Description
Book SynopsisThe Scottish Reformation is often presumed to have had little economic impact. Traditionally, scholars maintained that Scotland’s late medieval church gradually secularised its estates, and that the religious changes of 1560 barely disrupted an ongoing trend. In Riches and Reform Bess Rhodes challenges this assumption with a study of church finance in Scotland’s religious capital of St Andrews, a place once regarded as the ‘cheif and mother citie of the Realme’. Drawing on largely unpublished charters, rentals, and account books, Riches and Reform argues that in St Andrews the Reformation triggered a rapid, large-scale, and ultimately ruinous redistribution of ecclesiastical wealth. Communal assets built up over generations were suddenly dispersed through a combination of official policies, individual opportunism, and a crisis in local administration, leading the post-Reformation churches and city of St Andrews into ‘poverte and decay’.
Table of ContentsAbbreviations Conventions Acknowledgements Plan of St Andrews in the Sixteenth Century Introduction 1Pre-Reformation St Andrews 2Income and Estates 3Administration 4Donations and Expansion 5Feuing 6The Reformation Crisis 7Settlement of the 1560s 8Conflict and Disintegration 9Legacy Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index
