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

By Mairi Cowan

Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350-1560 examines lay religious culture in Scottish towns between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. It looks at what the living did to influence the dead and how the dead were believed to influence the living in turn; it explores the ways in which townspeople asserted their individual desires in the midst of overlapping communities; and it considers both continuities and changes, highlighting the Catholic Reform movement that reached Scottish towns before the Protestant Reformation took hold. Students and scholars of Scottish history and of medieval and early modern history more broadly will find in this book a new approach to the religious culture of Scottish towns between 1350 and 1560, one that interprets the evidence in the context of a time when Europe experienced first a flourishing of medieval religious devotion and then the sterner discipline of early modern Reform.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526162908

Mairi Cowan

Dr Mairi Cowan is a Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga

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Death, Life, and Religious Change In

Scottish Towns, c.1350-1560

Death, Life, and Religious Change In Scottish Towns, c.1350–1560

Mairi Cowan

Manchester University Press

Manchester

Copyright © Mairi Cowan 2012

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

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN 978 0 7190 8023 4 hardback

First published 2012

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

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To Uncle Bill

Contents

Preface and acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Lamenting the dead

1 How the living influenced the dead

2 How the dead influenced the living

Part II: Summoning the living

3 Communities of religion

4 The individual in the community

Part III Summoning the living

5 Religious dissent

6 Catholic reform

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Preface and acknowledgements

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

The School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the St Andrews Society of Toronto provided financial support that enabled me to travel across the Atlantic and conduct research in the archives, libraries and churches of Scotland, and I would like to thank the personnel in all these places for going out of their way to help a fumbling student from abroad to locate original documents for historical interpretation unmediated by distance and editors: I will never forget the experience of opening an envelope that contained an otherwise forgotten charter and smelling the unexpected and utterly delightful aroma of beeswax, still sweet after 600 years.

While many authors have an ideal reader in mind as they work, I was so fortunate as to have not just one but three ideal readers for whom to write. I thank each of them humbly for their willingness to devote time from their very busy lives to read and comment on my drafts. Elizabeth Ewan, carrying on her role as primary adviser, continued to be the most generous scholar I know. She shared her knowledge – and even books! – about medieval and early modern Scottish towns, and offered wise and always welcome guidance through the rough patches of research. Hilary Evans Cameron, who commands perhaps the sharpest reasoning skills of anyone I have met, brought her analytical lens into focus on my prose and not only pointed out unsupported claims and lapses in logic, but also applied her keen ability to discern what I was actually trying to say and then suggest better ways of saying it. Whitney Hahn corresponded with me from three different continents to provide the perspective of an intelligent and curious non-specialist. Although she apologised repeatedly for not having much of a background in medieval and early modern Scottish history, her confusion was in fact extremely valuable to me as a guide to determining how much explanation might be required by a sensitive reader with expertise in things other than the scope of this monograph.

As a novice to the book-writing procedure, I would like to thank the staff at Manchester University Press and the anonymous reviewers of the typescript for their patient assistance in getting the book through production, and I would like to thank also my supportive friends and colleagues at the University of Toronto for their patient assistance in getting me through the process.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends from outside the academe who have been wonderfully encouraging of my historical curiosity and who, in so being, have endured my many historical rants and raves with remarkably good humour. I would like particularly to thank my parents, John and Norma Cowan, who have always supported me in my education. I thank them also, along with my parents-in-law, Linda and Todd Meyer, for help in caring for my daughter Daphne, who was a gurgling baby when this book began and is now a singing and dancing bilingual schoolgirl. Most especially, I owe much gratitude to my spouse, Chris. For more than half of our lives he has been a sounding board, adviser, and travelling companion to both physical and metaphysical sites of historical interest, and I thank him for listening patiently to my imaginative wanderings, for providing intelligent observations on my nascent ideas, and for accepting my curious ways.

Introduction

In about the year 1460, a new bell was installed at the parish church of St Giles, Edinburgh. Its surface was adorned with an image of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus, the arms of Guelderland, and the Latin inscription ‘defunctos plango: vivos voco: fulmina frango’, which translates into ‘I lament the dead, I summon the living, I subdue thunderbolts’. Though purchased by the town’s burgesses, the bell was cast not in Edinburgh or even in Scotland but rather in Flanders, a prosperous region in the southern Netherlands that exported both its goods and its artistic culture throughout Europe.¹

Church bells like this one were rung on many different occasions. They tolled through the night on All Hallows’ Eve to request prayers for the recently deceased and they pealed on bright mornings to celebrate a royal birth; they marked ‘church’ time at the beginning of a religious service and also ‘town’ time at the start of a mason’s day of work; they chimed a welcome to visiting princes and they struck a summons to defend the city against attack. Visible to some and audible to many, this bell of St Giles connected its church to all the inhabitants of Edinburgh living and dead, rich and poor, local and foreign, pious and profane.

