Chapter XIX

Chapter XIX

The Social State of the People in the Sixteenth Century.

SECTION I.

PRIOR TO THE REFORMATION.

IN the preceding volume the characteristics of the government and the institutions of the kingdom were described; the general traits of feudalism, the powers and privileges of the nobles, and their action, as exhibited in the history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Resuming the social history of the people from that period, it is unnecessary to dwell on matters of a similar kind to those treated in the foregoing chapters. The aim of this work will be attained by giving a connected view of the social relations of the people, and thus present a continuous account of their development, while noting the causes adverse or favourable to their progress. In the main the present chapter is a continuation of the chapters in the first volume, with this difference, that the habits and the institutions of the people are now assumed to be more familiar, so that only the changes and modifications, and especially those consequent on the revolutionary movement, have to be noticed at length. Such is the method which will be followed, in order to throw light on this interesting department of human activity.

The Crown of Scotland had few great royal prerogatives which it could wield at pleasure; the government was, at all points, essentially aristocratic. The pretentions to prerogative which the kings sometimes assumed, were soon dashed to the ground by the dominant faction of the nobles. While in other nations of Europe the kings were augmenting their power by curtailing the privileges of their nobles, the Scottish nobility had gradually, during the last two centuries and a half, been increasing their power, till, at the time of the Reformation, they became supreme. But from that time onward other influences came into operation which slowly undermined their power.

In 1533 James V. remodelled the Court of Session, as the supreme court for the administration of justice in civil cases. From this date the Court of the Lords-Auditors ceased; but the Privy Council still retained the judicial power of the old Lords of Council. The theory of these courts seems to have been that the Council could administer justice by its inherent prerogative, and therefore it should interfere if the strict rule of law inflicted a wrong; while the Court of Session was supposed to proceed according to the rules of law. In consequence of this distinction, the lords of the Privy Council assumed something like a right of superiority over the Court of Session, and on critical occasions the former sometimes took a very emphatic and decisive attitude.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 317‒318, 520‒526, 620, et seq. The Records of the Privy Council for the greater part of the 16th century are still preserved. Two volumes of the Register, embracing the period from 1545 to 1579, have recently been published under the authority of the Record Commissioners, and these volumes have been ably edited by Dr. Burton, who has conferred a great boon on historical students by rendering this valuable record easily accessible.

The ordinary official staff of the executive comprised the sheriffs of the counties and their deputes, the bailies of the hereditary regalities, baronies, lordships, stewardships, and their subordinate officers. In time of peace throughout the Lowlands, this organisation afforded a comparative measure of rough order and security to the inhabitants, though, even in the best settled parts of the kingdom, acts of violence and lawlessness were very common, and, owing to the defective means for detecting and apprehending them, and the want of simplicity in criminal procedure, the offenders often escaped unpunished. Upon the Borders and in the Highlands, on the other hand, the state of society was little removed from intermittent anarchy. In both regions the small clan system prevailed; feuds were frequent and bloody. At short intervals, when the excesses rose to an unusual height, the government proceeded to punish and repress them. The chiefs of the clans were made responsible for the action of their followers, but this was soon found to be but a very imperfect restraint. When, as it frequently happened, the chiefs and their men were both engaged in the same lawless depredations, it often became necessary for the government to interfere directly. The usual mode of treating the Borderers was this: the king mustered an armed force, and proceeded against the reivers and notorious thieves, and executed justice upon them by seizing and hanging them on the spot, or by occasionally bringing some of them to Edinburgh to be hanged. The national records during this century are full of such raids on the border thieves and reivers. The mode of dealing with the Highlanders was much the same, only the Crown often delegated its power to a local noble, as to the Earl of Huntly in the north, and the Earl of Argyle in the west.

During the minority of James V. the administration of justice was wretchedly neglected in every quarter of the kingdom. But in 1530 disorder on the Borders had risen to such a crisis that the King, at the head of an army, scoured the glens of Yarrow and Ettrick, and seized Cockburne of Henderland, and Scott of Tuschielaw, two of the most notorious offenders. They were taken to Edinburgh, and tried for extorting black-mail from the poor tenants, and for common theft and reset. Both were convicted and executed, and their lands forfeited to the Crown.¹ In connection with this raid the king summoned the Earl of Bothwell, the Lords of Home and Maxwell, the Lairds of Buccleuch, Fernihirst, Johnstone, and Mark Ker; all of them were imprisoned, and Bothwell was at last banished. At the same time the King compelled about fifty other barons and lairds in the counties of Berwick, Roxburgh, Peebles, and Selkirk, to find security to appear before the Justiciary when required. In this way the Crown sought to bridle the reivers and cattle-lifters by making their superiors and neighbours responsible for the crimes and depredations of those who lived and harboured upon their lands.² The same year the King made another raid on the Borders, partly for pleasure, but at the same time prepared to punish any noted thief who came within his grip. He was accompanied by the Earls of Athole, Huntly, Argyle, and many other barons, and it was reported that they killed eighteen score of deer. It was on this occasion that the famous John Armstrong was taken, a border marauder who, it seems, operated chiefly on the English side of the marches. He is represented as surrounded by his followers, and coming to meet the king to offer him homage; but when James saw him and his company mounted on horseback, he ordered the chief and most of his men to be immediately hanged, without the formality of a trial. Armstrong’s fate excited great commiseration amongst the people of the district, and his memory is commemorated in a stirring ballad.³ By repeating these harsh measures, the King for a time reduced the borderers to comparative quiet,⁴ but it is doubtful whether the severe punishment he inflicted on them was at all calculated to promote the permanent peace of the district. Excessive severity often defeats itself; and, besides, the lawlessness of the borderers could be effectually remedied only by changing their circumstances; harsh treatment might aggravate existing evils, but could not reform them.

¹ Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 144‒145. There is an exceedingly spirited and touching ballad――“The Widow’s Lament”――which is supposed to refer to the fate of Cockburne. Though rude and turbulent, the Borderers had some fine traits of character; even this reiver and king of thieves had some estimable qualities.

² Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 146‒148.

³ Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, pages 152‒154; Veitch’s History of the Poetry of the Scottish Borders, pages 287‒294; 1878.

⁴ Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 171‒173.

After the death of the King the borderers broke out in greater excesses than ever; and throughout the regencies of Arran and the Queen mother, they grew worse and worse. In the end of the year 1546 the Council resolved that the regent should pass with an army towards the Borders and restore order; but the government being then occupied with the siege of the Castle of St. Andrews, had not a sufficient force. Accordingly an Act of Council was passed in March, 1547, calling a muster of the local forces to accompany the regent to the Borders to assist in stanching the theft, reif, and oppression of the thieves and reivers. Five years later the Queen regent again attempted to remedy the evils of the borders, but the people there daily became more disorderly. The Master of Maxwell in 1553 declined to accept the Wardenship of the West Marches which his deceased brother had held. The government offered him five hundred pounds yearly, and some other reward, such as a benefice or the like, but he still refused to undertake the office till the offenders against the public authority were punished, or a sufficient force was placed at his command to punish them. This could not be done, and Sir James Douglas of Drumlanrig took the office, but threw it up in less than a year, and the troubles of the region thickened.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 28, 57, 64, 120‒125, 132, 137, 140, 143‒146, 152, et seq.

The social state of the Highlands resembled that of the Borders in many particulars, but there were some differences between them. The peculiarities of race which have been made so much of, were in reality of little consequence. The social condition of the Highlanders was the result of a long chain of causes, rather than of any peculiarities belonging to the race. This is well shown by the quickness with which the Highlanders adapt themselves to the requirements of a higher civilisation so soon as their surroundings are changed. If they had been the incapable and erratic savages that some have represented them, how came it, that on being removed from the mountains and glens, and placed under a course of training for a few months, they proved themselves amongst the best soldiers in the British army? If idleness, thieving, and fighting, for the mere love of such things, had been essential features in the Celtic population of the Highlands, why was it that they were so easily and readily cast aside when the circumstances of the Highlander were changed? The fact is that the social condition of the Highlands was due to a long chain of circumstances by which the inhabitants were forced into those habits of living that characterised them, and which were explained in the preceding volume. To talk, therefore, of their social condition being due to their defects or peculiarities as a race is inapt and misleading, and calculated to distort justice and obscure history. The main difference between the Borderer and the Highlander consisted in the more complete dependence of the latter on his chief. The vassals and dependents of the Highland chief stood by him with a fidelity and love in misfortune as well as in prosperity, which we do not meet with among the Borderers. In this respect, one of the moral elements of clanship was decidedly higher in the Highlands than on the Borders.

The heads of the clans Cameron and Ranald having failed to appear before the Council at Inverness, the case of the latter was entrusted to the Earl of Argyle. In 1552 Argyle reported to the government that the captain of the clan was loyal to their authority, and that he would have attended before the justiciary if the charge had reached him previous to his departure for Ireland. Argyle was ordered to continue his proceedings, and to cause the head of the clan to appear before the regent and council before Christmas, and take their orders for the good government of the district. If he failed, Argyle was to make war upon the clan, and to pursue them with fire and sword, according to the Act passed at Inverness. At the same time the Earl of Huntly was ordered to proceed against the Camerons and to pursue them in the same fashion.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 125‒126.

In the autumn of 1553 it was recorded that for a long time there had been great slaughter, reifs, enormities, and oppression, committed upon the people in the northern quarters of the kingdom, and especially by the strife between the Earl of Caithness and M‘Kay, and their kin and adherents. The Earl of Caithness was summoned to meet the Earl of Huntly and the Bishop of Ross at Inverness, in order to concert measures for restoring order in the county; but he neither appeared nor condescended so much as to answer the Regent’s letters. The Council then directed the officers at arms to charge the Earl of Caithness to come to Inverness and meet the Earl of Huntly and the Bishop of Ross, and to bring sufficient pledges for himself, his kin, and his allies, that he would maintain better order in future, under the penalty of rebellion and horning.¹

¹ Ibid., page 147.

There was one enemy of peace and civilisation common in the Highlands, the Borders, and the Lowlands; this was the numerous feuds which had sprung up and accumulated during centuries of internal strife, till they were spread throughout the entire nation. The bonds of manrent by which the different clans and families became bound and banded together, and against one another in all their causes and quarrels, constantly tended towards anarchy and confusion. An injury, or the slaughter of a member of the clan, was never forgotten by the surviving kin; and an intense feeling of revenge had been fostered so long that it had assumed an almost incredible strength, as the feud had in many cases been transmitted from father to son, and from kindred to kindred, through many generations. In Catholic times the Church recognised its power by leaving the right hand of male children unchristened, that it might deal the more unhallowed and deadly a blow to the enemy.¹ This sentiment now appears to us extremely shocking, but it is one which belongs to all stages of predatory society. It was nursed, not only among the Highlanders and the Borderers, but also among the Lowland aristocracy, and was encouraged and prolonged by the weakness of the central authority. The feuds among the Lowland nobles in the sixteenth century were notorious, and often formed the subject of parliamentary enactments and acts of Council.² Some of the bonds which they entered into for gaining their ends through deeds of violence have long been matter of history. The habits of the Scottish nobles always tended towards lawlessness. Whatever party was at the head of affairs, there was always sure to be another party plotting, scheming, or fighting against them, and thus the nation was continually kept in a state of insecurity. Revolutions in the government followed each other so rapidly that no encouragement whatever was afforded for peaceful industry among the people.

¹ Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders; Veitch’s History of the Poetry of the Scottish Borders, page 299; Evan’s Ballads, Volume III., page 106.

² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III.; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume I., pages 133‒134, 150‒151.

During the half century immediately preceding the Reformation, the national records disclose a deplorable state of crime among all ranks of society. Murder, slaughter, mutilation, and theft in the form of cattle lifting, were extremely prevalent. Theft in these times often led to assault, which usually ended in slaughter, or something like robbery and murder. Parliament passed many Acts against these crimes, and the phraseology of the Acts themselves vividly recalls the state of society. Homicide and slaughter were so common that many respites and pardons were granted every year. In the end of the year 1501 the Master of Errol, the son of the Earl of Errol, and three others, were granted a remission for stealing thirty-one oxen from Sir William Keith of Inverugy. In 1508 a remission was given to Lord Oliphant and two of his accomplices for the oppression of Lord Drummond, by casting down the dykes between the lands of Drymane and Balloch, “and for the murder of John, Earl of Buchan, in Perth, after the slaughter of James Oliphant, committed by the said Earl and his accomplices, and for all other oppressions, felonies, and crimes.” Here we see the action of the feeling of revenge; the Earl of Buchan had murdered an Oliphant, Lord Oliphant then murdered the Earl, and we may pretty safely assume that Lord Drummond was an ally of the Earl of Buchan. To grant pardons for these crimes was perhaps the best thing that the government of the time could do. If every one had been hanged who committed slaughter and murder, there would have been two or three executions every day of the year. In 1517 “The Master of Glencairn, the son of the Earl of Glencairn, and twenty-seven others, obtained a remission for the cruel murder of Sir Matthew Montgomery, Archibald Caldwell, and James Smyth, and for hurting John Montgomery, the son of the Earl of Eglinton.” The Earl of Argyle, in 1532, and ninety-two of his followers, obtained a remission for treasonable fire-raising in the Islands, with his standard unfurled. “The King and his Council dispensed with the general act, on the condition that the Earl satisfied the kin of Donald Ballo M‘Ancrum, Donald Crum M‘Cowuane, Farquhar M‘Sevir, and others having lawful claims.”¹ These few cases of pardon for crimes are merely a selection from hundreds of a similar character; and though the criminal records for the first half of the century are very incomplete, an examination of what remains discloses a state of society absolutely lawless.

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II., pages 250, 282, 347, 372, 492; Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 102, 108, 234, 247.

Although in 1528 Parliament attached a severe penalty to the crime of rape, this crime was often passed over with a very light punishment. Bigamy and adultery were common offences, and in 1551 Parliament enacted a measure which proposed severe penalties against them. The Act proceeds to deal with married persons “that are open, manifest, and common, and incorrigible adulterers, and will not desist nor cease therefrom, for any fear of the spiritual jurisdiction or the censure of holy Church, to the great peril of their own souls,” and directs that such persons shall be visited with the processes of the Church, and then denounced as rebels and put to the horn. Divorce was also extremely common among the upper class in Scotland, and was encouraged by the fashion of granting papal dispensations.¹

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II., pages 298, 377, 486; Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 28‒406; Statutes of the Scottish Church, Volume II.; A. Robertson’s _Lectures on the Government, Constitution, and Laws of Scotland_, pages 133‒134, 183; 1878.

As indicating the absence of respect for the law, and the defectiveness of the police organisation, the treatment which the executive officers and messengers often met with may be instanced. Their summonses and letters were often taken from them and torn to tatters; “and the evildoers boasted, menaced, disobeyed, struck, and pursued the officers, and sometimes killed them outright.” In 1546 the Lords of Council passed an Act imposing severe penalties upon offenders of this description; and it was resolved to grant no respites to any one guilty of such crimes for three years to come. On the other hand, the officers of the law were often guilty of oppression and corruption. They took bribes from the rich and powerful and permitted them to remain at home, so that when the pursuer’s case came on before the court, there was not a sufficient number of jurymen, and the case broke down, while the injured party lost all the value involved, and the trouble and the expense of the action. They were accused of summoning poor and simple persons as jurymen, who had no knowledge to enable them to decide upon doubtful matters. In 1531 twelve messengers-at-arms were by one sentence proclaimed fugitives from the law and rebels, and forbidden to exercise their office on pain of being hanged and drawn. In 1539, again, thirty-three messengers-at-arms were convicted at once, and deprived of their offices, for common oppression of the people, “by the false and unjust exercise of their office, and frustrating them in their just actions through their ignorance.” After the Reformation attempts were made to remedy the defects among the officers at arms.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 66‒660; Volume II., pages 74, 176, 365‒367; Pitcairn’s _Criminal Trials_, Volume I., pages 48, 74‒75, 154‒157, 217.

The municipal organisation of the burghs was pretty complete, but owing to various causes the state of society in them was by no means peaceful or secure. In 1529 it was stated in the Town Council of Edinburgh that in past times there had been slaughters and murders in the burgh, because the officers and citizens had not been careful to resist and punish evildoers, and that thus the character of the town had been defamed. It was therefore enacted, “That every merchant and craftsman should always have beside them in their shops ready for use an axe or two or more, according to the number of their servants, that they might be prepared to fortify and assist the magistrates in the administration of justice.” Those failing to comply with the Act were to be fined forty shillings for the first fault, and for the second, forty pounds. This Act was repeated in 1539, and again in 1553, when it was stated that there had been great slaughters and tussles in the town, which were likely to recur. It was therefore enacted that “all persons who occupied shops or chambers in the Highgate should have long weapons therein, such as a hand axe, a Jedburgh staff, or a halbert, and that after the ringing of the common bell, or when they saw or apprehended any brawls on the streets, they should immediately turn out and assist the officers in stanching and quelling the disturbance. Those who absented themselves from a tussle on the streets, after being warned, were to be deprived of their freedom for ever. Each bailie was ordered to search his own quarter of the city to see that the statute was obeyed.”¹ Similar regulations for meeting sudden brawls on the streets were enforced in all the burghs of the kingdom. In 1522 the citizens of Aberdeen unanimously ordained that all men dwelling in the town, both burgesses of guild and other craftsmen, should always have in their shops and office-houses a good fencible weapon, such as an axe, a halbert, or a Jedburgh staff, for the defence of their persons, goods, and the commonweal of the city. But in 1530, at a meeting of the whole citizens called by the provost, it was resolved that――“Considering the cruel slaughters, murders, and oppression done to them and their neighbours by gentlemen of the country, ... every neighbour dwelling in the town should wear daily his weapon on his person, until some remedy be found how this good town may be freed from such cruel oppressors; and that every craftsman have his weapon beside him in his workshop, and when he passes into the street to truss it in his hand, that they may be able at all times to defend themselves and their neighbours.”²

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 7‒8, 93, 177.

² Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., page 103, 111, 131, 448‒449.

