312 MEMORIALS OF EDINBURGH.
“he tenement directly opposite to the site of St Mary’s Chapel, and forming the south
side of the alley leading into Boyd’s Close, is curious, as having been the residence of
James Norrie, painter, the celebrated decorator during the earlier part of last century,
to whom we have already frequently referred. His workshops lay immediately behind, and
adjoining to the coach-house of Lord Milton, as appears from the titles of the property.
Both of them were afterwards converted into stabling for Boyd‘s celebrated White Horse
Inn. This street then formed the approach to the town by one of the great roads from
the south of Scotland ; and here, accordingly, were several of the principal inns. At the
foot of the wynd was Mr Peter Ramsay’s famed establishment, from which he retired with
an ample fortune, and withdrew to his estate of Barnton, in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh,
still possessed by his descendants. A large and handsome edifice, with considerable pretensions
to architectural ornament, near the foot of the Pleasance, was the Black Bull Inn,
another of these commodious and fashionable establishments, which the erection of the
North and South Bridges ruined, by diverting the current of visitors to the capital into a
new channel.
Nicoll reports, in 1650, that “ the toun demolished the hail1 houssis in St Marie Wynd,
that the enymie sould haif no schelter thair, bot that thai mycht haif frie pas to thair cannoun,
quhilk thai haid montit upone the Neddir Bow.”’ The earliest date now observable
is that of 1680, cut over the doorway of a house about the middle of the wynd, on the
east side, but one or two other tenements present features of an earlier character. At
the foot of the wpd was situated the Cowgate Port, one of the city gates, constructed
with the extended wall in 1513; and, at a later period, another was erected across the
wynd at its junction with the Pleasance, which was known as St Mary’s or the
Pleasance Port. This was the frequent scene of exposure of the dismembered limbs
of political offenders, as in the case of Garnock and other Covenanters, whose heads
were ordered “to be struck off, and set up upon pricks upon the Pleasance Port of
Edinburgh.”a The old ,Port was demolished on the approach of the rebels in
1715, from the daculty of maintaining it in case of assault; but part of the wall
remained, surmounted by one of the iron spikes, until it was demolished in 1837 to
make way for the new Heriot’s School. This ancient thoroughfare is commended in
Ferguson’s address to Add Reekie, as the unfailing resort of threadbare poets and
the like patrons of the Edinburgh rag-fair. It still continues to be the mart for such
miscellaneous merchandise, flaunting in the motley colours of cast-off finery, and
presided over by
“ St Mary, broker’s guardian ~aunt.”~
Beyond St Mary’s Port, lay the Nunnery dedicated to Sancta Maria de Placentia. It
stood about sixty yards from the south-east angle of the city wall, not far from the foot
of Roxburgh Street ; but of this ancient religious foundation little more is known than the
Chapel, Niddry’s Wynd ; the Virgin Mary’s Chapel, Portsburgh ; the Hospital of Our Lady, Leith Wynd ; the Chapel
and Convent of St Mary de Placentia in the Pleasance; the great Church at Leith, of old styled St Nary’s Chapel; and
the Collegiate Church of Restalrig, the seal of which-now of very rare occurrence-bears the figure of the Virgin and
Child, under a Gothic canopy.
Nicoll’s Diary, p. 24. Keith‘s Hist. Spottiswoode Soc., voL ii. p. 619.
The east side of this narrow wynd has now been entirely removed, and a spacious street substituted, named St
* Fountainhall’s Decisions, vol. i p. 159.
Mary’s Street.
ST LEONARD’S, ST MARY’S WYND, AND COWGATE. 3’3
name.’ This district anciently formed a part of the town of St Leonards, as it is
styled in the charter of Charles I. confirming the superiority of it to the magistrates
of Edinburgh; and the name of Pleasance, that early superseded its quaint title of
Dearenough, and by which the main thoroughfare of this ancient village is still known,
preserves a solitary memorial of its long extinct convent. Some singularly primitive
erections, which remain on the east side of the street, undoubtedly belong, at the
latest, to the early part of the sixteenth century. A plain but very substantial substructure
of stone is surmounted by a timber superstructure mainly consisting of a
long sloping roof, pierced with irregular windows and loopholes wherever convenience
has suggested an opening; while the whole plan of domestic archit,ecture is evidently
the result of a state of society when it was no upusual occurrence for the villager to
carry off his straw roof along with him, and leave the enemy to work their will on the
deserted walls.’
St John’s Hill and the village of Pleasance form a portion of the long ridge which
skirts the valley at the base of Salisbury Crags. The whole of this ground appears to
have been ecclesiastical property in early times, and appropriated to various religious
foundations, all of which were subject to the canons of Holyrood.s St Leonard’s Lane
bounded it on the south, separating it on that side from the Borough Muir. At the
junction of these lands there stood, in ancient times, a cross, which is understood to have
been erected in memory of one Umfraville, a person of distinction, who was slain on the
spot in some forgotten ~ontest.~T he shaft of the cross had long disappeared, having
probably been destroyed at the Reformation ; but the base, a large square plinth, with a
hollow socket in which it had stood, was only removed in the early part of the present
century. On an eminence at the end of the lane stood the chapel and hospital of St
Leonard, but not a fragment of either is now left, though the font and holy water stoup
remained in Maitland’s time, and the enclosed ground was then Bet apart as a cemetery
for self-murderers. The hospital was one of those erected for the reception of strangers,
and the maintenance of the poor and infirm, and near to it there was another on the road
betwixt Edinburgh and Dalkeith, founded by Robert Ballantyne, Abbot of Holyrood,
for seven poor people. Of these hospitals, which were governed by a superior who bore
the title of Magister, Spottiswoode enumerates twenty-eight in Scotland at the period of
the Ref~rmation.~S t Leonard’a Chapel was the scene of a traitorous meeting of the
Douglases, held on the 2d of February 1528, to concert the assassination of their
Maitland, p. 176. Piacenza, or Placentia, is now the second town in the Duchy of Parma The Chiirch of S.
Maria di Campagnq belongs to the Franciscan Friars. It was made the subject of special privileges by Pope Urban II.,
owing to his mother being buried there,
A relic of a remoter era, a copper coin of the Roman Emperor Yespasian, was found in a garden in the Pleasance,
and presented to the Society of Antiquaries in 1762.-Account of the Society, p. 72.
8 The following names of property in the neighbourhood of Ediuburgh occur in the Stent Rolls of Holyrood, 1578-
1630 :-‘‘ The Kirkland of Libertoun, the landis callit Pleasance and Deiranewch, the aikeris callit Biedmannis Croft of
Sanct Leonardis gait, the landis of Bonyngtoun, the landis of Pilrig and mmmoun mvir, the landis of Wareistoun, the
landis of Brochtoun, the landis of Coittia, the landis of Sauchtonhd and Sauchton,” &c.-Liber Cartarum, p. cxvii.
4 Maitland, p. 276, Umfraville was the name of an old border family of note, whose Castle of Harbottle, in the
middle marches, passed by marriage into the Talbois family. Margaret, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Thomas Urnfraville,
knight of Harbottle, is mentioned by Wood as married, about 1430, to Sir John Constable of Halaham, arceator of the
Viscounts Dunbar.
,
Spottiswoode’s Religious Houses, p. 291.
2 B -
