hunter, Violet, 173 iconoclasm, 153, 163–5, 171–2 Inchkeith, 195 indulgences, 24 Inverness, 24, 94, 196 Iona, 69 Irvine, 92 Italy, 32, 43 Jacobus, de Voragine, 59 James I, King of Scots, 8, 115 James II, King of Scots, 4, 67 James III, King of Scots, 62, 64 James IV, King of Scots, 5, 64, 67, 69, 102, 137, 162 James V, King of Scots, 64, 74, 167, 170, 186, 187–8 Jedworth monastery, 86 Jerusalem, 62 ‘Jesus Psalter, The’, 25 Jocelin, of Furness, 59–60 John, of Caralis, 35 John, of Dalrymple, 42 John, of Ireland, 21, 44, 62, 73, 87 John, of Levington, 62

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John, the Baptist, St, 71, 114 Johnson, Gilbert, 26 Kellar, Clare, 183 Kempt, William, 138 Kennedy, Quintin, 185 Kentigern, St, 45, 59–60, 62, 71, 76 Kieckhefer, Richard, 10 Kilstaris, John, 185 Kingdon, Robert, 189 Kinnaird, Catherine de, 73 Kinross, 67 kinship ties guild membership and, 103 identity and, 45, 173 religious responsibility and, 40–4, 55–8, 142, 145, 163 Kintor, Richard, 196 Kirkcaldy, 170 Knight, Stephen, 198 Knollis, Sandris, 199 Knox, John, 162–3, 174, 175 Kravarˇ, Pavel, 161 Lambe, Robert, 173 Lang, John, 116 Lauder, Elizabeth, 42 Lauder, James, 185 Lawdere de Blyth, Alexander, 40–1 Lawson, Katherine, 35 Legat, Alexander, 26 Leiche, Patrick, 57 Leith, 70, 74, 170 Leith, William de, 34 leprosy, 132–4 Leslie, William, 132 Lichton, David, 91 Life of St Kentigern (Jocelin of Furness), 59 limbo, 33 Lindberg, Carter, 10 Linlithgow, 70, 92, 116, 169 literacy rates, 137, 155 Logie, Barbara, 156 Lollards, 160–3 Lords of Bonaccord, 54, 196–202

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Louvain, 168 Low Countries, 5, 6, 184 Lufrent, Johne, 105 Luther, Martin, 9, 167–8, 181, 204 Lynch, Michael, 159 Lyndsay, David, Sir Dialogue betuix Experience and an Courteour, 62, 68, 158 ‘Dreme, The’, 18 on clergy and laity, 154, 158 on heaven and hell, 19, 20 on images of the cross, 75 on penitence, 24, 25 on saints and pilgrimages, 62, 68, 73 on suicides, 33 views on reform, 180–1 Mackison, John, 155 McAlpin, Agnes, 98 Magdalen Chapel, 139–44 Mair, John, 155 Maitland, Richard, 202 Maknedon, John, 116 Margaret, Queen, consort of Malcolm III, King of Scots, 62, 65 Marr, John, 155 marriage, 43–4, 96–9. See also kinship ties Marshall, Jonet, 116 Martin, Mariota, 116 Mary, of Guise, Queen, consort of James V, King of Scots, 174 Mary, of Gueldres, Queen, consort of James II, King of Scots, 4–5, 62 Mary, Queen of Scots, 171, 172 Mauchan, Isobel, 141 McQueen, Michael, 139, 140, 142, 144 McQueen, Patrick, 142, 144 Meldrum, Elsbeth, 130 Menteith, Elizabeth, 42 Menzies, John, 37 Merenez, William de, 73 Mersere, Thomas, 34

misrule, figures of, 54, 196–202 M’Nedyr, Matthew, 116 Montrose, 170 Morchoson, John, 199 Mowbray, Andrew, 22, 39 Muir, Edward, 10, 189, 201 Mungo, St. See Kentigern, St Mure, Agnes, 116 Murray, John, 26 Murray, Roger, 193 Musselburgh, 74, 185 Myllar, Andro, 137 Napier, Alexander, 42 Napier, Archibald, 42 Napier, John, 42 Nele, Thomas, 38, 86 Nelson, William, 115 Nicholas, of Lyra, 23 Ninian, St, 45, 60, 64, 69–70, 71, 76 Noble, William, 116 North Berwick, 67, 115 Norwich, 85 Ochiltree, Andrew Stewart, Lord, 163 Office of the Dead, 18, 28–9, 45 Of May (Scott), 200 ‘Of Penance and Confession’ (John of Ireland), 21 Oldcastle, John, Sir, 161 Orygynale Cronykil of Scotland (Andrew of Wyntoun), 197–8 Otterburn, Battle of, 66 Ottirburne, Adam, 41 Oxford University, 160 papacy, 7, 22, 33, 66 Paris, 85 parish churches, 3, 87–94, 114, 156 Paterson, Jonet, 41 Patrickson, Davy, 119 Patrick’s Places (Hamilton), 168 Patten, William, 68 Pearson, Thomas, 23 Peebles, 2–3, 100, 115, 197, 198–9

