1 - Contesting the Reformation: Roger Mason’s (‘sufficiently plausible’) Debt to David Hay Fleming and Andrew Lang

Summary

IN 1881 the publishers of the St Andrews Citizen produced An Alphabetic Guidebook to St Andrews by David Hay Fleming – a local man whose father John had a china and stoneware business which David would sell two years later to finance a life focused on all things antiquarian. His guidebook pointed to the usual tourist attractions, including the skating rink at the west end of the Scores where workmen had unearthed a lead seal of Pope Innocent IV, a pontiff described by Hay Fleming as ‘inferior to none of his predecessors in arrogance and insolence of temper’. In comments such as these it was clear that Hay Fleming offered more than a map to the boulevards of the town: he also suggested he had the measure of its soul. Anticipating the black tourism of later generations, while clinging unapologetically to hegemonic Protestant ‘truths’, Hay Fleming began this volume by guiding visitors around sites of execution and iconoclasm, imbuing the built environment of St Andrews with the memory of religious fervour.

… Patrick Hamilton gained the martyr's crown; but his “reek” infected all on whom it blew. … the gentle George Wishart was consumed in front of the Castle that Cardinal Beaton might luxuriously gloat over his dying agonies. The retribution, however, was swift and terrible, for he who had shown no mercy was slain without mercy in his own stronghold. Walter Mill, though aged and feeble, was committed to the flames in 1558. The following year the inhabitants of St Andrews, fired by the irresistible logic and eloquence of Knox, invaded the monasteries, and cleansed the churches of everything that seemed to savour of idolatry. In a niche over the archway between the east end of the Cathedral and the Turret Light, there was an image of the Madonna; though it has been rudely handled, a fragment is still to be seen; it is the only surviving vestige of a Popish idol in St Andrews.

Yet Hay Fleming’s, as one might expect, was not the only voice when it came to St Andrews’ heritage around this time. In 1861 Selkirk born Andrew Lang enrolled at St Andrews University.