Sc&- PUBLICATIONS OF THE SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY VOLUME LIV STATUTES OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCH OCTOBEK 190' V STATUTES OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCH 1225-1559 Being a Translation of CONCILIA SCOTIAE: ECCLESIAE SCOTI- CANAE STATUTA TAM PROVINCIALIA QUAM SYNODALIA QUAE SUPERSUNT With Introduction and Notes by DAVID PATRICK, LL.D. Printed at the University Press by T. and A. Constable for the Scottish History Society 1907 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION— i. The Celtic Church in Scotland superseded by the Church of the Roman Obedience, . ix ir. The Independence of the Scottish Church and the Institution of the Provincial Council, . xxx in. Enormia, . xlvii iv. Sources of the Statutes, . li v. The Statutes and the Courts, .... Ivii vi. The Significance of the Statutes, ... lx vii. Irreverence and Shortcomings, .... Ixiv vni. Warying, . Ixx ix. Defective Learning, . Ixxv x. De Concubinariis, Ixxxvii xi. A Catholic Rebellion, ..... xciv xn. Pre-Reformation Puritanism, . xcvii xiii. Unpublished Documents of Archbishop Schevez, cvii xiv. Envoy, cxi List of Bishops and Archbishops, . cxiii Table of Money Values, cxiv Bull of Pope Honorius hi., ...... 1 Letter of the Conservator, ...... 1 Procedure, ......... 2 Forms of Excommunication, 3 General or Provincial Statutes of the Thirteenth Century, 8 Aberdeen Synodal Statutes of the Thirteenth Century, 30 Ecclesiastical Statutes of the Thirteenth Century, . 46 Constitutions of Bishop David of St. Andrews, . 57 St. Andrews Synodal Statutes of the Fourteenth Century, vii 68 viii STATUTES OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCH Provincial and Synodal Statute of the Fifteenth Century, . .78 Provincial Synod and General Council of 1420, . 80 General Council of 1459, 82 Provincial Council of 1549, ...... 84 General Provincial Council of 1551-2 .... 135 General Provincial Council of 1558-9, • • • • 149 APPENDIX I.— Adamnan’s Canons, ....... 192 Synod of North Wales, 197 From Decretals of Gregory ix., . .199 Chancery Forms and Brieves, ..... 207 The Bishops to King Alexander hi., . 211 Mandate of Innocent iv., ...... 212 James i. to the Council of Basel, . 218 Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Council of Trent, . 220 Rubrics, . 223 APPENDIX II.— Formulas of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth Centuries, 224 Pope Alexander hi. to the Bishops of Scotland, . 234 Declaration on the Teind Sheaves of Pitlour, 1465, . 235 Of the Conventions General and General Provincial Councils of 1536, 1543, 1545, 238 Ordinances of St. Andrews Diocese in 1516-21 . 260 Ordinances of St. Andrews Diocese in 1544-6 . 284 The Ex-Archbishop of Lyons to the Bishop of Glas- gow in 1200, 288 Bull of Innocent in. against Clerical Duelling in 1216, 293 Fragments, ........ 294 James i. on behalf of the Church of Candida Casa, . 294 Grant by James iv. of the Chapel Royal of St. Mary of the Rock in 1496, ...... 295 INDEX, 297 INTRODUCTION In 1225 a papal bull permitted and commanded the bishops and clergy of the Scottish Church to meet in council under immediate apostolic authority, but without the presence of a papal legate, though they had as yet no metropolitan to summon them or preside over them. And the first meeting of what was practically a national council of a national church is a notable event in the history of the country, and marks a stage in the most sweeping revolution Scotland was to know. The radical reformation in church and state begun under Malcolm Canmore and St. Margaret was com- pleted in its main outlines under their sons, and by the end of the twelfth century had transformed the schismatic Ecclesia Scoticana of the eleventh century, the isolated church of Celtic Scotia beyond the Forth, into the all but fully equipped Church of Scotland, to which as to an indisputable branch of the Church Catholic the bull of Pope Honorius m. was addressed. The bull proclaimed urbi et orbi that a new nation had come into being in North Britain, and that the church which had been established there was henceforward to rank as sub- stantially a distinct province of Catholic Christendom. Of this new nation the kernel was, not any Celtic tribe or tribes, but the English-speaking lowlanders, ruled by an Anglo-Norman king and led by Anglo-Norman barons. The lowlanders were in no sense in communion with the Celtic church of Scotia, nor could they accordingly reform it from within : they maintained their own church, for many STATUTES OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCH centuries an integral part of the church of Northumbria, uncontaminated by the Celtic peculiarities they abhorred, and imposed it by force on the Celts. The church of the men of Lothian became the church of the nation, everywhere extruding and superseding the Celtic church. The new establishment brought with it the Roman canon law and the bishops’ courts in which that law was enforced; and when the ecclesiastical