Story presented as told by an itinerant craftsman who travels from gravesite to gravesite -- thus his nickname "Old Mortality" -- restoring inscriptions on headstones of forgotten Presbyterian martyrs.
Jacobite royalists enforce recreation -- sports, dancing -- as well as military drills for young men in order to seduce them from severity of Covenanter society.
"To compel men to dance and make merry by authority, has rarely succeeded even on board slave ships where it was formerly sometimes attempted by way of inducing the wretched captives to agitate their limbs and restore their circulation during the few minutes they were permitted to enjoy the fresh air upon deck."
May Day celebration includes traditional game of shooting the "Popinjay": brightly feathered target suspended from a pole at great distance from the contestants.
Scott's account of rivalry of green-caped gentry and fashionable noble to hit Popinjay will be told by him again, much more elaborately, in archery contest won by Robin Hood in "Ivanhoe."
Scott introduces two zealots: the crude Royalist bully Bothwell (of royal blood, but disposessed) and the uncompromising dissenter Balfour, on the run having assassinated the Archbishop. (Later he will introduce the almost Satanic Claverhouse as the polar opposite to Balfour; the consummate cynic to Balfour's true believer).
Scott's hero Henry Morton, winner of the Popinjay contest, tries to navigate between the two extremes, but in a brave manner, like his dead father, rather than a cautious one, like his penurious uncle.
Uncompromising covenanters such as Balfour (also known as Burley) see the "indulged" Presbyterian ministers as tools of the Royalists: "a fighting of the wars of darkness with the swords of the children of light."
The brave fanatic (one could say terrorist) Balfour on his eventual fate: "my hour is not yet come. That I shall one day fall into their hands and be honorably associated with the saints whom they have slaughtered, I am full well aware. And I would that hour were come; it will be as welcome to me as ever wedding to bridegroom."
For all his ardor and certitude, Balfour still expresses doubt to Henry as to the source of an inspiration that causes him to violate "feelings of natural humanity" in order to serve divine will.
Balfour to Henry: "think ye our conquests must be only over our corrupt and evil affections and passions? No; we are called upon, when we have girded our loins, to run the race boldly, and when we have drawn the sword, we are enjoined to smite the ungodly, though he be our neighbor, and the man of power and cruelty, though he were of our own kindred, and the friend of our own bosom."
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