Jamie Burne hesitates before tipping a measure of sugar into his claret. He might as well be seasoning the wine with silver but sugar makes the wine taste better and besides, who knows their moment?
He observes the flicker of candle flame through the wine glass then sips. Here, in his counting house, he pretends he can afford a little wine, a wee bit candlelight. After all, he is a merchant, a guildsman and a burgess. And as for his debts…
Besides, the candlelight is necessary if he is to check and recheck the facts and figures in his ledger.
The overwhelming fact is that he owes Gerrit Pieter Bicker of Amsterdam 1,127 guilders.
It will be considerably more by Martinmas for interest never sleeps. Like a rat behind the wainscot, it scratches away, accumulating and accumulating. All across the world, now, debts mount, bigging up under their own miraculous power: like foost on an old cheese.
The glazed window of Jamie’s counting house overlooks his booth on the Causagait. Tonight, the muddy square is empty of all life except the rats. Beyond the Merkat-cross, the Tolbooth and the Tron insist on order: justice, measure, trade. And tariffs. Especially on tariffs.
Ten years ago, that square was raucous with mummers and pipers, the night sky bright with bonfires. Jamie had just returned from Danzig. His uncle’s ship was berthed at North Queensferry, laden with Polish grain. Janet was sixteen.
Whilst the monks from the Abbey celebrated All Souls with chants and incense, the townsfolk guised and revelled from bonfire to bonfire. After supper, Jamie’s uncle had advised him, gravely, though clearly drunk, to buy an indulgence from the Abbey. In the merchant trade, he said, you never know the minute. It was insurance, he said. But there was not enough silver in Jamie’s pouch, yet, to go passing it on to prelates, canons and deacons just in case.
That night, he recognised Janet by the way she moved despite her disguise and the fact that she had grown a year since he saw her last. She offered him two hazelnuts, nestled in her palm.
He would be away again next Spring, to the Low Countries or La Rochelle perhaps. What had he to lose?
Side by side, they hunkered down at the bonfire’s glowing edge and placed the nuts among the embers. The nuts hissed and their undersides began to glow.
Jamie still had another year of his apprenticeship to serve. In the previous four, he had been schooled in arithmetic and Dutch and French, sent off on long sea journeys to learn the business as well within the country as without. Rotterdam, Danzig, Stockholm, Trondheim, La Rochelle. Especially Danzig, for recent harvests in Scotland had been poor.
The merchants that he met on the Continent inhabited a richer, wider, more vivid world than anyone he knew of in Scotland outside Dunfermline Palace or the monasteries. In Dutch alehouses he learned about the flesh and the soul, heard good conversation from Lutherans, Genevans and Humanists, heretics who had been questioning the established order and speculating on reform for three decades. It was exhilarating. But they were only questions. Pub talk that sometimes degenerated into pointless grievance and complaints. He had learned to buy cheap and sell dear and to carry contraband only when the returns warrant it.
The nuts smouldered then crumbled to ash as Janet edged closer, not for warmth but for that other sort of heat. The quiet smouldering was known to be a good omen but perhaps it was just as good an excuse as any. He straightened first and moved away into the warm shadows closer to his father’s house. When he glanced back, she was not far behind him.
Ten years on, he takes wine and candle and steps away from his accounts.
Janet is sleeping in the upstairs room opposite his counting house, their latest bairn, wee Marion, is in the bed beside her, nuzzling into the milk scent of her breasts. Their oldest girl, Besse, mumbles in her sleep on the truckle bed at the foot of theirs. His boy, young Jamie, sleeps in the other room now, where the servant girl slept before they sent her away last week.
He descends the steps and follows the passage to the back door of the house.
The narrow strip of his toft stretches back into the darkness behind his house. The spill of expensive candlelight sketches in the gnarled branches of an apple tree, bare, now, of both fruit and foliage. Leaving his back-step, he feels his way out along the toft towards In-ablo-the-waas.
