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Bannatyne, secretary to John Knox, recounts a singular course of oppression practised on one of those titulars abbots, by the Earl of Cassilis in Ayrshire, whose extent of feudal influence was so wide that he was usually termed the King of Carrick.
Suffrages of the Saints. Thus were abolished the old formulae of suffrages and a new one inserted. Antiphon Beata Dei Genitrix.... V. Mitificavit .... R. Et exaudivit.... Oremus, A cunctis.... In Paschal time the Commemoration is of the Cross. In this prayer the names of the Holy Angels and of St. John the Baptist, if they be titulars, are inserted before the name of St. Joseph.
Every reader must recollect, that after the fall of the Catholic Church, and the Presbyterian Church Government had been established by law, the rank, and especially the wealth, of the Bishops, Abbots, Priors, and so forth, were no longer vested in ecclesiastics, but in lay impropriators of the church revenues, or, as the Scottish lawyers called them, titulars of the temporalities of the benefice, though having no claim to the spiritual character of their predecessors in office.
We give the fact as it occurs in Bannatyne's Journal, only premising that the Journalist held his master's opinions, both with respect to the Earl of Cassilis as an opposer of the king's party, and as being a detester of the practice of granting church revenues to titulars, instead of their being devoted to pious uses, such as the support of the clergy, expense of schools, and the relief of the national poor.
But if, on the other hand, the titulars were men of inferior importance, who had been inducted into the office by the interest of some powerful person, it was generally understood that the new Abbot should grant for his patron's benefit such leases and conveyances of the church lands and tithes as might afford their protector the lion's share of the booty.
The main result was that landowners were empowered to buy the tithes on their own lands from the multitude of "titulars of tithes" who had rapaciously and oppressively extorted these tenths of the harvest every year. The ministers had a safe provision at last, secured on the tithes, in Scotland styled "teinds," but this did not reconcile most of them to bishops and to the Articles of Perth.
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