ng felt to be a grievous oppression. Was it any
wonder that those crushed and down-trodden classes should rally round
their protectors, and under their kindly and godly training should grow
up to be a strength to the church and a power in the state? Charming
fancy pictures are still sometimes drawn of the stately monastery--with
its handsome church and kindly and cultured monks--as a centre of
civilising and Christianising influences to the district in which it was
erected. These influences no doubt had a certain reality in the early
ages of the church, and even in the days of the good Queen Margaret; but
in Scotland, at least, these days had long passed away before the
sixteenth century; and the monasteries, as a whole, had become a source
of weakness and scandal, rather than of strength and honour to the
dominant church. In fact, their wealth, being to a large extent derived
from the teinds of parishes, should have been devoted to the spiritual
interests of these parishes, whereas the vicars appointed by them being
generally put off with a miserable pittance and left largely dependent
on these hated and oppressive exactions--corpse presents, uppermost
cloth, Pasche-offerings--could not fail to alienate the peasantry from
the monasteries and their rural representatives. Such charges of
oppression could never have been so publicly made against them had they
not been notoriously true. And if further evidence were needed, it may
be found in abundance in the poems of Sir David Lindsay and the
Wedderburns. The picture the former has drawn of the poor peasant driven
out of house and holding[218] by these oppressive exactions is known to
be true to the life; and contributed greatly to the overthrow of the
merciless oppressors who, until the very eve of the triumph of the
Reformation, could not be persuaded either to abolish or abate their
dues.[219]

FOOTNOTES:

[180] [The six were John Wynram, John Spottiswoode, John Willock, John
Douglas, John Row, and John Knox (_supra_, p. 99).]

[181] Spottiswoode's History, Spot. Soc. ed., i. 371, 372.

[182] _Supra_, pp. 112, 113.

[183] The appointment of such an official as chief minister of the
English congregation of Frankfort had, however, been urged by Knox's
opponents there, but was refused by his party (Discourse of Troubles at
Frankfort, pp. xiv, xlvii, cxvii, cxxxv-cxxxviii, cxlvi, cxlvii).

[184] Dunlop's Confessions, ii. 409, 410; Laing's Knox, iv. 177.

[185] The g