Series 6 > Perth Kirk Session books, 1577-1590

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THE PERTH KIRK SESSION BOOKS
Native anticlericalism had fuelled Reformation fires: Sir David Lynd-
say s vigorous critique of monastic corruption, Ane Satyre of the Thre Estatis,
targeting among others Perth’s own Carthusian house, had been performed
in Perth’s Bow Butts before James V in 1540. It played to a receptive audi¬
ence: in 1537 two Perth men had been prosecuted for hanging an image of
St Francis with a ram’s horns and a cow’s rump attached to it, presumably
reflecting resentment of the Greyfriars for the sort of corruption criticised
by Lyndsay. In the year before the martyrs were executed, a mob attacked the
Blackfriars’ house and paraded their cooking pot through the streets - surely
an outcry against mendicant wealth and self-indulgence.72 At around the
same time two burgesses were heavily fined for reading the vernacular Bible
and disputing traditional versions of its meaning, and a converted priest (and
the town clerk) Sir Henry Elder was banished.73 Beaton may have thought
that his reprisal against the protestant townspeople would stem this tide,
but events proved him very wrong: in 1545 the burgh council elected an
outspoken protestant, the Master of Ruthven, to serve as provost, rejecting
Beaton’s own candidate.74
the event, and with his own axe to grind, but the account is not beyond credibility, given
the council’s election of a protestant provost in 1545 (PKCA ms B59/12/2, f. 4) and given
how events played out in the 1550s. Henry Adamson in The Muses Threnodie expanded on
popular support for the martyrs, recounting how Cardinal Beaton watched the execution
from the Spey Tower window, ‘Which treacherous fact did so enrage the town,/ No credit
more to black, white, nor gray gown/ After these dayes was given’ (53).
72 Lyndsay’s Satyre was edited for the Scottish Text Society; see Lyndsay, Works, ed. Douglas
Hamer, 4 vols (STS, 1931-36) iv, 91,11. 767-68, and iv, 387,11. 4390-94, for criticism of the
friars ofTullilum. John Row, Historic of the Kirk of Scotland, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1842) i, 3-4;
ii, 311-12, reported that Lyndsay, ‘being printed, came to the people’s hands’ and inspired
them to criticise the friars’ preaching,‘opening up the abuses among the clergy at that time’.
The performance in 1540 he said ‘made the people sensible of the darkness wherein they
lay, of the wickedness of their kirkmen, and did let them see how God’s kirk should have
been otherwise guided’. Janet Foggie’s fine accotmt of the Perth Blackfriars’ resort to law
to collect debts owed them by burgesses adds to the evidence for popular resentment of the
friars’ wealth and grasping ways: Renaissance Religion in Urban Scotland: The Dominican Order,
1450-1560 (Leiden, 2003). On Dominican incomes in the 1550s, NRS ms GD 79/6/3A.
Foggie reports the total income as £212 9s 9d for 1557-59.The average income of a servant
in this decade was about 4s per week without bed and board (Hunt, Hammermen’s Book, pp.
xxvii).
73 Knox, History i, 55; Calderwood, Historic, i, 175; NRS ms GD79/1/58 (on the cooking pot
incident); Milne, 232-4. John Elder paid either ,£200 or £250 for his pardon, Laurence
Pullar £40 in 1543 (Hunt, Hammermen’s Book, p. xxii).The baxter John Cameron was also
declared a heretic in 1539, though the nature of his beliefs is unclear; and the fresher Walter
Piper, guilty of disputing on the vernacular Scriptures, fled the town in the wake of the
executions in 1544. Henry Elder was not the first Perth cleric to convert to protestantism:
lest we grant too much credit to the craftspeople for early adoption of Reformed ideas, it
is important to note that in 1535 the Dominican prior John McAlpine, two other Domini¬
cans, and a Carthusian all fled the country after converting: M.Verschuur, ‘Perth and the
Reformation’, 332—33.
74 PKCA ms B59/12/2, fo. 4r.