Robert Baillie and the Second Scots Reformation

By F. N. McCoy

Scottish history has been strangely neglected. This is the first scholarly biography of Robert Baillie, the minister, historian and participant in the revolutionary Covenanter movement. Baillie's life (1602 - 1662) spans the most important period in the history of Scotland as an independent state. The revolution began in 1636 when Charles I, Stuart King of England and Scotland, attempted to unite the reformed churches of his two kingdoms by promulgating a universal litany known as the Service Book. Baillie, though himself a conservative Royalist, joined the Scottish lords and ministers in signing the National Covenant, the document that led ultimately to the downfall of Charles and two wars with England. Despite his prominence in what became the Second Reformation of the Scottish church, Baillie managed to survive many purges and changes of regime, keeping detailed journals on the events of which he was part. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520311954

F. N. McCoy

At the time of original publication, F. N. McCoy was Assistant Professor of English at Armstrong College, Berkeley.

Book preview

ROBERT BAILLIE AND THE SECOND

SCOTS REFORMATION

ROBERT BAILLIE

and the

Second Scots Reformation

F. N. McCOY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY, LOS ANGELES, LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1974, by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-02447-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-76110

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Jean Peters

For

my mother, a Covenanter,

and

Quirinus Breen, my teacher

Contents

Contents

Preface

1 Introduction

2 Baillie’s Early Years (1602—1638)

3 Baillie and the Glasgow Assembly (1638)

4 For Christ's Crown and Covenant (1639-1643)

5 Baillie at the Westminster Assembly (1643-1646)

6 For King's Crown or Covenant (1647-1670)

7 Baillie and the Glasgow Protesters (1651—1654)

8 Baillie and Patrick Gillespie (1654—1658)

9 Baillie’s Closing Years (1659—1662)

Bibliography of Works Cited

Index

Preface

The religious Reformation that John Knox and his disciples effected in 1560-1561 resulted in the overthrow of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland and in the establishment of a Calvinist church with a protopresbyterian form of church government. The religious Reformation that the radical reformers and their disciples effected in 1638 resulted in the overthrow of the episcopacy that James VI had superimposed upon the Reformed church and in the establishment of the Presbyterian church in Scotland.

This Second Reformation is acknowledged by political historians as a political revolution also, as the first volley in the English civil wars. From this viewpoint, the religious-political happenings in Scotland, from the royal proclamation of the Scottish prayer book in December 1636 through the period of the Cromwellian Protectorate to the Restoration, are important to students of English as well as Scots history.1

This Second Reformation, therefore, was an important one. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was studied repeatedly, although its students, unfortunately, were too often partisan in their loyalties. The twentieth century witnessed a diminution of interest until the post-World War II historians picked up the theme again. The work of these historians, C. V. Wedgwood, Maurice Lee, and Sydney Burrell, has awakened new interest in seventeenth-century Scotland.

The most prolific and eloquent voice on the seventeenth-century Scottish scene, the one on whom all historians of the period must rely, was Robert Baillie. Baillie was a Glasgow minister and professor of divinity at Glasgow College. He was a participant in the important events in seventeenth-century Scots church history. He shared in the framing of the National Covenant of 1638, spoke before the Glasgow General Assembly of that year, was chaplain in the first bishops’ war, was a commissioner to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and was a commissioner to attend young Charles II at The Hague in 1649. In the Protester-Resolutioner schism of the 1650s, Baillie was on the side of the Resolutioners. Throughout the years of the Protester hegemony during the Cromwellian occupation of Scotland, and often at the risk of his ministry, his teaching, and his very freedom, he remained a Resolutioner, a monarchist, a conservative legalist, a defender of the rights of the church courts, a foe to Independency and episcopacy alike, and a publicist for the cause of the Scots Presbyterian church.

Curiously, despite the importance of Baillie’s role in the Second Reformation and despite the importance to the historian of his three volumes of letters and numerous pamphlets and books, no full-length biography of the man has been published. Carlyle wrote a short sketch of his life, as did Reid in his Divinity Professors of the University of Glasgow, 1640-1903. David Laing, who transcribed Baillie’s letters in 1842, prefaced the three volumes with a Memoir of Baillie’s life. All three accounts, however, contain serious errors, primarily because the supplementary materials necessary to the historian were not available to these writers. Many of these materials are available today.²

Unfortunately, many of these materials remain lost, perhaps forever. Nevertheless, the twentieth-century historian is far better prepared to understand the seventeenth century Scottish scene than were his predecessors. One trusts, also, that the ecumenical spirit of the twentieth century will have washed clean the dark glass of bitterness that obscured the vision of so many earlier Scottish church historians. Robert Baillie would have wanted it so.