In 1529, during the months of October and November, there were nineteen persons, male and female, banished from Edinburgh for various offences. Margaret Clapane was banished for buying oysters to regrate contrary to the statutes; William Cawdor was banished for buying wild fowls contrary to the statutes; Janet Brown for her demerits was banished for all the days of her life; David Christeson was banished because he was a young stark fellow, who begged and would not work for his living. An Irishman that sung with a lass, and begged through the streets of the town, was banished because he was a stout young fellow, and would not work; if he failed to depart out of the city, he was to be burned on the cheek. Luke Jamison was expelled for regrating herring; and Andrew Gibson for regrating the king’s money. In 1536 all the vagabonds without masters were ordered forthwith to decamp from the town under the penalty of imprisonment, and thereafter to be banished. The same year, vagabonds who would not pay their debts, were to be banished from the burgh; and vagabonds who had no occupation, nor anything to live upon, nightwalkers, and players at dice and cards, were all commanded to remove out of the city, under the penalty of imprisonment. No beggars were to be allowed to live in the town, except those who had been born in it, and of these such only as were feeble and unable to work for their living, under the penalty of burning of their cheeks and banishment. It appears, however, from other statutes that the beggars in Edinburgh were many. In 1538 Agnes Wright was convicted for causing a disturbance, and was sentenced to be put in irons at the market cross, or else above the cross on the scaffold, that the people might see her, when her offence was to be openly proclaimed, and thereafter she was to be banished. In 1551 all the sergeants of the burgh were dismissed for failing in the execution of their duties, and the bailies were commanded to receive others in their places.¹

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 8‒16, 73, 80, 88, 90, 156.

Among the sums disbursed by the Treasurer of Edinburgh for the year 1554‒55, we find the following: “For taking of a great gibbet off the nether Tolbooth, and bringing it to the top of the Dow Crag, to have hanged hummil Jok on, and bringing it down again to St. Paul’s Work, the sum of twelvepence; and for cords to bind and hang him with, eightpence. In November, for cords to bind and hang a thief, who was convicted before the sheriff, eightpence. The same month, a great long chain of iron for the thieves’ hole, with four arms extended from it, and four locks and bolts, weighing eleven stones and three quarters, made by John Ahamnay, blacksmith, and the price of each stone was eleven shillings and fourpence――the total sum six pounds fourteen shillings and twopence: and for bringing it from the workshop, and helping to fasten it――eightpence. For cords to bind and hang Tom Gelirson, and to bind a woman when she was burned on the cheek――two shillings. For cords to bind Nicoll Ramsay when he was hanged――sixpence. For cords to hang the man that burnt Lord James’ corn――eightpence.” In the month of February, 1557, the Town Council ordered their treasurer, “To pay to John Wauchlott, officer and surgeon, the sum of three pounds for curing and mending of James Henderson’s leg, which was broken in the town’s service at the taking of Ramsay, a thief who was slain in the taking.”¹

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 294, 295, et seq.; Volume III., page 16; _Old Dundee prior to the Reformation_, pages 350, 208, et seq., by Alexander Maxwell, 1891.

The surgeons of the period had considerable work in attending to the broken heads and limbs which resulted from brawls and assaults, and it appears that the injury inflicted by an assailant was usually assessed upon their judgment. “When David Arthor hurt Wille Terbat, it was ordered that the Leech, by the great oath, deponed how many days Wille might not work through the hurt, and David to pay each day eightpence, and also pay the leech-craft.” So also “when Rob Dawson struck Wille Pangell, he was ordained to pay the Leech for his craft of Wille’s head breaking, and give Wille twelve pence each day that the Leech deponed that he might not freely labour through the hurt.”

Persons appearing before the burgh court were required to show due respect to it, and to give the bailies becoming honour. On the 13th of March, 1551, in the burgh court of Dundee, Andro Kynneris was sentenced to pay “to Our Lady light two pounds of wax for causing a disturbance in the court.” Three years later David Spankey was fined ten shillings, and ordered to ask the bailies’ forgiveness, for saying in their presence “that there was no justice done in the Tollbooth.” Subsequently the Head Court of the burgh enacted: “That if any person be found disobeying or slighting any officer holding office, he shall pay to Our Lady Kirk five pounds of money; and the person convicted of such an offence shall come to the High alter and offer a pound of wax in a candle, and, if he disobeys, to lose his freedom. But, if he has not goods or gear, in that case, he shall lie forty-eight hours in the stocks, and on the following Sunday shall pass about the Kirk, afore the procession, in linen clothes, and a wax candle of two pounds in his hand; and if he fails to perform this, to be banished from the town for a year and a day.” Shortly after this Act was made, Robert Peblis disturbed the court and uttered defaming words to the bailies, for which he was fined five pounds.

In 1556 harlots were ordered to wear a distinctive dress when they appeared on the streets of Edinburgh. The Town Council of Dundee, on the 10th of January, 1559, said that “It had been reported to the great defame, slander, and shame of honest men’s wives, their daughters, and women servants, that they have been seduced by panders and procurers to use themselves unlawfully in fornication; for remedy of which the Council ordered that if there be any such men or women panders in the burgh, they despatch themselves off within twenty-four hours, under the penalty of being openly taken to the Market Cross, and there banished for ever.” Regarding the places where immoral practices were carried on, it was enacted “that from this day forth no brothels should be permitted within the burgh.” The custom of “hand-fasting” was then not uncommon, which was an agreement between a man and a woman to live together either for a limited or an indefinite yet a terminable time.¹

¹ Ibid., Volume II., pages 248; see also Burgh Records of Aberdeen, and Old Dundee, page 285.

In Catholic times a form of penance was sometimes imposed on offenders as a part of their punishment. In the year 1523, John Pitt, a tailor in Aberdeen, was convicted, on his own confession, for disobeying David Anderson, one of the bailies. The tailor had refused to take his proper place, with the sign of his craft, in the Candlemas procession, and he abused the bailie and the merchants of the town by calling them “coffers, and bidding them take the salt-pock and the fire-brush in their hands.” For this offence he bound himself before the council to appear the next Sunday bare-headed and bare-footed in the church, in the time of high mass, with a wax-candle in his hand, and to offer it to their patron saint, Nicholas; he also promised to have the usual token of his craft on his breast――that is, a pair of patent shears; and then to sit down humbly on his knees and beseech the provost to remit his fault. Bessie Dempster was convicted in 1538, before the council by a jury, for the aspersion of David Reid, both by word and deed; and a part of her punishment was that, on the next Sunday, she should go before the procession, with nothing on her but her shift, and enter the High Church with a wax-candle in her hand, and offer it “to the holy blood light;” and then sit down on her knees, and beseech the magistrates and the good men of the town to request David to forgive her. In 1544 the Town Council commanded Mage Durtty, who had been twice convicted before, and at this time for disturbing Janet Lesly, that she must go the next Sunday, with a wax-candle burning in her hand, into the church, and sit down on her knees, and ask Janet to forgive her. But if ever she again committed such offences, they ordained that “her crag should be put in the jougs.” Thomas White was convicted by the bailies, in 1549, for interfering with David Reid, an officer, in the execution of his duty, and for assaulting Duncan Fraser. He was ordered to appear on Sunday in the church, in the time of high mass, bare-headed and bare-footed, with a wax-candle in his hand, and then sit down on his knees, and ask the magistrates and council to forgive him, and the officer, Duncan Fraser; and, finally, to offer the candle to St. Nicholas light.¹

¹ Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., pages 93, 154, 155, 198, 206, 212, 271, 272, 429, 445.

There is little variation in these cases of public penance, but they enable us to understand some of the peculiar features of the Catholic system; and it will be found that something of the old forms of penance passed into the discipline of the Reformed Church. Although the hierarchy in Scotland was tottering to its fall, and was upon the very brink of destruction, yet within a few years of the Reformation the surface of things was seemingly little disturbed. In 1555, John Sandris, a couper, and his wife, were tried and convicted by the bailies of Aberdeen, for striking and drawing blood of Thomas Gellane and his wife; and their sentence was that they should pay Thomas twenty shillings, to be given to the barbour for curing his wounds; and to go next Sunday to St. Nicholas Church, in the time of high mass, each of them with a candle of wax in their hands, and there ask forgiveness of Thomas and his wife. The same year, other two persons in Aberdeen underwent penance in a similar form for their offences.

In Dundee between the years 1520‒3 the bailies in the burgh court, among other cases, disposed of the following, which have the characteristic of penance. Willy Marshall for disobedience to the bailies, and not paying the King’s tax, was sentenced to go to the kirk “on Sunday before the time of high mass in shirt and gown, barefooted and bareheaded, with a candle of a pound of wax, and ask the bailies’ forgiveness, and offer the candle where they command him: and, if he fails, to come next Sunday with a candle of four pounds; and, if he fails the third Sunday, to pay a stone of wax to Our Lady.” Reche Crag had threatened the town’s officers with a dirk, and having confessed the fault, he was “ordered to come on Sunday in the time of high mass, and the knife drawn in his hand by the point, and on his knees ask the provost’s forgiveness, and give him the knife to be placed where he pleases.” If he failed to do this, he was to pay half a stone of wax to Our Lady light.¹

¹ Burgh Records of Aberdeen, pages 282, 285, 288; also Old Dundee, pages 17, 18.

All classes of the people were in the habit of swearing. The literature of the period contains ample evidence of the number of oaths which were then common among the Scots. The writings of Sir David Lindsay alone exhibit upwards of fifty forms.¹ Parliament, in 1551, passed an act touching “the abominable swearing, execration, and blaspheming of the name of God, swearing in vain by His precious blood, body, and wounds; devil stick, cummer-gor, reist or rife them, and other vulgar oaths and execrations against the command of God. Yet, both among the high and low, it has come into such vain-glorious use that the people may be heard daily and hourly blaspheming openly God’s name and majesty.” The remedy proposed was a graduated scale of fines for those who could pay them; and the poor people found guilty were to be put in the stocks or imprisoned for four ♦hours; but women guilty of swearing were to be treated according to their blood and station, and the parties with whom they were coupled.²

¹ In a note on Lyndsay’s Satire of the Three Estates, Chalmers says――“The one-half of conversation in that age, both in England and in Scotland, was made up of swearing.” And he then gives a list of the most fashionable oaths which occur in Lyndsay’s play, and they amount to thirty-three. Among them may be mentioned the following:――“By God’s wounds; by God’s cross; by God’s bread (that is, the altar); by Him that made the moon; by Him that herried hell; by our Lady; by St. Mary; by sweet St. Gile;” and so on.――_Works of Sir D. Lyndsay_, Volume I. pages 360‒363.

♦ “honrs” replaced with “hours”

² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II., page 435.

Some of the habits of the people and their modes of living were extremely defective. This appeared most in the deplorable sanitary state of the towns. The necessary conditions of health were but little understood, and usually disregarded, till pestilence reached a height which compelled the authorities to take active measures, and endeavour to mitigate the suffering. The streets of the towns, and the houses of the poorer classes, were in a wretched state; and throughout this century the country was never long free from the pest. Many acts of parliament and council were passed for dealing with the pestilence, and the records of all the burghs are full of regulations about it; but they are chiefly remarkable for the single idea, that to prevent contact with the persons affected with the disease was the only remedy and protection against it. The efforts of the authorities were mostly directed to this, and thorough cleanliness seems to have been greatly undervalued and neglected. The authorities, however, often showed commendable energy to prevent the spread of the pest by actual contact; they exerted themselves to separate those affected with the disease from the healthy portion of the people; and, in carrying out their regulations on this point, they frequently acted with great determination.¹ On the second of October, 1559, the Town Council of Dundee ordered “that all persons, either rich or poor, having middens in any place within the boundary of the burgh, should remove them before Wednesday night, and lay no more in time coming.” Each bailie was enjoined to visit the quarters where they were, and to cause the Act to be put into execution. Subsequently the town’s officers were ordered to pass through the burgh once every twenty-four hours, and enforce the Act. But, although repeatedly prohibited, the offensive heaps still continued. It is now well known, though as yet only imperfectly acted upon, that the rational mode of preserving health depends on the proper sanitary conditions of the country, and especially of the great centres of population――thorough drainage and sewerage arrangements, which tend to promote the general vigour of the entire population of the Island.

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volumes II., III.; Register of the Privy Council, Volumes I., II., III., IV., V., VI.; _Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Peebles, Perth, and Dundee_.

In Scotland the streets, even of the chief towns, were not lighted at night. The Town Council of Edinburgh, in November, 1554, ordained that, “for eschewing of the evil doings of the vagabonds and others who go in the burgh in the night, stealing and robbing within the same, there be nightly, from this day forth till the 24th of February, lanterns and bowets set up and lighted at five o’clock in the evening, and to burn till nine, by the following persons:――Each barber on the highgate, each candlemaker on the highgate, each apothecary, each taverner, each baker, and each common cook, to have a lantern or bowet burning in front of their shops and houses during the said hours; and likewise each brewer in the closes and outwith should furnish a bowet; and also that all the persons dwelling in closes must furnish bowets night about, as they shall be ordered by the bailies: and where it happens that two candlemakers or barbers dwell near to each other, then the bailies shall put one of their bowets to any other place as he pleases; and these parties were required to comply with this statute under a fine of two shillings.”¹ This was a primitive enough mode of lighting the streets of the capital of a kingdom.

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 204‒205; Burgh Records of Aberdeen, 262.

In 1557 Bessie Campbell having been brought before the magistrates of Edinburgh, promised that she would desist from making aqua vitæ, or selling it in the burgh, except on the market days. It appears from various records that the use of spirits was quite common amongst all classes of the people; and drink-money and drink-silver was a very common phrase in the accounts paid to the different classes of workmen by the Town Councils throughout the kingdom.

Reference has already been made to the oppressive burdens which were imposed upon the tenants, the occupiers, and the tillers of the land. Contemporary literature abounds with evidence of the wretched state of these classes of the people. Sir David Lyndsay enumerates by name several of the burdens which the landlords enforced upon their tenants; such as “the great fine on the renewal of leases,” and the fines which had to be paid on the marriage of their daughters.¹ In the Complaynt of Scotland, which was published in 1549, the oppression of the tenants and labourers of the ground is touchingly related. Their corn and cattle were often reft from them, and they were then turned out of their holdings. The poor especially were excessively oppressed.² Prior to the Reformation, however, some efforts were made to relieve them. In 1535, Parliament enacted that the poor who cannot work should be supported by the parishes in which they were born.³ In 1553, James Henderson laid proposals before the Town Council of Edinburgh for the improvement of the burgh; and it was then suggested that a new hospital should be built, with forty beds, for helpless men and women, with a priest, a surgeon, and a doctor attached to it. The scheme, does not appear to have been carried out; but about the same time the necessity of some mode of assisting the helpless poor was recognised. The Town Council, in 1555, appointed a committee to devise means for supporting the poor, and expelling sturdy beggars from the town. The next year the Council appointed two men to receive the bread and the silver collected for the poor, and to distribute them till the next term. In 1557, the Council resolved to provide for the maintenance of the poor in the meantime, and passed several Acts in 1559 for expelling beggars who did not belong to the town. It was also proposed to make provision for the poor, according to the Act of Parliament and the statutes of the burgh. The most common mode of dealing with the poor in the burghs seems to have been to grant to those who were born in the town liberty to beg, and to expel all other beggars.⁴ Many of the hospitals for the sick and infirm which had formerly existed in many places throughout the country,⁵ had fallen into a state of decay; and as yet there was no definitely organised scheme for giving assistance to the poor, although the matter had frequently engaged the attention of public bodies.

¹ Works, Chalmers’s Edition, Volume II., pages 6‒7, 118; Volume III., page 147.

² Dr. Murray’s Edition, page 123, et seq.

³ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II.

⁴ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 169‒172, 232, 261; Volume III., pages 50‒51; see also Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., page 234.

⁵ Mackintosh’s History of Civilisation in Scotland, Volume I., page 434.

The religious feelings and opinions of the people themselves, as manifested in their daily life during this revolutionary period, is a highly interesting subject; and an attempt will be made to show what they were immediately before the crisis of the Reformation. In 1514, the Town Council of Aberdeen resolved to impose a tax for buying ornaments and books to the church of their “glorious patron Saint Nicholas.” At the same time an act was passed by which no burgess was admitted, nor any unfreeman licensed to sell, without the payment of a certain sum of money for the repairing of St. Nicholas church and choir. This act was often repeated, and others similar to it were enacted with the consent of the whole community of the city.¹ The citizens also gave voluntary contributions for furnishing ornaments to the altars of their “glorious Saint Nicholas”; and in many other ways they exhibited their feelings by bestowing a liberal share of the good things of the earth and of the waters on the Church.² The Town Council of Edinburgh, in 1518, ordained that the servants of the guild and the beadle should keep the College Church of St. Giles and its choir free from all evil persons in the time of matins, high mass, and evensong; and that no beggars should be permitted to enter the church at such times. In 1521, the Town Council resolved that the dean of guild and seven others should form a committee, to meet every Friday, and sit one hour, and deliberate and advise touching the good of the church and the making of freemen and guild brethren. The Council, in 1546, ordered that all the fines taken from those who had broken the price of wine, should be applied to the reparation of the high altar; and the following year the magistrates resolved that the tavern keepers should be poinded for the dues which they owed to St. Anthony’s altar. In 1552 the magistrates entered into a contract for making the stalls of the choir of St. Giles; and in 1555 they appointed a man to sing in the choir at the masses of Our Lady and the Holy Blood, for which service he was to receive twenty merks a-year. The same year the council ordered the musicians who played before St. Giles on that saint’s day to be paid out of the town’s funds. In the beginning of the year 1556, the provost and bailies granted to Alexander Scott a pension of ten pounds for one year only, for his attendance and singing in the choir on all the festival days, and for playing on the organ when he was requested by the authorities of the town. On the 5th of November, 1557, the Town Council granted the benefice of St. Andrews altar in St. Giles’ church to Robert Craig, the son of a goldsmith, “who promised to be a priest within two years, or else renounce his prebendary.” The great church of St. Mary in Dundee had upwards of thirty altars, and a large staff of priests and officials. There was a peal of five bells in the tower, on which a chime of one hundred and twenty-nine strikes was rung three times daily, to call the people to matins, mass, and evening song. In such churches, and in the grand cathedrals of the kingdom, the magnificence of the ritualistic service was exceedingly imposing. The varied and beautiful decoration of the whole interior of the churches, the altars adorned with cloth of gold, silver vessels, and fine service books, the beautiful hues of the vestments of silk and tissues of gold, the sacred crucifix, and the greatly venerated relics of the saints, and withal, the vocal chanting of touching hymns to the resonant harmony of the organ, were all carefully calculated to touch the devout hearts and impress the souls of the humble worshippers.³

¹ Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., 88, 89, 96, 178, 176, 218, 235, 248.

² Ibid., 119‒120, 149, 151, 180, 279, 299.

³ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume I., pages 177, 208; Volume II., pages 125‒127, 142, 174, 218, 220, 236; Volume III., page 12; Old Dundee, Maxwell, page 13, et seq.

