.13 ii c? :.SjOJ«i LI.' mi iaOTffi?a "i,r(:HiR.J> §& co'fiisb C s£ "C’ O 'V S o c £cf -O- Ses. § is. 12^ PUBLICATIONS OF THE SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY THIRD SERIES VOLUME X LI I ACCOUNTS OF THE COLLECTORS OF THIRDS OF BENEFICES 1561-1572 1949 ACCOUNTS OF THE COLLECTORS OF THIRDS OF BENEFICES 1561-1572 Edited by GORDON DONALDSON, Ph.D. EDINBURGH Printed by T. and A. Constable Ltd. Printers to the University of Edinburgh for the Scottish History Society 1949 Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS PAGE Introduction ....... vii Charge of Thirds, 1561-1572 .... 1 Account of the Collector General, 1561 . 45 Account of the Collector General, 1562 . 120 Accounts of the Collector General, 1563-1568 172 Abstracts of Accounts of Sub-Collectors, 1563-1572 :— Orkney and Shetland ..... 202 Inverness, etc. ‘ • • • • 205 Moray . 211 Aberdeen and Banff . .218 Forfar and Kincardine ..... 227 Fife, Fothrik and Kinross .... 237 Perth and Strathearn ..... 247 Stirling, Dumbarton, Renfrew, Lanark, Kyle, Garrick and Cunningham .... 256 Edinburgh, Linlithgow, Haddington and Berwick 271 Roxburgh, Berwick, Selkirk and Peebles . 280 Dumfries, Annandale, Kirkcudbright and Wig- town ....... 286 Index 298 A generous contribution from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland towards the cost of producing this volume is gratefully acknowledged by the Council of the Society. INTRODUCTION Any statesmanlike and practicable attempt to settle the disposition of the property of the Scottish church at the Reformation had to take into account not only the financial needs of the protestant congregations but also the compet- ing claims of the crown, the beneficed clergy, the nobility and the gentry to share in the ecclesiastical wealth. For at least two generations the crown, in collusion with the papacy, had profited substantially from the church revenues, partly through the allocation of benefices and pensions to royal nominees and partly by the exaction of heavy taxation. The clergy in possession in 1560 included prelates whose relationship to the most powerful families in the land was sufficient protection against deprivation ; some provision for the rank and file of the clergy was reasonable and the weakness of Scottish administration might in any case have rendered their dispossession im- practicable. Certain noble houses had established a right of hereditary succession in abbeys and priories and had already gone far towards converting them into secular lordships. Laymen of lower rank were enjoying ecclesias- tical fruits through their feus of lands and tacks of teinds. In short, the division of the spoils was already far advanced, and no policy which disregarded these established interests could be seriously entertained. A secondary problem arose from the diverse nature of the revenues themselves. The ‘ temporality ’ of the church consisted broadly of lands—^principally the large estates of the bishoprics and abbeys—and their rents or feu-duties. The main element in ‘ spirituality ’ was the teinds, originally a tithe of produce paid by landholders to the clergy and properly forming the endowment of the parish priests ; but through the ‘ appropriation ’ of the majority of the parish churches to bishoprics, monasteries and collegiate churches the bulk viii ACCOUNTS OF THIRDS OF BENEFICES of the teinds had in many cases been diverted from par- ochial uses, leaving only small assignations to the vicars who served in the parishes. The distinction between temporality and spirituality tended to be lost sight of when a bishopric or abbey was drawing rents and teinds from the same lands and had perhaps set both kinds of dues in tack for a single money payment. There would be immense difficulty in any attempt to ‘ dissolve the prelacies ’ by extricating the appropriated churches and to separate teinds from land-rent and restore them to their initial simplicity as an endowment for the parochial clergy. In the first Book of Discipline (May 1560) the reformers claimed all the ecclesiastical revenues except the tem- poralities of the monastic houses, which were tacitly relinquished to the holders—including the commendators whose support the reformed cause dared not alienate. All other competing claims were disregarded. The temporal- ities of the bishoprics were allotted to the superintendents and the universities, while all parochial revenues—includ- ing all teinds—were to be available for the maintenance of the ministry. The wholesale dispossession of holders of benefices which this programme would have involved could have been carried through only by a government strong enough to ignore the wishes of the nobility, and the necessary extrication of the teinds was probably a task beyond the powers of contemporary administration. The plan was not practicable in the Scotland of 1560. The Book of Discipline led, not to a solution of the financial problem, but to prolonged