This book was made possible by the precepts of the two persons to whom it is dedicated, by the discipline in research taught me by Joseph A. McGowan, by a grant from the American Association of University Women, by the encouragement of Elizabeth K. Nottingham, by the patience of Richard Dell and the librarians of the University of Glasgow, and by the kindness of Grant Barnes, my editor.

I thank them all.

1 Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: Church and Nation Throuh Sixteen Centuries (London: SCM Press, 1960), p. 83; H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573—1643, 2nd ed. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 368; Sidney Burrell, Kirk, Crown, and Covenant (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1953), p. 8; C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace. 1637-1641 (New York: Macmillan, 1956).

2 Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 4 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1870), 4:304-338; H. M. D. Reid, The Divinity Professors in the University of Glasgow, 1640-1903 (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson & Co., 1923); Robert Baillie, The Letters and Journals of Robert Baillie, AM., Principal of the University of Glasgow, MDCXXXVII-MDCLXI1, David Laing, ed. (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1841-1842), 3 vols.

1

Introduction

Robert Baillie knew two Scotlands. The Scotland he knew as a man was a state where, in true Calvinist theory, church and state were separate, yet where, in truer Calvinist practice, they were one. It was a state where the civil legislative bodies of parliament, privy council, and convention of royal burghs could hardly be distinguished from the church legislative body of the General Assembly and where the duties of layman and ordained clergy, formerly discrete, had become blurred. The Scotland hé had known as a boy had been, in many ways, a more orderly world, a more comfortable world in which to live. Although changes in both church and state had occurred since the 1561 settlement, they had occurred slowly. Above all, they had occurred relatively peacefully.

The ‘Parliament. In the period prior to the First Reformation, the Parliament had consisted of three groups, lay lords, clerical lords, and burgesses, each voting separately. Because the Parliament represented only landed interests, it was their instrument. Because it was a feudal institution, its powers for legislation were limited.

In the Reformation Parliament of 1560 a fourth group appeared: the barons of the shires. Their right to participate had been granted by James I in the early fifteenth century. Until 1560, however, their participation had been negligible. Their presence in the Reformation Parliament after more than a century’s absence posed a question of the legitimacy of that Parliament.

After the First Reformation and during the minority of James VI (1567-1578), a fifth component of the Scots Parliament appeared: the members of the king’s privy council, who represented the interests of the crown and who constituted a group peculiar to the Scottish Parliament. These officers appeared first in the Parliament of 1567 and retained parliamentary status until 1641, when they were excluded.

The Scots Parliament of the early seventeenth century, therefore, was composed of five groups: (1) the higher clergy and (2) the nobles, who were summoned by the crown; (3) the privy council, whose members sat as representatives of the crown; (4) the barons of the shires; and (5) the burgesses. The members of the last two groups were elected. The five groups sat as a single chamber.

Parliament was not a large gathering at any time. Before 1660 it never numbered more than 183, and it rose above 150 on only six occasions.1

The First Reformation had not affected the status of the clerical estate in Parliament. Clerics continued to attend until they were abolished as an estate in 1639. Roman Catholics, however, had been barred from Parliament in 1572.

The privy council. More influential than the Parliament was the king’s privy council. The first function of the privy council was judicial, and it was responsible in its judgment to the king and, in theory, to Parliament. In its feudal capacity as advisory body to the crown lay precedence for its second function, that of executive in the absence of the monarch.

During the minority of James VI, its power increased. Its members sat in Parliament; they were members also of the more important parliamentary committees. Indeed, the measure of the essential weakness of the Parliament was the measure of the almost continuous strength of the Privy Council.²

After James VI began to rule in his own name, the privy council too began to lose its autonomy, as James assumed increasingly the right to choose his own councilors and to dismiss them at will. Thus, the privy council became increasingly an instrument of his will. After 1603 James governed Scotland through a compliant privy council and a subservient parliament.