Touching the processions in which the craftsmen joined on notable saint days, pretty full accounts are contained in the Records of Aberdeen, where they were an important institution. It appears, however, that these displays sometimes ended in bickerings, that is, in a general uproar, especially among the young.¹ In 1531 the Town Council of Aberdeen passed the following statute: “According to the lovable custom and right of this burgh, and of the noble burgh of Edinburgh, of which rite and custom the provost has received a copy: that is to say, that in the name of God and the blessed Virgin Mary, the craftsmen of this burgh, in their best array, keep and decorate the procession, as on Corpus Christi day and Candlemas day, as honourably as they can, every craft with their own banner, with the arms of their craft thereon, and they shall pass each craft by themselves, two and two, in this order:――First the fleshers, and next the barbers; next the skinners and furriers together; next the shoemakers; next the tailors; after them weavers, walkers, and listers together; next them the bakers; and last of all, nearest to the Sacrament, passes all the hammermen――namely, smiths, wrights, masons, ♦coupers, slaters, goldsmiths, and armourers. And every one of the said crafts, in the Candlemas procession, shall furnish their pageants, according to the old statute of the year of God 1510.” The crafts were ordered to furnish their pageants as follows:――“The fleshers, St. Bestian and his tormenters; the barbers, St. Lawrence and his tormenters; the skinners, St. Stephen and his tormenters; the shoemakers, St. Martin; the tailors, the coronation of our Lady; the listers, St. Nicholas; the weavers, walkers, and bonnetmakers, St. John; the bakers, St. George; the hammermen, the Resurrection and the Cross.”²

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 8, 73.

♦ “coupars” replaced with “coupers” for consistency

² Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., pages 449‒451.

Turning to another class of illustrations of the religious sentiments of the people, the shoemakers of Edinburgh were incorporated by a seal of cause, 1510, which contained rules touching payments to the altar of the craftsmen. “For augmentation of divine service at the altar of St. Crispin, in the College Church of St. Giles, we desire that the following statutes, articles, and rules, should be sanctioned by your authority.” Every apprentice at his entry to the craft had to pay six shillings and eightpence, for upholding of divine service at the altar of St. Crispin; and when a shoemaker commenced business as a master, he had to pay four marks to the altar of St. Crispin. Every master had to pay one penny weekly for keeping the altar in repair, and each of his servants a half-penny. All the fines for breaking the rules of the craft, or disobeying the kirk-master, were also to be applied to the service of the altar of St. Crispin. The candlemakers were incorporated in 1517; and it was stated in their seal of cause, “that when they set up shop, each master must pay to St. Giles’ work half a mark of silver, and to the reparation and upholding of the light of any altar in St. Giles’ Church, where the deacon and craftsmen think it most needful, half a mark weekly; ay, and until they be furnished with an altar of their own. And, likewise, each master of the craft, in honour of Almighty God and his Blessed Mother St. Mary, and of our patron St. Giles, and of all the saints of heaven, shall give the sum of ten shillings yearly to the helping and furnishing, either of light or any other needful thing to any altar in the church of St. Giles.” The bakers were incorporated in 1523, and their patron was St. Cuthbert, whose altar was in St. Giles; and they kept a chaplain of their own to perform divine service at their altar. All the fines for disobeying the rules of the craft were to be devoted to the altar, chiefly in the form of wax candles to lighten the church and enliven the worship. The tailors had St. Ann for their patron; and they also had an altar and a chaplain of their own, “who said prayers.” The bonnetmakers were under the protection of St. Mark. The skinners and furriers of Edinburgh were incorporated in 1533. “In example of others, and for augmentation of divine service at the altar of St. Christopher our patron, in the college church of St. Giles. Seeing that all virtuous practices depend on a good beginning, thence persevering and advancing to the end, therefore all those who set up as skinners and furriers should pay five pounds for the maintaining of divine service at their altar of St. Christopher; unless, indeed, they be skinners’ sons within this burgh, in which case, they shall only pay ten shillings. Every master who has a shop, should pay one penny weekly to the reparation of the ornaments of our altar and sustaining of the priests’ meat thereof, as it comes about.” Indeed almost every craft had its special saint and altar. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the weavers of Dundee resolved to found an altar to St. Severus, their patron saint, and the erection having been sanctified, they then framed rules, which were presented to the town council. In 1512, the council granted a seal of cause, incorporating the weavers, “for the supplying and upholding of divine service and reapparelling of their altar of St. Severus, uphorlden by them in Our Lady Kirk, and for the government of their work and labours. It was provided that the fees and fines exacted for infringement of the rules of the craft should go to the upholding of the altar, and that each man and woman engaged in the craft, who gives not to the priest of the altar his meat in the year, as the rest does, shall pay every week to the altar a penny, to be collected by the deacon of the craft.” In 1516, the town council incorporated the glovers, and the craft became bound, “in honour and loving of God Almighty, and of the glorious Lady the Virgin Mary, and of St. Duthac, our patron, to the reparation of our altar in the parish kirk, for the upholding of God’s service daily at the said altar, and to the honest sustentation of a chaplain daily to sing and say at the altar;” and to collect from every person engaged in the craft forty shillings, for upholding the altar and the service thereof, except freemen’s sons of the craft, who should pay only six shillings and eightpence. St. Cuthbert was the baker’s patron saint, and they founded and maintained his altar in St. Mary’s Church, and appointed their chaplain annually. In 1515 the guild merchants of Dundee, with the consent of the town council, resolved to erect an altar in St. Mary’s Church, “to the loving of God Almighty, of Christ’s precious blood, and to his blessed mother the Virgin Mary, and to appoint a chaplain daily to sing and say divine service there, and for singing mass solemnly every Thursday in honour of the Holy Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” For the reparation of the altar and the upholding of the service, the merchants were empowered to elect a dean, who was authorised to exact duties on all goods exported, to tax all merchants beginning business, and to exact fines from those who encroached on the High Market Gait with their goods.¹

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume I., pages 127‒129, 170‒172, 214, 215; Volume II., pages 22‒24, 48‒50, 52‒55, 61‒66, et seq.; Burgh Records of Dundee.

In the preceding pages some of the religious sentiments of the people have been indicated, as manifested in their life and action; the next point is to look for the signs of the new religious opinions amongst them before the crisis of the Revolution. The magistrates of Aberdeen in 1525 received a letter from the King, stating that the bishop of the diocese had informed him that there were several persons in the district who had the books of the heretic Luther, and who favoured his opinions; and the act of parliament newly passed against heresy was ordered to be proclaimed, and a searching inquisition made of all suspected persons within the bounds of the diocese. The king’s letter and the act of parliament were both inserted in the records of the city. There was no more mention of heresy in Aberdeen till 1544, when some of the citizens were committed, and convicted for injuring the black friars; while the same year two of the townsmen were found guilty of hanging the image of St. Francis. In the beginning of the year 1559 the buildings of the black and the gray friars were attacked by some of the citizens, who were assisted by certain strangers; and the bailies then inquired whether these buildings should be preserved for the good of the town, “and the setting forth of God’s glory, and the suppression of idolatry;” notwithstanding the provost’s protest, which was adhered to by fifteen of the inhabitants, in March the whole community of “the good town” resolved to support the Lords of the Congregation. In the month of June the chaplains of St. Nicholas church petitioned the magistrates to devise some means for defending their church, and for preserving the chalices, silver work, caps, and ornaments, till the uproar and tumult of the people was quelled by the ancient and wise council of the kingdom.¹

¹ Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., pages 206, 211, 315‒323.

In 1551, parliament had passed an act prohibiting the printing or publishing of any books or ballads, either in Latin or English, unless licensed by the king and government; and in 1554, the Town Council of Edinburgh passed an act against the makers of defamatory and blasphemous ballads. The ballads had been placed before the people, and had raised discord among them; but the parties who composed the ballads were unknown, and the bailies ordered that no one should dare to make such ballads, under the penalty contained in the common laws. On the 22nd of September, 1556, the archbishop of St. Andrews sent a document to the town council of Edinburgh, touching the images which had been taken down in the churches; and the council agreed to make inquiry concerning the matter, and to report to the justice clerk. The following day the council received a message from the Queen Regent, in the name of the primate, which she desired to be inserted in the records of the burgh. It proceeded, “as we are informed that there are certain odious ballads and rhymes lately set forth by some evil-inclined persons of your town, who have also taken down divers images, and contemptuously broken them――which is a thing very slanderous to the people, and contrary to the ordinances and the statutes of Holy Kirk――and we understand that the makers of this misorder are all dwellers and inhabitants of your town. Wherefore we charge you that immediately after the sight hereof, ye diligently inquire, search, and seek for their names, and deliver them in writ to our cousin the archbishop of St. Andrews, to be used according to the statutes of the Kirk; assuring you, if ye do not your utmost endeavours therein to bring the same to light, that ye shall be considered by us favourers and maintainers of such persons, and shall underlay the same punishment that they ought to sustain, in case we get knowledge thereof by you.”¹ Thus we see that the popular ballads had an influence on the revolutionary movement.

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 199, 200, 251.

In June, 1559, Matthew Stevenson, a servant of a barber, was accused before the Council of Edinburgh for throwing stones at the windows of the buildings of the black and the gray friars, the last night that he was upon the watch. He pleaded guilty, and his master became bail for his appearance when required. On the 27th of June the Council appointed a number of persons to whom the vestments, the ornaments, and the gear of the church of St. Giles were committed for safety. The council met in the Tolbooth on the 29th of June, and after long reasoning upon the coming of the Lords of the Congregation to Edinburgh, they at last resolved to send a deputation to meet them at Linlithgow; and to arrange with them for the preservation of the religious buildings and the churches of the burgh.¹ There is something very touching in the anxiety and the care which the town council of Edinburgh exhibited for the preservation of the furnishings and the ornaments of their churches, which, as we have just seen, had been so long and so closely associated with their altars, and with the religion of their fathers.

¹ Ibid., Volume III., pages 40‒45.

SECTION II.

AFTER THE REFORMATION.

When the Protestants came into power the evidence of the great change was soon seen in the proceedings of the citizens. In May, 1560, the town council of Edinburgh ordered their treasurer to pay the sum of forty pounds for furnishing the household of their minister, John Knox, and because he had been living with David Forester since he came to the town, to settle this account also; and they ordered the treasurer to pay for a lock to Knox’s lodgings. In June the council ordered that twenty pounds should be paid to John Willock, the Reformer; while the council and the deacons of the crafts resolved that the bell, called the Mary Bell, and the brazen pillars of the Church of St. Giles, should be made into cannon for the use of the town; they also directed that the silver work belonging to the town, which had been used in St. Giles’ church in bypast times, both the gilt and the ungilt, should be at once sold or coined into money; and the whole of the vestments, caps, and other gear of the church were to be sold, and the proceeds to be applied to the common works of the town, and especially to the rebuilding of the interior of the church, according to the requirements of the new order of worship. The dean of guild and the treasurer were appointed to carry these arrangements into effect.¹ The interior of the churches of Edinburgh were refitted on the 1st of August, 1560, and the deacon of the tailor craft presented the following complaint to the provost and council:――“Bearing in effect that the traves close room or seat, built and made by command of James Barron, dean of guild, at St. Anne’s altar, sometimes called the tailor’s altar, ought and should be removed, and the deacons and brethren of the tailor craft permitted to build their seats there, to be used by them and their craft at all sermons and other times convenient and none others, conform to their old possession; to this it was answered, and for plain ordinance by the provost, bailies, council, and deacons, declared, that in respect of the goodly order now taken in religion all title and claim to altars and such other superstitious practices are and should be abolished, and no further word nor claim thereof to be in time coming; but as it is commanded by God’s most holy Word, brotherly amity should be amongst us who are joined in his congregation, the nobility, provost, bailies, council, elders, and deacons, being first placed, the honest merchants and the honest craftsmen to place and set themselves together as loving brethren and friends in that and all other places of the church vacant at all times needful, providing always that nowhere the apprentices or servants of the merchants or the craftsmen, or other common people take up the places and seats of the said merchants and craftsmen; and this act to take effect without alteration in all time coming.” In the beginning of January, 1561, the town council of Aberdeen agreed to sell all the silver and brass work, the images and the ornaments of the church of St. Nicholas; and the whole of the inhabitants of the city were warned to attend on the 6th of that month and see these articles sold by auction. The caps brought one hundred and forty-two pounds, the brass work sixteen shillings the stone, the silver work was sold at twenty-one shillings per ounce, and the total sum of the sale amounted to five hundred and forty pounds. Two men, David Menzie and Gilbert Collison, dissented and protested against this sale for themselves and their adherents, but the goods were delivered to the purchasers by the voice of the majority.² On the 8th of May, 1562, the town council resolved to apply the above sum of money to the building of a pier and quay-head;³ so swiftly had the religious notions of the leading citizens changed.

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., pages 63‒65, 66, 70‒71, 85.

² Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., pages 328‒329, 331.

³ Ibid., page 344.

It will be seen that a new epoch had begun. When objects which had been venerated for many centuries, and were still believed to be possessed of uncommon virtues, were turned into cash and cannon, and applied to build harbours, it was obvious that a revolution had been effected. The citizens of Edinburgh entered warmly and earnestly into the reformation movement. The town council and some of the deacons of the crafts met in June, 1560, and having considered the great number of idolaters, whoremasters, and harlots who daily resorted within the burgh, provoking the indignation of God upon it, as had been oftentimes foreshadowed by the preachers, so they issued a proclamation in a comprehensive form――“That all such persons should come into the presence of the ministers or the elders, and give testimony of their conversion from such abuses before next Sunday, or failing that, the said idolaters to be defamed by setting them upon the market cross, there to remain for the space of six hours; and carrying of the said whoremasters and harlots through the town in a cart for the first fault: and burning of both classes of offenders on the cheek for the second fault, and banishment from the town; and for the third fault to be punished to the death.” On the 20th of September, 1560, the town council ordered the Act of Parliament against idolaters to be proclaimed.¹ On the 30th of October, the town council enacted that henceforward the holy day commonly called Sunday should be kept by all persons in the burgh, and that no one make market, nor open their shops, nor exercise any worldly calling on this day, but that all should attend the ordinary sermons both in the forenoon and in the afternoon: “And that from the first toll of the bell announcing the hour of the sermon to the final end thereof, there should be neither meat nor drink sold in open taverns, but that during this time they should be closed. That the flesh market, which used to be held on Sunday, should be henceforth held upon the Saturday; and that the cattle market at the House of the Muir, which had been held in past times on Sunday, should in all time coming be held on the Thursday.” At the same time they passed an act against swearing and taking God’s name in vain, under the penalty of being placed in the iron branks, “there to remain during the pleasure of the judge.” They also enjoined concerning taverns: “Because in past times the iniquity of women taverners in this burgh has been a great occasion of whoredom, insomuch that there appears to be a brothel in every tavern; therefore all vintners of wine who may engage women taverners before the next Martinmas hereafter were to be certified, that if their women committed any immoral fault they should have to pay forty pounds, except they deliver the offender into the hands of the bailie, to be banished, according to the laws, as soon as the offence comes to their knowledge.”² In November the same year, John Sanderson, the deacon of the fleshers, was convicted for adultery, and the bailies sentenced him to be carted through the town and then banished. But when the deacons of the various crafts heard of the sentence, and their aid was asked to carry it into execution, they unanimously dissented, and declared that they would not allow such extreme punishment to be inflicted upon any honest craftsman. The bailies and council then applied to the Lords of the Privy Council for their help and support in this case, and after much wrangling it was at last settled.³

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., pages 65, 82‒83.

² Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., pages 85‒86.

³ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., pages 89‒95. Compare the Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., pages 345, 367‒370, and Maxwell’s History of Old Dundee, pages 77‒81. 1884.

These social immoralities not only engaged the attention of the burgh magistrates and the courts of the Reformed Church, but Parliament also, and the Privy Council passed acts for their suppression. There can be no doubt that a clearer sense of the enormity of social vice originated with the Reformation; the most strenuous efforts were made to purify the feelings and the sentiments of the people, as well as to purge the nation of idolatry. The first General Assembly of the Reformed Church declared that fornication should be punished according to the law of God, and that public repentance should be made by those who were guilty of this sin. All through the acts and proceedings of the Assemblies of the Church, the clergy, as may be seen, were incessantly and earnestly trying to improve the morals of the people.¹ It is somewhat disagreeable to touch much on these matters, but social vice affects the very foundation of society, and should not be summarily dismissed; a false delicacy which would ignore the roots of social evil will never do much to help the onward and upward movement of mankind towards a higher civilisation and a happier life.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 5, 19, 29, 39, 44, 54‒56, 79, 91, 98, 114, 140, 170, 180, 267, 308, 366, 377, 379, 388, 536, 953, et seq.

As we have seen, the clergy were well supported by the authorities of the towns, and especially by those of Edinburgh, in their efforts to reform the morals of the people. In November, 1561, the bailies of Edinburgh banished an adulterer; and in May, 1562, they prepared a hole in the North Loch for dipping fornicators in, as the best means of suppressing them. On the 6th of November, 1562, the town council passed an act which directed the bailies to search all parts of the town for offenders of this description, and to apprehend them, whether man or woman, without exception of persons; “and then put them in the iron-house, and there to be fed on bread and water only for the space of a month, and afterwards to banish them from the town for ever. And suchlike offenders who had been tried and convicted by order, both the man and the woman should be scourged at the cart’s end through the streets and banished from the town; aye, and until some evidence be presented to the kirk and the magistrates of the amendment of their lives; and this order was to be observed in Edinburgh till it should please the Almighty to move the hearts of the higher powers to establish better laws for the punishment of these crimes.” In December the town council ordered a prison to be prepared for the reception of adulterers and fornicators, which should be secure and lockfast.¹

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., pages 129, 135, 152, 154; Register of the Kirk Session of St. Andrews, pages 36, 142, 172, 180, 377, 417, et seq.

The wish expressed in the last paragraph was realised. In 1563, parliament passed an act against notorious adulterers: and the Privy Council in 1564 passed an act prohibiting brothels, either openly or privately, under the penalty of eight days’ imprisonment with bread and water, and then to be scourged through the town, for the first fault; and for the second fault to be burned on the cheek and banished from the town for ever. At the same time the Privy Council ordered that those convicted of fornication, should be punished in the following manner:――“For the first fault they shall pay the sum of forty pounds, or else both he and she shall be imprisoned for the term of eight days, and their food to be bread and small drink, and thereafter presented in the market-place of the town bareheaded, and there to stand fastened that they may not remove for the space of two hours, from ten o’clock to twelve noon. For the second fault, when convicted, they shall pay the sum of one hundred marks, or else sixteen days’ imprisonment on bread and water only, and in the end to be fastened in the market-place, and the heads of both the man and woman to be shaven; and on conviction for the third fault they shall pay one hundred pounds, or else the above term of imprisonment, their food to be bread and water only, and in the end to be taken to the deepest and the foulest pool of water in the town or parish, and there to be thrice ducked, and thereafter to be banished from the town for ever; and thenceforward, that however often they may be convicted for this vice, the third penalty shall be executed upon them.” Parliament repeated this act in 1569; and it was then enacted that incest should be punished by death. The vice of adultery was also made punishable by death, according to the acts of parliament. But in spite of the severity of the laws this vice continued to be common; and as late as 1592 an act was passed which declared that the crime of adultery was daily increasing.¹ The citizens of Edinburgh had anticipated Parliament and the Privy Council, and it was because a section of the people were prepared to enforce a better social order that gave to these acts historic importance.

