Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350–1560

Mairi Cowan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780719080234
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162908
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

Death, life, and religious change in Scottish towns c. 1350-1560 examines lay religious culture in Scottish towns between the Black Death and the Protestant Reformation. It looks at what the living did to influence the dead and how the dead were believed to influence the living in turn; it explores the ways in which townspeople asserted their individual desires in the midst of overlapping communities; and it considers both continuities and changes, highlighting the Catholic Reform movement that reached Scottish towns before the Protestant Reformation took hold. Students and scholars of Scottish history and of medieval and early modern history more broadly will find in this book a new approach to the religious culture of Scottish towns between 1350 and 1560, one that interprets the evidence in the context of a time when Europe experienced first a flourishing of medieval religious devotion and then the sterner discipline of early modern Reform.

Part I

Lamenting the dead

1

How the living influenced the dead

The dead were the first concern of the St Giles bell. ‘Defunctos plango’, it said, lamenting those who had completed their earthly lives. The people of Scottish towns mourned the dead, but they also believed that death was not the end of a person: while the body was part of this world and therefore material and apt to decay, the soul was eternal. Thus when Elizabeth Gledstanis was dying in 1533, she said she was fearful. But turning her eyes to the salvation of herself, her children, and other faithful people, she gave a donation of money and an image of the Cross ‘for the service, care and ministry’ at the altar of the Holy Rood in her town of Selkirk.¹ Nearing the point of death, this Scottish townsperson felt apprehensive in the face of profound uncertainty associated with her soul’s final destination. She did not, however, feel powerless. She took measures while still alive to improve the position of her own soul – through a good work in the form of a donation in cash and kind to her parish church – and she also extended the benefits arising from the good work to the souls of others – her children and other faithful people. The basic anxieties, hopes, and actions of Elizabeth Gledstanis were widespread among the inhabitants of Scottish towns. They feared death, but they did not despair. Rather, they made arrangements for their own souls to pass as painlessly as possible into a blessed eternity, and they attended to the souls of those already deceased, especially to the souls of their blood kin and their civic brethren.

Fear of death

‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ (‘the fear of death distresses me’) is the haunting line that ends each of the 25 verses in a poem written by William Dunbar around the turn of the sixteenth century.² The poem is often known today as ‘Lament for the Makars’ because in its second half Dunbar mourns a series of named poets, or ‘makaris’, who have recently died. Its deeper message, however, is both more individual and more universal. The poem opens with a personal reflection on the poet’s declining health to the point of ‘greit sicknes’, and it concludes with the recognition that death will not leave the poet alone. The poem moves beyond Dunbar’s individual awareness of his own mortality to a more universal scope when it emphasizes that death is the great leveller that takes people of all estates, both rich and poor of all degree. While the refrain ‘timor mortis conturbat me’ may at first appear to be a personal message and something to be spoken by the poet alone, it actually adds to the poem’s wider resonance, for this line was not composed originally by Dunbar himself, but taken from the Office of the Dead, a liturgical ritual common in Europe from at least the tenth century and heard in Scottish churches right up to the Protestant Reformation. In Dunbar’s poem, where it locks each verse into place with a regular metre and rhyme, it provides a poignant, pulsing echo of anxiety, individually felt but universally acknowledged, concerning the inevitable end of life.

Some of this anxiety arose from a fear of the pains associated with dying, described rather coldly in the fifteenth-century ‘The Craft of Deyng’ as hard and ‘rycht horrebile to mony men’.³ Such fear might have been sharpened by artistic representations of death found in churches, such as the skull covered with worms on the ceiling of the Blackadder aisle in Glasgow Cathedral, the skeletal and living forms participating in the Dance of Death at Rosslyn Chapel, and the clerical vestments ornamented with death’s heads at Aberdeen.⁴ Yet apprehension surrounding the dreadful hour of death reached beyond the physical trials of dying and into the inability to know with certainty where the soul would spend eternity. Ancient and early medieval Christian thinkers had wrestled with heterogeneous passages from the Bible in addition to Greek and Roman writings in their attempts to assemble a coherent picture of what happened to the soul after death, and by the fourteenth century theologians, writers, and artists in the Christian West were describing three possible destinations: ‘purgatory, hell, [and] ioy celistiall’.⁵

