The thirteenth century brought changes, too, for many of the ordinary secular clergy, and not all of them were welcome. By 1300 more than 60 per cent of parish kirks had their teinds (tithes) appropriated, in whole or in part, to another ecclesiastical foundation - usually a religious house or cathedral chapter. By the sixteenth century, the figure would rise to 85 per cent. Already by 1250 part of the price of magnificent buildings such as the abbeys of Kelso or Dryburgh or the new cathedral churches and growing diocesan administration of sees like St Andrews and Glasgow was becoming apparent: instead of beneficed parish priests, many parishes were beginning to be served by vicars. This was almost certainly not as yet as damaging as it would be on the eve of the Reformation, by which time much of the ordinary business of the Church was carried out by curates, with the holder of the benefice absentee. Yet the process had already begun by which the 'foot soldiers' of the later medieval Church would be chaplains of various sorts, underpaid, lacking in job security and forever on the move. It is as well to remember that within most great ecclesiastics - ranging from William Wishart, a Bishop of Glasgow in the late thirteenth century who is alleged to have amassed twenty-two rectories and prebends by the time of his election, to the celebrated Bishop Elphinstone who employed a race of Elphinstones in his Aberdeen diocese in the late fifteenth century - there lurked either a pluralist or a nepotist, and that behind them was a transient and poorly paid workforce.

The descent of the parish clergy into real poverty belonged to the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. In the thirteenth century, vicars-pensioner (who were paid only a fixed pension rather than a share of the teinds of the parish) were allowed ten merks and chaplains £5. By the fourteenth century such vicars were supposed to be paid a minimum of £10 but often were not. The intention of the church authorities, it is likely, was to keep the income of the parish clergy on a par with that of freeholders or husbandmen, the backbone of rural society who, if they had an income of £10, were required by parliament to be armed and horsed for military service. Their status was not unlike that of seventeenth-century ministers of the reformed Church, whose income matched that of the lairds, feuars and greater tenant farmers in their congregations. But increasingly the income of the parish clergy fell in real terms as price inflation gripped late medieval Scotland. Long before the Church was faced by a spiritual crisis, it was confronted by an economic one.