Scottish Text Society publications > Third series > Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, 1490-1555 > Volume 4, 1936

INTRODUCTION.
XXV
ride ; their swords are rusty, and they know not how to
use them. Moreover they are afraid of each other, and
in the last resort take to their fists, the natural weapons
of their class. Everything in the poem is high parody,
and the amount of detail crammed into the sixty-eight
lines is surprising.
Two other poems written before the King’s death in
1542, in four-foot couplets, continue the vein of satire.
The first, Ane Supplicatioun to the Kingis Grace in Con-
temptioun of Syde Taillis, is a satire against the long
trailing dresses of women, denounced, at times with
frankness, as unhygenic, especially when worn by farm-
lasses, and certainly as no proof of modesty. This poem
is a quip. Not so the second poem, Kitteis Confessioun,
the only poem of Lindsay’s to be published anonymously,
obviously of necessity. It is a satire against the practice
of auricular confession, especially to drunken, lecherous
priests, who break secrecy to discover and denounce
readers of the Bible in English. Kitty is a country
wench, no Puritan, who is seen at confession with such
a priest ; but this is introductory to a brief history of the
confessional and its degradation, which in turn changes
to a plea for the abolition of general confessions and the
substitution of a voluntary system. Parts of the poem
are not altogether clear, and the form is unsatisfactory,
but the satirical introduction was deliberately employed
to entrap the reader into considering the later heretical
suggestion regarding the confessional.
Of Lindsay’s part in the attempts made by Henry VIII.
to induce James to abolish the monasteries nothing is
really known beyond the advice given to the King in
the 1540 version of Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis to seize
Church lands, but it is easy to see that his hostility to
the Church would lead him to sympathise with such a
movement in Scotland, and it is possible to argue that he