{4} Seven years after his death, however, a man who knew him well, namely, Peter Young, tutor and librarian of James VI., told Beza that Knox died in his fifty-ninth year.

Dr.Hay Fleming has pointed out that his natal year was probably 1513-15, not 1505, and this reckoning, we shall see, appears to fit in better with the deeds of the Reformer.
If Knox was born in 1513-15, he must have taken priest's orders, and adopted the profession of a notary, at nearly the earliest moment which the canonical law permitted.

No man ought to be in priest's orders before he was twenty-five; Knox, if born in 1515, was just twenty-five in 1540, when he is styled "Sir John Knox" (one of "The Pope's Knights") in legal documents, and appears as a notary.

{5} He certainly continued in orders and in the notarial profession as late as March 1543.

The law of the Church did not, in fact, permit priests to be notaries, but in an age when "notaires" were often professional forgers, the additional security for character yielded by Holy Orders must have been welcome to clients, and Bishops permitted priests to practise this branch of the law.
Of Knox's near kin no more is known than of his ancestors.