The convention of royal burghs. In more meaningful and in more all-pervasive ways, the most important of the three legislative bodies was the convention of royal burghs. Royally chartered towns, called royal burghs in Scotland, had deveoped in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In return for the responsibilities of paying proportionately larger taxes, the charters granted exclusive rights over imports, exports, fairs, and markets. By the mid-sixteenth century thirty-five royal burghs existed. After that period few new ones were created because of the opposition of the existing ones.³

Each burgh had its own court, although all royal burghs operated under the same law code. Out of these individual burghal courts evolved the convention of royal burghs, which was a burghal parliament. Its functions were both legislative and judicial. It had begun quite informally out of a common interest, that of merchant control over mercantile matters. In 1581, however, Parliament defined the duties and privileges of the convention: It had the right to determine each burgh’s share of the total assessed taxes; it could regulate foreign trade; it was to meet yearly to deal with the welfare of merchants; it was recognized as the guardian of the privileges of the royal burghs.⁴

Just as the merchants controlled the burghs, so they controlled the convention, and so they came to control the burgesses in Parliament. The burgesses in Parliament, therefore, did not so much represent the interests of all burgesses as they represented the interests of the convention.

Because of the parochial views of the burgesses, a true third estate did not evolve in the Scots Parliament. The barons of the shires tended to align themselves with the nobility rather than with the burgesses; the burgesses were interested principally in matters mercantile. Indeed, as early as the mid-sixteenth century the convention of royal burghs and the estate of burgesses in Parliament had become confused, in that the burgesses who were elected to attend the Parliament were most frequently the same men who were commissioned to attend the convention as well. A major function of the delegates to the convention appears to have been the preparation of legislation to be submitted to the Parliament by the convention commissioners in their capacity as parliamentarians.⁵

The Scots judiciary. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scots judiciary system was a conglomeration of medieval and modern elements. In the period between the death of Robert Bruce (1329) and the formal Reception of Roman Law (1532), the so-called Dark Age in Scots legal history, justice was dispensed by a weakened central authority and by decentralized, but strong, feudal courts. The Renaissance monarchs, James IV and James V (1488-1542), tried to put an end to this feudal control over the dispensation of justice. The establishment of the college of justice in 1532, which utilized Roman Law, was the result of their combined efforts.

The college was to be financed partly by additional church taxes and partly by the crown. The judges of the college, therefore, were to be seven laymen and seven clerics, with a cleric as president. They were to be chosen by the king with advise and consent of the three estates. After the First Reformation an act of Parliament decreed that the president might be either lay or cleric. In the 1630s the distinction between the two estates was abolished.6

After 1603, the college too lost its autonomy, as King James, using the increase in power that the addition of the English crown had given him, came to nominate not only judges but president as well, disregarded the advice of the estates, and often nominated men who were obviously not qualified. His policy of disregarding the recommendations of the estates was continued by his son and successor, Charles I. Although the civil wars put an end to such executive control of the college, it was resumed with the Restoration in 1660.

In addition to the college of justice, other courts claimed supreme jurisdiction. Chief among these was the Parliament, which tried cases of treason and which claimed, although apparently without success, the right of appeal from the college of justice in civil procedures. Others were the court of justiciary, which was the highest criminal court; the admiralty court, which tried maritime cases; the court of the exchequer, whose area of jurisdiction lay with finances; the commissary courts of the burghs, which were the remnants of the old episcopal courts and which dealt with marriage, divorce, legitimacy and testaments.7

Other vestiges of medieval jurisdiction were the sheriff’s court, which was the local court for both civil and criminal matters, and the baron and burgh courts, both of which were little used in the seventeenth century.

New courts, those of the Reformed church, will be discussed later in this chapter.

The crown, The Scots crown in the late sixteenth century was weak. Prior to 1603 the king’s authority was limited by the necessity of securing approval of the king’s council and, in matters of taxation, the Parliament. This position of weakness was furthered by the fact that from James I (1437-1460) until Charles I (1625-1649) every Scots monarch, with only one exception, was a minor when he acceded to the crown. He was thus a tool in the hands of regents and councilors, at least until he had reached his majority. Both regents and councilors represented, at any given period, the strongest families in the feudal first and second estates. As in France, a state with which Scotland had maintained close alliance for centuries, the goal of the feudal landed aristocracy, many of whom were Norman in ancestry, appears to have been to prevent the monarch from amassing any real power.8