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II., page 539; Volume III., pages 25‒26, 213, 543; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume I., pages 296‒298; Volume II., pages 306, 499: Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 13‒14, 22‒40, 78‒80, 100, 169.

In 1562, the General Assembly resolved to petition the Queen for the punishment of all vice that the law of God commanded, which, as yet, was not commanded by the public laws of the kingdom: Such as blaspheming of God’s name, contempt of the Word and sacraments, perjury, breaking of the Sunday by holding common markets on that day, and profane talking. The clergy directed their efforts especially to the abolition of markets on the Lord’s-day.¹ This is a point of much interest, and well deserves to be further explained. We have seen that the Town Council of Edinburgh passed an act, in October, 1560, immediately after the establishment of the Reformation, ordering that Sunday should be observed; and it may safely be assumed that the ministers of Edinburgh had been consulted by the magistrates before this act was passed.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 19, 30.

The Privy Council passed an act in 1564, re-enacting the statute of James IV., which prohibited the holding of markets on holydays, or in churches or churchyards. But this act, like many others, had never been observed, and the Council then enjoined that no markets should be held on Sunday, nor in churchyards. And in July, 1569, the Regent issued a proclamation prohibiting markets on Sunday, which directed the authorities throughout the country to seize and confiscate the goods of those who exposed anything for sale on Sunday. The provost and bailies of Elgin were charged by the Lords of Council, in November, 1569, to put the acts prohibiting markets on Sunday into execution. It was further ordered that in all the free burghs common harlots should be banished; and the provost and bailies of Elgin were imprisoned for not executing these acts. In 1574, the magistrates of Aberdeen were enjoined by the Lords of Council to prohibit markets on Sunday, within the bounds of the freedom of the burgh, under the penalty of forfeiting all the goods offered for sale on that day.¹ Parliament, in 1579, re-affirmed the act of James IV., and added, that as markets were yet held in the towns and in the country on Sunday, and that the people still continued to work at their usual occupations on the Lord’s-day, or gamed and played, and passed the day in taverns, and remained away from the church in the time of sermon and prayers: it was therefore anew enacted that no markets should be held on Sunday, nor in churches, nor churchyards, on any other days, under the penalty of forfeiting the goods exposed for sale, and the proceeds thereof to be given to the poor of the parish. All manual labour was strictly forbidden on Sunday, and the frequenting of ale-houses, and the selling of meat and drink, and also all gaming and playing, under the penalty of severe fines, which were to be applied to the relief of the poor and helpless.²

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 296, 688; Volume II., pages 64‒65, 390.

² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., page 138.

In 1574, the Town Council of Glasgow ordered that every Sunday one of the bailies, with an officer and some other honest men, should pass through the town to visit the taverns and the flesh-market; and if any flesh was found exposed for sale after nine o’clock, it was to be confiscated, and given to the poor; and if the taverners offered any contempt, they were to be punished according to the judgment of the council. In 1576, two persons were convicted in Glasgow for selling meal in their houses on Sunday; and the same year the council and bailies agreed to a conditional restriction touching the taking of salmon on Sunday. “No salmon-cobles were to be employed on the Sunday, within the freedom of the city, by the inhabitants thereof, providing that the whole of the cobles on the waters of the Clyde, burgh and land, do likewise and keep the same, and otherwise not.” But in 1577, the Town Council of Glasgow concluded that no market should be held on Sunday, under the penalty of forfeiting all the goods exposed; yet some persons were shortly after convicted for selling flesh on Sunday.¹ The Town Council of Aberdeen, in 1580, ordained that the fish-market should in future be held within the Iron-ring, and around the Fish-cross; and that on Sunday, from the ringing of the first bell in the forenoon and in the afternoon, until the sermon be done, there should be no market, under the penalty of the confiscation of the fish to the poor. The General Assemblies were always complaining that the acts of Parliament and of the Privy Council touching the keeping of Sunday were not enforced. In 1581, the Synod of Lothian complained before the General Assembly that the act of parliament for prohibiting markets on Sunday was not put into execution, that the people still continued to hold their markets on that day, absented themselves from the church, and remained in their ignorance, and that thus atheism was increased.²

¹ Burgh Records of Glasgow, pages 21, 48, 60, 63, 65, 74.

² Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume II., page 38; _Book of the Universal Kirk_, pages 253, 284, 536.

But it is extremely difficult to change the customs of a people; and in spite of all the efforts of the clergy and the authorities, ♦the observance of Sunday for several generations after the Reformation was far from universal in Scotland. In 1588 the Town Council of Aberdeen recorded that many of the citizens stayed away from the church on Sunday, frequented taverns and alehouses, dealt in merchandise, and continued at their manual labour during the time of the sermon, contrary to the order of the Reformed Church. The council then proposed the following scale of fines to be exacted from those who absented themselves from the preaching: “Every burgess of guild and his wife for their remaining from the sermon on Sunday, thirteen shillings and fourpence; and for their remaining from the sermon on the weekly days, two shillings. Every craftsman, householder, and other inhabitants, for remaining from the sermon on Sunday, six shillings and eightpence; and every week-day, twelvepence. And in case any merchant or burgess of guild be found in his shop after the ringing of the third bell on the week-day, he must pay six shillings and eightpence.”¹ The days on which sermons were preached in Aberdeen, besides Sunday, were the Tuesdays and Thursdays; and down to the present time there is a service in one of the city churches every Thursday, though sad to tell, few of the inhabitants are even aware of it.

♦ duplicate word “the” removed

¹ Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume II., page 62; Compare Burgh Records of Glasgow, page 93.

In 1590 the General Assembly found it necessary to pass an act for restraining of markets on Sunday, the going of mills, the delivering of loads, and the selling of flour and fruit in Edinburgh; and in 1592 parliament passed another act touching the holding of markets on Sunday. It enacted that the markets formerly held on Sunday should be held on any other day of the week, except the day on which the neighbouring burgh held their market. In 1598 the town council of Aberdeen ratified the act passed before concerning the holding of markets on Sunday in the time of the sermon. From this it seems to follow that markets were still held on Sunday in Aberdeen about the end of the century, though not during the hours of worship.¹ Even as late as 1602, more than forty years after the Reformation, the General Assembly reported that the churches in many places were not well attended, owing to the people continuing to labour on Sunday, especially during the harvest and seed-time, and also by the going of the mills, and by many of the people fishing on Sunday for white fish and salmon. The Assembly ordered that all such labour upon the Lord’s Day should cease, under the penalty of incurring the censures of the Church; and at the same time the Assembly requested the King to enact some special punishment for those who persisted in working on Sunday.² The observance of Sunday in Scotland was not attained till after a long and vigilant struggle. On this point the reformed clergy and the magistrates both may have sometime been rather severe; yet it is difficult to see how they could have reached their end otherwise. The importance of the day of rest, even on the comparatively low ground of the physical and social advantages resulting from it to the people themselves, is very great, apart from the higher aims of morality and religion.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 776, 777; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume III., page 548; _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_, Volume II., page 167.

² Book of the Universal Kirk, page 996; Register of the Kirk Session of St. Andrews, pages 309, 314, 343, 349; et seq.

It is true that the discipline of the Reformed Church of Scotland assumed an austere and rigid form, although on the whole it was far more moral and vigorous than the system which it superseded; but in the special region of feeling and emotion it was weaker than its Catholic rival. The strongest characteristic of Roman Catholicism has always consisted in the art of presenting to the human senses a variety of easily comprehended objects. The immense multitude of her saints and martyrs can be easily localised anywhere, and in the requisite proportion to fit the capacity of her humblest votary. In the chief church of the city or parish there may be ten, twenty, thirty, or forty altars, each dedicated to a particular saint, as in St. Giles at Edinburgh, where each of the different crafts of the town had their own special saint and altar, at which they worshipped. It must be admitted that there is something indescribably fascinating in the feeling of having the assistance and the protection of a great saint; and the element of selfishness in it merely raises the emotion to a higher pitch, and enhances the value of the benefits which spring out of the union between the saint and his devoted adherents. In this connection everything has been very skilfully arranged for avoiding any unnecessary strain on the imagination of the worshipper: the image of his patron saint is pleasingly and gracefully placed before his eyes, and he is thus relieved from all troublesome cogitation. As the God of the universe has condescended to make the Roman Catholic Church infallible, the true Catholic can have no religious doubts; he has no occasion to ruffle the serenity of his mind, for his Church has settled everything, and his simple duty is to believe what she teaches, and he cannot be wrong. This is a primary article of faith with all Roman Catholics. It has taken a firm hold on multitudes of the human race, and penetrates deeply into the minds of many earnest and able men. Hence Roman Catholicism has a stronger tendency to make men docile and submissive than Protestantism. Those who believe that the Church is infallible on earth and supreme in heaven, can have no motive to venture beyond the comparatively narrow circle marked out for them. Thus it is, that in those countries where Catholicism has most completely maintained its sway, there has been little real progress in the region of science, or philosophy, or the higher criticism, and less freedom of thought, than amongst the Protestant nations. But in the realm of the fine arts Catholicism has held her own, if she has not always been able to maintain an unchallenged supremacy. Yet our deepest thoughts touching God, the world, and man, cannot be successfully handled by the figurative arts; as these thoughts are too abstract for sensuous representation.

The discipline of the Reformed Church was brought to bear upon the people in many ways. The process of censure which she then wielded was a great power. The form of excommunication used in the Church of Scotland was drawn up by John Knox, and, as finally revised, it was adopted by the General Assembly in 1569, and ordered to be printed. It is a treatise containing an enumeration of the crimes which deserve excommunication, the forms to be followed, the pains and penalties incurred, the form of repentance, and of readmission to the society of the Church.¹ The first part treats of summary excommunication. And under this head the following crimes are noted as deserving of such a sentence: Wilful murder, adultery, sorcery, witchcraft, conjuring, charming, giving of drink to destroy children, and open blasphemy against God and his holy Word, or railing against the Sacraments. All who committed these offences were to be excluded from the society of Christ’s Church, that their impiety might be held in greater horror, and that they might be the more deeply moved when they saw themselves abhorred by the godly. Against these open malefactors the process of summary excommunication might be applied. When the offender had been tried by a jury, the Church was not to excommunicate him, but to proceed by way of admonition, and to show him how precious human life is in the sight of God, and that no one ought to shed blood, except by the sword of the magistrate; and upon sufficient evidence of repentance he was to be restored to the fellowship of the Church. If the offender was fugitive from the law and his crime well known, the sentence of excommunication was to be pronounced without delay.² There were forms also for the readmission of penitents. After confessing their sin and admitting that Satan had for a time gotten the victory over them, they had to present themselves on three Sundays before being finally restored.³

¹ The General Assembly in 1563 requested John Knox to put in order the form and manner of excommunication. In 1567 the Assembly appointed a committee to revise the order of excommunication, composed by John Knox; and in 1568 the Assembly nominated John Craig, John Willock, John Row, Robert Pont, James Gray, William Christeson, and David Lindsay, to revise the order of excommunication, which had been penned by John Knox. Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 37, 93, 131, 155. This treatise is printed in the Collection of Confessions published at Edinburgh, 1722, Volume II., pages 700‒752. It is also printed in the sixth volume of Dr. Laing’s collected edition of Knox’s works, pages 445‒470.

² As may easily be conceived, the process of summary excommunication must have been open to grave and fatal abuse. In 1590 the General Assembly had under consideration the state of crime, such as murder, adultery, and incest; many persons guilty of these evil deeds eluded the Church by shifting from place to place, and thus continued to evade the final sentence. The question was then asked whether summary excommunication should be pronounced on persons falling into such odious crimes, and it was answered in the affirmative. But in 1595 the King proposed to the General Assembly that summary excommunication should be utterly abolished; the Assembly however did not comply with his request, the subject was postponed. The point again came before the Assembly in 1597, and without giving a final decision, they agreed in the meantime to suspend all summary processes of excommunication. Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 779‒852, 853, 947.

³ The Church in handling those guilty of capital crimes, proceeded with the aim of strengthening the hands of the magistrate. See _Acts of General Assembly.――Book of the Universal Kirk_, pages 144‒145. “Those who have been excommunicated for their offences, should present themselves in sackcloth, bareheaded and barefooted, on six preaching days, and the last one after sermon, to be received in their own clothes.”――Ibid. page 159. Touching those guilty of heinous crimes but not excommunicated. “They should be placed in the public place, where they may be known from the rest of the people, bareheaded the time of the sermon; and the minister must remember them in his prayer after the sermon: after going through this, they had to appear before the Assembly bareheaded and barefooted in linen clothes, and humbly to request the Assembly to restore them to the bosom of the Church.” Ibid., pages 176‒177, 283, 284, 309, 358, 583, 748, et seq.

One class of offences came under the punishment of what was called public repentance, such as fornication, drunkenness, swearing, breaking the Sabbath, and common contempt of the order of the Church. Lesser offences, as vain words and uncomely gestures, were visited with admonition.

The form of excommunication and the rules of the process for the case of the absolutely obstinate sinner who resisted all admonition were minutely laid down. The final words of the sentence ran thus: “And at the command of this congregation, cut off, seclude, and excommunicate this man from the body and from our society, as a person slanderous, proud, a contemner, and a member at present altogether corrupt and pernicious to the body. And this his sin by virtue of our authority we bind and pronounce it to be bound in heaven and in earth. We further give him over into the hands and the power of the devil to the destruction of his flesh.” Every one who associated with or sheltered an excommunicated person rendered himself liable to a similar sentence.

The last part of this remarkable treatise laid down the mode of procedure for receiving the excommunicated person again into the fold of the faithful. The civil penalties attached to the sentence of excommunication was enough to make it a terrible punishment. No other punishment at all approaches that which deprives a man of all intercourse with his fellowmen; and probably if a human being were certain that no other person in the world sympathised with him, and that he was abandoned and abhorred by all men and driven from their presence, he could not live. Even the most degraded individuals need the sympathy of their fellows. Among the criminal class this is the case; the most hardened criminal feels that he has at least the sympathy of his companions and confederates. A criminal who has often eluded the hand of justice and defied the laws of his country, is regarded as a hero among his own class. Though he has been convicted often and has suffered many years of imprisonment, he is still looked upon by them as a distinguished character, and is conscious that he has their sympathy. But the man who was excommunicated in the sixteenth century was probably placed in a much more harrowing position than the worst criminal of the present day.

Fasting in the Reformed Church of Scotland was a mode of discipline which was often resorted to; and there was a treatise on the subject composed by Knox and Craig, in 1565, by the authority of the General Assembly, which reduced this exercise to a regular form.¹ When the General Assembly of 1565 proposed to hold a fast, the order and form to be observed was drawn up and printed. This form was afterwards followed, and a brief notice of the occasions on which, according to a statement afterwards added to it, it was deemed necessary to hold a national fast, will give a vivid impression of the ideas and sentiments of the clergy and of the state of society.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages, 279, 578‒581, 590; 74. The treatise on fasting is printed in the _Collection of Confessions_, published in Edinburgh in 1722, Volume II., pages 642‒700; and in the sixth volume of Laing’s edition of Knox’s Works, pages 391‒429.

In 1572 the Assembly resolved that there should be a public humiliation among all who feared God and professed the true religion, with prayers and fasting throughout the kingdom, to begin on the 23rd of November, and to be continued to the last day of the month, “with the intent that the notorious offenders and open slanderers of the Church may be brought to amend their lives, or else to be excluded from the society of the faithful.” It was deemed necessary that before the fast the superintendents and the ministers should appoint certain days and call before them all the known offenders in their respective districts and parishes, such as murderers and their accomplices, adulterers, robbers of the patrimony of the Church and of other men’s possessions; commencing with the ministers themselves and the nobility, and then to proceed through every other class of the people, that wickedness and heinous crimes which offend the majesty of God may be purged out of the nation. A rigorous scrutiny was to be made of the diligence and the life of the clergy themselves, and also of the life of the nobility, who ought to be the chief example of the whole country.¹ The General Assembly which met in April, 1577, having considered the great iniquity that overflowed the whole face of the community, as it appeared by the light and revelation of the true religion, justly to provoke and stir up the justice of God to take judgment and vengeance on this unworthy and unthankful nation; “observing also the many perilous storms and the rage of persecution daily invading the true Church of Jesus Christ; the extreme suffering of her members in France and elsewhere, that therefore earnest recourse should be had to God by prayers, the Assembly appointed a fast in all the congregations of the realm, to begin on Sunday the 9th of July and to be continued to the following Sunday.”²

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 252‒253.

² Book of the Universal Kirk, page 390.

The cry of the Church was that corruption pervaded all classes of the nation, that it was therefore necessary to have recourse to fasting, and to call upon God to avert His righteous judgment impended over the people. Another specimen of the language commonly used to express their ideas and sentiments as to the grounds of fasting, may suffice to illustrate this phase of the reformed religion, as it was then understood and practised. The General Assembly in 1581, “ordained a general fast to be observed universally in all the kirks of the realm, with doctrine and instruction of the people, to begin the first Sunday of July and to be continued to the next Sunday thereafter inclusive, using in the meantime, exercise of doctrine according to the accustomed order; and the commissioners were instructed to call on the King and to request him to assist therein by sending out proclamations to that effect.” The causes of this fast are stated in the following order. “1. Universal conspiracies of the papists and the enemies of God in all countries against Christians, for execution of the bloodthirsty Council of Trent. 2. The oppression and thraldom of the Kirk of God. 3. Wasting the rents thereof without remedy. 4. Falling from the former zeal. 5. Flocking home of Jesuits and Papists. 6. Manifest bloodshed, incest, adultery, and such horrible crimes defiling the land unpunished. 7. The danger wherein the King’s majesty stands through evil company resorting about him, by whom it is feared that he may be corrupted in manners and in religion. 8. Universal oppression and contempt of the poor.”¹ About this time, the Church of Scotland stood almost alone in her bold and unflinching opposition to the pretensions of the Church of Rome. Through all the vehement and rude language of the Protestant clergy, they never forgot to plead for the oppressed and the struggling poor.

¹ Ibid., pages 407, 409‒410, 569‒570, 730, 747. In 1596 the General Assembly drew up a list of what was called “The common corruptions of all the Estates within the realm.” This report gave a fearful description of the state of society. But there is always hope of amendment and reform for a nation that has the heart and the honesty to acknowledge its errors and misdeeds. The clergy were not afraid to admit and proclaim their own shortcomings, and it is only foolish mockery to cry peace, peace, when crime, and injustice, and oppression, and vice, and suffering, abound on every side. Those who wish to see this representation of the state of society in Scotland at that period, should consult the original document in the records of the Church, and in other national and local documents.――_Book of the Universal Kirk,_ pages 864‒867, 872‒875.

