chapter 2 Protection and Salvation: Devotion to the Saints
Sum to sanct Roche, with diligence, To saif thame from the pestilence; For thare teith, to sanct Apollene.1
These lines come from Book II of David Lindsay’s poem the Monarche, written in around 1554. In the Monarche, the renowned court poet expressed his deep concern with the proliferation of statues, paintings and murals depicting the saints in Scotland’s churches. For Lindsay, and for Catholic and Protestant reformers in the same period, the line between the use of such images as a learning tool for the illiterate laity, and their idolatrous veneration, was coming to be increasingly blurred. He also blamed the clergy for encouraging “com- moun” Scots to make connections between saints and the cure of particular diseases or misfortunes. For the plague, St Roch was your man; for dental prob- lems, St Appollonia. Problems with your livestock? Invoke St Anthony to “saif the sow” and Brigit for “calf and koow”.2 The twenty-seven saints chosen by Lindsay to illustrate his point were clearly intended to be familiar to his sixteenth-century audience.3 There is a certain irony therefore in the fact that Lindsay’s poem, intended to critique popular religion, provides the modern audience with a strong indication of the holy men and women that were best loved by his fellow Scots. In addition to works of literature like Lindsay’s poem, a range of surviving sources allow us to identify with some accuracy the various saints that late medieval Scots, both clerical and lay, considered to be the finest exemplars of the ideal Christian life, best able to aid them in adversity and the most effective to intercede on their behalf after death. The feast days of these saints were marked in the calendars of books of hours and psalters, pilgrims flocked to their shrines, individuals and corporate groups founded altars and chapels in their honour, and parents used their names for their children.
1 David Laing, ed., Works of Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1879), iii, 29–30. 2 Ibid, iii, 29. 3 In addition to the Holy Blood, Holy Rude and Mary the saints referenced in the poem were Peter, Paul, John, James, Michael, Katherine, Giles, Francis, Apollonia, Roch, Eloi, George, Anthony, Bridget, Cosmo and Damian, Crispina and Crispinian, Zita of Lucca, German, Barbara, Gabriel, Margaret of Antioch, and Bastian, ibid, iii, 27–30.
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1 Fasts and Feasts. Scottish Calendars and the Aberdeen Breviary
The Christian calendar with its major and minor fasts, feasts and holy days was the framework around which the men and women of medieval Scotland organised their lives.4 The major feasts of the church, Easter, Christmas, Whitsun, Martinmass and Candlemass dictated the patterns of work and rest, and served as the dates on which wages, debts and rents were paid. In parish churches, cathedrals and religious communities, feast days were marked by the reading aloud of the lives of saints who were believed to have died on that day. Two authorised calendars or ‘uses’, known as Roman and Sarum, were most commonly found in Scotland.5 These ‘uses’ were a framework to which local religious institutions or individuals added their own choice of saints and feasts. In addition to regional and local variation, the range of feasts that were marked in the calendars also changed over time, reflecting new fashions in devotion and the promotional initiatives of religious institutions and individ- ual clerics. These calendars therefore provide an interesting guide to changes in fashion amongst local church institutions and the educated elite, the other group in Scotland who commissioned private psalters and books of hours. A combination of the destructive energies of the reformation and the ravages of time mean that only thirty-seven complete or fragmentary calendars within books of hours, breviaries and psalters have survived from the many thousands which must have existed in medieval Scotland.6 The eleven calendars that have survived from Scotland prior to the fifteenth century were mainly imported English books with a Roman or Sarum calendar (Table 1. no. 1–11).7 Typically these early psalters, breviaries and books of hours only marked the feasts of, at most, three or four distinctly local saints. The decision to mark a particular feast was often dictated by location or institu- tional affiliation. The Iona Psalter (2), for example, marked the feasts of two former abbots, Columba and Adomnan. The Coldingham Breviary (3) included
4 Richard W. Pfaff, The Liturgy of medieval England – A History (Cambridge: University Press, 2009), 445–509. 5 David McRoberts, “The medieval Scottish Liturgy, illustrated by surviving documents”, Transactions of the Scottish Ecclesiological Society 15 (1957), 24–40. 6 This list, included below in Table 1 and Table 2, is based upon a survey carried out by John Higgitt for his book on the Murthly Hours; nls. Research papers of John Higgitt, Acc 12978/2, and those liturgical books noted by Stephen Holmes that feature a calendar. Stephen Holmes, “Catalogue of liturgical books and fragments in Scotland before 1560”, Innes Review 62.2 (2011), 127–212. 7 McRoberts, “The medieval Scottish Liturgy”, 27.