Part 12

At the back of the Commendator’s house there is a projection,[67] on the top of which is a bartisan or flat roof, faced with three lettered stones. There is a tradition that Oliver Cromwell lived in this house,[68] and used to come out and sit here to view his navy on the Forth, of which, together with the whole coast, it commands a view. As this commander is said to have had his guard-house in the neighbouring alley called Dunbar’s Close, there is some reason to give credit to the story, though it is in no shape authenticated by historical record. The same house was, for certain, the residence of Sir William Dick, the hapless son of Crœsus spoken of in a preceding article.

These houses preserved, until their recent renovation, all the characteristics of that ancient mode of architecture which has procured for the edifices constructed upon it the dignified appellative of _Mahogany Lands_. Below were the booths or piazzas, once prevalent throughout the whole town, in which the merchants of the laigh shops, or cellars, were permitted to exhibit their goods to the passengers. The merchant himself took his seat at the head of the stair to attend to the wants of passing customers. By the ancient laws of the burgh, it was required that each should be provided with ‘lang wappinis, sick as a spear or a Jeddart staff,’ with which he was to sally forth and assist the magistrates in time of need; for example, when a _tulzie_ took place between the retainers of rival noblemen meeting in the street.

This house could also boast of that distinguished feature in all ancient wooden structures, a _fore-stair_, an antiquated convenience, or inconvenience, now almost extinct, consisting of a flight of steps, ascending from the pavement to the first floor of the mansion, and protruding a considerable way into the street. Nuisances as they still are, they were once infinitely worse. What will my readers think when they are informed that under these projections our ancestors kept their swine? Yes; _outside stairs_ was formerly but a term of outward respect for what were as frequently denominated _swine’s cruives_; and the rude inhabitants of these narrow mansions were permitted, through the day, to stroll about the ‘High Gait,’ seeking what they might devour among the heaps of filth which then encumbered the street,[69] as barn-door fowls are at the present day suffered to go abroad in country towns; and, like them (or like the town-geese of Musselburgh, which to this day are privileged to feed upon the race-ground), the sullen porkers were regularly called home in the evening by their respective proprietors.

These circumstances will be held as sufficient evidence, notwithstanding all the enactments for the ‘policy of bigginis’ and ‘decoring the tounes,’ that the stranger’s constant reproach of the Scots for want of cleanliness was not unmerited. Yet, to show that our countrymen did not lack a taste for decent appearances, let it be recollected that on every occasion of a public procession, entry of a sovereign, or other ceremonial, these fore-stairs were hung with carpets, tapestry, or arras, and were the principal places for the display of rank and fashion; while the windows, like the galleries of a theatre compared with the boxes, were chiefly occupied by spectators of a lower degree.[70] The strictest proclamations were always issued, before any such occasion, ordaining the ‘middinis’ and the ‘swine’ to be removed, and the stairs to be decorated in the manner mentioned.

Beneath the stair of the house now under review there abode in later times an old man named Bryce, in whose life and circumstances there was something characteristic of a pent-up city like Edinburgh, where every foot of space was valuable. A stock of small hardwares and trinkets was piled up around him, leaving scarcely sufficient room for the accommodation of his own person, which completely filled the vacant space, as a hermit-crab fills its shell. There was not room for the admission of a customer; but he had a _half-door_, over which he sold any article that was demanded; and there he sat from morning till night, with his face turned to this door, looking up the eternal Lawnmarket. The place was so confined that he could not stand upright in it; nor could he stretch out his legs. Even while he sat, there was an uneasy obliquity of the stair, which compelled him to shrink a little aside; and by accustoming himself to this posture for a long series of years, he had insensibly acquired a twist in his shoulders, nearly approaching to a humpback, and his head swung a little to one side. This was _l’air boutiquier_ in a most distressing sense.

