An afternoon in the Grassmarket

Re-reading my way through Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels is a self appointed task and with their heavy prose, an excellent soporific. No sleeping tablets required.

Having said that, they are grand tales of Scottish history even with the archaic and probably contrived speech of the "common" folk which was no doubt to give them authenticity but makes them a wee bit inaccessible to the modern reader.

After I was asked to do a background piece on Tales of the Covenant for the revival of Wilson's "Tales of the Border",

http://www.wilsonstales.co.uk/

 I read Old Mortality with its story of Covenanting times for some background colour and then carried on with The Black Dwarf, a failed Jacobite uprising and so to Heart of Midlothian with the Porteous Riots in Edinburgh and Rob Roy, the famous outlaw hero.

Coming down from Arthur's Seat (Blog 18/05/2017) with Scott fresh in my mind, I spent the rest of the day in the Grassmarket where the public executions of criminals and religious dissenters took place and features greatly in Scottish history and literature.

One of Rob Roy's sons was executed there on what was somewhat questionable evidence.

Many Covenanters died here and the site of the old gallows is now a memorial to them.

 Captain Porteous, a significant character in the first chapters of Heart of Midlothian, was the officer commanding the City Guard.  The Guard were universally disliked. They were mainly  Highlanders, armed with Lochaber axes, a fearsome weapon but were generally elderly  and less than competent. They were lampooned mercilessly by Robert Fergusson, the poet of Auld Reekie. 

Fergusson's statue outside the Canongate Kirk

At the execution of two men, Wilson and Robertson, Wilson had managed to impede three of the four guards while his companion Robertson knocked down the fourth and escaped.

The Edinburgh mob was always volatile and after Wilson was executed, they attacked the guard.  Captain Porteous ordered his men to fire on the crowd. Several were killed and the impetuous captain was tried for unlawful killing and sentenced to hang.  Queen Caroline in London granted a reprieve whereupon the incensed mob stormed the Tolbooth, seized Porteous and hanged him from a dyer's pole in the Grassmarket.   Not for the first, nor the last time, did the Scottish public resent interference from London in their affairs.

Executions were well attended and, if you owned a house or a "land" with a good view, then  there was money to be made...

"and to think what a weary walk they hae gien us", answered Mrs Howden with a  groan; "and sic a comfortable window I had gotten, within a penny-stane cast o' the scaffold – I could hear every word the minister said – and to pay twalpennies for my stand and a' for naething" *

 (The lady was extremely disgruntled at the reprieve of Captain Porteous)

A grand view of proceedings!

The  West Bow curves up from the Grassmarket to the Castle and at its foot is the old Bow Foot Well establish in1674 with water from a reservoir on the Castle mount to supply the townsfolk.

The Bow Head Well

It was up the West Bow that lived the notorious Major Weir and his sister. He had served with distinction as a Covenanter soldier being an original signatory to the document and was renowned for his strict Presbyterianism and preaching. On his sick bed, he and later, his sister, confessed to necromancy, incest and witchcraft. They were both executed. The confession may have been the deranged ramblings of dementia and religious mania and the sister's corroboration, an example of folie a deux in a submissive partner. Indeed, the provost, at first, did not believe them but as they persisted in their guilt then their fate was sealed.

Major Weir along with the more renowned, Deacon Brodie may have been an inspiration for RLS's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The only witchcraft on the West Bow now is aimed at the customer

 The houses on the south side of the Grassmarket that had originally been the property of the Knights Templar and then the Knights of St John had iron crosses fixed to them.

Such a cross can still be seen in Old St Paul's Church. It would have been the last thing seen by a condemned man...or woman.

 Half Hangit Maggie escaped the gibbet.  In 1742, she was accused of concealing her pregnancy and being delivered of a premature child which presumably died. She was sentenced to be hanged! Apparently, she revived in her coffin as it was trundled away and lived another forty years.

 A fascinating place is the Grassmarket.

* The Heart of Midlothian