A Short History of Scotland by Andrew Lang
page 93 of 267 (34%)
page 93 of 267 (34%)
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must be sought,--aid in money, and if possible in men and ships.
Meanwhile the reformers dealt with the ecclesiastical buildings of St Andrews as they had done at Perth, Knox urging them on by his sermons. We may presume that the boys broke the windows and images with a sanctified joy. A mutilated head of the Redeemer has been found in a _latrine_ of the monastic buildings. As Commendator, or lay Prior, James Stewart may have secured the golden sheath of the arm-bone of the Apostle, presented by Edward I., and the other precious things, the sacred plate of the Church in a fane which had been the Delphi of Scotland. Lethington appears to have obtained most of the portable property of St Salvator's College except that beautiful monument of idolatry, the great silver mace presented by Kennedy, the Founder, work of a Parisian silversmith, in 1461: this, with maces of rude native work, escaped the spoilers. The monastery of the Franciscans is now levelled with the earth; of the Dominicans' chapel a small fragment remains. Of the residential part of the abbey a house was left: when the lead had been stripped from the roof of the church it became a quarry. "All churchmen's goods were spoiled and reft from them . . . for every man for the most part that could get anything pertaining to any churchmen thought the same well-won gear," says a contemporary Diary. Arran himself, when he arrived in Scotland, robbed a priest of all that he had, for which Chatelherault made compensation. By the middle of June the Regent was compelled to remove almost all her French soldiers out of Fife. Perth was evacuated. The abbey of Scone and the palace were sacked. The Congregation entered Edinburgh: they seem to have found the monasteries already swept bare, but they seized Holyrood, and the stamps at the Mint. The Regent proclaimed that this |
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