constitution was developed by the creation of a provincial or national church council, the canon law of Rome was expanded and applied exactly on the English model by this council in its Statuta. And by making its own the spirit and substance, in many cases the very words, of enactments passed at national, provincial, and diocesan synods of the English church, the new church in North Britain proved to demonstration that, as in apostolic suc- cession, doctrines, institutions, and rites, so also in the details of discipline and the working of its ecclesiastical courts, it was no offshoot or daughter of the old separatist Celtic church, but a true, though locally distinct and independent, branch of the Anglo-Catholic church. The right to call its own councils, conceded by Rome and tacitly admitted by England, was an important recognition of the independence alike of church and nation, a modest triumph of the discreet but persistent Scottish nationalism maintained at Rome by a succession of Scottish kings, barons, and bishops in the teeth of equally persistent English opposi- tion. This cannot be called the accepted view : it is hot set forth in Dr. Robertson’s learned preface; and recent autho- rities who quote with due respect the Statuta and Dr. Robertson’s comments thereon pass over the period without even alluding to the institutional significance of the council or its work. Hence it is necessary here briefly to survey some aspects and episodes of that establishment of the Catholic kirk in Scotland, of which the provincial council was for more than three centuries the copestone. INTRODUCTION xi We first hear of the Ecclesia Scoticana under that name late in the ninth century, and then it was apparently the ecclesiastical factor in the Celtic reaction and renaissance that placed Kenneth Macalpin’s dynasty on the throne of the Pictish kingdom. The church council of Chalons in 813 had given final effect to St. Boniface’s zeal against the Scotic or Irish missionaries by pronouncing their orders utterly invalid and tainted with simony; a great English council at Chelsea in 816 had followed suit, denouncing Scotic orders, and exclud- ing clerics ordained by Scoti from ministering in any of the sacraments. The Pictish church, which for more than a hundred years had been under Anglican influence, also refused to recognise Scotic masses, and, according to the Pictish chronicle, was therefore justly punished by the victory of Kenneth, who in Pictland took up the challenge of Christen- dom, and in opposition to southern influences drew closer the old bond of connection with the Scotic church in Ireland. In 878 one of Kenneth’s successors, Girg or Gregory, gave the Ecclesia Scoticana liberty from servitude ‘ according to the use and wont of the Piets,’ a liberty Kenneth had obviously failed completely to secure for it. And Kenneth and Girg significantly showed the animus of this Ecclesia Scoticana against the Ecclesia Anglicana by burning or plundering, the one Melrose, the other Lindisfarne—the two most sacred shrines in Northumbria in the days of the old Scotic mission from Iona, which had become odious in Scotic eyes by joining in the Roman defection of Whitby in 664. In 908 the Scotican church of Kenneth and Girg was united on a footing of equality or something more with the national church of the kingdom of Pictavia or Alba ; and a quarter of a century after this union, Scotia or Scotland—of old the name for Ireland only, a name the Irish now most oppor- tunely gave up, possibly as exposing them to obloquy abroad—- becomes the accepted and universal designation for the king- dom of the Piets between Forth and Spey : the church of the xii STATUTES OF THE SCOTTISH CHURCH Scoti is now accordingly the national church; and the Epscop Alban at St. Andrews is henceforth the Episcopus Scotorum. When St. Margaret made Scotland her adopted country, and began the work of converting the Scotic clergy to Scrip- tural and Catholic views and observances, it was with the church of this Scotia alone that she had to do. Moravia (the great northern province of which modern Morayshire is but a fragment), Caithness, Argyll were hardly within her husband’s authority: the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland were wholly without it. Strathclyde and Galloway, though under the kings of Scotia, were no part of their hereditary kingdom, and their churches, though churches of Celtic races and of Celtic rites, had no connection with that of Scotia; the ancient sees of Whithorn and Glasgow, both daughters of British missions from the south, had always looked southward not northward for spiritual guidance. Lothian, which had come under the power of the kings of Scotia early in the century, was in all respects more completely alien. The Anglic inhabitants had bargained that they were to be allowed to retain their own laws and customs; of their speech there never had been question; and their church was an integral part of the church of Northumbria, of the Roman obedience.