The quiet of this All-Hallows night feels eerie. The revels of Samhain are long abolished by the Kirk. The Kirk has proscribed everything: saints and popes and purgatory, piping, dancing, bonfires, adultery and fornication, swearing and drunkenness, vagrancy and pilgrimage. Christmas.
On a Thursday night, when he is in Dunfermline, Jamie attends the sermon in the nave of the old Abbey. But it is not the Kirk that is suffocating the town in a blanket of silence tonight. It is pestilence. Plague keeps even the minister and elders from congregating. If not for the plague, the session would be searching him out, a miscreant checking his sums at sermon-time. Discipline in a Godly Commonwealth.
Word of the first instances of plague in Edinburgh came on the 8th September[i]. Jamie Dalgleish brought it into the town, they said. Probably out of Holland and not long after Jamie’s own ship returned from the staplemarkt at Rotterdam with a cargo of sugar, wine and rye.
So, it must already have been abroad in Fife by then.
In October, special measures were imposed. The plague had come before: the powers-that-be had routines and plans to moderate the catastrophe.
Dogs, cats and swine are to be kept within a house or yard – those running loose are put down.
Children wandering in the streets are put in the stocks and scourged.
Any teacher continuing to run a school is banished.
All trading booths have closed on pain of confiscation of all the vendor’s goods.
The onset of illness is to be reported within 12 hours, child or adult. Failure to do so will result in branding on the cheek.
The stricken are quarantined in huts outside the walls on the Burgh Muir.
Knowingly breaking quarantine is punishable by death.
These measures are a serious impediment to trade. No one leaves their doors unless they must and every neighbour keeps a watchful eye for clues of the sickness in their peers; shivering, vomiting, headaches, intolerance to light. Buboes.
Supply chains have been disrupted. There are already material shortages. The apothecaries of the capital are desperate for sugar to concoct their syrups, fomentations and decoctions. Sugar and spice that sits, quarantined, in Jamie’s warehouse. But any man bringing goods into Edinburgh without permission will have his hand cut off: her cheek branded if a woman. And not only cossars and tinkers. Davy Aitken’s widow wears the raw mark of the hot iron on her left cheek.
The lords and gentry who enforce the Regent’s laws still want their medicines and their marzipane subtleties, however, so their apothecaries and confectioners beg supply at premium prices.
While the local lords have shut themselves up in their castles, Dunfermline townsfolk of the poorer sort die on the Burgh Muir. Jamie has watched, from the walls, the dead dragged on a hook, scraps of rotten flesh in scant rags. The hurdles rattle across the rough ground on the way to the burial pit. In the capital, they have appointed desperate men and women as cleansers to ridd out the middens and burn the clothes and goods of households that have been infected. The heaps of smouldering furniture and clothing are the only bonfires burning on this All-Hallows.
Meanwhile, the Kirk’s comprehensive surveillance is redoubled as both Godly discipline and personal hygiene come under communal scrutiny. Preachers revel in the pestilence, calling it a ‘good work’ designed by God to ‘draw us nearer and nearer unto Him’ and intended to further ‘His own glory’. It is a scourge sent by God to awaken the people of Scotland to the ungodly policies of their government and the sins of the populace. The walls of the town, they insist, will not keep them safe nor the daily and nightly efforts of vigilant attendants. The wise old age of the elders cannot devise any relief from public sorrows, nor the infant king’s love devise a citadel for the country and a fortress for the people. Health cannot be determined through the prayers of a heedful neighbourhood which looks to its own. For human effort is. and always is, pointless to an unwilling God.[ii]
So, the townsfolk bide indoors, slaughter stray dogs and swine, inhibit trade despite being helpless against an obdurate God who singles them out, household by household, parent or child, to suffer for their misdeeds. Unto the fourth generation. We are never good enough. Justified or not.
Jamie steps beyond the branches of the apple tree, searching for the pattern of stones that marks where he buried the hoard.