contention among the reforming party. The Reformation parliament (August 1560), although it established the reformed church quoad sacra, made no provision for its endowment. The com- prehensive claim enunciated in the Book of Discipline was followed, logically enough, by a resolution of the first General Assembly (December 1560) that all who had been in ‘ the ministry of the pope’s kirk ’ should live on alms like paupers, and by the slightly more modest demand of the second, five months later, that protestant stipends INTRODUCTION ix should be the first charge on the teinds of each parish. Meantime, the protestant lords who had ultimately ac- cepted the Book of Discipline had done so only with the qualification that beneficed men who conformed should enjoy their livings for life provided that they supported ministers from their revenues.1 This method of paying stipends was used in some pases.2 Elsewhere, certain clergy who did not support the Reformation suffered confiscation at the hands of protestant magnates, some of whom paid pittances to ministers from the revenues with which they intromitted.3 Several burghs undertook the maintenance of their own ministers.4 Such expedients, while they might alleviate the poverty of the ministers, did not contribute to a settlement, and agreement on financial policy had not been reached when Mary returned from France in August 1561. In the resulting political and religious armistice the domination of the lords of the congregation was at an end ; * the bishops began to grip again to that which most unjustly they called their own ’; and the protestant gentlemen who had intromitted with episcopal and other revenues had to cease their operations.5 By the end of the year the impracticability of the Book of Discipline, apparent to statesmen even before Mary’s return,6 must have been obvious to the most obtuse. Yet something had to be done for the ministers, and agitation for some kind of settlement—inevitably a compromise— came from the ‘ barons ’ 7—the lesser nobility and lairds who had been prominent in the reformation parliament 1 Keith, History (Spottiswoode Soc.), i. 325 ; Diurnal of Occurrents (Bannatyne Club), p. 63; Knox, Works, ii. 130, 161-2, 257-8; Acts and Proceedings of the General Assemblies (hereafter cited as ‘ B.U.K.’), i. 5, 8. * Vide pp. 95, 152 infra ; Rentals Dunkeldense (Scot. Hist. Soc.), p. 347. 3 Knox, ii. 221-2, 298. Vide pp. 152-3 infra. 4 E.g., Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh, 1557-71, pp. 63-5, 68, 72, 75-6, 87 ; Ayr Burgh Accounts (Scot. Hist. Soc.), pp. 30-34, 132; Records of the Burgh of Peebles, 1165-1710, p. 263; Records of the Burgh of Stirling, 1519-1666, p. 74. * Knox, ii. 298. 8 Ibid., 128. 7 Ibid., 297-8. ACCOUNTS OF THIRDS OF BENEFICES and seem to have been peculiarly susceptible to the ex- hortations of the protestant preachers. The privy council agreed with some of the beneficed clergy that a convention of the entire ecclesiastical estate should meet on 15 December 1561. On the 22nd the archbishop of St. Andrews and three bishops offered a quarter of their revenues for one year, to be employed as the queen thought fitting. Emphasis was laid on the financial needs of the crown as well as the kirk. The council, in view of the uncertainty of the amount required for the maintenance of the reformed clergy and for the ‘ support of the queen’s majesty, above her own proper rents, for the common affairs of the country,’ decided that if necessary a third or more of the fruits of every benefice should be uplifted yearly ‘ until a general order be taken.’ Beneficed men were ordered to produce rentals of their revenues, those south of the Mounth on 24 January and those to the north on 10 February ; while the local courts of the reformed church 1 were to send in their estimates of the requirements for stipends. On 24 January the queen appointed a small committee of state officials, with John Wishart of Pittarro, to receive the rentals and to obtain the names of the reformed clergy. By 12 February so few rentals had appeared that it was concluded that the order had been treated with contempt. Factors and chamber- lains were therefore appointed to collect for the queen’s use the revenues of benefices of which rentals had not been given up and also revenues fraudulently concealed in rentals produced ; tenants were to be liable only for the sums set forth in the rentals ; and the court of session was to issue any necessary executorials at the instance of the factors and chamberlains. On 15 February came the decision that the requirements of the crown and the kirk amounted to, not a quarter, but 1 The phrase ‘ the hale superintendentis, ministeris, eldaris and deaconis of the principale townis and schires ’ clearly means those courts, composed of the superintendent with the kirk session of the chief town of his diocese, which played a major part in the government of the kirk for several years after 1560.