Hell was the most feared of the three, a place of unrelenting and everlasting physical, mental, and spiritual torment. It was thought to lie in the lowest part of the earth or somewhere underneath, a ‘pitt obscure’.⁶ Souls in hell were condemned to eternal suffering in three forms: the privation of grace, the privation of glory, and the feeling of pain by the senses.⁷ While for theologians the worst aspect of hell may have been deprivation of the sight of God, most people were likely more strongly affected by descriptions of physical pain. In the poem ‘The Contemplacioun of Synnaris’ by the fifteenth-century Franciscan author William of Tours, hell is described as a place of ‘dedlie dollour’, of pain that no words can express. It is ‘maist vile venomus’, a dark dungeon for damned creatures, and a hole of horrible darkness and intolerable stink. Souls could neither defend themselves against nor flee from its pains, which lasted for a ‘thouusand mulyeoun yearis’.⁸ In Sir David Lyndsay’s poem ‘The Dreme’, hell contained sinners suffering eternally in ‘flame of fyre, rycht furious and fell’. They had hunger and thirst rather than meat and drink, and toads and scorpions for their clothing. Their dwellings were covered with stink, they saw only horrible visions, they heard only scorn and derision, and they felt only unsupportable pains.⁹

If authors could sometimes show a sense of humour when depicting hell – Dunbar wrote of Gaelic speakers in that infernal place mounting a Highland pageant so offensive to the ears that even the Devil himself had to smother the revellers¹⁰ – this carnivalesque and grotesque appreciation did not erase the theological certainty that there was simply no escape: once in hell, a soul would suffer its torments for all eternity. The very bad sink at once into its depths, according to The Golden Legend, a text read widely in Europe and found in several Scottish libraries including that of a Dominican house in Edinburgh and those of chaplains at Glasgow and Aberdeen.¹¹ They cannot be freed from pain, their punishment cannot be lessened, and their damnation cannot be suspended even for a moment. Nor can they be strengthened to bear their suffering more lightly. In short, ‘in hell there is no redemption’.¹² When Dunbar and his contemporaries feared death, part of what they really feared was the destination of the damned.

Heaven, by contrast, was the destination that people most longed to reach. It was located somewhere above the earth, a glorious port ‘quhair we sall rest the schip of our nature in perpetual tranquillitie and securitie of bayth bodie and saul’.¹³ Some poets described heaven in courtly terms, as a ‘palice of licht’, a ‘Court Celestial’, complete with princes in armour of burnished gold inset with precious stones.¹⁴ Though Gavin Douglas insisted that only virtue mattered to those in heaven, not the pomp and might of earthly estate, this chivalrous vision was likely appealing to aristocrats if not to burgesses or the urban poor. Perhaps Sir David Lyndsay’s heaven of ‘myrth and infinite plesuouris’ was closer to popular hopes for the afterlife. It was characterized both by an absence of pain and also by the presence of pleasure. Neither fire, nor sword, nor heat, nor cold, nor wind, nor rain could cause any pain in heaven; it was a place of ‘sensuall plesouris delectabyll’ delighting the senses with heavenly sounds, celestial bright colours, a beautiful smell surpassing by far the scent of any earthly flower, and a taste of ‘sweit and Supernaturall Sapowris’.¹⁵

Heaven may have been desired by a great many, but only a very few were thought to go directly there after death. It is difficult to imagine that very many would have shared the optimism of poet Robert Henryson’s old man who sang, ‘the more of age, the nerar hevynnis blisse’.¹⁶ Most people expected that they would be prevented from entering heaven immediately after death because they bore on their conscience the stain of at least some sin, however minor, however long since its committal. Heaven was opened only for those who had completed all penance and committed no venial sins, or whose venial sins had all been consumed by the fervour of their charity.¹⁷ Entry into heaven was not forever to be denied to the rest, but it would have to be delayed until their souls were pure.

The necessary purgation or satisfaction due for sins would take place in purgatory, the third possible destination in the afterlife according to the beliefs of later medieval Scots. Purgatory may never have been all that clearly or authoritatively described by theologians, yet it was a defining doctrine of late medieval Catholicism and a very creative idea for the imaginations of believers.¹⁸ Popular lay responses to the doctrine of purgatory drew upon two main understandings. First, purgatory was a thoroughly unpleasant place where a soul could spend a long time but not eternity, since all the souls in purgatory ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Lamenting the dead
• Part II: Summoning the living
• Part III Summoning the living
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index