He has always known there might come a time he would need to dig it up under the cover of night. It is too dark, tonight, to know for sure. Is this the moment? It is well an accepted fact, after all, learned from every previous plague, that in the aftermath prices will fall and wages will rise. The value of the stock in his store will shrink, especially the store of sugar loaves which currently command premium prices if they can be moved.
And then there are his debts, in silver. Gerrit Pieter Bicker might succumb to plague but his accounts will not.
It was Davy Aitken who hatched the plot. Davy was the Dean of Guild that year.
Jamie was in his booth when Davy’s lad came by saying his master needed a word at his own place – would he come? By the time Jamie arrived, Walt Baxter, Willie Cooper, Jamie Shorthouse, Johne Boswell and Larry Dalgleish were already there.
Master Knox had returned from Geneva a few months before and had preached a sermon in St. John’s Kirk, in Perth. After his sermon, the congregation – not the gentlemen or those that were earnest professors of the faith but the ‘rascal multitude’– sacked the Blackfriars and Greyfriars Houses in the town[iii].
Despite the bailies at their gates, the congregation burst through and, although Idolatry was the occasion of the outburst, began to look for spoil. They say only the poor were permitted to participate in the looting, insisting that no honest man was enriched by the value of a groat. The men of conscience were, apparently, so ‘beaten with the Word’ that they had no respect to their own particular profit but only to abolish idolatry and the places and monuments thereof[iv].
But even paupers need to fence their loot to someone. Goods fall into trade. It was a rumour that all the men assembled in Davy Aitken’s booth had heard. From Germany and the Low Countries there were tales of ships laden with sculptured and carved statues, bells, brass and stone effigies of saints, candlesticks and other suchlike ornaments from the churches dispatched to Narva or Moscow[v].
Since the stramash in Perth, armed bands were afoot in the country. French mercenaries, brought in by Mary of Guise to support her interest, contested with the so-called Lords of Congregation. French or Protestant, either force might sack Dunfermline. This, Davy explained, was his concern.
“So?” Jamie said.
Davy pulled back the sack cloth covering his bench. Beneath it, the fragments of the Holy Blood Chapel’s monstrance and chalice lay, neatly cut into almost-squares. Jamie guessed Davy’s loon used shears, a cold chisel and a hammer. The sacramental silver was divided into seven, approximately equal, piles.
“Whit hiv ye done, Davy?”
The Merchants’ Guild was patron of the Holy Blood Chapel. The livings of the priests were paid for by the donations of pilgrims seeking blessings from the Holy Blood they stored behind the altar in a precious vial.
“Best spread the risk, lads. Ye ken that fine. These bandits will tak aa they fin bit will mebbe nae fin it aa? Tak yer portion an keep it safe an hidden till this passes. Syned, God willing, we can big this silver up more blesséd than afore. Eh?”
Each of them eyed the portions of silver on the bench. A bird in the hand.
Davy made them solemnly agree and recorded receipt of the portion in the Guild’s minute book. He didn’t mention the two altar cloths and 1½ ells of linen, 5 towels, the altar frontal of yellow velvet, a cross of gilt brass and two brass candlesticks, two albs, three chasubles (one of them of blue velvet), a stole and, of course, the vial of Holy Blood. And the burgesses of Dunfermline he trusted, Jamie included, were too daft to ask.
It did occur to Jamie, at the time, that none of the Guildsmen summoned to that tryst were monks. Despite their Benedictine vow of poverty, monks at the Abbey owned property in the town and some were members of the Merchant Guild. Davy said he was vexed about a conflict of interest. Whose? Jamie wonders now[vi].
It was the Lords of Congregation who arrived in Dunfermline first. In one day, the congregation smashed all of the statues in the Abbey and the chapels, stripping them of their appurtenances. Though they looted the buildings, they did not demolish them. Within a year, the celebration of the Mass was banned and the Romish church outlawed. But each of the 26 brothers in the Abbey was allocated a piece of land or garden within its precinct. They are allowed to keep their own cell in the dormitory building and paid a pension of £51 a year. No one, it seems, wants the apples to fall too far from the tree.
