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In Scotland, the reformers took a radical, root-and-branch approach toward worship. They brought changes much more radical than in other reformations. Lutherans in Germany and Anglicans in England, for example, sought to retain a great deal of the medieval liturgy. Not the Scottish reformers.

They obliterated what they saw as the clutter of nonessentials in late medieval religion: making oral confession of sins, invoking Mary and the saints, venerating relics, using images, believing in purgatory, saying masses for the dead, obtaining indulgences, and making pilgrimages to shrines.

The Latin Mass was denounced as idolatrous (it appeared to involve the worship of a wafer), and blasphemous (it detracted from Christ’s unique sacrifice at Calvary). The Scottish reformers consistently called for return to, in John Knox’s words, “the grave and godly face of the primitive church.” As a result, the liturgy of the pre-Reformation church and the patterns of Protestant worship could scarcely have been more different.

At the heart of the medieval Scottish liturgy was the Mass. Several ministers stood in attendance at the altar, amid rich ceremony, organ music and choristers, incense, and flickering candles offered to images.

Elaborate polyphonic music, which a professional choir alone could master, provided a suitably ornate setting for the solemn celebration and devotion of high Mass. In St. Machar’s Cathedral in Aberdeen, the enlarged choir included twenty vicars choral, two deacons, two subdeacons, two acolytes, and a master of the songschool to train the choristers.

A high sung Mass could be found daily in cathedrals, wealthy collegiate churches, and abbeys. In a great cathedral church like St. Machar’s in Aberdeen, prayers were said throughout the day. At the canonical hours of matins and lauds (before dawn), prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline, clergy offered prayer, penitence, and praise on behalf of the people.

An alternative to the elaborate and lengthy high Mass was low Mass. The bulk of parish churches up and down the land were simple, often impoverished and unadorned, rural churches. There was neither choir nor music, and simpler services were conducted by a single priest and a clerk who made the responses.

In either high or low form, prevailing practice excluded the people: they were passive spectators and listeners in a rite the clergy said in Latin. Even their view of the priest’s actions at the altar was obscured because the celebrant turned eastward, his back to the congregation, until the elevation of the consecrated elements of bread and wine, the miraculous and awesome moment when the congregation might adore what they believed was the body of Christ present on the altar. Frequently, the priest was the only one to receive Communion (except on Easter, the main occasion for lay Communion).

At such masses, the people’s attendance could not be taken for granted: the provincial council of Catholic clergy meeting at Edinburgh in 1552 lamented how “very few indeed out of the most populous parishes deign to be present at the sacrifice of holy Mass on the Sundays and the other double festivals appointed by the church.”

At the same time, the belief that the sacrifice offered at each Mass removed venial sin (just as the sacrifice at Calvary did away with mortal sin) encouraged the proliferation of private masses. In Edinburgh, St. Giles’s Church had more than forty altars dedicated to Mary and the saints before which priests, silently or in low voices, said masses privately for particular souls, that they might escape torment after death. The more masses purchased, the greater the perceived benefits for the souls of the living and the dead. This emphasis transformed the corporate action of the Eucharist into individual priestly offerings.

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