Excerpt from The Lord Chancellors of Scotland, Vol. 1: From the Institution of the Office to the Treaty of Union To the student of history the want of such a work as the present has long been evident, but its production, even with our present knowledge, will in some respects be dis appointing. It will be noticed, on perusal of the text, that several of the notices are very brief. This is much to be regretted, but arises from the scarcity of recorded material available for the purpose, and it is impossible, in these circumstances, to enlarge the narrative. The scheme of the work is not to give biographies of the Chancellors, but rather an outline of their official careersso far as that is possible from authentic sources. Prior to the Reformation the history of the Chancellors is practically a history of the Catholic Church in Scotland, and it must be confessed that the progress of the Catholic Church in Scotland from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries makes fascinating reading, and is full of incidents both interesting and important, when we consider the antiquity of these events and their bearing on the political history of the country during the period. Some of the Catholic Bishops and Archbishops made very good Chancellors, but the office was really one which was outside their profession altogether, and the duties foreign to their conception of the order of things. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.