Just beyond his own bare apple tree, Jamie feels with his foot for any disturbance in the wet earth that might hint at the presence of the hoard. He senses a slight mound peppered with sharp stones.
Since the world capsized, the value of Scottish coin has dwindled. The silver is adulterated and its value against the English Pound or Dutch Guilder has depreciated. Jamie’s pound of silver, melted to bullion, appearing nowhere on his accounts, might provide for Janet and the bairns should the worst befall him. For surely not all of them will be claimed?
It is not that he does not acknowledge his former impieties and licentiousness. He and Janet had two bairns out of wedlock while he prevaricated and she fornicated. They knew well enough that fornication was impious when they had their first born. And then a second. Taking the fruit afore the flower. But the gyte in her was not to be refused.
By then Jamie understood that, eventually, the focus of his business would be his counting house not at sea. But where would that counting house be sited?
As a merchant, he sank or swam on margin calls, hedging risk by entering partnerships with other guild members. It was safer to have 25% of 4 boats and cargoes than 100% of one. The Dunfermline market depended on the Palace and Abbey for its high margin trades. Despite the shortage of grain, the trade in staples was constrained by the long trauchle overland of goods, carried in panniers on horseback, from North Queensferry to the town itself and then on-shipment to customers in the North and West. It was better to sell stuff on from his warehouse at the port. Jamie was no grand Edinburgh merchant. But he was ambitious.
Was Dunfermline really the place for his counting house?
With each trip back to Dunfermline, he saw a little more of Janet and his bairns.
Though easily established by his family connections in the Dunfermline Guild, access to a guild in another place might offer a better return over time. The fine to an outland man was higher than for the son of a local burgess but fines were known to be lowered for sons-in-law[vii]. To exercise that option Jamie had to be unmarried. Janet remained on hold; patient mostly, ruined certainly.
It turned out the Kirk Session were not as tolerant as the laissez-faire monks of the Abbey had been about such arrangements, however. Burgess or not, Jamie and Janet were summoned by the Session. They were both fined and directed to sit for three Sundays in succession on the stool of repentance, barefoot, just in their linen, then repent on their knees and beg the forgiveness of the congregation. The higher fine Jamie offered spared them both the jougs.
Those were long, tedious and uncomfortable Sundays. The reading from the Bible, the first sermon, over an hour long, then the catechising, then another hour-long sermon. Janet and Jamie shivered in just their sarks. Janet took it hard but she has sand.
Call and response, the catechists drilled them in the truths the priests had concealed behind their Latin mumbling.
What is the chief end of man?
Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
What is God?
God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.
Despite the chill and aches and the rough linen rubbing, the words flowing from the pulpit, brushed and scratched at his conscience, his ignominy, his worthlessness and Janet’s, his partner in perfidy. Sitting there in the ruined nave of the old Abbey, the words in Scots made him think about their meaning in ways he never had when the priests mumbled their Latin rigmaroles beyond the reredos.
Yes: the frivolous idolatry and sensuous seductions of earlier times were missing; the formal plainsong and the haze of incense and candle-smoke hanging between the columns that supported the vaulted roof. The silver and gold in each of the Abbey’s twenty-two chapels glinting pathos and penitence from their alcoves. But were these scents and flickerings, colours and harmonies a barrier between God and man or a vision of God for man?
And was Jamie’s chief end to glorify God and to enjoy him forever?
Perhaps he should have bought those indulgences his Uncle recommended for there are none on the market these days.
These days, Jamie knows the words and the right-meaning of every part of the Shorter Catechism. He tests the older two of his three children, nightly, so that they will pass muster when the elders come around to examine them.
But Jamie and Janet are only the first generation to foreswear the errors of idolatry. Their children, and the children of all the folk of this town, must suffer for the iniquity of their fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers. It is a grim thought and yet here is this pestilence and there is that debt. Is God’s wrath, then, compounded over time?
