Chapter XVIII - Visitation (I)

Summary

There is stronger evidence from Scotland, perhaps, than from any other country in Europe, that monasticism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries needed very sweeping measures of reform. There are the confessions of Church statesmen and the complaints of lay politicians; again, the orthodox writers of the sixteenth century speak almost as plainly and as strongly on this point as the heretics. Moreover, the list of early Scottish reformers seems to show a far larger proportion of monks, friars, or secular clergy than any other country in Europe. All these points have been emphasized by general Church historians like Dowden and Macewen, and by Dr Hay Fleming in his valuable History of the Reformation in Scotland. Here, then, I shall do as much as possible to avoid the ground which has been covered so well by them. Again, I shall quote only sparingly from a book equally interesting and equally conclusive, Dr Patrick's translation of the Statutes of the Scottish Church, where his Introduction sums up all the features of Church life revealed by episcopal and conciliar decrees, and thus provides a clear conspectus of those matters which, in the opinion of the best and most orthodox churchmen, clamoured most loudly for reform during the three centuries before the Reformation. My approach will be supplementary to those, and mainly from a different angle.