the pasche-offering, tiend-ale, and all handlings[216] upaland can neither be required nor recieved of good conscience."[217] [Sidenote: Exactions of the Medieval Church.] [Sidenote: The Oppressors relentless.] The history of the world, the history of the Christian church, has few passages more noble than this, where these poor ministers, not yet assured of decent provision for their own maintenance, boldly undertake the patronage of the peasantry, and say they would rather suffer themselves than ask that teinds should be exacted from those who had been so long ground down, not only by the exaction of these from their crofts and even from their gardens, but also by a multitude of other imposts, which, although their very names are now almost forgotten in Scotland, had been long felt to be a grievous oppression. Was it any wonder that those crushed and down-trodden classes should rally round their protectors, and under their kindly and godly training should grow up to be a strength to the church and a power in the state? Charming fancy pictures are still sometimes drawn of the stately monastery--with its handsome church and kindly and cultured monks--as a centre of civilising and Christianising influences to the district in which it was erected. These influences no doubt had a certain reality in the early ages of the church, and even in the days of the good Queen Margaret; but in Scotland, at least, these days had long passed away before the sixteenth century; and the monasteries, as a whole, had become a source of weakness and scandal, rather than of strength and honour to the dominant church. In fact, their wealth, being to a large extent derived from the teinds of parishes, should have been devoted to the spiritual interests of these parishes, whereas the vicars appointed by them being generally put off with a miserable pittance and left largely dependent on these hated and oppressive exactions--corpse presents, uppermost cloth, Pasche-offerings--could not fail to alienate the peasantry from the monasteries and their rural representatives. Such charges of oppression could never have been so publicly made against them had they not been notoriously true. And if further evidence were needed, it may be found in abundance in the poems of Sir David Lindsay and the Wedderburns. The picture the former has drawn of the poor peasant driven out of house and holding[218] by these oppressive exactions is known to be true to the life; and contributed greatly to the overthrow of the merciless oppressors who, until the very eve of the triumph of the Reformation, could not be persuaded either to abolish or abate their dues.[219] FOOTNOTES: [180] [The six were John Wynram, John Spottiswoode, John Willock, John Douglas, John Row, and John Knox (_supra_, p. 99).] [181] Spottiswoode's History, Spot. Soc. ed., i. 371, 372. [182] _Supra_, pp. 112, 113.