Taking a spade from the store, Jamie strikes at the turf and begins to dig. It would be sinful, obviously, for this silver to be resurrected as a graven image. Surely it was better it become bullion in the hands of men. A man?
As he gouges at the wet depression in the earth, water seeps in to fill it. He promises God he will become an elder after the plague subsides and, God willing, they are spared. He recalls this is known as the Arminian heresy for there is no salvation in good works. But surely that would be a sign in itself?
[i] By the end of the month the situation was so concerning that the Regent Moray was concerned that “the publict ordour to be observit anent the plaige”, might cause new civic officials to, “throw laik of experience may omyt the maist necessar thingis that in sa strait ane tyme ar requisit to be done”. On 13th October Edinburgh ruled that nobody was to pass to the Burgh Muir (where the sick were quarantined in huts) without an official escort, and, a couple of days later, officers were appointed to clean the victims’ houses and take charge of burying the dead. Meanwhile it was ordained “that how sone any maner of persoun fallis seik within this burgh, in quhatsumeuir kynde of seiknes that ever it be, the awneris of the hous inclose thame selffis and cum nocht furth of thair houssis, nowther suffer ony to resort to thame unto the tyme thai aduertice the baillie of the quarter and ordour be taiken be him, under the pane of deid
[ii] Hercules Rollock: De Peste Edinburgi & reliqua late Scotia grassante anno 1585. Nania. (gla.ac.uk)
[iii] The Grey Friars house was so well provided, they said, that ordinary men could not believe their riches; sheets, blankets, beds, and coverlets such as no Earl in Scotland had better.
[iv] John Knox History of the Reformation in Scotland, p.149–50: ‘… the whole multitude came together, not the gentlemen or those that were earnest professors [of the faith], but the rascal multitude.’
‘Finding nothing to do in that church, these ran without deliberation to the Grey and Black Friars, and, notwithstanding that these monasteries had within them very strong guards for their defence, their gates were forthwith burst open. Idolatry was the occasion of the first outburst, but thereafter the common people began to look for spoil.’
[…]the Grey Friars [house] was so well provided that unless honest men had seen it, we would have feared to report what provision they had. Their sheets, blankets, beds, and coverlets were such that no Earl in Scotland had better…’
‘The poor were permitted to take the spoil; but no honest man was enriched by the value of a groat. For the preachers had before threatened all men, that for covetousness sake none should put their hand to such a Reformation. …
‘So had men’s consciences before been beaten with the Word, that they had no respect to their own particular profit, but only to abolish idolatry, and the places and monuments thereof.
‘In this they were so busy and so laborious that, within two days, these three great places, monuments of idolatry, to wit, the monasteries of the Grey and Black thieves and that of the Charterhouse monks (a building of a wondrous cost and greatness) were so destroyed that only the walls remained.’
[v] Four ships were laden with sculptured and carved statues, bells, brass and stone effigies of saints, candlesticks and other suchlike ornaments from the churches. All are to be dispatched to Narva and Moscow. The dispatchers hope to do good business with them. Fuggers Newsletters in Barzun, p15.
[vi] A formal declaration was recorded in the Guild minute book:
We Walter Baxter, William Cooper, James Burn, James Shorthouse, David Aitken, John Boswell and Laurence Dalgleish, guild brethren and burgesses of Dunfermline, the seven men before named grant us every one of us respectively to have received from David Aitken dean of guild 8 ounces of silver sharp weight of the eucharist (monstrance) and chalice of the Holy Blood altar and because of the troublous world both of the Congregation and the French men, because we thought it not expedient to put it all in one hand, and for the relief of the Dean of Guild, we being us and each one of us by this present writ to hold it forthcoming to the guild brethren. Subscribed with our hands and our merchant marks set to. At Dunfermline the last day of November 1559
Aitken also secured other accoutrements for safe-keeping: “Two altar cloths and 1½ ells of linen, 5 towels, an altar frontal of yellow velvet, a cross of gilt brass and two brass candlesticks. The priest’s vestments were also hidden – two albs, three chasubles (one of them of blue velvet) and a stole.”
