om
its best uses to the less desirable side--the monastic side--of the
mediaeval church. In the revival which came from England before the
twelfth century, a great impulse had been given to the parochialising of
the country, and to keeping up religious life in every district and
estate. But a prejudice running back to very early centuries branded the
parish priests as seculars, and gradually drew away again the devotion
and the means of the faithful from the parishes where they were needed,
and to which they properly belonged. It drew them away, in Scotland, not
only to rich centres like cathedrals, with their too wasteful retinue,
but far more to the great monasteries scattered over the land. Kings and
barons, who proposed to spend life so as to need after its close a good
deal of intercession, naturally turned their eyes, even before
death-bed, to these wealthy strongholds of poverty and prayer; and of a
hundred other places besides Melrose, we know 'That lands and livings,
many a rood, had gifted the shrine for their soul's repose.' But the
transfer, to such centres, of lands (which were supposed, by the feudal
law, to belong to chiefs rather than to the community), was not so
direct an injury to the people of Scotland, as the alienation to the
same institutions of parochial tithes--sometimes under the form of
alienating the churches to which the tithes were paid. These parochial
tithes all possessors of land in the parish were bound by law to pay,
whether they desired it or not. And, strictly, they should have been
paid to the pastor of the parish and for its benefit. But by a
scandalous corruption, often protested against by both Parliament and
the Church, the Lords of lands were allowed to divert the tithes, which
they were already bound to pay, to congested ecclesiastical centres,
sometimes to cathedrals, more often to religious houses of 'regulars.'
After this was done the monastery or religious House enjoyed the whole
sheaves or tithes of the land in question; the local vicar, if the House
appointed one, being entitled only to the 'lesser tithes' of domestic
animals, eggs, grass, etc. This robbery of the parishes of
Scotland--parishes which were already far too large and too scattered,
as John Major points out--was carried on to an extraordinary extent.
Each of the religious houses of Holyrood and Kelso had the tithes of
twenty-seven parishes diverted or 'appropriated' to it. In some
districts two-thirds of the