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]

The small booths around St Giles’s continued, till 1817, to deform the outward appearance of the church. Long before their destruction, the booksellers at least had found the space of six or seven feet too small for the accommodation of their fast-increasing wares, and removed to larger shops in the elegant tenements of the square. One of the largest of the booths, adjacent to the south side of the New or High Church, and having a second story, was occupied, during a great part of the last century, by Messrs Kerr and Dempster, goldsmiths. The first of these gentlemen had been member of parliament for the city, and was the last citizen who ever held that office [in the Scottish parliament]. Such was the humility of people’s wishes in those days respecting their houses, that this respectable person actually lived, and had a great number of children, in the small space of the flat over the shop and the cellar under it, which was lighted by a grating in the pavement of the square. The subterraneous part of his house was chiefly devoted to the purposes of a nursery, and proved so insalubrious that all his children died successively at a particular age, with the exception of his son Robert, who, being born much more weakly than the rest, had the good luck to be sent to the country to be nursed, and afterwards grew up to be the author of a work entitled The Life of Robert Bruce, and the editor of a large collection of voyages and travels.

GOLDSMITHS.

The goldsmiths of those days were considered a superior class of tradesmen; they appeared in public with scarlet cloak, cocked hat, and cane, as men of some consideration. Yet in their shops every one of them would have been found working with his own hands at some light labour, in a little recess near the window, generally in a very plain dress, but ready to come forth at a moment’s notice to serve a customer. Perhaps, down to 1780, there was not a goldsmith in Edinburgh who did not condescend to manual labour.

As the whole trade was collected in the Parliament Close, this was of course the place to which country couples resorted, during the last century, in order to make the purchase of silver tea-spoons, which always preceded their nuptials. It was then as customary a thing in the country for the intending bridegroom to take a journey, a few weeks before his marriage, to the Parliament Close, in order to buy the silver spoons, as it was for the bride to have all her clothes and stock of bed-furniture inspected by a committee of matrons upon the wedding eve. And this important transaction occasioned two journeys: one, in order to select the spoons, and prescribe the initials which were to be marked upon them; the other, to receive and pay for them. It must be understood that the goldsmiths of Edinburgh then kept scarcely any goods on hand in their shops, and that the smallest article had to be bespoken from them some time before it was wanted. A goldsmith, who entered as an apprentice about the beginning of the reign of George III., informed me that they were beginning only at that time to keep a few trifling articles on hand. Previously another old custom had been abolished. It had been usual, upon both the occasions above mentioned, for the goldsmith to adjourn with his customer to John’s Coffee-house,[82] or to the Baijen-hole,[83] and to receive the order or the payment, in a comfortable manner, over a dram and a caup of small ale; which were upon the first occasion paid for by the customer, and upon the second by the trader; and the goldsmith then was perhaps let into the whole secret counsels of the rustic, including a history of his courtship—in return for which he would take pains to amuse his customer with a sketch of the city news. In time, as the views and capitals of the Parliament Close goldsmiths became extended, all these pleasant customs were abandoned.[84]

GEORGE HERIOT.

The shop and workshop of George Heriot existed in this neighbourhood till 1809, when the extension of the Advocates’ Library occasioned the destruction of some interesting old closes to the west of St Giles’s Kirk, and altered all the features of this part of the town. There was a line of three small shops, with wooden superstructures above them, extending between the door of the Old Tolbooth and that of the Laigh Council-house, which occupied the site of the present lobby of the Signet Library. A narrow passage led between these shops and the west end of St Giles’s; and George Heriot’s shop, being in the centre of the three, was situated exactly opposite to the south window of the Little Kirk. The back windows looked into an alley behind, called Beith’s or Bess Wynd. In confirmation of this tradition, George Heriot’s name was discovered upon the architrave of the door, being carved in the stone, and apparently having served as his sign. Besides this curious memorial, the booth was also found to contain his forge and bellows, with a hollow stone, fitted with a stone cover or lid, which had been used as a receptacle for and a means of extinguishing the living embers of the furnace, upon closing the shop at night. All these curiosities were bought by the late Mr E. Robertson of the Commercial Bank, who had been educated in Heriot’s Hospital, and by him presented to the governors, who ordered them to be carefully deposited and preserved in the house, where they now remain. George Heriot’s shop was only about seven feet square! Yet his master, King James, is said to have sometimes visited him and been treated by him here. There is a story that one day, when the goldsmith visited His Majesty at Holyrood, he found him sitting beside a fire, which, being composed of perfumed wood, cast an agreeable smell through the room. Upon George Heriot remarking its pleasantness, the king told him that it was quite as costly as it was fine. Heriot said that if His Majesty would come and pay him a visit at his shop, he would show him a still more costly fire.

