The First Book of Discipline

The book sets out how the new church was to be ordered: what doctrine was to be preached, how the sacraments were to be administered, how ministers were to be chosen and paid, how discipline was to be kept, and how the old church’s revenues were to support the ministry, the schools and the poor. It gives each congregation the right to elect its minister, proposes superintendents to oversee the ministers of a district, and asks for a schoolmaster in every church and a college in every notable town.

Knox, in his the History of the Reformation of Religion within the Realm of Scotland, names the six men charged with writing it: John Winram, John Spottiswood, John Willock, John Douglas, John Row and himself. He places the commission after the Parliament of August 1560; the book’s own preface says the charge from the Great Council was dated 29 April 1560. Knox also says that part of the nobility signed it in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh on 27 January 1560, by the reckoning that began the year in March, and that others, who held church lands, called it “devote imaginationis” and would not have it made law.