In the description of this old tenement given in the title-deeds, it is called ‘All and haill that Lodging or Timber Land lying in the burgh of Edinburgh, on the north side of the High Street thereof, forgainst the place of the Tolbooth, commonly called the Poor Folks’ Purses.’ The latter place was a part of the northern wall of the prison, deriving its name from a curious circumstance. It was formerly the custom for the privileged beggars, called _Blue-gowns_, to assemble in the palace yard, where a small donation from the king, consisting of as many pennies as he was years old, was conferred on each of them; after which they moved in procession up the High Street, till they came to this spot, where the magistrates gave each a _leathern purse_ and a small sum of money; the ceremony concluding by their proceeding to the High Church to hear a sermon from one of the king’s chaplains.[71]

THE KRAMES.

The central row of buildings—the _Luckenbooths proper_—was not wholly taken away till 1817. The narrow passage left between it and the church will ever be memorable to all who knew Edinburgh in those days, on account of the strange scene of traffic which it presented—each recess, angle, and coign of vantage in the wall of the church being occupied by little shops, of the nature of Bryce’s, devoted to the sale of gloves, toys, lollipops, &c. These were the _Krames_, so famous at Edinburgh firesides. Singular places of business they assuredly were; often not presenting more space than a good church-pew, yet supporting by their commerce respectable citizenly families, from which would occasionally come men of some consequence in society. At the same spot the constable (Earl of Errol) was wont to sit upon a chair at the ridings of the parliament, when ceremonially receiving the members as they alighted.

I am told that one such place, not more than seven feet by three, had been occupied by a glover named Kennedy, who with his gentle dame stood there retailing their wares for a time sufficient to witness the rise and fall of dynasties, never enjoying all that time the comfort of a fire, even in the coldest weather! This was a specimen of the life led by these patient creatures; many of whom, upon the demolition of their lath and plaster tenements, retired from business with little competencies. Their rents were from £3 to £6 per annum; and it appears that, huddled as the town then was around them, they had no inconsiderable custom. At the end of the row, under the angle of the church, was a brief stair, called _The Lady’s Steps_, thought to be a corruption of _Our Lady’s Steps_, with reference to a statue of the Virgin, the niche for which was seen in the east wall of the church till the renovation of the building in 1830. Sir George Mackenzie, however, in his _Observations on the Statutes_, states that the Lady’s Steps were so called from the infamous Lady March (wife of the Earl of Arran, James VI.’s profligate chancellor), from whom also the nine o’clock evening-bell, being ordered by her to an hour later, came to be called _The Lady’s Bell_. When men made bargains at the Cross, it was customary for them to go up to the Lady’s Steps, and there consummate the negotiation by wetting thumbs or paying _arles_.

CREECH’S SHOP.

The building at the east end of the Luckenbooths proper had a front facing down the High Street, and commanding not only a view of the busy scene there presented, but a prospect of Aberlady Bay, Gosford House, and other objects in Haddingtonshire. The shop in the east front was that of Mr Creech, a bookseller of facete memory, who had published many books by the principal literary men of his day, to all of whom he was known as a friend and equal. From this place had issued works by Kames, Smith, Hume, Mackenzie, and finally the poems of Burns. It might have been called the Lounger’s Observatory, for seldom was the doorway free of some group of idlers, engaged in surveying and commenting on the crowd in front; Creech himself, with his black silk breeches and powdered head, being ever a conspicuous member of the corps. The flat above had been the shop of Allan Ramsay, and the place where, in 1725, he set up the first example of a circulating library known in Scotland.

FOOTNOTES

[65] Up to the year 1830, when George IV. Bridge gave easy access to Parliament House, this quaint custom was followed by Lord Glenlee, who walked from his house in Brown Square, down Crombie’s Close, across the Cowgate, and up the Back Stairs.

[66] Napier of Merchiston.