When a national fast was proclaimed by the Church its observance was strictly enforced. In the General Assembly of 1580, Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the minister of Ceres, was questioned for not causing the fast to be observed within his bounds; “so that when the rest of the country was humbled in fasting, there was no fasting in Fife.” His answer was that he had done all that he could to cause the fast to be observed, but there were instances which no one could remedy, and these he had particularised in his report to the Assembly.¹ As we have seen, the saints’ days, festivals, and holydays, were all discarded at the Reformation; and although sometimes here and there the people showed a tendency to revert to observances of them,² the sermons on two days of the week, the occasional fast days, and the entire devotion of Sunday to religious exercises, were amply sufficient to satisfy the spiritual needs of the people.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, page 451.

² Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume II., pages 25, 39, 66; Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 332, 334, 389; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume II., page 390.

But some of the old traditions and customs associated with the saints still exhibited signs of life amid the changed forms of worship and belief. This was strikingly manifested in connection with the venerated wells of the early saints. The General Assembly, in 1573, determined that the discipline of the Church should be used against all who went on pilgrimage to wells; and it was deemed an offence that the magistrates ought to punish. In 1580, the Church requested the government to make a special punishment for all those who went on pilgrimages to wells and churches, as a number of persons had lately passed on pilgrimages to the Holy Rood of Peebles, and to other places. The following year, the General Assembly craved that an act of parliament should be passed against persons who go on pilgrimages, and perform superstitious practices at wells, crosses, images, and altars, or observe feasts on days dedicated to saints. Accordingly parliament passed an act in 1581 forbidding pilgrimages to wells, chapels, and crosses, the observance of any festival days, “and such other monuments of idolatry――as making bonfires, singing of carols in and about the churches at certain seasons of the year, and the observance of other superstitious rites to the dishonour of God and the contempt of true religion.” A severe fine was to be imposed upon all who broke the law for the first time, and for the second offence the penalty of death was to be inflicted.¹ But only two years later, a question came before the Assembly as to how the ministers who permitted people to repair on pilgrimages to wells close beside their own manses, without reproving, but rather encouraging them by entertaining them with meat and drink, should be punished? The Assembly concluded that a minister guilty of such neglect of his obvious duty, deserved to be deprived of his office.² In spite, however, of the acts of parliament and the discipline of the Church, numbers of the people still continued to visit the wells, to go on pilgrimages to certain churches, to make bonfires, and to keep holydays.³ In fact, many of the wells were resorted to down to the present century, and within my own recollection there were wells supposed to possess special virtues, which were frequently resorted to by the people.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 280, 462, 535‒536; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume III., page 212.

² Book of the Universal Kirk, page 638.

³ Ibid., pages 720‒721, 874, 1055, 1120.

The relation of the sexes at the time of the Reformation was in an extremely unsatisfactory state. In the preceding volume of this work, it was shown that the institution of marriage had passed through various modifications, and that though the Roman Catholic Church had often attempted to make it a public and solemn act, she had only partly succeeded in overcoming the loose habits of the people.¹ In this volume it has already been indicated that the principle of celibacy imposed upon the Roman priesthood and the religious orders had the effect of lowering, instead of elevating, the feelings and sentiments naturally associated with the institution of marriage. The obvious fact could hardly fail to strike the mind that, if marriage is a good and lawful connection instituted for the continuance and comfort of the race, the consequent inconsistency of prohibiting any class or profession from entering into it becomes palpable; for what is absolutely necessary to the continuance of the race, and calculated to increase the sum of human happiness, cannot be denied to any class of men without introducing a most invidious, immoral, and warping distinction. The principle of moral consistency is utterly shocked by the rules of a celibate priesthood, as if this pretension of unhuman purity exalted them above their fellow-men, and prepared and enabled them to become qualified instructors of mankind; as if the natural sentiments which cluster round the domestic hearth must be eradicated from their breasts; and that when thus shorn and dwarfed, they are better able to feel and understand what is needful for the well-being of humanity. First extinguish the strongest and most essential sentiments of the human heart, and then you have a priesthood admirably fitted to maintain their position as the enemies of all progress, of all liberty, of all freedom of thought; a priesthood that for ever struggles to uphold a belief in traditions and legends, in signs and wonders, and enfolds their adherents in a mesh of puerilities and absurdities well suited to the spirit of the Dark Ages.

¹ Mackintosh’s History of Civilisation in Scotland, Volume I., pages 153‒156, 244, 428.

The first General Assembly of the Reformed Church agreed to adopt the law of Moses, touching the degrees of blood relations in marriage. By it first cousins were allowed to marry with each other, and all remoter degrees, but in the direct line of descent marriage is forbidden throughout; this became law by act of parliament in 1567. It was found, however, to be difficult to bring the people under restraint in the relation of the different sexes; as men and women had a custom of cohabiting after promising to marry, without publicly solemnising their marriage. The Church was forced to take severe measures against defaulters of this character, and the reformed discipline was sternly applied. It was enacted by the General Assembly that those who wished to be married must give in banns to their parish minister and be proclaimed on three successive Sundays. In 1579 it was stated in the General Assembly that some of the ministers would solemnise marriage only on Sunday, while others married people upon week-days, which had raised much slander; and the Assembly was called upon to give a decisive answer on the point. The answer of the Assembly was, that when parties had been thrice proclaimed they might be married on any day of the week if a sufficient number of witnesses were present.¹ But some persons were still married without proclamation of banns, and the General Assembly of 1597 resolved that none should be joined together in marriage, unless thrice proclaimed in their own parish church, according to the custom observed in Scotland; and that any minister who contravened this rule should be deprived of his office, and the other parties ordained to satisfy the Church by public repentance.²

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., page 26; Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 5, 30, 32, 66, 72, 73, 114, 440‒441.

² Book of the Universal Kirk, page 939.

It was not necessary that marriage should be celebrated by a clergyman, and though it was the law of the Church that banns should be proclaimed, the consent of the parties might be declared simply before witnesses. Even when no formal consent appeared, marriage was presumed from cohabitation, if the parties were reputed to be husband and wife. Before the civil courts of Scotland evidence of this description was often held to prove marriage.¹ When marriage was solemnised according to the order of the Church, it was called regular, when otherwise, clandestine, which, however, was held to be valid, though penalties were sometimes annexed to it.

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II.; Erskine’s Principles of the Law of Scotland, page 66; 1802. The complete system of registration, established about forty years ago, will ultimately supersede the necessity of having recourse to such evidence touching marriages.

In connection with marriage some curious points were occasionally brought before the General Assembly. In 1575 this question was asked: “Whether the contract of marriage which used to be made before the proclamation of banns between the man and the woman should be made by words of the present time. The man saying to the woman, I take thee to be my wife, and the woman saying to the man, I take thee to be my husband; or should there be no promise made till the very time of the solemnisation of the marriage. Answer――Parties to be married should come before the session and give in their names, that their banns may be proclaimed, and no further ceremony used.” Again, it was asked what should be done in the following case: “A man and a woman in the presence of some of the parishioners were married in the parish church, or hand-fast by the reader, and thereafter mutually cohabited together at bed and board as married people, and were so reputed and holden. The minister of the same church, at the woman’s desire, a good space after, leads a form of divorce between them in this manner: he calls the woman before him, and caused her to swear that her husband never had any sexual intercourse with her, and thereupon, without further questions at the man, decerns them separated and divorced from each other, the man always dissenting and still claiming her as his wife. Whether is this form of divorce allowable in a Reformed Church that has received the Gospel, and if it be not, what correction does the minister deserve who usurped and used this manner of process and judgment?” The Assembly answered: “That this divorce was not lawful, and that the minister should be suspended and make public repentance.” Once more: “A certain man with his accomplices ravished and took away a woman, and thereafter married her without proclamation of banns, but did not solemnise the marriage in the face of the Church, but in a private house. Whether is this marriage lawful, or are children begotten therein legitimate or not? and what punishment should the minister receive who so abused marriage?” The Assembly answered that the minister should be deposed.¹ In 1579 it was asked in the General Assembly: “What order should be taken with the persons who went to a popish priest to be married, and their banns not being proclaimed, should they be esteemed as married persons, and if not, what discipline should be used against them?” It was answered: “This connection is no marriage, and therefore ordains the persons to be called before the particular assemblies, and to make satisfaction as fornicators; and upon a new proclamation to be married according to the order of the Reformed Church, and the papist priest to be punished.”²

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 143, 144, 345.

² Ibid., page 441. In the Register of the Kirk Session of St. Andrews, which covers the period from 1559 to 1600, there is great collection of interesting information on the social state of the people; the Register was issued by the Scottish History Society in 1889‒90.

The question, at what age the young should be allowed to marry, came before the General Assembly in 1600. It was then stated that great inconveniences had arisen from the untimeous marriages of young persons before they were of age meet for entering into this union. As yet there was no statute of the Church defining the age at which persons might marry; but it was then enacted that henceforth no minister should join in matrimony any persons, except the male be fourteen years of age, and the female at the least twelve years: the Assembly directed their commissioners to request parliament to ratify this act.¹ When the Church was making an act on this important social point, she might have shown a little more wisdom, and not given her sanction to the marriage of persons at this early age. In justice to the Church, however, it must be mentioned that there was still an heirship of feudalism involved in the marriage of a certain class of individuals. This was a pecuniary casualty due to the superior from the heir of his former vassal, after the age of fourteen if a male, and if a female twelve; and thus there was an engrossing interest attached to the marriage of a portion of the landed class while they were minors, and under the control of their superiors. This marriage casualty arose from the right which the superior had over the person, as well as over the estates of the minor heir; and it was chiefly restricted to ward holdings, except where a special clause in the charter imported it. It was the privilege of the superior to dispose of the heir in marriage, and to take the marriage portion to himself; but if the minor heir refused the offered match, and named another, then he was not entitled to the possession of his lands after the ward terminated, till the superior was refunded the double of the value of the portion which would have accrued to him from the offered marriage. Seeing, however, that no man nor woman could be forced to marry, it was the interest of the superior to have the power of arranging this important affair, while the heir or heiress was very young; and so an extremely complicated mode of attaining this end was gradually introduced into the law of the kingdom.² Cases arising out of these peculiar rights of the superior, in connection with the marriage of his vassals, frequently came before the courts;³ and under various modifications these invidious privileges continued till 1748, when they were finally abolished.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, page 953. Erskine says, “But by our law, children may enter into marriage without the knowledge, and even against the remonstrances, of a father.” ――Principles of the Law of Scotland, page 66.

² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II.; Volume III.

³ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 311, 324, 326; Volume II., pages 470‒472, 447, 693; Volume III., pages 250, 312, 318, 547, 667, 687; Volume IV., pages 222, 418, 422, 712; also Volumes V. and VI.

Regarding divorce, the doctrine of the Reformed Church was clear and emphatic. She insisted that marriage could only be dissolved either on the ground of adultery, or wilful desertion; and for obvious reasons she endeavoured to make divorce difficult. The Church firmly maintained that divorced persons should not be permitted to marry their paramours; and at her request, Parliament passed an Act in 1600 prohibiting such unions.¹ There are two sides to this social question, and at that time there was ample justification for the Act.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 19, 31, 146, 148, 197, 262, 269, 306, 333, 377, 524, 539, 953; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volumes III., IV.; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume II., page 7.

Some account has already been given of the measures taken for the relief of the poor in the period preceding the Reformation. From the first, the Reformed Church endeavoured to make provision for the really indigent poor, and also to relieve the labourers of the ground and the oppressed tenants, from some of their burdens. The first General Assembly resolved to petition the government to make better laws for the protection of pupils and orphans. In 1565, the Assembly took into consideration what should be done to those who oppressed children, and it was resolved in 1568, that oppressors of children, should be admonished by the Church to make public repentance in sackcloth, bareheaded and barefooted, as often as the particular congregation shall appoint.¹ The following year, the General Assembly petitioned the government to make provision for the poor, suggesting that a portion of the tithes should be applied to that purpose, and requesting that the poor labourers of the ground should have intromission to take their own tithes upon a reasonable composition. It is quite evident that after the nobles obtained possession of the Church lands, they then oppressed the tenants by exacting tithes, rents, and other dues, so that for a considerable time the occupiers of these lands were much harder pressed than before the Reformation. The reformed clergy in many ways exerted themselves to improve the material well-being of the people, as well as their moral and social state: and there is ample evidence of this throughout the records of the period.²

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 6, 75, 125.

² Ibid., pages 146, 306, 353, 339, 417, 425, 603. In 1587, the General Assembly petitioned the King: “That order should be taken with the poor, who in such multitudes wandered up and down the country without law or religion.” Ibid., page 715. The next year, the Assembly made a proposal that every minister should endeavour to deal with this moving mass of poor within his own parish. Ibid., page 731. Concerning the tenants and labourers of the ground, the Assemblies made repeated appeals to the Government to take measures to relieve them, pages 22, 40, 49, 60, 108, 507, 511.

Collections were made in the churches every Sunday for the poor; other sources of revenue that should have fallen to them, had been diverted by the Revolution into other channels. The government in 1574 ordered the provost and magistrates of Aberdeen to remove the organs out of their churches, and dispose of them, and to give the proceeds to the poor. They were ordered to sell the Gray Friars’ church and grounds to the highest bidder, except what was required for lodging the poor, and all the proceeds of the sale to be applied to sustain the poor. At the same time the Town Council of Aberdeen came under an obligation to build an hospital for the poor and impotent, and to put the croft and the mire and the house belonging to the leper folk, which lies between Old and New Aberdeen, into proper repair, for the support of the leper men and women, as was originally intended. The community of the city the same year resolved that alms should be collected weekly by one of the elders of the Church, and delivered to the keeping of the minister, to be distributed among the poor every month, according to the discretion of the session. Beggars not born in the town were ordered to be removed, and the poor citizens were directed to wear the town’s token on their outer garments that they might be known.¹ The Lords of Council passed an act in 1575 for the punishment of sturdy and idle beggars, and for providing support for the poor and helpless. In 1578 there was a great dearth in Scotland, and the Lords of Council discharged the customs on victuals imported, in order to mitigate the suffering of the poor.²

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 391‒393, 402; Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume II., pages 20, 21.

² Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 435, 680.

One difficulty of dealing with the poor arose from the defective police organisation. There was no adequate means for handling the multitude of strong beggars, “such as make themselves fools and bards,” gipsies, and a host of other vagabonds, who moved about and continually multiplied. It was difficult to separate these from the really deserving poor, and this long hampered the laws relating to the latter class. The city of Aberdeen had an official whose duty it was to keep the town free from extraneous beggars “not born and bred within the burgh.” In 1577 the council agreed to give him forty shillings to buy a garment to himself, on which the town’s arms was to be put, and then remitted “him to the session, to be helped and aided by them also, as his office concerns for the most part the ecclesiastical jurisdiction.”¹ When mixed notions of this kind prevailed regarding the jurisdiction of the civil and ecclesiastical spheres of action, we can easily see how the beggars would succeed. In 1574 Parliament passed an Act re-enacting the former Acts against beggars and all idle persons between the age of fourteen and seventy, and proposed to inflict severe penalties upon them. This Act also provided for the support of the poor, the aged, and the helpless, and it may be considered the first Poor-law Act of Scotland. It was repeated in 1579, and again, with some additions, in 1592, and once more in 1597. But the beggars and vagabonds still increased.² The centuries of feudal anarchy had entailed a legacy of vagrancy which the Government and the Church endeavoured to suppress. Years and generations passed, yet all the influences of religion and the restraints of the law appeared equally powerless to remove the idle and the ruffian population who preyed upon the industrious inhabitants of the kingdom. A long train of circumstances had concurred to feed the natural inclination to idleness and wandering among the people. A large portion of mankind have always manifested a similar tendency. But notwithstanding all the anarchy and the wretchedness of the nation, there was a core of vigour and health; and the moral discipline which the Church was so earnestly inculcating soon began to take root in the heart of the people.

¹ Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume II., page 29.

² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 86‒89, 139, 579; Volume IV.

The subject now to be noticed is one of melancholy interest, for the sad aberration of the faculties of the human mind which it manifested. A belief in magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and necromancy is a phenomenon which has afflicted mankind from the earliest ages onward to the present day. The forms they assumed are innumerable and endless; but whether it originated from ignorance, and has been sustained and continued by this; or whether something akin to it must naturally arise from the constitution of man, and the circumstances in which he was placed in the universe, as some eminent philosophers seem to hold; or whether it springs up gradually from a confused consciousness, at first tinged with an inclination, and afterwards with a deliberate intention to impose upon and deceive the people for interested ends, is a problem that cannot be decidedly answered.¹ The manifestation of the mind and feeling of the human race has been so diversified and unequally developed, that what is superstition and necromancy to one nation, may appear to another to be the only true form of religion; while that which another community believes and professes to be true and holy, a different people may believe to be the very work of the enemy himself. The beliefs of mankind, so far as they are known, have always contained opposing and directly exclusive elements of this character, which is mainly a result of the varied degrees of civilisation that have prevailed throughout the world. Even the same nation, at different periods of her life and development, may entertain the most opposite beliefs, as we find in the history of our own country. The difference between a believer in witchcraft and a believer in modern spiritualism is only one of degree and development; and if witchcraft and spiritualism are both founded upon the same class of notions, it is the higher development of morality and intelligence which renders the latter more harmless in the nineteenth century than the former was in the sixteenth. Among all the forms of belief in evil spirits, that which assumes the reality of a union between the evil spirit and a human being for the purpose of doing injury to other people is the most mischievous in its action on society. When men believed that the devil was an enormously powerful being, and that he could give an almost unlimited portion of this power to his confederates――the witches, for working all manner of evil――we need not be surprised that the King and the clergy were very anxious to purge the land of witches.

¹ On the rise and development of the notions of ghosts, spirits, demons, divination, exorcism, and sorcery, there is much valuable information in Tylor’s Primitive Culture, and in the First Volume of Herbert Spencer’s _Principles of Sociology_.

