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Riches and Reform
Ecclesiastical Wealth in St Andrews, c.1520–1580
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The 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 Drawing on largely unpublished charters, rentals, and account books, Riches and Reform argues that in St Andrews the Reformation triggered a rapid, large-scale, and ultimately ruinous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’.
Bess Rhodes, Ph.D. (2013), University of St Andrews, is Head of Historical Research for the digital heritage team Smart History and teaches at the University of St Andrews.
“Many of Rhodes’s findings are dynamite. […] This is a clearly written and precisely organized book. There is a joy in the detail and the accuracy, and some of the findings have major implications for our understanding of Reformation Scotland.”
Miles Kerr-Peterson, University of Glasgow. In: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 60, No.2 (2021), pp. 466–468.
“Riches and Reform is an astute, illuminating, and essential study that necessitates not only continued reconsideration of assumptions about the state of the pre-Reformation Church in Scotland and the role of national settlements for and structures of ecclesiastical revenues had in the implementation of Protestant reform, but also further research into ecclesiastical finance and economy at all levels of operation and across Scotland.”
Catherine E. McMillan, Bozeman, Montana. In: Scottish Church History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2021), pp. 166–168.
Miles Kerr-Peterson, University of Glasgow. In: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 60, No.2 (2021), pp. 466–468.
“Riches and Reform is an astute, illuminating, and essential study that necessitates not only continued reconsideration of assumptions about the state of the pre-Reformation Church in Scotland and the role of national settlements for and structures of ecclesiastical revenues had in the implementation of Protestant reform, but also further research into ecclesiastical finance and economy at all levels of operation and across Scotland.”
Catherine E. McMillan, Bozeman, Montana. In: Scottish Church History, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2021), pp. 166–168.
Abbreviations
Conventions
Acknowledgements
Plan of St Andrews in the Sixteenth Century
Introduction
1 Pre-Reformation St Andrews
2 Income and Estates
3 Administration
4 Donations and Expansion
5 Feuing
6 The Reformation Crisis
7 Settlement of the 1560s
8 Conflict and Disintegration
9 Legacy
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Conventions
Acknowledgements
Plan of St Andrews in the Sixteenth Century
Introduction
1 Pre-Reformation St Andrews
2 Income and Estates
3 Administration
4 Donations and Expansion
5 Feuing
6 The Reformation Crisis
7 Settlement of the 1560s
8 Conflict and Disintegration
9 Legacy
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
All interested in sixteenth-century religious, economic or urban history. Of particular relevance to scholars and students of late medieval and early modern Scotland.