Scottish Text Society publications > Old series > New Testament in Scots > Volume 1, 1901

INTRODUCTION.
It has often been remarked that at the time of the
Reformation in Scotland no attempt was made to pro¬
vide the people with the Scriptures in their own ver¬
nacular. The Bible was imported from England, and its
language, which at first cannot have been easily under¬
stood by the masses, came by degrees to exercise a
marked influence in anglicising the native speech. A
few years ago no fragments of any portion of the Bible
in Scots were known to exist, if we exclude the oc¬
casional quotations made by a few writers, and these
chiefly Roman Catholics, who, repudiating the English
versions, made their own translations as required from
the Latin Vulgate. John Gau in his ‘The Richt Vay to
the Kingdome of Heuine,’ printed at Malmo in Sweden
in 1533, is almost the solitary instance of a Scottish
Protestant citing Scripture in his native dialect, and
his book is a translation of the Danish work of
Christiern Pedersen, ‘ Den rette vey till Hiemmerigis
Rige,’ originally published at Antwerp in 1531.1 Gau
1 See Professor Mitchell’s Introduction to his reprint of the ‘ Richt Vay ’
(Scot. Text Soc.), 1888.
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VOL. I.
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