Chapter XIX · (continued 3)
Reading edition
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 40, 220‒221, 354.
Parliament was equally anxious to put the people right in the matter of eating and drinking at marriages and baptisms. It was enacted that only bishops, earls, barons, and gentlemen who have two thousand marks of free yearly rent, or fifty chalders of grain after deducting all charges, should presume to have at their marriages and banquets, or on their tables for their daily fare, any drugs or confectionaries, brought from foreign countries. After the Reformation Acts of Parliament and Council were often passed forbidding the eating of flesh during Lent. On the 12th of February, 1562, the Lords of Council passed an Act prohibiting the eating of flesh from that date to the 29th of March, under the penalty of ten pounds for the first offence, twenty pounds for the second, and confiscation of all movable goods for the third. The Act proceeded on the ground that:—“In the spring of the year, called Lenten, all kinds of flesh decays and grows out of season, that it is not meet for eating; and also that by the tempestuous storms of the last and preceding winters, the whole stocks of cattle were so plagued, smothered and dead, that the price of flesh had risen to such extreme dearth that the like had not been within this realm; and if such dearth continued it will be to the great hurt of the commonweal.”¹ In 1567, Parliament, to save the nation from the harm entailed by the daily eating of flesh, enacted that the people should eat flesh only on four days of the week, under a penalty: and in 1568 the Lords of Council passed an act forbidding all classes to eat any flesh during Lent. It was ordered also that no fleshers, cooks, hostlers, nor tavern keepers, should slay or prepare any kind of flesh for sale during that time, under the penalty of the confiscation of their goods and the imprisonment of their persons, unless they had obtained a written license from the King upon reasonable consideration. During the time of the civil war, after the flight of Mary, the Lords of Council issued proclamations against the eating of flesh in Lent, but they were little heeded.² In 1584 it was again enacted, “because of the disorder amongst all ranks of the people by the licentious eating of flesh every day of the week, which besides producing other evils, was also the cause of the dearth of all meat.” It was then commanded that no one should presume hereafter to eat any kind of flesh on Wednesday, Friday, or Saturday, nor in the time of Lent, under the penalty of the confiscation of all their goods to the Crown. This act was again repeated in 1587 with some additions.³
¹ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, page 221; Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., page 200. The same year it was stated: “Forasmuch as the tempest and storms of weather fallen this last winter, the most part of the sheep of Scotland are perished and dead, which causes the dearth thereof so to increase that the poor cannot well abide the same; and if the lambs be likewise wasted and consumed, the dearth shall not only increase, but also the sheep of the country shall so decay that few or none shall be left therein, for the sustaining of the people of this kingdom. For remedy thereof, it is statuted by the Queen’s Majesty, with the advice of the Lords of Council, that no manner of lambs be slain or eaten by any of the people of this realm for the space of three years to come, under the penalty of the confiscation of all the movable goods of the persons who contravene this statute.”—Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., pages 200‒201.
² Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 40; Register of the Privy Council, Volume I., page 611; Volume II., pages 337, 431, 500, 593.
³ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume III., pages 353, 453.
After the Reformation several of the old amusements of the people were proscribed. This however need occasion no great regret, for with the spread of refinement and the progress of civilisation they would have died out of themselves. The citizens of Edinburgh had a pastime called “bickering,” and this word itself partly explains the character of the amusement. The bickering seems to have consisted of a company of people, mostly the young, who made a mock attack upon certain places, which however often ended in serious mischief. On the 11th of April, 1567, the Town Council of Edinburgh:—“ordered the bellman to pass through the town and discharge the bickerers, under the penalty of hanging those come to age, and the scourging of such as are not of age.” ¹ The people were still in the habit of amusing themselves pretty freely. There were rude stage plays; the field games of golf, of football, and many others, which the humblest of the people enjoyed. Towards the end of the century parliament passed an act that enjoined Monday to be observed as a holiday for pastime and amusement, that every one in the nation might have one day in the week for their own enjoyment. The King himself had a fancy for rope-dancers, in the year 1600 James Melville records in his diary “that in Falkland, I saw a Frenchman play strange and incredible pranks upon stretched ropetakle in the Palace close, before the King, the Queen, and the whole Court.” In the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, in August, 1600, the sum of £333 7 shillings 8 pence is entered as the payment of this rope-dancer, so it seems he was handsomely rewarded for his performance. In 1598 an English juggler, “played such supple tricks upon a rope, which was fastened between the top of St. Giles’s Kirk steeple and a stair beneath the cross, the like was never seen in this country, as he rode down the rope and played so many pavies on it.” For the performance of this trick the King ordered him to get twenty pounds.²
¹ Burgh Records of Edinburgh, Volume III., pages 229‒230.
² Burgh Records of Glasgow, page 193; Burgh Records of Aberdeen, Volume II., pages 179, 180; Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Volume IV.; Melville’s Diary, pages 17, 29, 30, 487.
The general influence of the Reformation on the social state of the people was in the main salutary and beneficial. It is true that some of the commons and tenants were in better circumstances under the Roman Catholic churchman than after the Reformation, and the fact is undeniable that many of the tenants of land were excessively oppressed by the nobles after that event.¹ The evidence adduced in this volume is sufficient to prove that the exertions of the reformed clergy to lighten the burdens of the people were not in vain; while the benefits of the revolution were far reaching and immense.
¹ Pinkerton’s Ancient Scottish Poems, Volume II., page 321; 1786.