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penance, 21–4, 135–6 Perth burials, 54 figures of misrule in, 197 iconoclasm in, 164 John Knox and, 175 merchant guild, 101 patron saint, 114 pilgrimages from, 62 Reformation in, 183 religious houses, 115–16 repair of church in, 89–90 size, 1 Petheid, Mariota, 38 Philip (the Good), Duke of Burgundy, 4 Picts, 65 pilgrimages, 62–7, 73–4, 160 Piper, Christian, 173 Piper, Walter, 173 Porter, Margaret, 199 Prat, Thomas, 90 ‘Prayer for the Pest, Ane’, 25 Preston, William, 57, 138 prostitution, 195 Protestant Reformation, 9–10, 11, 44, 165–75, 181–4 Protocol Book of John and Ninian Brydin and Other Notaries, 72– 3 purgatory, 20–1, 26–7, 44, 187 Quiñones Breviary, 137 Rabelais, François, 69 Ramesay, Alexander, 40 Ramesay, Janet, 57 Ranaldson, Ellen, 130 Rede, Elizabeth, 40 Redschaw, Marjory, 43, 56 Reginald, of Fenwick, 115 Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, 142 Reid, Robert (Bishop), 184–5 relics, 57, 60–2, 115, 153 ‘Remembrance of the passion’, 75

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Resby, James, 161 Restalrig, 61 Richard II, King of England, 160 Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine (Gau), 169 Robert, Duke of Albany, 115 Robert, of Linlithgow, 115 Robert III, King of Scots, 67 Robin Hood, 197–8, 201, 202 Rollock, James, 174 Rome, 62 Rosslyn Chapel, 18 ‘Rough Wooing’, 172, 193 Roxburgh Castle, 161 Rubin, Miri, 10 Rutherford, Andrew, 55 Rutherford, John, 98 Rutherford, Richard, 55 Rynd, Jonet, 41, 139–44 Rynd, Margaret, 37 Ryrie, Alec, 183 Sadler, William, 118 saints, 58–76, 160, 166. See also individual saints St Andrews, 8, 31, 65–7, 100, 170, 197 St Andrews Cathedral, 65–6, 87 St Andrews University, 4, 168 St Giles, church of altars, 71 bell, 1, 29, 153, 209 Bishop of Dunkeld and, 69 burials, 35, 53 furnishings and upkeep, 30, 91 St John, church of (Perth), 61 St John’s, church of (Ayr), 194 St Leonard’s College, 65 St Leonard’s Hospital, 67 St Mary ad Nives, 89 St Nicholas, church of burials, 34, 53 charters, 95, 128 donations to, 23, 39–40 feasts, 74 religious dissent and, 153

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staff, 157 statutes and regulations, 40, 192 San Callisto, 62 Santiago de Compostela, 62, 63 Sarum Use, 59 Schand, Robert, 72 Schang, David, 137 Scheves, Henry, 57 Scheves, John, 57 Scheves, Robert, 57 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 44 Scotichronicon (Bower), 52, 65, 198 Scots, 4, 63, 186 Scott, Alexander, 200 Scribner, Robert, 10, 94 Selkirk, 117 Sempill, Grisel, Lady, 155 Smith, William, 132 Southern, R. W., 10 Spettal, Robert, 26 Stallis, Andrew de, 136 Statuta Gilde, 31, 104, 105 Stewart, Walter, 57, 163 Stewart dynasty, 4 Stirk, Helen, 173 Stirling, 91, 92, 108, 131, 194 Stirling Bridge, Battle of, 66 Strabrok, William de, 34 suicides, 32–3 Sutherland, Alexander, 63 Sutherland, Elizabeth, 118 Swanson, R. N., 10 Swift, Janet, 34 Swift, Thomas, 34 Symson, George, 53–4 Symsoun, David, 22 Tennand, James, 53 Ternan, Saint, 61 Testament of Cresseid (Henryson), 133

Theneu, Saint, 60 Thomas, à Becket, Saint, 7, 61 ‘Thre Deid Pollis, The’ (Henryson), 53 transubstantiation, 160, 162, 191–2 Triduana, Saint, 61 Trinitarians, 115 Trinity College Church, Edinburgh, 4 Trumbill, Janet, 98 Tudor, Edward. See Edward VI, King of England Tyrie, Alexander, 56 University of Marburg, 168 University of Paris, 161 Valois, Madeleine de, 188 Vauchez, André, 10, 75 Verschuur, Mary, 183 ‘Vertewis of the Mess, The’, 29 Wauchope, Robert, 188 Waus, Margaret, 37 Wedderburn, James, 170 Wemes, Margaret, 38 Wemys, Robert, Sir, 131 White, Allan, 116 White, William, 136 Whithorn, 64 William, of Tours, 19 Williamson, Alexander, 34 Williamson, Thomas, 43 Wilsoun, David, 32 Wischart, Agnes, 38, 86 Wod, Elizabeth, 39 women, 26, 35, 37, 42–3, 73 Wycliffe, John, 160, 161 York, 7 Yorkshire, 44