"Of nature I am churlish, and in conditions different from many," he wrote; but this side of his character he kept mainly for people of high rank, accustomed to deference, and indifferent or hostile to his aims.

To others, especially to women whom he liked, he was considerate and courteous, but any assertion of social superiority aroused his wakeful independence.

His countrymen of his own order had long displayed these peculiarities of humour.
The small Scottish cultivators from whose ranks Knox rose, appear, even before his age, in two strangely different lights.

If they were not technically "kindly tenants," in which case their conditions of existence and of tenure were comparatively comfortable and secure, they were liable to eviction at the will of the lord, and, to quote an account of their condition written in 1549, "were in more servitude than the children of Israel in Egypt." Henderson, the writer of 1549 whom we have quoted, hopes that the agricultural class may yet live "as substantial commoners, not miserable cottars, charged daily to war and slay their neighbours _at their own expense_," as under the standards of the unruly Bothwell House.
This Henderson was one of the political observers who, before the Scottish Reformation, hoped for a secure union between Scotland and England, in place of the old and romantic league with France.

That alliance had, indeed, enabled both France and Scotland to maintain their national independence.