ath of many nobles at the battle of
Flodden, the clergy became, for a time, [Sidenote: 1513] the strongest
estate in the kingdom.

{354} Like the other estates the clergy were still in the Middle Ages
when the Reformation [Sidenote: Reformation] came on them like a thief
in the night. In no country was the corruption greater. The bishops
and priests took concubines and ate and drank and were drunken and
buffeted their fellow men. They exacted their fees to the last
farthing, an especially odious one being the claim of the priest to the
best cow on the death of a parishioner. As a consequence the parsons
and monks were hated by the laity.

Humanism shed a few bright beams on the hyperborean regions of Dundee
and Glasgow. Some Erasmians, like Hector Boece, prepared others for
the Reformation without joining it themselves; some, like George
Buchanan, threw genius and learning into the scales of the new faith.
The unlearned, too, were touched with reforming zeal. Lollardy sowed a
few seeds of heresy. About 1520 Wyclif's version of the New Testament
was turned into Scots by one John Nesbit, but it remained in manuscript.

In the days before newspapers tidings were carried from place to place
by wandering merchants and itinerant scholars. Far more than today
propaganda was dependent on personal intercourse. One of the first
preachers of Lutheranism in Scotland was a Frenchman named La Tour, who
was martyred on his return to his own country. The noble Patrick
Hamilton made a pilgrimage to the newly founded University of Marburg,
and possibly to Wittenberg. Filled, as his Catholic countryman, Bishop
John Leslie put it, "with venom very poisonable and deadly . . . soaked
out of Luther and other archheretics," he returned to find the martyr's
crown in his native land. [Sidenote: February 29, 1528] "The reek of
Patrick Hamilton" infected all upon whom it blew. Other young men
visited Germany. Some, like Alexander Alesius and John MacAlpine,
found positions in {355} foreign universities. Others visited
Wittenberg for a short time to carry thence the new gospel. A Scotch
David[1] appears at Wittenberg in January 1528. Another Scot,
"honorably born and well seen in scholastic theology, exiled from his
land on account of the Word," made Luther's acquaintance in May, 1529.
Another of the Reformer's visitors was James Wedderburn whose brother,
John, [Sidenote: 1540-2] translated some of the German's hymns, and
publi