‘Indeed!’ said the king; ‘and I will.’ He accordingly paid the goldsmith a visit, but was surprised to find only an ordinary fire. ‘Is this, then, your fine fire?’ said he.

‘Wait a little,’ said George, ‘till I get my fuel.’ So saying, he took from his bureau a bond for two thousand pounds which he had lent to the king, and laying it in the fire, added: ‘Now, whether is your Majesty’s fire or mine most expensive?’

‘Yours most certainly, Master Heriot,’ said the king.

Adjacent to George Heriot’s shop, and contiguous to the Laigh Council-house, there was a tavern, in which a great deal of small legal business used to be transacted in bygone times. Peter Williamson, an original and singular person, who had long been in North America, and therefore designated himself ‘from the other world,’ kept this house for many years.[85] It served also as a sort of vestry to the Tolbooth Church, and was the place where the magistrates took what was called the Deid-chack—that is, a refreshment or dinner, of which those dignitaries always partook after having attended an execution. The Deid-chack is now abjured, like many other of those fashions which formerly rendered the office of a magistrate so much more comfortable than it now is.[86]

The various kirks which compose St Giles’s had all different characters in former times. The High Kirk had a sort of dignified aristocratic character, approaching somewhat to prelacy, and was frequented only by sound church-and-state men, who did not care so much for the sermon as for the gratification of sitting in the same place with His Majesty’s Lords of Council and Session and the magistrates of Edinburgh, and who desired to be thought men of sufficient liberality and taste to appreciate the prelections of Blair. The Old Kirk, in the centre of the whole, was frequented by people who wished to have a sermon of good divinity, about three-quarters of an hour long, and who did not care for the darkness and dreariness of their temple. The Tolbooth Kirk was the peculiar resort of a set of rigid Calvinists from the Lawnmarket and the head of the Bow, termed the Towbuith-Whigs, who loved nothing but extempore evangelical sermons, and would have considered it sufficient to bring the house down about their ears if the precentor had ceased, for one verse, the old hillside fashion of reciting the lines of the psalm before singing them. Dr Webster, of convivial memory, was long one of the clergymen of this church, and deservedly admired as a pulpit orator; though his social habits often ran nigh to scandalise his devout and self-denying congregation.

The inhabitants and shopkeepers of the Parliament Square were in former times very sociable and friendly as neighbours, and formed themselves into a sort of society, which was long known by the name of The Parliament-Close Council. Of this association there were from fifty to a hundred members, who met once or twice a year at a dinner, when they usually spent the evening, as the newspaper phrase goes, ‘in the utmost harmony.’ The whim of this club consisted in each person assuming a titular dignity at the dinner, and being so called all the year after by his fellow-members. One was Lord Provost of Edinburgh, another was Dean of Guild, some were bailies, others deacons, and a great proportion state-officers. Sir William Forbes, who, with the kindness of heart which characterised him, condescended to hold a place in this assemblage of mummers, was for a long time Member for the City.

Previous to the institution of the police-court, a bailie of Edinburgh used to sit, every Monday, at that part of the Outer Parliament House where the statue of Lord Melville now stands, to hear and decide upon small causes—such as prosecutions for scandals and defamation, or cases of quarrels among the vulgar and the infamous. This judicature, commonly called the Dirt Court, was chiefly resorted to by washerwomen from Canonmills and the drunken ale-wives of the Canongate. A list of Dirt-Court processes used always to be hung up on a board every Monday morning at one of the pillars in the piazza at the outside of the Parliament Square; and that part of the piazza, being the lounge of two or three low pettifoggers who managed such pleas, was popularly called the Scoundrels’ Walk. Early on Monday, it was usual to see one or two threadbare personages, with prodigiously clean linen, bustling about with an air of importance, and occasionally accosted by viragoes with long-eared caps flying behind their heads. These were the agents of the Dirt Court, undergoing conference with their clients.

There was something lofty and august about the Parliament Close, which we shall scarcely ever see revived in any modern part of the town; so dark and majestic were the buildings all round, and so finely did the whole harmonise with the ancient cathedral which formed one of its sides! Even the echoes of the Parliament Square had something grand in them. Such, perhaps, were the feelings of William Julius Mickle when he wrote a poem on passing through the Parliament Close of Edinburgh at midnight,[87] of which the following is one of the best passages: