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

The Brownie of Bodsbeck

 James Hogg monument at The Loch of the Lowes

James Hogg is now being given the status he deserves as a writer.  During his lifetime and for long afterwards, he was regarded as a minor figure in Scottish  literature.  Befriended but patronised by Scott and the  Edinburgh literary establishment, his true ability wasn’t fully recognised.
 Now, his Confessions of a Justified Sinner is seen as a truly modern novel
The Brownie of Bodsbeck is his tale of the bloody strife that surrounded the struggle between the Stuart kings on their new English throne and their Presbyterian Scottish subjects
Published after Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality, it received little of the latter's popularity but Hogg himself was always at pains to point out that it was written before Scott’s novel but held back by the publisher, presumably not to foreshadow and possibly devalue what was certain to be another bestseller from Scott.
Scott has been accused of caricaturing the Covenanters and white-washing the Royalists which is what one would expect from a member of the Tory establishment.  True or not, Hogg’s account is much  more from the people’s point of view as they saw their herds seized, their relatives shot and tortured by ruthless agents of the Crown.   James Graham of Claverhouse, latterly Viscount Dundee, was such a man and his swathe of suppression through the Borderlands forms the background to the novel.

The Watch Law from where a lookout was kept during Covenanter services

 A group of Covenanters, mainly in the southwest, followed the teachings of Richard Cameron and offered armed resistance to the Crown
When the crown ejected ministers from their parishes for refusing to submit to the rule of bishops, the Covenanters followed them to the hills and worshiped at open air services called conventicles.
Every year in July, an open air “Blanket preaching” is held at the Kirkyard of St Mary of the Lowes by St Mary’s Loch in Yarrow in memory of the Covenanters.
http://www.selkirk.bordernet.co.uk/news/30.html

 As the threat from government forces increased the Covenanters began to carry weapons to their conventicles and to post armed pickets to keep a lookout.
The Cameronian regiment - The Scottish Rifles - which arose from these Covenanting origins, continued to take their rifles to church parades and to post sentries at each service until disbanded in 1968

Chapelhope

Hogg’s story concerns Katherine the daughter of the farmer at Chapelhope, a farm in Yarrow.   Hope is one of these intriguing geographic terms. On the coast it means a bay- Longhope.  In the hills it means a valley or hollow .  There are several hopes in the Brownie of Bodsbeck - Kirkhope, Riskinhope,  Kershope
  Katherine plays on the superstitions of her family and neighbours by pretending to be in league with the Brownie of Bodsbeck allowing her access to the moors at night.   According to custom, brownies must be placated with food - bannocks and milk, thus Katherine is able to hide and feed the fugitive Presbyterians in the hills.
Clerk, the cowardly priest, a Royalist spy who denounces his parishioners, attempts to seduce her under the guise of exorcism but is unhinged when he meets, Katherine’s brownie - a  escaped Cameronian, twisted and misshapen by torture and hidden by her in a cave under the waterfall at Chapelhope.
 It is clear where Hogg’s sympathies lay and, with only eighty years separating his birth from the death of “Bluidy Clavers” at Killiecrankie,  his childhood would have been filled with tales of the “Killing Times”.

The Brownie of Bodsbeck is, at times, difficult as some of the dialogue is in the everyday speech of the locals which even in Hogg’s day contained many words that were slipping out of usage.  He makes passing reference to this when Clavers is interrogating an old shepherd and  admits to not understanding him

Chapelhope still has its beautiful linn or waterfall but never was there a cave.

The chapel that gives the hope its name and where the sly priest Clerk spied on his flock is now a series of grassy mounds and the only flock that attends there are the sheep.

Rodono Chapel ruins

All is now quiet and peaceful with few reminders of the death and oppression visited on the people of the valley, but perhaps the hills remember.