The Renaissance monarch, James IV (1488-1513), emulating Henry VII in England, had tried to establish a strong personal monarchy. His decrees that resulted later in the college of justice are evidence of his efforts to regain some of the regal rights that the Scots Roman lawyers advised him belonged to the crown. His untimely death at Flodden had left his infant son, James V, the nominal ruler. For fifteen years James V was the pawn of factions ruling in his name⁹ although he later continued the work of strengthening the crown, as, for example, in his founding of the college of justice. His daughter, Mary, was, from the moment of her return from France in August 1561, never in control either of Parliament or of the privy council. Her Catholicism and proFrench sympathies alienated her from her Calvinist, anti-Catholic and hence anti-French, Lowlanders.

James VI, however, understood the stomach of the Scots as well as he understood his own limited powers. Only after he acquired the throne of England did he undertake to act contrary to the sympathies of commoners and nobles alike. Even in his gradual réintroduction of bishops into the Reformed church, he was successful because he based his appeal upon ancient Scottish custom and law. After 1603 James set about to put down the Scots feudal nobility by banning many of their feudal privileges. Indeed, the outstanding fact of James’s reign was the transformation which he wrought in the Scottish constitution. He found it a monarchy strictly limited, and he left it all but a pure despotism.¹⁰

Foreign trade. The Scotland that James ruled was a relatively poor place. Its economy was primarily agricultural, and, employing the primitive farming methods they did, the Scots knew years of famine alternating with years of plenty.¹¹

At the turn of the seventeenth century, Scotland’s industries too were primitive. The traditional industries depended on an abundance of native resources. The newly developing ones involved manufacture. Those in the first category included skins and hides, fish, salt, and coal. Those in the second category included cloth- and soap-making, beer, paper- and sword-making, and tanning.

All these products were exported. Because of an old alliance with France and because of exemption from custom duties there, Scotland did a brisk trade with France prior to the Treaty of Edinburgh in 1560. Even afterward, Scotland continued to export salmon and herring, raw wool, skins, hides, and coal to France, and to import fruit, lace, tapestry, and salt, but primarily wine, which was the favored drink among the Scots. After 1603, however, trade with France fell off, in part because of better relations between Scotland and England, in part because of the lessening of troubles along the border, in part because Scotland’s own salt and cloth industries were expanding.

Scotland’s chief trading region, however, were the Lowlands. Records of a staple port in the Lowlands begin with the early fifteenth century. The staple port was originally in Bruges (1426-1492), later at Middelburgh (1492-1503), and finally at Veere (1541-1799). The port had been established by contract with the town and the Scots merchants who were burgesses of Scots royal burghs. By the contract only these Scots merchants would be allowed to trade at the port. They were to be given a house for lodgings, a church and burial ground, and to be free from paying anchorage duty for their ships.

The nature of the goods that were classified as staple is not clear. Specific goods were not defined until the mid-seventeenth century, and even after this first definition, which included salt, coal, knitted stockings, and salmon, changes continued to be made in the classification of the staple. The nature of the staple must be inferred from the facts that only free burgesses of royal burghs could engage in foreign trade and that the staple goods were those goods in which only free burgesses of free towns could trade. Therefore, they would have been those goods that, being exported, were subject to tax by the Scots crown. Any goods whatever that merchants exported would, therefore, have come under the label of staple.¹²

All matters concerning the staple and its port were under the control of the convention of royal burghs. The merchants who exported came under its jurisdiction as did the administration and regulation of the staple port. Export duties were collected by the conservator, who lived at the port and who was both an employee of the convention and the representative of the royal burghs. He had jurisdiction also over the merchants, was required to report to the convention yearly, had the obligation to enforce laws regarding trade, and acted as judge in disputes among the Scots merchants. In the seventeenth century he became virtual governor of the Scots colony at Veere.