[vii] providing the girl they married was a clean virgin of good repute
©John Bolland 2026
[i] By the end of the month the situation was so concerning that the Regent Moray was concerned that “the publict ordour to be observit anent the plaige”, might cause new civic officials to, “throw laik of experience may omyt the maist necessar thingis that in sa strait ane tyme ar requisit to be done”. On 13th October Edinburgh ruled that nobody was to pass to the Burgh Muir (where the sick were quarantined in huts) without an official escort, and, a couple of days later, officers were appointed to clean the victims’ houses and take charge of burying the dead. Meanwhile it was ordained “that how sone any maner of persoun fallis seik within this burgh, in quhatsumeuir kynde of seiknes that ever it be, the awneris of the hous inclose thame selffis and cum nocht furth of thair houssis, nowther suffer ony to resort to thame unto the tyme thai aduertice the baillie of the quarter and ordour be taiken be him, under the pane of deid
[ii] Hercules Rollock: De Peste Edinburgi & reliqua late Scotia grassante anno 1585. Nania. (gla.ac.uk)
[iii] The Grey Friars house was so well provided, they said, that ordinary men could not believe their riches; sheets, blankets, beds, and coverlets such as no Earl in Scotland had better.
[iv] John Knox History of the Reformation in Scotland, p.149–50: ‘… the whole multitude came together, not the gentlemen or those that were earnest professors [of the faith], but the rascal multitude.’
‘Finding nothing to do in that church, these ran without deliberation to the Grey and Black Friars, and, notwithstanding that these monasteries had within them very strong guards for their defence, their gates were forthwith burst open. Idolatry was the occasion of the first outburst, but thereafter the common people began to look for spoil.’
[…]the Grey Friars [house] was so well provided that unless honest men had seen it, we would have feared to report what provision they had. Their sheets, blankets, beds, and coverlets were such that no Earl in Scotland had better…’
‘The poor were permitted to take the spoil; but no honest man was enriched by the value of a groat. For the preachers had before threatened all men, that for covetousness sake none should put their hand to such a Reformation. …
‘So had men’s consciences before been beaten with the Word, that they had no respect to their own particular profit, but only to abolish idolatry, and the places and monuments thereof.
‘In this they were so busy and so laborious that, within two days, these three great places, monuments of idolatry, to wit, the monasteries of the Grey and Black thieves and that of the Charterhouse monks (a building of a wondrous cost and greatness) were so destroyed that only the walls remained.’
[v] Four ships were laden with sculptured and carved statues, bells, brass and stone effigies of saints, candlesticks and other suchlike ornaments from the churches. All are to be dispatched to Narva and Moscow. The dispatchers hope to do good business with them. Fuggers Newsletters in Barzun, p15.
[vi] A formal declaration was recorded in the Guild minute book:
We Walter Baxter, William Cooper, James Burn, James Shorthouse, David Aitken, John Boswell and Laurence Dalgleish, guild brethren and burgesses of Dunfermline, the seven men before named grant us every one of us respectively to have received from David Aitken dean of guild 8 ounces of silver sharp weight of the eucharist (monstrance) and chalice of the Holy Blood altar and because of the troublous world both of the Congregation and the French men, because we thought it not expedient to put it all in one hand, and for the relief of the Dean of Guild, we being us and each one of us by this present writ to hold it forthcoming to the guild brethren. Subscribed with our hands and our merchant marks set to. At Dunfermline the last day of November 1559
Aitken also secured other accoutrements for safe-keeping: “Two altar cloths and 1½ ells of linen, 5 towels, an altar frontal of yellow velvet, a cross of gilt brass and two brass candlesticks. The priest’s vestments were also hidden – two albs, three chasubles (one of them of blue velvet) and a stole.”
[vii] providing the girl they married was a clean virgin of good repute