Church, the
spoils of the religious houses.

In Scotland, as elsewhere, the causes of the religious revolution were
many. The wealth and luxury of the higher clergy, and of the dwellers in
the abbeys, had long been the butt of satire and of the fiercer
indignation of the people. Benefices, great and small, were jobbed on
every side between the popes, the kings, and the great nobles. Ignorant
and profligate cadets of the great houses were appointed to high
ecclesiastical offices, while the minor clergy were inconceivably
ignorant just at the moment when the new critical learning, with
knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, was revolutionising the study of the
sacred books. The celibacy of the clergy had become a mere farce; and
they got dispensations enabling them to obtain ecclesiastical livings for
their bastards. The kings set the worst example: both James IV. and
James V. secured the richest abbeys, and, in the case of James IV., the
Primacy, for their bastard sons. All these abuses were of old standing.
"Early in the thirteenth century certain of the abbots of Jedburgh,
supported by their chapters, had granted certain of their appropriate
churches to priests with a right of succession to their sons" (see 'The
Mediaeval Church in Scotland,' by the late Bishop Dowden, chap. xix. Mac-
Lehose, 1910.) Oppressive customs by which "the upmost claith," or a
pecuniary equivalent, was extorted as a kind of death-duty by the clergy,
were sanctioned by excommunication: no grievance was more bitterly felt
by the poor. The once-dreaded curses on evil-doers became a popular
jest: purgatory was a mere excuse for getting money for masses.

In short, the whole mediaeval system was morally rotten; the statements
drawn up by councils which made vain attempts to check the stereotyped
abuses are as candid and copious concerning all these things as the
satires of Sir David Lyndsay.

Then came disbelief in mediaeval dogmas: the Lutheran and other heretical
books were secretly purchased and their contents assimilated.
Intercession of saints, images, pilgrimages, the doctrine of the
Eucharist, all fell into contempt.

As early as February 1428, as we have seen, the first Scottish martyr for
evangelical religion, Patrick Hamilton, was burned at St Andrews. This
sufferer was the son of a bastard of that Lord Hamilton who married the
sister of James III. As was usual, he obtained, when a little boy, an
abbey, that of Ferne in Ross-shire