At the time of the bell’s manufacture, Edinburgh was the largest of Scotland’s towns. Its population was probably approaching 12,000, making it roughly the same size as Norwich, Bremen, Delft, and Zurich. Only a few Scottish towns, including Aberdeen, Perth, and Dundee, had more than 5,000 inhabitants; most were considerably smaller, with populations in the hundreds rather than the thousands.² If a premodern ‘town’ is defined as any settlement where a significant proportion of the population lived off nonagricultural occupations such as trade, industry, and administration,³ towns had existed in Scotland since long before this period, and perhaps as early as the Iron Age. But most towns took on a new character during the twelfth-century revival of European urban culture when King David I (1124–1153) created the first official Scottish ‘burghs’, towns that were incorporated by charters granting special rights such as monopoly over trade in surrounding areas. ‘Burgesses’ were privileged inhabitants of the burghs. They had the right to buy or sell in the town’s market without paying a toll, to hold land free of any services other than rent, and to be tried by their peers in a burgh court that was presided over by the provost and bailies, who were officers chosen by the wider community of burgesses. Entry into this privileged group of burgesses was normally achieved through family connections – more specifically through being the son of a burgess or the husband of a burgess’s daughter – and through payment of a fee. In the early years of Scottish burghs, many adult males would have been burgesses, and women and children acquired some of the privileges of burgess-ship through their husbands and fathers, though very few of a town’s female inhabitants were actually burgesses themselves. As immigration from the surrounding countryside increased in the later Middle Ages, so too did the number of non-burgesses, who lived and worked in the town but lacked the privileges accruing to burgess status.⁴

Although early town settlements grew up informally around suitable nuclei such as natural harbours, crossroads of trade, or religious centres, the official founding of burghs usually included the planning of streets and burgage plots. A typical Scottish town plan featured a single main street divided into frontages of between 6 and 7 metres, with burgage plots extending back from the frontages in a herringbone pattern. To the rear of these plots were back lanes, which over the years sometimes evolved into larger thoroughfares. In many cases the main street of a town widened at the market place, where the market cross, the tron or weigh beam, and the tolbooth were located. This last structure served many functions, including the collection site for tolls, the town gaol, and the meeting place for the burgh council, and therefore it tended to be conspicuously placed and sturdily built. The ground floor of the tolbooth at Peebles, for example, was made of stone and covered at least 12 metres by 5 metres, and its upper floor was occupied by public rooms such as the council chamber.⁵

If the importance of commerce gave prominence to the market places of Scottish towns, the importance of religion conferred distinction on their ecclesiastical buildings. Parish churches were located either centrally within the townscape or on sites of special religious significance, such as the burial place of a saint, and were usually relatively large in scale and built of stone. Only one large Scottish town, Aberdeen, was also a cathedral city. In other Scottish towns, the high-ranking ecclesiastical officials attached to cathedrals – the bishops themselves, but also their deans and chapters – were largely absent from urban politics.

Houses were set facing the street along the fronts of burgage plots, with a long stretch of property extending to the rear. These backlands could be used for vegetable gardens, livestock pens, servants’ living quarters and middens. Most domestic buildings were made from wooden posts, wattle walls daubed with clay, and thatched roofs, though by the sixteenth century some of the larger houses of the more prosperous burgesses may have had roofs of tile and windows of glass. The houses that fronted on to the main street often combined a workshop or commercial shop at street level with living quarters above or behind. As towns expanded, houses were also built on the vennels or closes that ran perpendicular to the main street. In areas of higher population densities, especially near the market, backlands were sometimes subdivided into smaller plots and filled in with additional houses. A few towns dealt with population pressure by building houses upwards, with the tallest examples in Edinburgh reaching five or six storeys.⁶

Some aspects of urban life in Scotland were similar to conditions of local rural life. Towns had landscape features connecting them to rural areas, such as green spaces, gardens, and livestock pens. Many urban inhabitants came originally from the countryside, and wealthy burgesses acquired property outside the town in which they were living. Towns had symbolic boundaries, most notably the gates, but most were not walled and easy access and egress could be had from the backs of burgage plots. In spite of these links between urban and rural areas, towns differed from the countryside in significant ways, too. They were more crowded than their rural hinterlands, and they were locations where people of different classes, occupations and places of origin lived in very close proximity with one another. Although towns housed only about 5–10 per cent of the population of Scotland, they nonetheless played important roles in the country’s economy and culture. Towns exported animal products such as raw wool, hides, and fish, along with increasing quantities of salt, coal, and cloth, and they imported a wide range of manufactured and luxury items. Towns were also centres of formal education. Three universities were found in Scottish towns by the end of the fifteenth century (at St Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen), as well as many song schools and grammar schools.⁷

