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INTRODUCTION.
XI
a steadfast and powerful protector of the friends of the
Reformation ; and the latter of whom was to be enrolled
among the confessors, though fortunately not among the
martyrs of those unquiet times. He was to be arraigned
before his former fellow-student, Cardinal Betoun, for
reading the English New Testament and favouring the
heresies of England ; and managing to escape his adver¬
saries, was to be burned in effigy, but spared in person
to have his sentence formally reversed after the Reforma¬
tion by John Wynram, who had also taken part in the
original process of condemnation. “ This worthy knight
ended his aige with fulnesse of daies at St Andrewes.”
The last on this roll who falls to be mentioned as an
athlete in the great contest of the sixteenth century is Jho.
Gaw, the author—or rather, as is now ascertained, the trans¬
lator—of the first treatise in exposition and defence of the
Reformed faith which appeared in the Scottish tongue, with
a brief account of whose story and book the rest of this
introduction is to be occupied.
John Gau, Gaw, or Gall (for in all these ways his name
has been written) is supposed to have been born in the last
decade of the fifteenth century, and in the city of St Johns-
toun or Perth.1 There is this at least to be said in favour
of the long-received tradition as to the place of his birth,
that the name of Gaw was one not unknown in that district
about that time, and is actually found in the records of the
rentals of three of the altarages2 before the close of the cen¬
tury. In the year 1509 it appears on the matriculation list
of the University of St Andrews, which, according to the
1 Laing in 1 Miscellany of Bannatyne Club,’ vol. iii. p. 347.
2 See letters in Appendix A. The name, however, is not peculiar to Perth.
A “ Patricius Gawe, na. Laudo."—i.e., of the Lothian nation,—matriculated a
few years after John.