Ignorant and profligate cadets of the great houses were appointed to high ecclesiastical offices, while the minor clergy were inconceivably ignorant just at the moment when the new critical learning, with knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, was revolutionising the study of the sacred books.

The celibacy of the clergy had become a mere farce; and they got dispensations enabling them to obtain ecclesiastical livings for their bastards.

The kings set the worst example: both James IV.

and James V.secured the richest abbeys, and, in the case of James IV., the Primacy, for their bastard sons.

All these abuses were of old standing.
"Early in the thirteenth century certain of the abbots of Jedburgh, supported by their chapters, had granted certain of their appropriate churches to priests with a right of succession to their sons" (see 'The Mediaeval Church in Scotland,' by the late Bishop Dowden, chap.xix.