The book Arran; - Cook Clan

CHURCHES BEFORE THE REFORMATION 85
name rises to the surface at St. Mary's, that of rector Walter
Kennedy, M.A. (therefore styled Master), in 1483.^ The rest
is silence. Somehow or other— ^we have seen examples of
how— ^the necessary rites were performed and religious instruction
conveyed, and let us hope things went better in
the blank years and beneath the surface. As in so much
history, it is only the questionable and mischievous that has
left its traces ; the good is too smooth and unexciting for
remark ; so may it have been with St. Mary's of Arran.
How precisely the ecclesiastical properties of the parishes,
manses, glebe-lands and teinds were affected by the Reformation
we cannot say ; what still remains is probably,
as in other parts, but a portion. Nor can anything be said
as to ecclesiastical provision for education, if any such there
was. Nor of what happened to the monastic property on
Holy Isle, whatever that may have been. On these questions
we can only conjecture. Some knowledge, however, we do
possess as to the destination of the only abbey lands on the
island ; such lands became more easily and obviously the
perquisites of the local or the new nobility. There was no
place for abbeys in the reformed church. But even before
the Reformation noble houses were taking time by the forelock
and anticipating the disintegration that was to come.
When Reginald, son of Somerled, who, as the later royalist
scribe puts it,
' called himself King of the Isles,' founded
in the twelfth century the monastery of Saddell in Kintyre,
just across the water, he gifted it, among its other posses-
sions, with twenty marklands of the lands of Shisken,^ a fair
property in a broad alluvial plain of the middle west, which
' Registrum Magni Sigilli. The term Margnaheglish ('the "mark" of the
church'), in two examples, has suggested this name being a relic of Church property.
Cf. ' The ground at Lochranzay lying round the kirk called Margnahaglish ' (Burrel's
Journal, 1772).
But we have already seen
' Marcynegles/ Lamlash, part of the king's
lands in the fifteenth century (p. 39). The church seems to have been only the distinguishing
feature of such land. Cf. on ' mark,' p. 14, note 2.
2 Ibid., Jan. 1, 1508.