As trade with France fell off after the turn of the century, so trade with the Lowlands increased, in part because of the church Reformations that had united the two Calvinist countries in a bond of common ecclesiology. Indeed, in the contract of 1578 between Veere and the Scots merchants, a clause granted the merchants not only the choir of the great kirk for their services but stipulated also that the minister should have from the town their dwelling house, with free excise of beer and wine for his household and family, all so that the Scots in residence should be not frustrated in the word of God and exercise of the religion, as it is for the present used in Scotland.¹³

The first known appointment of a Scots minister to the church was not made, however, until 1614. Between that date and 1630 three men held the post, but little is known of the men or of the church activities in these years. With the appointment of William Spang in 1630, the church records at Veere clarify. Spang, who was a Glasgow man and a cousin to Robert Baillie, remained at Veere until 1654, after which date he was called to the Scots congregation at Middelburgh. Throughout his years at Veere and Middelburgh, Spang corresponded with his cousin in Scotland. Baillie’s letters to Spang constitute the bulk of the three volumes of Baillie’s published correspondence.¹⁴

The Reformed church. The church to which Baillie and Spang ministered had weathered several crises in its short history. The Reformation begun by John Knox in 1560 had aimed at a restoration of the church to apostolic simplicity, but that aim had not been achieved. Although the First Reformation had abolished some of the dogma, doctrine, and outward signs associated with the Catholic church, as far as the government of the Reformed church was concerned, this First Reformation had only divorced the church from communion with Rome. Although it had spoken against the office of bishop, it had not abolished it.

The details of reorganization of the Reformed church were the later work of Andrew Melville after his return from Geneva in 1574. It was Melville who claimed parity of the ministry, government of the church by assemblies of pastors and elders rather than by bishops, and the separation and equality of the two kingdoms of church and state. The supreme authority of the church on earth, Melville asserted, was not the king but was rather the voice of the whole congregation met in an assembly. This assembly was later called the General Assembly.

The General Assembly was one of the four church courts in operation at the opening of the seventeenth century. The lowest court was the kirk session, which met almost weekly and which was composed of the minister and elders of one church. It handled matters of discipline, morals, and disputes among congregational members. Matters not able to be resolved at the kirk session level could be referred to the presbytery court. The presbytery met once or twice a month and was composed of ministers and elders from all the churches in the diocese, or presbytery. It was the court of first appeal from the kirk session, exercised jurisdiction over expectant ministers, and held the right of ordination. The synod, or provincial court, met twice a year and was composed of ministers and elders from all the presbyteries in the synod. Unresolved matters could, in theory, be appealed to the synod court, although its chief function appears to have been administrative. Finally, at the top of this juridical pyramid, was the General Assembly, which was supposed to meet once a year and to be composed of at least one delegate from every presbytery. The General Assembly heard cases on appeal from the presbytery, handled administrative matters not settled by the synod, and legislated for the entire church.15

In the years between 1560 and 1600 the General Assembly had grown increasingly powerful. In those same years the Parliament had become increasingly subordinate to the will of the Assembly. By 1592 the two wings of the state’s legislative-judicial system, which were in theory to be separate and equal, had in fact become merged in one, in part because the same influential earls, lords, barons, and burgesses who sat as members in the church court sat also in the civil court, in part because James VI did not assume personal rule until 1578, by which time the power of the General Assembly had become firmly established, and in larger part because the church had the support of the common folk of Scotland. One result of this absorption of the civil interest by the ecclesiastical had been the confirmation by act of Parliament, in 1592, of the Presbyterian form of church government, with its system of inferior and superior church courts, as the only legal one for Scotland. This Charter of Presbytery, as the act is called, also abolished the ecclesiastical office of bishop as one not warranted by Scripture.

James VI chafed under the limitations that presbytery placed upon the office of king. In the year 1600, therefore, knowing that he was to succeed Elizabeth as monarch of England, James took the first step that was intended ultimately to make of the church in Scotland a duplicate of that in England, namely, an episcopacy with the king at the head. In that year, with the qualified approval of the General Assembly, James advanced three Scots ministers to the title of bishop and appointed them to sit in Parhament, to complete, he said, the three estates necessary to a parliament. In 1606 a parliamentary act approved this reinstatement of the estate of bishops. Within the church, however, these bishops had no superiority over any other pastor. Like ah pastors, they were subject to the authority of the general assemblies. In 1609, however, some of their old diocesan juridical functions were returned to them by act of Parliament. In 1610 three Scots bishops were consecrated at London by Anglican bishops, and in the same year each Scots archbishop was made judge over his own court of high commission, a court that superseded presbytery and synod alike. Finally, in 1612 the Parliament repealed the Charter of Presbytery.¹⁶

Although the bishops were subject to the authority of the General Assembly, the act of 1592 had given to the king the right not only to convene the Assembly but also the right not to call one. Furthermore, to convene without his permission was an offense. The last Assembly had been called in 1618 at Perth. At this Assembly, whose delegates had been chosen by the king via the bishops, five articles reinstating Catholic rites (kneeling at the communion, private communion, private baptism, early childhood confirmation, and observation of five holy days) were passed. Throughout the seven years remaining in the reign of James VI and the first thirteen years of the reign of Charles I, no General Assembly was convened. The collective voice of the presbytery was not heard; abuses went unchecked; the supreme authority on earth of the Scots Reformed church was stilled.