It seems to be pretty well ascertained that the belief in ghosts, spirits, and demons, has descended from the early cult of the prehistoric ages. One cause of the continuance of the belief in such imaginary beings into comparatively advanced stages of civilisation, appears to be the extreme credulity of uncultured and uncritical man, and another is the craving for the marvellous――a notable trait even in recent times. In the early stages of culture there seems to have been scarcely any distinction between the facts of inspiration and the facts of divination. The diviner employed his power for practical ends. The medicine-man of the savage stage operated in a somewhat similar way as an exorcist does; he invoked the aid of supernatural agents, and then endeavoured to make the body of the patient so disagreeable that the demon became glad to depart. In the more developed forms of exorcism, one demon was employed to expel another, or the officiating priest might summon a friendly spirit to his assistance. This power of the exorcist over evil spirits, when further developed, was used for many other purposes, and assumed the forms of sorcery and magic. The belief in the agency of evil spirits which the human race has manifested is a perplexing problem in the history of religion. In the earlier forms of religion the evil spirit or god was most feared, and hence a kind of devil worship seems to have prevailed. In the neo-platonic philosophy――that curious mixture of subjective thought, ecstasy, and theosophy, which flourished from the beginning of the third century to the sixth――there was a large element of theurgy and magic, and some of the most eminent of these philosophers were addicted to sorcery, and professed to have received divine communications to foresee ♦the future, and to perform miracles. The trials and executions for witchcraft in the sixteenth century present painful evidence of the continuance of the belief of demoniac agency. The belief in the power of the devil as something which manifested itself in the life of men and women was universal; the Reformation failed to shake it. The seventy-third canon of the Church of England, enacted in 1603, prohibited the clergy from casting out devils; in the present century the belief in demoniac possession of the body, which continued among the lower classes of the people in Germany in spite of the progress of civilisation, was revived among educated Protestants; and even yet it is not quite extinct in any nation in Europe.

♦ duplicate word “the” removed

In 1563, witchcraft was declared by Act of Parliament to be punishable by death. Probably the sudden shaking and the suppression of the traditions and notions of the people at the Reformation, had tended to arouse and revive other ideas of the demoniac order. However, witches soon became numerous after the revolution. The clergy and the kirk-sessions were very active in searching for witches. When these poor creatures were apprehended, they were placed in solitary confinement, and often fearfully tortured, to extort a confession of their guilt. They were systematically deprived of their natural rest; they had to endure cold, hunger, and thirst; and then the branks were applied to the unhappy victims, who were soon reduced to a fit state for confessing what was required. Their trial followed on the emission of one or more of the confessions thus obtained, which usually formed the groundwork of the public accusation and prosecution for this imaginary crime.¹

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II.; Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 38, 49‒58.

It was stated in the General Assembly of 1563, that four witches had been delated for witchcraft by the superintendent of Fife and Galloway. The Assembly requested the Lords of Council to take order with them, and the complainers were commanded to give in their information. The General Assembly, in 1573, passed an act touching those who consult with witches, and ordered that persons suspected of conferring with them should be called before the superintendents; and, if they were found to have consulted witches, then they had to undergo public repentance in sackcloth, on Sunday in the church, under the penalty of excommunication. “If they be disobedient, to proceed after due admonition, and excommunicate them.” The popular party in the Church accused Bishop Adamson of consulting witches. Under the year 1583, James Melville records that Adamson was lying sick in his castle, “and oftentimes under the care of a woman suspected of witchcraft.... This woman being examined by the presbytery, and found to be a witch, in their judgment, was given to the bishop to be kept in his castle for execution, but he suffered her to slip away; but within three or four years thereafter, she was taken, and executed in Edinburgh for a witch.”¹

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 44, 283; Melville’s Diary, page 137.

It is well known that James VI. was a firm believer in witchcraft, and he greatly encouraged the prosecution of the wretched creatures accused of this crime. During the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, a considerable number of witches were tried and executed in every quarter of the kingdom. They were accused, tried, burnt, and drowned, for doing and attempting to do, many curious and wonderful things; but most of the points in the accusations appear to us very ridiculous and absurd. Making a clay picture of the individual whom the witch intended to injure or to kill, was a very common point of the indictment. One count of the indictment against Bessy Rory, who was tried in 1590 for witchcraft, but acquitted, was this: “Thou art indicted for a common awaytaker of women’s milk in the whole country, and detaining the same at thy pleasure, as the whole country will testify.” Much of the records of the trials for witchcraft are quite unfit for publication. One of the most extraordinary stories in these indictments is the account of the meeting of the witches with the devil in the church of Berwick. The company who met his satanic majesty on this occasion consisted of a hundred persons, of whom six were men, and the rest women. The old enemy boldly ascended the pulpit, and delivered an address to his servants. He inquired what they had done since their last meeting; then, after giving them some more instructions, he concluded by commanding them to do all the evil that they could. Before the company separated, the witches showed their respect for their master in an unmistakable and exceedingly becoming fashion. On this night, the devil was respectably dressed――he wore a fine black gown and a hat.¹

¹ Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 76, 101, 161‒165, 186, 201‒204, 207‒213, 230‒241.

Many of the witches were accused of conspiring and attempting by their devilry to destroy the King; and this aroused the weak-minded monarch to greater efforts against them.

Francis Stewart, Earl Bothwell and High Admiral of Scotland, was a son of John Stewart, prior of Coldingham, a natural son of James V.; thus the Earl was a nephew of Queen Mary and the Regent Moray, and a cousin of James VI. He became a powerful personage, and by his daring exploits often threw the King into a state of extreme alarm and terror. Politically he was wayward and reckless, and acquired a reputation for dissipation. For a considerable time many of his offences were condoned; but at last he was accused of trafficking with witches in a treasonable manner, and for treasonable purposes, and on these charges he was brought before the King and Council on the 15th of April, 1591, and committed to prison in Edinburgh Castle to await his trial; while two of his servants were summoned on similar charges to appear before the King and Council on the 6th of May. Bothwell escaped from the Castle of Edinburgh on the morning of the 21st of June; and on the 25th a royal proclamation was issued denouncing him as a wicked traitor who had entered into a conspiracy “against his Majesty’s own person, consulted with necromancers and witches, both in and without this country, for the purpose of taking his Highness’s life, which was confessed by some of the same class already executed, and by some others yet alive, ready to be executed for the same crime.... For which cause, and the former treasonable offence whereof he was convicted, his Majesty now at last has caused the doom of forfeiture to be pronounced against him, so that he is now a declared rebel, a traitor, an enemy to God, his Majesty, and this his native country.” Yet Bothwell was not extinguished, for, on the night of the 27th of December, he suddenly entered Holyrood Palace and battered at the doors of the King’s chamber, the Queen’s chamber, and the apartments of Maitland, the Chancellor. It seems that he intended to seize the King, to murder the Chancellor if necessary, and thus effect such a revolution in the Government as he desired in his own interest; but his attempt failed, though it appeared that he was abetted by several persons in the King’s court. The hue and cry against the bold rebel and consulter of witches was redoubled, and proclamations against his accomplices were issued, still the daring Bothwell, with his witchery, almost drove the King, the Chancellor, and the Council, into utter distraction. Meantime the prosecution and execution of the witches and the sorcerers had been proceeding. Euphame MacCalyean, the wife of a notable Edinburgh advocate, was accused on various charges of witchcraft. Her trial lasted from the 9th to the 13th of June, and one of the chief counts in her indictment was that she had kept intercourse with the witches who had formed a conspiracy for the destruction of the King. She was convicted and sentenced to death, and the poor woman, “on her conscience, protested that she was innocent of the crimes laid to her charge.” On the 25th of June, 1591, the very day on which Bothwell was proclaimed a rebel, Euphame was executed on the castle hill of Edinburgh. Barbara Napier of Edinburgh was another reputed witch, and was also accused of treasonable witchcraft against the King’s own person. On the 11th of May, 1591, she was convicted, and sentenced to be strangled and burned; but, after the stake was set in the Castlehill, and everything prepared for her execution, some of her friends alleged that she was pregnant, whereupon the execution was delayed. As it was considered hard to execute her after this, her life was spared, whereat the King was much displeased. James was enraged at the jury for acquitting her of the charge of treasonable witchcraft against his own person, and he purposely went to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh and delivered an oration on the subject to enlighten the minds of jurymen and the people touching “The use of witchcraft, and the enormity of the crime; its punishment according to Scripture, the ignorance of thinking such matters were fantasies, the cause of his own interference, the ignorance of the jury in the late trial, the cause of their finding, and his own opinion of what witches really are.” His Majesty explicated the above points at great length; and it appears that his oratory had been effective, for on the 26th of October the Privy Council appointed a Special Commission, consisting of six members, viz., Cockburne, the Justice-Clerk; MacGill, the King’s advocate; two burgesses of Edinburgh, and two Presbyterian ministers. This Commission was empowered to deal with all persons suspected, delated, or accused of witchcraft, sorcery, and all such devilish devices, and to examine, imprison, and torture them, and then report in writing the depositions to the King and his Council in order that the witches and sorcerers might be tried by a jury and justice executed upon them. Moreover, the King granted, and also sold, many commissions to earls, barons, sheriffs, stewards, and to the local authorities of burghs and towns, which empowered them to search for all persons suspected of witchcraft within the districts included in the commissions, to examine and torture them, put them to trial and execute them. For many years this cruel mania against witches raged throughout the kingdom, and was mainly instigated by the conceit and timidity of the King.

Richard Graham, the great sorcerer of the time, who had been connected with the alleged evil practices of Euphame MacCalyean, Barbara Napier, Earl Bothwell, and others, was himself at last brought to trial and condemned. He appears to have been a thorough rascal; but he adhered to the declarations which he had emitted, that Bothwell had held magical consultations touching the King’s death, and he also asserted that Ex-Chancellor Arran had dealt in witchcraft. He confessed to several raisings of the devil, especially once in the house of John Boswell of Auchinleck, “and once in the yard of the house in the Canongate belonging to Sir Lewis Ballenden, the late Justice-Clerk.” On the 29th of February, 1592, Graham was strangled and burned at the Cross of Edinburgh.

Bothwell still continued his exploits. On the night of the 28th of June, 1592, he re-appeared with an armed company of his followers and besieged the King and Queen in Falkland Castle, intending to carry them off, and putting them in terror of their lives; but the people of Fifeshire mustered and went to the rescue of the King, and on their approach Bothwell retired, having been frustrated in his main object. Great efforts were made to drive him out of the kingdom, yet, though repeatedly chased, condemned and forfeited, and proclaimed a traitor and an outlaw, under every possible form, still he was at liberty, and supported by an unknown number of followers; and thus he was a cause of constant anxiety to the Government and of terror to the King. Early on the morning of the 24th of July, 1593, Bothwell was again in the Palace of Holyrood by the connivance of the Duke of Lennox, Lord Ochiltree, and other courtiers. The King was then forced to capitulate to his detested archenemy; in fact, Bothwell for five or six weeks was master of the political situation; so on the 26th of July the King granted an act of remission and condonation of all the crimes of Bothwell and his accomplices. This was obtained, however, under menacing circumstances, when Bothwell and a band of his armed followers stood around the King, who was in terror of his life. Bothwell then had such a number of associates in Edinburgh that he offered to stand his trial to clear himself of the charges of witchcraft against the King’s life, which had been the chief cause of all the trouble with him. Accordingly a jury was summoned, and on the 10th of August he was tried before it, and unanimously acquitted of all the charges of witchcraft against the King’s person. For a time Bothwell and his party had the King in their hands, and his Majesty was sorely vexed at the restraint of his liberty, and extremely perplexed as to how he could extricate himself from his embarrassed position. On the 7th of September, a Convention of Estates was assembled at Stirling, in which Bothwell’s party seems to have sunk into a feeble minority. On the initiative of the King, the Convention intimated to him that he was not in any way bound by the conditions extorted from him at Holyrood Palace, and an Act was immediately passed declaring “that his Majesty, with the advice of the Estates, had recalled the grant made to Bothwell in August last.” This was intimated to Bothwell, and shortly after he assumed a threatening attitude. On the 11th of October he was summoned, along with two of his adherents, to appear before the King and the Council on the 25th, under the penalty of rebellion, and having failed to appear he was denounced; still, he was not extinguished. On the 3rd of April, 1594, he appeared at Leith with a body of armed followers, attacked the royal army under the King’s own command, and forced them to retire, and nearly obtained possession of the capital. The following year, early in April, however, he was obliged to leave Scotland. It was reported that he had gone to France, thence into Spain, and finally to Naples, where he died in poor circumstances, about the year 1606.

It appears that no other man of public mark had been so much connected with the alleged practices of witchcraft as Bothwell, or so incessant in consultations with the noted witches and warlocks of the period, and especially with the arch warlock Richard Graham. In the charge of high treason on which he was arrested and imprisoned in April 1591, which had driven him into his subsequent career of rebellion, the main count had been that he conspired with such infernal agencies for the death of the King, and thus to attain his own ambitious aims in the State. This was the view that the King entertained of Bothwell’s proceedings and exploits.

It is quite evident that the belief in witchcraft was entertained by all classes, the parliament, the Lords of Council, and the Judges of the Court of Session; none of them indicated any doubt of the reality of infernal agency, nor any inkling of the absurdity of the devil appearing in a human form, and assisting persons to accomplish all manner of mischief.¹

¹ Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials, Volume I., pages 242‒257, Volume II., pages 361, 397‒400. Witchcraft was a crime for which no remission or respite was given. _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume II., pages 198, 318; Volume IV., pages 392, 609, 624, 643, 666, 680, 705; et seq., Volume V., pages 4‒5, 14, 72, 91‒98, 100, 137‒139, et seq.

The Church also continued to search and hunt for witches. The General Assembly, in 1587, had before them the case of a witch who was lying in prison at St. Andrews; but it seems the evidence in her case was insufficient, and James-Melville was ordered by the Assembly to travel on the coast side and collect matter for an indictment against her. In 1597, it was reported to the Assembly that several persons had been convicted of witchcraft, yet the magistrates not only refused to punish them according to the law of the country, but in contempt set them at liberty. The Assembly then ordered that the presbyteries should proceed in all severity with the censures of the Church against such magistrates as liberated convicted witches. About the end of the century a great number of witches were burnt in Aberdeen; yet it seems the city was not free of them, as in the beginning of the year 1600 the council resolved――“That the commission purchased to the provost of the burgh and the sheriff of the county, for holding of justice courts on witches and sorcerers, should be prosecuted upon all persons in this burgh and the freedom thereof, who were delated for this crime, so that the city should be purged of such contagious enemies of the commonweal.”¹ Indeed the local authorities and the clergy were intently bent on reforming the nation, and with the Catholics, the Jesuits, the troops of beggars, the poor, and the mass of crime and vice, it must be admitted that their hands were full enough. They never wavered, however, but steadfastly fought against everything which they deemed an evil; and, although we must candidly confess that their ideas of what constituted an evil or a crime were often confused and mistaken, and that their judgments were frequently wanting in discrimination, nevertheless, the evidence proves that they struggled manfully to improve the social state of the people.

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 725, 938‒939; _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_, Volume II., pages 144, 155‒6, 204‒5. There are many books on witchcraft; but those who wish to make a study of Scottish witchcraft will find a mass of original information on the subject in Pitcairn’s _Criminal Trials_, 3 volumes, in the Old Spalding Club Miscellany, and in the Records of the Proceedings of the Church Courts; and also in the volumes of the _Register of the Privy Council_.

The number of trials and executions for witchcraft in Scotland was not comparatively greater than in other European countries. Barrington estimated that in England, during a period of two centuries, 30,000 witches were executed. Matthew Hopkins, the witch finder, by his allegations caused the execution of one hundred persons in 1645‒47, in the counties of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk. In 1515, five hundred witches were burned at Geneva in the space of three months. In 1520, a great number were burned in France, and one sorcerer confessed to having twelve associates; while in Lorraine, between the years 1580 and 1595, nine hundred witches and warlocks were burned; and in Bretagne twenty poor women were executed as witches in 1654. In Germany upwards of 100,000 were executed for witchcraft; while in Wurtemburg alone, between the years 1627 and 1629, one hundred and fifty-seven persons were burned.

The discipline of the Reformed Church not only aimed at the suppression of crime and vice, but also, according to its light, endeavoured to strike at the roots of evil. The General Assembly in 1563 passed an act prohibiting the publication of any book either printed or written, if it touched upon religion, till it was presented to the superintendent of the district and approved by him and the most learned of his brethren within his bounds; but if they could not agree on the points raised in the book, then it should be placed before the General Assembly for a final decision on its merits and orthodoxy. In 1568 the Assembly found that Thomas Bassandyne had printed a book in Edinburgh, entitled The Fall of the Roman Church, “naming our King supreme head of the primitive Church,” and that he had printed a psalm book at the end of which was a profane song called “Welcome Fortune”; and that these books had been issued without the license of the magistrates or the Church. The Assembly unanimously agreed to order the printer to call in all the copies of the book which had been sold, to alter the title and expunge the profane song, and in the future to refrain from printing anything without the license of the supreme magistrate, and the revision of such matters as related to religion by the committee appointed for that purpose.¹ Though the Church was thus careful in guarding against the spread of immoral writings, and what she held to be erroneous doctrine, she was not an enemy to the press. Robert Lekpreuik, the Edinburgh printer, had fallen into straitened circumstances; and in 1569 the General Assembly, after considering his position, and the money which he had expended on his establishment, resolved to give him fifty pounds yearly out of the funds of the Church. The Assembly in several other instances encouraged printers, and petitioned the government to treat them liberally.²

¹ Book of the Universal Kirk, pages 35, 125‒126.

² Ibid., pages 164, 306, 462.

The Privy Council in 1574 passed an act prohibiting the printing of any book without a license from the government. The act directed that the authorities throughout the kingdom should proclaim to the people, that none of them may presume to print or sell any books, ballads, rhymes or tragedies, either in Latin or English until they were seen and examined, and allowed by the Chancellor and other persons appointed by the King, and at the least three of these must concur before the King’s license could be granted for the publication. The penalty attached to the contravention of this act was death and confiscation of goods.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., page 387; Volume III., pages 587, 549, 583; Volume IV., page 459; Volume V., page 313; Volume VI., pages 18, 185; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume IV., page 187.

In the secular affairs of life, the citizens still exhibited the same restriction and monopoly, which was described in the tenth chapter of the first volume. This greatly hampered the internal industry and the trade of the country. While the wars with England and the disturbed state of the nation before the Reformation, and the troubles which ensued after it, were all inimical to trade and commerce. Owing to these circumstances, industry and trade made comparatively little progress in the sixteenth century; this period was more remarkable for moral and religious change and transformation than for material prosperity.