Towns had some distinctive features, but they were still part of a larger nation. Two languages were widely spoken in late medieval and early modern Scotland, with Scots, a northern dialect of English, predominant in the south-east and Lowlands, and Gaelic, a Celtic language with many dialects and a Common form understood by the literate elite on both sides of the Irish Sea, the principal language of the Highlands and Islands. International relations centred on Scotland’s ‘auld enemy’, England, and its partner in the ‘auld alliance’, France. As with most European states, Scotland’s system of government was a monarchy, and from 1371 it was under control of the Stewart dynasty. This control was highly dependent on the cooperation of subjects, however, because the kingdom was relatively decentralized and its most important ties were personal ones based on lordship, kinship, and friendship. Many kings of the Scots came to the throne while still children, and political factions were often jostling for power during the minority government. Nevertheless, crown and magnates were usually able to cooperate, in spite of short periods of friction.⁸

Scotland was connected in many ways with other parts of Europe. The St Giles bell itself came from the same place as the Scottish queen at the time of its forging, Mary of Gueldres, who had married King James II in 1449. Her uncle, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, sent the huge cannon Mons Meg with an escort of 50 men-at-arms to the Scottish king in 1457. When James died three years later, Mary founded Trinity College Church in Edinburgh, and commissioned Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes to paint its altarpiece. Mary was also responsible, possibly at the request of merchants, for bringing to Scotland the order of Observant Franciscans, who founded nine Scottish houses during the later fifteenth century.⁹ The Low Countries, including Flanders, had especially close trading connections with Scotland during this time but it was not the only part of Europe to leave its mark. Books came to Scotland from France, Germany, and England, as well as the Netherlands.¹⁰ Even the built heritage of Scottish towns reflected Scotland’s alignment with developments abroad. In the fourteenth century, English styles influenced Scottish architecture quite heavily. Then, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Scottish architecture turned more to continental models and a revival of older, indigenous Scottish traits.

King James IV’s statement in a letter to the Prior General of the Dominican order in 1506 that Scotland was ‘almost the most remote region in the world’ was obviously something of an exaggeration.¹¹ Scotland was in fact very much part of Europe, and tied in with wider European events.¹² The most calamitous of these was the plague of the mid-fourteenth century that brought death to hundreds of millions in Eurasia within the space of a few years. Regardless of whether or not its impact on Scotland was as severe as in more densely populated regions, the Black Death was the greatest demographic crisis that Scotland had ever experienced. Introduced to Scottish soldiers by English forces in 1349, it quickly spread through the country and killed at least a quarter, perhaps a third, of the population in a matter of months. For the survivors of the first wave, reduced population pressure led to lower prices and rents alongside higher wages and a concentration of capital, which in turn brought generally higher standards of living.¹³

Following the first wave of plague, the Scottish economy experienced a boom that lasted from the late 1350s to the early 1380s, by which time Scotland had become the second biggest exporter of wool in Europe. At the end of the fourteenth century, however, a European-wide recession caused a serious slump in Scottish trade, and in the fifteenth century wool exports averaged only about a quarter of what they had been at their height 100 years earlier. Scotland’s economy continued to suffer, with a balance-ofpayments deficit, bullion shortage, and devaluation of coinage, all of which contributed to a sharp rise in the prices of basic commodities. The inhabitants of towns felt this change most keenly, since they had to purchase so much of their food and other basic goods at market. As prices rose, landlords responded by ‘feuing’ their lands and granting them to ‘feuars’, who paid a large entry payment and life leases in order to become heritable proprietors. The landlords were able to make money quickly in this system, but suffered financial losses in the long run because inflation shrank the real value of money made on the leases. Scottish trade started to grow again in the 1530s, only to contract once more with the English invasions of the 1540s. Whatever the overall extent of economic expansion in the sixteenth century, it did not keep pace with population growth, and unemployment and vagrancy became increasingly destabilizing forces from the mid-sixteenth century on.¹⁴

Political and economic conditions in Europe at large clearly had an impact on Scotland, but so did that aspect of society that is central to this study, religion. At the beginning of the period covered in this book, virtually every person in Scotland was Christian. In 1350, Western Christendom had not yet shattered along lines of confessional difference, and most of its inhabitants would likely not have thought of their religion as anything more specific than ‘Christian’, though modern readers are inclined to identify it more precisely as Catholic. Different kinds of religious attitudes and activities coexisted, from the sophisticated theology of the university-trained intellectuals to the everyday rituals of illiterate farmers who made use of charms and spells along with the prayers they offered in their parish church. Important features of this system that were more or less uniform across western Europe included an acknowledgement in principle of the spiritual authority of the papacy; a belief that the saving power of God was located in the rites of the Church and the concomitant belief that nobody was saved outside this Church; confidence in the helping power of saints; and faith in an afterlife whose characteristics depended largely on a person’s beliefs and actions while alive but also on the prayers of others after death. New developments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries led to laypeople in much of Europe taking a greater role in their own spiritual affairs. One popular movement in parts of north-west Europe was the devotio moderna. Originating in the Low Countries, it included an adherence to the vita apostolica, the apostolic life in imitation of the original followers of Jesus, and a stress on the inner life of the pious individual.