[67] This projection is still a notable architectural feature in the open space at the back of the tenement referred to. The original windows have been built up. One of the lettered stones bearing the words, ‘Blessit be God for all his giftis’—a favourite motto with old Edinburgh builders—was removed to Easter Coates house, where it may still be seen in that now old building adjoining St Mary’s Cathedral.

[68] From this tradition it was known as ‘The Cromwell Bartizan.’ Dunbar’s Close did not get its name from its supposed association with Cromwell’s soldiers, but from a family that lived in it. At an earlier period it was known as Ireland’s Close.

[69] Edinburgh was not in this respect worse than other European cities. Paris, at least, was equally disgusting. Rigord, who wrote in the twelfth century, tells us that the king, standing one day at the window of his palace near the Seine, and observing that the dirt thrown up by the carriages produced a most offensive stench, resolved to remedy this intolerable nuisance by causing the streets to be paved. For a long time swine were permitted to wallow in them; till the young Philip being killed by a fall from his horse, from a sow running between its legs, an order was issued that no swine should in future run about the street. The monks of the Abbey of St Anthony remonstrated fiercely against this order, alleging that the prevention of the saint’s swine from enjoying the liberty of going where they pleased was a want of respect to their patron. It was therefore found necessary to grant them the privilege of wallowing in the dirt without molestation, requiring the monks only to turn them out with bells about their necks.

[70]

‘To recreat hir hie renoun, Of curious things thair wes all sort, The stairs and houses of the toun With tapestries were spread athort: Quhair histories men micht behould, With images and anticks auld.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE QVEEN’S MAIESTIES MAIST HONORABLE ENTRY INTO THE TOWN OF EDINBVRGH, VPON THE 19. DAY OF MAII, 1590. BY JOHN BVREL.’—_Watson’s Collection of Scots Poems_ (1709).

[71] In the early times these privileged beggars were called ‘Bedesmen,’ from telling their beads as they walked from Holyrood to St Giles’. From the erection of the Canongate Church in 1690 the ceremony took place there, until it was discontinued in the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign. A well-known worthy of this community was reputed in 1837 to possess property which yielded an annual income of £120.

SOME MEMORANDA OF THE OLD KIRK OF ST GILES.

The central portion or transept of St Giles’s Church, opening from the south, formed a distinct place of worship, under the name of the Old Church, and this seems to have been the first arranged for Protestant worship after the Reformation. It was the scene of the prelections of John Knox (who, it will be remembered, was the first minister of the city under the reformed religion), until a month before his death, when it appears that another portion of the building—styled the Tolbooth Kirk—was fitted up for his use.

It also happened to be in the Old Kirk that the celebrated riot of the 23rd of July 1637 took place, when, on the opening of the new Episcopal service-book, Jenny Geddes, of worthy memory, threw her cutty-stool at the dean who read it—the first weapon, and a formidable one it was, employed in the great civil war.[72]

Jenny Geddes was an herbwoman—_Scottice, a greenwife_—at the Tron Church, where, in former as well as in recent times, that class of merchants kept their stalls. It seems that, in the midst of the hubbub, Jenny, hearing the bishop call upon the dean to read the _collect_ of the day, cried out, with unintentional wit: ‘Deil colic the wame o’ ye!’[73] and threw at the dean’s head the small stool on which she sat; ‘a ticket of remembrance,’ as a Presbyterian annalist merrily terms it, so well aimed that the clergyman only escaped it by jouking;[74] that is, by [ducking or] suddenly bending his person.