During the reigns of James V. and Queen Mary, many acts of parliament were passed relating to the coinage of the kingdom. A great variety of gold, silver, and copper coins were struck. In 1525 it was ordered that a gold coin should be struck, called a crown, of the fineness of twenty-one carats and a-half and two grains; nine of these were to be coined out of the ounce of gold, and each to pass current for twenty shillings. For every ounce of gold brought to the mint, the seller was to get seven pounds, and out of every ounce of coined gold the King was to get twenty-five shillings. In 1527 the Crown entered into a contract with two men for coining of silver money. According to this agreement, one hundred and seventy-six coins were to be made out of the pound of silver, and each was to be of the value of eighteen pence Scots. The coins of Queen Mary are numerous and present a variety of types. In 1547 the Regent and Lords of Council passed an act stating that the pennies and half-pennies were mostly all gone out of the country; and thus the people, but especially the poor, suffered for want of them. The Council ordered twelve stones of silver to be coined into pennies and half-pennies, of the fineness and weight of the old pennies; and commanded that they should have currency throughout the kingdom. In 1554 the Bishop of Ross was going to France in the character of ambassador, and the Regent and Council ordered James Atcheson, the master coiner, to receive a silver vessel and coin it into babies to defray the ambassador’s expenses. In the end of the year 1565 directions were issued for coining the silver piece called the Mary Rall; it was to pass for thirty shillings, and the two-thirds and the one-third of the same to pass for twenty, and ten shillings respectively. During the reign of Queen Mary, the intrinsic value of the currency underwent several remarkable changes. As in 1544 the value of a pound of silver was £9 10 shillings, in 1556, £13, and in 1565 it was raised to £18. At this time, in England the pound of silver was worth from £2 8 shillings to £3, which pretty plainly shows that money was scarce in Scotland.¹

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II.; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume I., pages 71, 151‒152, 154, 413; Lindsay’s View of the Coinage of Scotland, pages 39‒52, 141‒145; 1865.

In 1565, the Lords of Council ordered the false coins called hardheads, brought from Flanders, to be melted, and to have no currency in the kingdom. The same year an act was passed against the importation of false coin; and in 1566, several persons were convicted in Aberdeen for this offence. The following year, in May, a proclamation was issued against importing false coins――hardheads, placks, babies, or any other light money; and in 1568, Forbes of Monymusk and Forbes of Pitsligo, two brothers, were cited for coining false babies.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 325, 335, 468, 510, 642‒643. “Owing to the constant exporting of good coin and the importing of bad, the circulating medium of the country was in a wretched state. There seems to have been a regular system of coining base placks and lions (otherwise called hardheads) in the Low Countries, to be introduced by merchants into Scotland.”――Chambers’s Domestic Annals, Volume I., page 102.

Many acts touching the coinage were passed in the reign of James VI. In 1567, the regent and council passed an act ordering the coinage of a silver piece, to be called the James Rall, of the weight of an ounce troy, and to pass for thirty shillings in Scotland, two-parts of the same for twenty shillings, and the third-part for ten shillings. This year, in December, the parliament passed an act dealing with the coinage, and with false and clipped coins. It was stated that the King with the consent of the Regent, may coin gold and silver pieces of the same fineness as that of other countries, and that no gold or silver coin should be melted. The Lords of Council, in 1572, stated that parliament had authorised a new silver coin to be sent out, “for payment and support of the charges of this present civil and intestine war, raised against his highness’ authority by certain declared traitors, rebels, and conspirators, who, after the murder of the King’s dearest father, and of his uncle the Regent of this realm, have never ceased to resist his highness’ authority and to seek his own life, and, as far as in them lies, to pull his royal crown off his head.” This money was coined in whole and in half-pieces――the first to be called the half mark, and to pass for six shillings and eightpence; the second to be called the forty-penny piece, and to pass for three shillings and fourpence. The council ordered that the new coinage should be made known to the people by proclamation: “And to command and charge them to receive the said money in thankful and ready payment, and no one may presume to refuse the same upon any pretence whatever, under the penalty of treason; certifying to those that fail, that they shall be condemned to death with all rigour as an example to others.”¹ This act gives some indication of the difficulties connected with the currency, which mainly arose from the scarcity of specie, and the confused ideas of what constituted wealth; as yet there was no paper currency to make up the deficiency. Only three months after the issue of these two pieces of money, the Council had to proclaim that it was counterfeited by some persons to the great injury of the people.² It may be inferred that the motive for counterfeiting these coins so quickly arose from their being further debased than the money before in circulation. In the copper coinage, as well as in the gold and silver, there seems to have been much counterfeiting practised.³ During the later half of the century numerous acts were passed prohibiting the exportation of gold and silver; and injunctions were issued for bringing all the gold and silver to the master coiner, who was to pay the ordinary price for it.⁴

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., page 556; Volume II., pages 135‒136.

² Ibid., Volume II., page 160.

³ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III.

⁴ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 212‒213, 330; Volume II., pages 410, 554, 615‒616; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume III., page 216.

In 1579 parliament enacted that there should be a piece of gold coined of twenty-one carats, containing ten in the ounce, to be called the Scottish crown, and to pass for forty shillings. At the same time it was proclaimed that the ounce of the finest gold was to be bought for twenty-one pounds of the money of the realm, and the price of all other gold to be according to its fineness. A silver piece was to be coined of the fineness of eleven deniers, in whole and in half pieces――the first to pass for twenty-six shillings and eightpence, and to be called the two-mark coin; and the half piece to pass for thirteen shillings and fourpence, and to be called the half-mark. The price to be given for the finest silver was thirty-six shillings the ounce, and for other silver in proportion to its quality. But in 1580, parliament ordered that all the money in the kingdom, except the stamped placks and pennies, should be reformed and reduced to the fineness of eleven deniers, and a new gold coin was also ordered to be struck. The next year, the King and parliament thought that the last silver coinage had been fixed at too high a value, and this had caused great injury to the people, and had also been the occasion of a dearth and many other inconveniences. The new act, therefore, directed that the last coinage, which extended to two hundred and eleven stones and ten pounds of silver, should be brought in again to be recoined into ten shilling pieces, containing four in the ounce. In 1584, parliament passed another act, reciting that the gold of the kingdom had been continually exported, and that of other countries introduced to the loss and injury of the people; and it was then ordered that two pieces of gold, of the fineness of twenty-one carats and a-half, should be coined――the one of six coins to the ounce, each to pass for three pounds fifteen shillings; and the other nine to the ounce, and to pass for fifty shillings. In 1597, it was stated in an act of parliament that the current money of the kingdom was scarce, and that gold and silver had risen to exorbitant prices owing to the liberty which all persons took of raising the price of money at their pleasure, far above the value prescribed by the laws and acts of parliament. Through this, and constant exporting of the money, great confusion had been caused; and it was then enacted that parties transgressing the laws would be severely punished. The scarcity of money is very apparent from the high value which the laws set upon it. The ounce of foreign gold of twenty-two carats was twenty-eight pounds sixteen shillings, Scots money, in 1598; and in 1601, the price given at the mint for gold was thirty-three pounds the ounce; at the same time the ounce of silver was about forty-eight shillings, Scotch money.¹ In 1587, parliament passed an act limiting the rate of interest on money and on grain to ten per cent.

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 150, 191, 310, 311; Volume IV., 134‒135. Lindsay’s _View of the Coinage of Scotland_, pages 53‒59, 145‒151.

At the time of the union of the crowns the relative value of English and Scotch money was as twelve to one; the gold pieces which passed in England for twenty-one shillings each, in Scotland passed for twelve pounds.

Some early attempts at mining were noticed in the preceding volume. In the reign of James IV., the gold mines of Crawfurd Moor were discovered; and in the years 1511, 1512, and 1513, many payments were made by the crown to Sir James Pettigrew for working these gold mines. Payments were also made to Sebald Northberge, the master finer, Andrew Ireland, finer, and Gerard Essemer, the melter; and in 1513 the Abbot of Tungland received payment from the King to visit the mines of Crawfurd Moor. These mines engaged the attention of the government in 1515. In 1524 a court was ordered to be held at Edinburgh to deal with those who had broken the order of the mine, and conveyed gold out of the kingdom; and the gold of the mine was then ordered to be coined in the coining house. The Albany medal of 1524 was made from gold found in Crawfurd Moor; and it seems that some of the gold coinage of James V. was minted of native metal. In 1526 a lease was granted to a party of Germans and Dutchmen of all the mines of gold, silver, and other metals for a term of forty-three years; and in the following year a contract was made with them to coin certain gold and silver money for ten years, but it appears that the enterprise was not successful as the foreigners departed homeward in 1531. In 1535 a Commission was appointed to inquire into the working of the mines, and in 1539 miners from Lorraine were brought to Scotland to work the mines. They were placed under the management of John Mossman, a goldsmith, and a considerable quantity of gold seems to have been found by them; and shortly after forty-one ounces of native gold were used in making a crown for James V., and thirty-five ounces for a crown to his Queen, while seventeen ounces were added to the King’s great chain, and nineteen and a half ounces for making a belt to the Queen; a quantity was also used for the coinage of gold bonnet pieces and other purposes. During the minority of Queen Mary little was done in gold mining. In 1565 the Privy Council granted a licence to John Stewart of Tarlair, and his son William, to search for all kinds of minerals, and to work the mines of gold and silver and other metal between the Tay and Orkney, on the condition that they should pay to the government one stone of metal out of every ten which they found. They were also authorised to work all the gold and silver mines throughout the country, on the condition that they brought all the gold and silver to the coining-house; for every ounce of gold they were to receive ten pounds, and for each ounce of silver twenty-four shillings. If in the course of their explorations they discovered coal haughs, not within ten miles of any royal residence, then they should be free to work them, and only pay the tenth penny of the proceeds to the Crown. Their licence was to endure for nine years. In March, 1568, the Regent Moray granted a licence to Cornelius Vois, a Dutchman, to work the gold and silver mines for nineteen years in every quarter of the kingdom, and he undertook to pay to the Crown for every hundred ounces of gold and silver which was found, purified by washing, eight ounces, and if purified by fire, four ounces; while there were other alternative arrangements. Cornelius was allowed to employ as many of the Scots as he pleased, but not more than twenty foreigners. He had, as one of his partners, Nicolas Hilliard, the noted medallist, and also the Earl of Morton, who had ten shares, and some of the Scottish merchants.

In 1576 Abraham Paterson and his partners obtained a licence to work all the gold, silver, lead, and copper mines in Scotland, excepting the lead mines of Glengonar and Orkney, which were then worked by George Douglas of Parkhead, and Adam Fullerton, a burgess of Edinburgh. Lengthy and very minute stipulations occur in this licence; he was to pay six ounces out of every hundred of gold or silver to the Crown, and the licence was to continue for twelve years. In 1583 a general grant of all the mines and minerals in the country for twenty-one years was given to Eustachius Roche, mediciner. He was authorised to search anywhere for minerals, and to use timber, coals, and peats from the royal territories on the condition of paying seven ounces out of every hundred of gold found, and of all the other metals ten ounces out of every hundred, and all the rest of the gold and silver was to be brought to the coining-house at the price of twenty-two pounds Scots per ounce of fine gold, and forty shillings per ounce for fine silver. All other persons were prohibited from working minerals unless authorised by Roche. Further privileges were granted to him by contract, which was ratified by Parliament in August, 1584; but certain mines which belonged to the Earl of Arran were exempted from the scope of Roche’s lease; afterwards Roche obtained a separate lease of Arran’s mines, but when Roche attempted to transport the lead, in 1585, which had been got in the mines of Glengonar and Wanlock (on Arran’s territory) it was arrested in Leith by the Treasurer, although, on appeal to the Privy Council, the claim was abandoned and the lead permitted to be transported on payment of the royal duty according to the contract.

George Douglas of Parkhead, mentioned above, had obtained a grant of the mines in the Leadhills district in 1576, but he was forfeited in 1581, and fled to England. On the turn of the political wheel, however, he was restored in 1585, and in 1592 he was permitted to work the mines of Waterhead, “otherwise called Over-Glengonar,” on the condition of paying fifty ounces of fine silver out of every thousand stone of lead ore. He was allowed to sell one thousand stone weight of the ore for the advancement of the work. The following year the master of the metals complained to the Privy Council that Douglas had worked much more ore than his licence permitted, and so he was summoned to pay the whole duty due from the commencement of his lease. This resulted in an agreement between Douglas and Thomas Foullis, a goldsmith and burgess of Edinburgh, by which all the rights of Douglas in connection with the mines were transferred to Foullis for an annual rent of five hundred merks. Foullis then obtained an Act of the Privy Council, confirmed by Parliament, granting to him all the minerals and metals in the lands of the Friar’s Moor, in the sheriffdom of Lanark, for twenty-one years, at a yearly rent of one thousand merks; but he ceased to search for the precious metals on any extensive scale, and directed his attention to develop the lead mines.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 232, 330, 612‒614; Volume II., pages 506‒514; also Volumes III. and IV.; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II.; Early Records Relating to Mining in Scotland, by R. W. Cochran-Patrick, 1878.

A long Act of Parliament touching the mines was passed in 1592. This Act explicitly stated that all mines belonged to the Crown, and that in the past these mines had not been made so profitable as they might have been, owing mainly to there not having been a specially qualified man appointed to look after the whole work connected with them. Therefore, it was enacted that henceforth there should be an officer appointed by the Government to oversee the whole matter of the metals and minerals, who should be called the Master of the Metals, with full powers touching the management and working of the mines. The Act appointed Mr. John Lindsay, a brother of Sir David Lindsay of Edzell, Master of the Metals for life. One clause of the Act stated that the King, if he thought fit, with the advice of the Treasurer and the Master of the Metals, for a reasonable composition, might let in feu to every earl, baron, or other freeholder in the kingdom, all mines of gold, silver, copper, lead, or other metals and minerals “which is or may be found in their own lands, giving to them power to seek and to work such mines on the condition of paying the Crown one-tenth part of the whole metals found.” It appears that Roche had not been very successful in his mining operations, and it was resolved to reduce his contract. Accordingly he was charged with having neither worked the mines in operation before the date of his contract, nor those which he had discovered himself, that he had also neglected to pay the duty owing to the Crown, and he was ordered to appear before the Privy Council to answer these charges, and at the same time to produce all his papers and titles. Roche appeared and answered the charges against him, but the contract with him was reduced, and his connection with the mines then ceased.¹

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., page 556; Balcarres’ Papers; Lives of the Lindsays, Volume II.

There is little mention of iron mining till a comparatively late period, but coal was a common article of commerce in ♦1425. In 1542 the annual value of the coal haughs of Wallyfurd and Preston, which belonged to the Crown, was 1100 merks. Coal was worked at Culross in 1572, and in 1584, Lord Sinclair had a coal pit at Dysart. In 1592 Parliament passed an Act relating to the working of coal, which enacted that any person who wilfully set fire to coal haughs, from motives of revenge and spite, should incur the penalty of treason, if found guilty of this crime. In 1600 it was enacted, that as the King’s coal haughs could not be worked within the bounds of his annexed territories unless at great expense; in consequence of this his Majesty neither received coal for the royalty, nor any profit, it was therefore resolved to separate them from the Crown lands and let them in feu.¹

♦ date uncertain; probably “1525”

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II., pages 10, 424; Volume IV., page 229.

In the sixteenth century there was not much commerce between England and Scotland. The Low Countries, France, and the Baltic kingdoms, were the places where the Scots mostly traded. During the war between the two countries in the reign of Henry VIII., within a very short time, the English took twenty-eight trading ships from the Scots. In 1545 the treaty between the Emperor and Scotland touching the commerce of the Scots with Flanders was renewed; thus the Flemings were exempted from attacks of the Scottish ships commissioned for warfare. But difficulties arose between this country and Flanders, and several Scottish ships were detained there. It was stated in 1550 that “when our ships came to Flanders as to our friends for traffic of merchandise, after they had been well received, and were ready to depart, the whole fleet of fourteen ships, richly laden with Flemish wares, were taken, held, and disposed of, and the merchants imprisoned by the Emperor’s subjects.” The same year the Lords of Council had to interfere to protect the Scots from the ships of Holland and the Lowlands of Flanders, the subjects of the Emperor; they were daily committing enormities upon the Scots within the Firths and other places. As many of the Scottish war ships as could be put into a seaworthy state, were commissioned and instructed to proceed against them; they were commanded to take, and chase these pirates off the coasts and out of the waters of Scotland. But they were specially restricted from interfering with the ships of England, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Hamburg. It seems however that trade was not long interrupted between Scotland and Flanders. In 1552 the Lords of Council passed an act complaining that the flesh of the country was barrelled, packed, sold, and sent out of the kingdom to other countries, and especially to Flanders, which had caused a great dearth of meat at home whereby the people had been much hurt; and its exportation was therefore prohibited under the penalty of confiscation and death.¹ New regulations were passed by the Council in 1565 for the guidance of the Scotch Conservator in Flanders; these were very minute and bear upon the merchants as well as the Conservator, touching the hours of business and such matters as the following: “That no merchant when he has bought his goods should bring them home himself, but should employ others to carry his gear to his lodgings or his cellar like a merchant, under a fine of five shillings. That no merchant who buys his meat in the market should truss it home upon his sleeve or on the point of his knife, under the same fine. That no one should deal in merchandise unless he be honestly able like a merchant; and if he be not well dressed the Conservator should warn him to clothe himself better, and if he fail to do that, then the Conservator should take as much of his goods as will clothe him properly withal.”²

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 18, 40, 41, 92, 104, 127; Macpherson’s Annals of Commerce, Volume II., page 93.

² Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 332‒334.

Even in the latter part of the sixteenth century the foreign trade of Scotland was comparatively small. The exports were comprised within very narrow limits, but the imports were more varied. There were some very curious regulations imposed in connection with the exports, which strikingly brings before us the state of society and the character of the times. It was noticed that there were acts prohibiting the exportation of gold and silver; and there were other things which were allowed to be exported under limitations one year, while the next they were absolutely prohibited. A considerable quantity of salt was produced at the various salt works throughout the country, but the export of salt was only permitted under certain contingencies. The Council in 1573 passed an act stating that it was unlawful to export any salt until the whole people and the carriers to all the markets in the kingdom were supplied with a sufficient quantity of it, which had to be sold at the salt-pans for eight shillings the boll. Then whatever quantity of it remained after satisfying the people, was allowed to be exported to other countries. But the owners and carriers of it were obliged to buy six ounces of silver for every chalder of salt exported, and this silver had to be delivered to the master coiner within eight days after their return to Scotland, and for every ounce of which the owner of the salt was to receive from the master coiner thirty shillings. It was further provided, that in the event of the exporters of salt buying up the stipulated proportion of silver, and not buying it from abroad, the silver so bought should be forfeited to the crown, and the exporters of the salt condemned to pay a sum equivalent to the silver they should have brought from foreign parts. To ensure the fulfilment of this condition the custom officers were ordered not to give the exporters of salt a cocket, till they came to the coining-house and gave security to bring home the required quantity of silver.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 264‒265, 290, 293; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volumes II., III.

