204 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
small and solitary parish church of the ancient unwalled town, there was the burial-place
for ‘‘ the rude forefathers of the hamlet,” and so it continued to the very end of the sixteenth
century. Down to that period the site of the present courts was occupied in part
by the collegiate building, for the residence of the prebendaries and other clergy that
officiated at the numerous altars founded at different times in St Giles’s Church. The
whole of the remaining portion lay open towards the south, extending in successive
terraces to the Cowgate, and the greater part of it appears to have remained in this condition
till the latter end of the seventeenth century. In the nether kirkyard, between St
Giles’s Church and the Cowgate, stood the ancient chapel of the Holy Rood till the
Reformation, when it appears to have been demolished, and its materials used in building
the New Tolbooth. Doubtless the erection of the latter building, where all the great civic
and national assemblies of the period took place, must have had considerable influence
in leading to the abandonment of the old churchyard of St Giles as a place of burial.
While its area continued enclosed with ecclesiastical buildings, and stood apart from the
great thoroughfares of the town, it must have been a peculiarly solemn and fitting place of
sepulture. But when the readiest access to the New Tolbooth was through the open churchyard,
and instead of the old monk or priest treading among its grassy hillocks, it became
the lounge of grooms and lackeys waiting on their masters during the meetings of Parliament,
or of quarrelsome litigants, and the usual retainers of the law, during the sessions
of the College of Justice, all idea of sacredness must have been lost. Such appears to
have been the case, from the fact that no record exists to show any formal abandonment
of it as a churchyard. Queen Mary granted the gardens of the Greyfriars’ monastery to
the citizens in the year 1566, to be used as a cemetery, and from that period the old
burial-place seems to have been gradually forsaken, until the neglected sepulchres of the
dead were at length paved over, and the citizens forgot that their Exchange was built
over their fathers’ graves.
One of the latest notices we have discovered of the ancient churchyard occurs in Calderwood‘
s narrative of the memorable tumult of 1596, described above, though the name
probably remained long after it had ceased to be used as such. On that occasion “ the
noblemen, barons, and gentlemen that were in the kirk, went forth at the alarum, and
were likewise in their armes. The Earl of Mar, and the Lord Halyrudhous, went out to
the barons and ministrie, conveenned in the kirkyard. Some hote speeches passt betuixt
the Erle of Mar and the Lord Lindsey, so that they could not be pacified for a long
tyme.”’ Skirmishes and tumults of a like nature were doubtless common occurrences
- there; exasperated litigants frequently took matters into their own hands, and made a
speedy end to “ the law’s delay,” while the judges were gravely pondering their case
within. In like manner the craftsmen and apprentices dealt with their civic rulers ;
club law was the speediest arbiter in every difficulty, and the transference of the Tolbooth
to the west end of the old kirkyard, transferred also the arena of such tumults to the
same sacred spot. Yet with all this to account for the desertion of the ancient burialplace,
it cannot but excite the surprise of every thoughtful observer, who reflects that
within this consecrated ground, on the 24th November 1572, the assembled nobles and
citizens committed John Knox,-“ the Apostle of the Scots,” as Beza styles him,-
.
Calderwood’s Hist., vol. v. p. 513.