Until 1638 the church in Scotland remained in this fluid state, neither wholly presbyterian nor wholly episcopal. Kirk sessions, presbyteries, and synods met regularly, although the bishop was the constant moderator at the two higher courts. The bishop also assisted in the ordination of new pastors, but he could do so only in the presence of, and upon the recommendation of, the pastors and elders of the presbytery. The bishops’ authority was hedged, in turn, by the king. They were his instruments.

Such, in substance, was the government of the church in Scotland when, in December 1636, King Charles, on his royal prerogative alone, ordered that The Scottish Book of Common Prayer, recently completed, be purchased and used throughout Scotland.¹⁷ The book had been the joint effort of the Scots bishops and some English bishops, particularly Archbishop Laud, and was an attempt to bring about increased uniformity in church services in England and Scotland—two sovereign states united only in personal union by the Stuart king—but at the expense of the Reformed church in Scotland. Throughout 1637 the ministry of the Scots church petitioned against the mandatory use of the book. An attempt to use it in St. Giles in Edinburgh in July 1637 resulted in riot by the parishioners. In autumn 1637 ministers and elders converged on Edinburgh to plan a course of action against it. When their many supplications to the king met with little response, three of the ministry met again in Edinburgh in February 1638 and composed the document that was to become known as the National Covenant. The covenant was subscribed throughout Scotland. The Covenanter party had come into existence. A revolution was in the making. As J. H. S. Burleigh, late professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Edinburgh, wrote, "The Book of Common Prayer was the spark that kindled a consuming fire."

In the words of Robert Baillie, one of the participating ministers, Scotland’s Second Reformation had begun.

1 Sir Robert S. Rait and George S. Pryde, Scotland (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955), p. 60; James Mackinnon, The Constitutional History of Scotland from Early Times to the Reformation (London: Longmans, Green, 1924), pp. 80-81; John D. Mackie and G. S. Pryde, The Estate of the Burgesses in the Scots Parliament and Its Relation to the Convention of Royal Burghs (St. Andrews: W. C. Henderson, 1923), p. 3, hereinafter cited as Estate of Burgesses; Robert S. Rait, The Parliaments of Scotland (Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson, 1924), p. 4; C. S. Terry, The Scottish Parliament, Its Constitution and Procedure, 1603-1707, •with an Appendix of Documents (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1905), p. 4.

2 ⁴ Rait, Parliaments of Scotland, p. 11.

3 I. F. Grant, The Economic History of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green, 1934), pp. 37, 92-94. Two other classifications of burghs existed: burghs of regality and burghs of barony, whose charters had been granted by nobles, barons, or great churchmen.

4 Ibid., pp. 95-97.

5 ⁷ Mackie and Pryde, Estate of Burgesses, pp. 1, 8, 21-25; Rait, Parliaments of Scotland, pp. 13, 15.

6 Robert Kerr Hannay, The College of Justice: Essays on the Institution and Development of the Court of Session (Edinburgh: William Hodge, 1933), pp. 63, 41, 109-110.

7 Rait and Pryde, Scotland, pp. 173-174.

8 Thomas B. Smith, Scotland, vol. 11 of The British Commonwealth: The Development of Its Laws and Constitutions (London: Stevens, 1962), p. 6; Grant, Economic History of Scotland, p. 55.

9 J. H. S. Burleigh, A Church History of Scotland (London; Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 120.

10 Grant, Economic History of Scotland, p. 161; P. Hume Brown, History of Scotland (Cambridge: University Press, 1902), 3 vols., 2:276.

11 S. G. E. Lythe, The Economy of Scotland in Its European Setting: 1550—162$ (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1960), pp. 15-21 et passim.

12 John Davidson and Alexander Gray, The Scottish Staple at Veere: A Study m the Economic History of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 354.

13 Ibid., 420-424, prints the contracts of 1541