This rather peculiar arrangement, which was contrary to acts of parliament, did not prove to be satisfactory. In 1574, the Lords of Council discharged the granting of licenses to export salt, on account of the exorbitant dearth of small salt at home. “As experience now teaches,” they said, “the granting of such licenses has been very prejudicial to the commonweal of the nation, as the conditions for furnishing and serving the people at the prices mentioned in the Acts of Parliament has in nowise been observed; but our sovereign lord’s subjects have been constrained to buy salt at exorbitant and unreasonable prices, and likely from day to day to rise to greater extortion, if timely remedy be not provided. Therefore all the licenses for exporting salt out of the kingdom were henceforward discharged.”¹ Three weeks after their lordships had passed this act, however, they granted a license to Robert Paterson, the master of the ship called “The Grace of God,” to export to Norway six chalders of salt for curing fish; and another to William Ker, the master of the “Swallow,” to export four chalders; and two burgesses of Edinburgh became sureties that the salt should not be converted to any other use. At this time the authorised price of salt was eight shillings per boll, but there were many complaints of parties selling it at a higher rate.² Only white salt was allowed to be exported in 1584; and the export of salt was prohibited in 1587; there was a duty on salt exported.

¹ Ibid., Volume II., pages 406‒407.

² Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., page 285; Volumes III., IV. On the 30th of August, 1573, the owners of thirty-eight salt-pans, of Preston and Musselburgh, gave security to supply Scotsmen with salt at eight shillings the boll.――Ibid., page 296.

Several other articles were dealt with in the same way. Licenses were now and again granted by the Lords of Council for exporting things which were prohibited by parliament. The exportation of coal was prohibited by Act of Parliament; but the Council, in 1573, resolved to grant licenses for exporting smithy-coal. In the same year, on the other hand, Walter Scott, in Dysart, became bound that the coals loaded in a ship of that port should not be exported;¹ the export of coal was forbidden in 1586, and in 1597. The trade of the country was carried on under the same changing and disturbing influences as its politics; and, so few of the resources of the country were as yet developed, and such restrictive and conflicting agencies were in operation that the merchants were greatly hampered. The regulations touching the export of lead were of the same varying character. Lead might be exported, but there was a royalty placed upon it; the exporter had to pay fifteen ounces of silver for every thousand stones of lead shipped.²

¹ Ibid., Volume I., page 340; Volume II., page 290, Volumes IV. V.; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II., page 543.

² Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., pages 102, 507, 626.

Licenses were sometimes granted for exporting grain, but owing to bad harvests, and the frequent neglect of agriculture from war, it was often deemed necessary to prohibit the export of corn and wheat. There were frequently seasons of dearth, and many attempts to fix the price of grain were made. In September, 1567, the Regent and Council stated that the merchants and others had exported great quantities of grain, under the pretence of licenses granted “by the Queen’s grace, our Sovereign Lord’s dearest mother, to the great increase and dearth of the same; the corn of this year’s crop being at God’s pleasure plagued and spoiled with rain, and so in all appearance scarce enough to sustain the inhabitants of this country.” Therefore the Council resolved to revoke all such licenses, and ordered that no grain should be exported hereafter, under the penalty of the confiscation of the ship and her cargo. In 1574, the Regent and Council ordered the comptroller to ascertain the quantity of grain exported that year, by whom, and at what ports, and other points concerning it. The Council, in the winter of 1577, agreed to allow the free export of grain for the following reason: “In times of dearth this country has received large help and support of victuals out of France, Flanders, and England, whereby the people have been greatly relieved; and the like favour and good neighbourhood, charity, and amity ought to be extended towards the people of these countries in this present year, when it has pleased God to visit them with the like dearth and scarcity, and this realm with such increase and plenty of grain, as some part thereof may, without prejudice of the State, be spared to the relief of our neighbours’ necessities.”¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 402, 571, 572; Volume II., pages 252, 589.

Horses and cattle were occasionally exported, but Acts of Parliament and Council frequently prohibited this; and on the whole the regular export trade of Scotland was as yet very small. It consisted mostly of raw materials, such as hides, wool, and the like; but the imports were more varied, and comprised a variety of articles, and especially large quantities of wines. There were Acts of Parliament and Council which prohibited the importers of wines from selling any to the people till the king, bishops, earls, lords, and barons, were first well stocked.¹

¹ Ibid., Volume I., pages 282, 298, 191, 285, 402, 571‒572; Volume II., pages 128‒129, 505, 515, 662, 675, 693; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume III.

The trade between the Highlands and Lowlands chiefly consisted of cattle and wood. The Highlanders had long been accustomed to bring their cattle to the Lowland markets; but sometimes parties in the Lowlands seized their flocks under the pretence that they were authorised by the Government, which was not the case. They brought the timber down the rivers in floats to the towns and sold it to the citizens.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 401, 470‒471; Volume II., pages 500‒501; _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_, Volume II., page 33.

The internal trade of the country was still carried on, under the strict principle of monopoly. The price of manufactured articles and goods, as well as of food and provisions, was fixed by law and regulated by the local authorities. The guild or merchants openly insisted on their exclusive right of commerce, not only in foreign trade, but also within the burgh, and often over the county in which it was situated.¹

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volumes II., III., IV.; Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volumes I., II., III.

Among the many regulations fixing the supply and the price of provisions, perhaps those relating to the sale of ale and spirits are the most instructive. Ale had long been a beverage in common and daily use, and large quantities of it were consumed by all classes of the people. The Acts of Parliament and Council fixing the price of malt and ale were numerous; and the statutes and regulations of the burghs touching the supply and the price of these two necessaries were endless. In 1535 Parliament passed an Act stating that the inhabitants of Edinburgh and the people who frequented it were greatly oppressed by the maltmakers of Leith, and others in that neighbourhood, exacting four, five, and even six shillings more for the malt than they paid for the barley. It was therefore enacted that maltmakers should produce and sell their malt at a competent profit, and charge only two shillings more for the boll of malt than the current price of the boll of barley. “Those who disobey these acts, it was ordained, shall be called and punished as oppressors of the King’s subjects, and particular courts shall be set for them, and the King shall give commission to such as he pleases to call the offending maltmakers before them in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, to execute justice upon them as they may think fit, and to cause this statute to be observed in all points.”¹ In 1551 the Regent and the Lords of Council, taking into consideration the high prices of all kinds of victuals “whereby the poor were at the point of perishing,” issued a commission under the great seal to the provost of Edinburgh, authorising him to deal with all the maltmakers, maltsellers, bakers, and regraters, within a circle of four miles of Edinburgh; and to bring them to punishment according to the Acts of Parliament and the laws of the kingdom. When Queen Mary visited Jedburgh in October, 1566, it seems that the good citizens of that town raised the price of provisions. Whereupon her majesty called together her council and the authorities of the burgh, who passed an act fixing the price of everything during the stay of the court in that quarter. The pint of good ale was to be fourpence, and sixteen ounces of fine bread fourpence. The price of a man’s dinner, “being served with beef, mutton, and roast at the least, was sixteenpence. For the use of a furnished bed the charge was to be twelvepence each night; and for stabling to a horse for the space of twenty-four hours, twopence.”² In 1573 the price of ale was four shillings the gallon; in 1589 the pint of ale was eightpence; and from this time to the end of the century it ran from one shilling to one and fourpence the pint.³ In 1571 the magistrates of Edinburgh enacted that Dutch drinking beer should not be sold higher than sixpence the pint.

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume II., page 351; Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 265‒266.

² Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 115, 488‒489.

³ Ibid., Volume II., page 269; Burgh Records of Glasgow, pages 25, 137, 162, 172, 198, 214; _Burgh Records of Edinburgh_, Volume III., page 284.

The price of wine varied during the first half of the sixteenth century, from sixpence the pint to one shilling and fourpence; but towards the end of the century, the price of it had nearly tripled. There is much evidence that large quantities of wine were consumed in Scotland. The members of the guild claimed the exclusive right to sell wine in all the burghs of the kingdom.¹

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volumes II., pages 373, 376, 483; Volumes III., IV.; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume I., pages 128‒129, 212‒213, 425‒428, 451; Volume II., pages 505, 662, 693; Volumes III., IV., V., VI.; Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., pages 114, 115, 120, 123, 125, 127, 132, 134, 144, et seq.; Volume III., pages 29, 84, 132, 156, 191, 198, 224; _Burgh Records of Glasgow_, pages 66, 82, 107, 184, 201; _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_, Volume II., page 149.

Whisky was known, but as yet it was not much used among the people. In 1557, as noticed in a preceding page, Bessy Campbell was brought before the magistrates of Edinburgh, and ordered to cease from making whisky in the burgh, and from selling it, except on the market-day, according to the privilege granted to the barbers, under their seal of cause, unless she was permitted by them. The use of whisky, however, was gradually becoming more common. In 1579, Parliament passed an act restricting the making and selling of it. This Act opened with a statement that grain would be scarce that year, and yet great quantities of malt was consumed in the making of aquavitæ, which was the cause of the dearth of the malt. It was enacted therefore that no person, either in town or country, should brew or sell any whisky, from the 1st of December, 1579, to the 1st of October, 1580, under the penalty of the breaking of their brewing utensils, and the confiscation of their stock of spirits. But the nobles and men of rank were permitted to brew and distil whisky from their own malt, on their own premises, for the use of their own house, families, and friends.¹ This act is very characteristic of much of the subsequent legislation relating to the sale of whisky and spirits; but it is clear that whisky had not then the hold on the people which it afterwards obtained.

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume II., page 262; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume III., page 174; Register of the Privy Council, Volume II., page 269.

There were many complaints that leather and shoes were so dear that the people were unable to buy them. In 1541, a number of the shoemakers of Aberdeen were convicted by a jury for making insufficient shoes, and for selling them above the legal price. The magistrates of Edinburgh, in 1563, fixed the price of boots and shoes as follows: “The pair of double-soled shoes of the largest size, well made and of good material, three shillings and eightpence; a pair of single-soled shoes of similar size, two shillings and eightpence; a pair of the finest double-soled boots, twenty-four shillings; a pair of single-soled boots, twenty shillings;” and so on in proportion for smaller sizes. The authorities of Aberdeen, in 1580, ordained that the price for shoeing the largest horses should be six shillings and eightpence, and the charge for the smaller horses and nags, four shillings.¹

¹ Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume I., pages 453‒454; Volume II., pages 38‒39; Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., page 155; Register of the Privy Council, Volume I.

Complaints were often made against the craftsmen that their workmanship was insufficient, and their charges too high. Complaints of this description frequently came before Parliament and the Privy Council, and acts were from time to time passed fixing the price of manufactured goods and articles. But the craftsmen struggled hard, and by their organisations they became a considerable power in the burghs. Sometimes they were rather troublesome to the guilds. Amongst the craftsmen the spirit of monopoly was excessive. The trade disputes between Edinburgh and Leith, and between the Canongate and Edinburgh, were numerous and bitter. The different bodies of craftsmen sometimes manifested an extreme jealousy of each other, and of their exclusive privileges, which was unfavourable to the development of trade and to the acquisition of skill.¹

¹ Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., page 142; Volume, II., pages 33‒34, 220‒221, 260, 577‒579; Burgh Records of Edinburgh; Burgh Records of Glasgow, pages 165‒166.

In 1562, the bonnetmakers of Edinburgh complained that various craftsmen, fleshers, wrights, shoemakers, and others, in the burgh, had enticed away their apprentices and servants, who were unfree persons, and had caused them to labour at kinds of work which belonged to their craft. The provost and council agreed that the bonnetmakers should be protected in their privileges and liberties; but they added, “That in case it pleased the goodness of God to give the gift to strangers and others resorting to this town to labour, and invent upon points a more perfect and finer fashion of hose, sleeves, gloves, and such like, than they themselves, their servants, or apprentices, could do, or has done, at any time before this, and that in such cases the said persons should not be stopped, nor the gifts of God smothered, provided always that nowhere they nor any others should be served by servants and apprentices who have had their beginning under the deacon and masters.”¹ This opinion of the Town Council was on the line which leads to improvement. In 1587, Parliament passed an act in favour of Flemish craftsmen――makers of serges, bedcovers, and other woollen fabrics belonging to their craft. They were to teach the Scots to make this class of goods, and the conditions of the bargain extended to twelve heads.²

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., page 148.

² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 607‒609.

It was already observed that the reformed clergy had exerted themselves to extinguish some of the amusements of the people; and Parliament followed in the same track, and passed sumptuary enactments. In 1567, the Estates of the realm enacted that no women should adorn themselves with dress above what was appropriate to their rank, unless they were prostitutes. And Parliament, in 1581, passed an act touching dress, and another against superfluous banqueting, and the inordinate use of confectionery and drugs. The act on dress opened with a statement that there was great abuse among the common people, even of the meanest rank, inasmuch as they presumed to counterfeit the king and his nobility by their habit of wearing costly clothing of silk, and of all varieties: “Laine, cameraige, fringes, pasments of gold, of silver, of silk, and woollen cloth, brought from other countries; thus the price of these goods had been raised to such a dearth that this state of matters cannot be longer endured without great scath to the nation. Though God has granted to the kingdom sufficient commodities for clothing the people thereof within itself, if they were properly employed manufacturing them at home; and whereby great numbers of the people now wandering in beggary might be relieved, and the honesty and the wealth of the country greatly increased.” The Act prohibited all persons below the ranks of duke, earl, lord of parliament, knight, and landed gentlemen, and their wives and families, from wearing costly dresses. Minute provisions were made for carrying out the Act, and penalties were to be inflicted for its infringement. This Act also contained a clause prohibiting the exportation of wool, under the penalty of confiscation, the object of which was to give more employment to the people at home, and to confer a benefit on the nation. The act against the wearing of costly clothing was ratified in 1584, and ordered to be carried out with all rigour.¹

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 40, 220‒221, 354.

Parliament was equally anxious to put the people right in the matter of eating and drinking at marriages and baptisms. It was enacted that only bishops, earls, barons, and gentlemen who have two thousand marks of free yearly rent, or fifty chalders of grain after deducting all charges, should presume to have at their marriages and banquets, or on their tables for their daily fare, any drugs or confectionaries, brought from foreign countries. After the Reformation Acts of Parliament and Council were often passed forbidding the eating of flesh during Lent. On the 12th of February, 1562, the Lords of Council passed an Act prohibiting the eating of flesh from that date to the 29th of March, under the penalty of ten pounds for the first offence, twenty pounds for the second, and confiscation of all movable goods for the third. The Act proceeded on the ground that:――“In the spring of the year, called Lenten, all kinds of flesh decays and grows out of season, that it is not meet for eating; and also that by the tempestuous storms of the last and preceding winters, the whole stocks of cattle were so plagued, smothered and dead, that the price of flesh had risen to such extreme dearth that the like had not been within this realm; and if such dearth continued it will be to the great hurt of the commonweal.”¹ In 1567, Parliament, to save the nation from the harm entailed by the daily eating of flesh, enacted that the people should eat flesh only on four days of the week, under a penalty: and in 1568 the Lords of Council passed an act forbidding all classes to eat any flesh during Lent. It was ordered also that no fleshers, cooks, hostlers, nor tavern keepers, should slay or prepare any kind of flesh for sale during that time, under the penalty of the confiscation of their goods and the imprisonment of their persons, unless they had obtained a written license from the King upon reasonable consideration. During the time of the civil war, after the flight of Mary, the Lords of Council issued proclamations against the eating of flesh in Lent, but they were little heeded.² In 1584 it was again enacted, “because of the disorder amongst all ranks of the people by the licentious eating of flesh every day of the week, which besides producing other evils, was also the cause of the dearth of all meat.” It was then commanded that no one should presume hereafter to eat any kind of flesh on Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday, nor in the time of Lent, under the penalty of the confiscation of all their goods to the Crown. This act was again repeated in 1587 with some additions.³

¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, page 221; _Register of the Privy Council_, Volume I., page 200. The same year it was stated: “Forasmuch as the tempest and storms of weather fallen this last winter, the most part of the sheep of Scotland are perished and dead, which causes the dearth thereof so to increase that the poor cannot well abide the same; and if the lambs be likewise wasted and consumed, the dearth shall not only increase, but also the sheep of the country shall so decay that few or none shall be left therein, for the sustaining of the people of this kingdom. For remedy thereof, it is statuted by the Queen’s Majesty, with the advice of the Lords of Council, that no manner of lambs be slain or eaten by any of the people of this realm for the space of three years to come, under the penalty of the confiscation of all the movable goods of the persons who contravene this statute.”――Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 200‒201.

² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 40; Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., page 611; Volume II., pages 337, 431, 500, 593.

³ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 353, 453.

After the Reformation several of the old amusements of the people were proscribed. This however need occasion no great regret, for with the spread of refinement and the progress of civilisation they would have died out of themselves. The citizens of Edinburgh had a pastime called “bickering,” and this word itself partly explains the character of the amusement. The bickering seems to have consisted of a company of people, mostly the young, who made a mock attack upon certain places, which however often ended in serious mischief. On the 11th of April, 1567, the Town Council of Edinburgh:――“ordered the bellman to pass through the town and discharge the bickerers, under the penalty of hanging those come to age, and the scourging of such as are not of age.”¹ The people were still in the habit of amusing themselves pretty freely. There were rude stage plays; the field games of golf, of football, and many others, which the humblest of the people enjoyed. Towards the end of the century parliament passed an act that enjoined Monday to be observed as a holiday for pastime and amusement, that every one in the nation might have one day in the week for their own enjoyment. The King himself had a fancy for rope-dancers, in the year 1600 James Melville records in his diary “that in Falkland, I saw a Frenchman play strange and incredible pranks upon stretched ropetakle in the Palace close, before the King, the Queen, and the whole Court.” In the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, in August, 1600, the sum of £333 7 shillings 8 pence is entered as the payment of this rope-dancer, so it seems he was handsomely rewarded for his performance. In 1598 an English juggler, “played such supple tricks upon a rope, which was fastened between the top of St. Giles’s Kirk steeple and a stair beneath the cross, the like was never seen in this country, as he rode down the rope and played so many pavies on it.” For the performance of this trick the King ordered him to get twenty pounds.²

¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., pages 229‒230.

² Burgh Records of Glasgow, page 193; _Burgh Records of Aberdeen_, Volume II., pages 179, 180; _Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland_, Volume IV.; Melville’s Diary, pages 17, 29, 30, 487.

The general influence of the Reformation on the social state of the people was in the main salutary and beneficial. It is true that some of the commons and tenants were in better circumstances under the Roman Catholic churchman than after the Reformation, and the fact is undeniable that many of the tenants of land were excessively oppressed by the nobles after that event.¹ The evidence adduced in this volume is sufficient to prove that the exertions of the reformed clergy to lighten the burdens of the people were not in vain; while the benefits of the revolution were far reaching and immense.

¹ Pinkerton’s Ancient Scottish Poems, Volume II., page 321; 1786.

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