Jenny, like the originators of many other insurrections, appears to have afterwards repented of her exertions on this occasion. We learn from the simple diarist, Andrew Nichol, that when Charles II. was known, in June 1650, to have arrived in the north of Scotland, amidst other rejoicings, ‘the pure [_q.d._ poor] kaill-wyves at the Trone [Jenny Geddes, no doubt, among the number] war sae overjoyed, that they sacrificed their standis and creellis, yea, the verie _stoollis_ they sat on, in ane fyre.’ What will give, however, a still more unequivocal proof of the repentance of honest Jenny (after whom, by the way, Burns named a favourite mare), is the conduct expressly attributed to herself on the occasion of the king’s coronation in 1661 by the _Mercurius Caledonius_:

‘But among all our bontados and caprices,’ says that curious register of events,[75] ‘that of the immortal Jenet Geddis, Princesse of the Trone adventurers, was most pleasant; for she was not only content to assemble all her Creels, Basquets, _Creepies_,[76] Furmes, and other ingredients that composed the Shope of her Sallets, Radishes, Turnips, Carrots, Spinage, Cabbage, with all other sorts of Pot Merchandise that belongs to the garden, but even her Leather Chair of State, where she used to dispense Justice to the rest of her Langkale Vassals, were all very orderly burned; she herself countenancing the action with a high-flown flourish and vermilion majesty.’

The Scottish Society of Antiquaries nevertheless exhibit in their museum a clasp-stool, for which there is good evidence that it was the actual stool thrown by Mrs Geddes at the dean.

In the southern aisle of this church, the Regent Murray, three weeks after his assassination at Linlithgow, February 14, 1569-70, was interred: ‘his head placed south, contrair the ordour usit; the sepulchre laid with hewin wark maist curiously, and on the head ane plate of brass.’ John Knox preached a funeral-sermon over the remains of his friend, and drew tears from the eyes of all present. In the Tolbooth Church, immediately adjoining to the west, sat the convention which chose the Earl of Lennox as his successor in the regency. Murray’s monument was not inelegant for the time; and its inscription, written by Buchanan, is remarkable for emphatic brevity.

This part of the church appears to have formerly been an open lounge. French Paris, Queen Mary’s servant, in his confession respecting the murder of Darnley, mentions that, during the communings which took place before that deed was determined on, he one day ‘took his mantle and sword, and went to walk (_promener_) in the High Church.’ Probably, in consequence of the veneration entertained for the memory of ‘the Good Regent,’ or else, perhaps, from some simple motive of conveniency, the Earl of Murray’s tomb was a place frequently assigned in bills for the payment of the money. It also appears to have been the subject of a similar jest to that respecting the tomb of Duke Humphrey. Robert Sempill, in his _Banishment of Poverty_, a poem referring to the year 1680 or 1681, thus expresses himself:

‘Then I knew no way how to fen’; My guts rumbled like a _hurle-barrow_; I dined with saints and noblemen, Even sweet Saint Giles and Earl of Murray.’

In the immediate neighbourhood of the Earl of Murray’s tomb, to the east, is the sepulchre of the Marquis of Montrose, executed in 1650, and here interred most sumptuously, June 1661, after the various parts of his body had been dispersed for eleven years in different directions, according to his sentence.[77]

FOOTNOTES

[72] We learn from Crawford’s _History of the University_ (MS. Adv. Lib.) that the service was read that day in the Old Kirk on account of the more dignified place of worship towards the east being then under the process of alteration for the erection of the altar, ‘and other pendicles of that idolatrous worship.’

[73] _Notes upon the Phœnix edition of the Pastoral Letter_, by S. Johnson, 1694.

[74] Wodrow, in his _Diary_, makes a statement apparently at issue with that in the text, both in respect of locality and person:

‘It is the constantly believed tradition that it was Mrs Mean, wife to John Mean, merchant in Edinburgh, who threw the first stool when the service-book was read in the New Kirk, Edinburgh, 1637, and that many of the lasses that carried on the fray were preachers in disguise, for they threw stools to a great length.’

[75] A newspaper commenced after the Restoration, and continued through eleven numbers.

[76] Small stools.

[77] See _St Giles’, Edinburgh: Church, College, and Cathedral_, by the Rev. Sir J. Cameron Lees, D.D.; also _Historical Sketch of St Giles’ Cathedral_, by William Chambers, by whom the cathedral was restored in 1872-83. Regarding the reinterment of Montrose, there is a narrative, with some fresh light on the subject, in the paper, ‘The Embalming of Montrose,’ in the first volume of _The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club_. The monuments to Knox, the Earl of Murray, and the Marquises of Argyll and Montrose are quite modern.

THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE.

ANCIENT CHURCHYARD—BOOTHS ATTACHED TO THE HIGH CHURCH—GOLDSMITHS—GEORGE HERIOT—THE DEID-CHACK.

Previous to the seventeenth century, the ground now occupied by the Parliament House, and the buildings adjacent to the south and west, was the churchyard of St Giles’s, from the south side of which edifice it extended down a steep declivity to the Cowgate. This might formerly be considered the metropolitan cemetery of Scotland; as, together with the internal space of the church, it contained the ashes of many noble and remarkable personages, John Knox amongst the number. After the Reformation, when Queen Mary conferred the gardens of the Greyfriars upon the town, the churchyard of St Giles’s ceased to be much used as a burying-ground; and that extensive and more appropriate place of sepulture succeeded to this in being made _the Westminster Abbey of Scotland_.

The west side of the cemetery of St Giles’s was bounded by the house of the provost of the church, who, in 1469, granted part of the same to the citizens for the augmentation of the burying-ground. From the charter accompanying the grant, it appears that the provost’s house then also contained the public school of Edinburgh.

In the lower part of the churchyard[78] there was a small place of worship denominated the _Chapel of Holyrood_. Walter Chapman, the first printer in Edinburgh, in 1528 endowed an altar in this chapel with his tenement in the Cowgate; and, by the tenor of the charter, I am enabled to point out very nearly the residence of this interesting person, who, besides being a printer, was a respectable merchant in Edinburgh, and, it would appear, a very pious man. The tenement is thus described: ‘All and haill this tenement of land, back and foir, with houses, biggings, yards, and well[79] thereof, lying in the Cowgate of Edinburgh, on the south side thereof, near the said chapel, betwixt the lands of James Lamb on the east, and the lands of John Aber on the west, the arable lands called Wairam’s Croft on the south, and the said street on the north part.’

BOOTHS.

The precincts of St Giles’s being now secularised, the church itself was, in 1628, degraded by numerous wooden booths being stuck up around it. Yet, to show that some reverence was still paid to the sanctity of the place, the Town-council decreed that no tradesmen should be admitted to these shops except bookbinders, mortmakers (watchmakers), jewellers, and goldsmiths. _Bookbinders_ must here be meant to signify booksellers, the latter term not being then known in Scotland. Of mortmakers there could not be many, for watches were imported from Germany till about the conclusion of the seventeenth century. The goldsmiths were a much more numerous tribe than either of their companions; for at that time there prevailed in Scotland, amongst the aristocracy, a sort of rude magnificence and taste for show extremely favourable to these tradesmen.

In 1632, the present great hall of the Parliament House was founded upon the site of the houses formerly occupied by the ministers of St Giles’s. It was finished in 1639, at an expense of £11,630 sterling, and devoted to the use of parliament.

It does not appear to have been till after the Restoration that the Parliament Close was formed, by the erection of a line of private buildings, forming a square with the church. These houses, standing on a declivity, were higher on one side than the other; one is said to have been fifteen stories altogether in height. All, however, were burned down in a great fire which happened in 1700, after which buildings of twelve stories in height were substituted.[80]

Among the noble inhabitants of the Parliament Close at an early period, the noble family of Wemyss were not the least considerable. At the time of Porteous’s affair, when Francis, the fifth earl, was a boy, his sisters persuaded him to act the part of Captain Porteous in a sort of drama which they got up in imitation of that strange scene. The foolish romps actually went the length of tucking up their brother, the heir of the family, by the neck, over a door; and their sports had well-nigh ended in a real tragedy, for the helpless representative of Porteous was black in the face before they saw the necessity of cutting him down.[81]