Although, as this book will discuss, the religious culture of Scotland was broadly in line with the rest of Europe, there were nevertheless a few structural elements of the Scottish Church that set it somewhat apart. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the ecclesiastical province of York (in England) claimed supremacy over the entire Scottish Church. The papacy for some time supported York’s claim, as shown by papal bulls from the first half of the twelfth century that repeatedly demanded the obedience of Scottish bishops to York. That constant repetition of the demand was needed strongly suggests a steadfast refusal among Scottish bishops to obey, though it was not until the middle of the century that papal attitudes shifted, likely in reaction to the Becket controversy. In 1164, the Pope reversed his office’s earlier position that Scottish bishops had to be consecrated by or with the permission of archbishops of York, and instead consecrated the Bishop of Glasgow himself. In 1175, the Pope described the church of Glasgow as his ‘special daughter’ with no intermediary, and in 1192, to make matters absolutely clear, he declared in the bull Cum universi that the entire Scottish Church was the special daughter of the Pope with no intermediary. This meant that the Pope himself would carry out those supervisory functions performed elsewhere by archbishops, and that all Scottish dioceses (except for Galloway, which was under the Archbishop of York) were exempt from any local metropolitan authority and were instead equal administrative units, each answerable directly to Rome. Although exempt dioceses could be found elsewhere in Europe, it was only in Scotland that they were so numerous as to form virtually a national Church with no local archbishop. The Scottish Church therefore had secured its independence from English claims, but this arrangement presented it with its own particular organizational and pastoral difficulties that were thrown into especially sharp relief following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. One of this council’s decrees was that archbishops were to hold yearly provisional councils, and that the bishops in attendance were to enforce the rules decreed within their own dioceses. With no archbishops, the Scottish Church was facing serious challenges of how to implement these efforts at reforming discipline and order, not to mention pastoral care. The solution proposed by the Scottish bishops was to hold regular provincial councils themselves. The Scottish Church remained without a provincial head until 1472, when St Andrews was elevated to an archbishopric, followed by the elevation of Glasgow in 1492. Though this arrangement did set Scotland apart from the rest of Europe in terms of its ecclesiastical organization, at the same time its status as ‘special daughter’ of the Pope quite possibly also helped this kingdom, geographically so distant from Rome, increase its sense of connection to the organizational centre of religion in Europe.¹⁵

The basic religious beliefs and symbols of Catholic Europe were international. Scottish churches contained images of Christ and saints in familiar iconography, and they held services that would have been recognizable throughout western Europe in their essentials. Scottish clergy regularly attended general councils of the Church, with more than sixty Scottish representatives attending the Council of Basel, for example, between 1431 and 1449.¹⁶ Scotland had over a hundred monasteries by the later Middle Ages, and while most of these monastic houses had already been founded by the mid-fourteenth century, some were established later, including the Carthusian house at Perth, founded by James I in 1429, and the female Dominican house of St Catherine of Siena, founded in Edinburgh in 1517.¹⁷ A more popular type of new foundation in the later medieval period was the collegiate church, where secular clergy were gathered into a college. There were 42 of these institutions in Scotland by the mid-sixteenth century.¹⁸

Late medieval Catholic religious culture has been characterized in a wide variety of ways over the years. Some historians have portrayed it as intense and degenerate, an overripe autumn excessive in its irrationality, its sentimentality, and its emotional drive.¹⁹ Historians focusing on popular expressions of religion in particular have often been inclined either to dismiss lay understandings of Christianity altogether, or to concentrate on exceptional individuals who were thinking and acting outside the mainstream.²⁰ Since the later twentieth century, alternate interpretations have arisen that rehabilitate late medieval religion somewhat, presenting it as a coherent system ultimately shared by clerics and laypeople, even if the different groups articulated this system in their own way. On the whole, according to this interpretation, the religious culture of late medieval Europe was a rich and diverse form of Catholicism that allowed believers more scope for personal direction in belief and practice than would normally be the case in later centuries.²¹

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

Scottish history remains largely absent from the dominant historical narrative of religion in