"
This spectacle of the national Church, with its disproportionate wealth
and its selfish, incompetent, and often degraded officials, could not
but be a growing offence to the developing intelligence of the nation;
and to quicken this feeling there were minor grievances which were an
ancient ground of complaint on the part of the laity against their
spiritual advisers. On every important event of his life the poor man
was harassed by exactions which Sir David Lyndsay has so keenly touched
in his _Satire of the Three Estates_. Says the Pauper in the interlude:
"Quhair will ye find that law, tell gif ye can,
To tak thine ky, fra ane pure husbandman?
Ane for my father, and for my wyfe ane uther,
And the third cow, he tuke fra Mald my mother."
And Diligence replies:
"It is thair law, all that they have in use,
Tocht it be cow, sow, ganer, gryse, or guse."
If the poor had these grounds of discontent, the rich likewise had
theirs; and they made bitter complaint against the protracted processes
in the consistorial courts, and the frequent appeals to the Roman Curia,
by which both their means and their patience were exhausted.
It was in the face of feelings such as these that, in the spring of
1559, the Queen Regent entered on her new line of policy toward her
refractory subjects.
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