The Saennes.] ST. KATHARINE?S CONVENT. 53
?Papingo,? makes Chastity flee for refuge to the
sisters of the Sciennes.
The convent was erected under a Bull of Pope
Lax., and also by a charter of James V. This
Bull informs us that the convent was created
hough the influence of the families of Seton,
Lord Seton, refusing all offers of mamage, became
a nun at the Sciennes, and dying in her seventyeighth
year, was buried there, according to the
history of her house.
The chapel of St. John the Eaptist became
that of the new convent, which, up to the middle
MR. DUNCAN MCLAREN. (Froma Pkofo~roph &y/. G. Tunny.)
Douglas of Glenbervie, and Lauder of the Bass,
the land being given by the venerable Sir John
Crawford. The first prioress was the widowed
Lady Seton ; ? ane nobill and wyse Ladye,? says
Sir Richard hlaitland, ?sche gydit hir sonnis
leving quhill he was cumit to age, and thereafter
she passit and remainit at the place of Senis, on
the Borrow Mure.? There she died in 1558, and
was buried in the choir of Seton church, beside
her husband, whose body had been brought from
Flodden.
Katharine, second daughter of George, fourth
of the skteenth century, received various augmentations-
among others, a tenement in the Cowgate.
The nuns made annual processions to the altar
of St. Katharine in St. Margaret?s Chapel at Liberton;
and it was remarked, says- the editor of
ArcAauZqia Scutica, that the man who demolished
the latter never prospered after.
In 1541 the magistrates took in feu from the
nuns their arable land, lying outside the Greyfriars?
Port, and, curious to say, it is on a portion of this
that the new Convent of St. Katharine was founded,
about 1860. Within the grounds on the north side
54 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [The Sciennes.
of the latter is a grand old thorn, which has always
borne the name of ?? St. Kathanne?s Thorn.?
In 1544 the convent at the 1Sciennes was destroyed
by the English ; and by the year 1567 its
whole possessions had passed into the hands of
laymen, and the helpless sisters were driven forth
from their cloisters in utter peniiry; nor would the
who also raised a cairn of stones from the
venerable building in his grounds at St. Eennet?s,
Greenhill. When St, Kathanne?s Place, near it, was
built, a large number of skulls and human bones
was found, only eighteen inches below the surface;
and thirty-six feet eastward, a circular stone well,
four feet in diameter and ten feet deep, was dis-
WW. VIEW, 1854. (dffera Drawing6y t/re Aut&.)
magistrates, until compelled by Queen Mary, says
Arnot, ? allow them a subsistence out of those very
funds with which their own predecessors had
endowed the convent.? The ? Burgh Records?
corroborate this, as in. 1563 the Prioress Christian,
Reatrix Blacater, and other sisters, received payment
of certain feu-duties for their sustenance out
of the proceeds of the suppressed house. At that
time its revenues were only A219 6s. sterling,
with eighty-six bolls of wheat and barley, and
one barrel of salmQn. (Maitland?s Hist.) Its
seal is preserved among king?s Collection,
No. 1136.
Dame Christian Ballenden, prioress after
the dispersion of the nuns (an event referred
to by Scott in his ? Abbot ?), feued the lands
in 1567 to Henry, second son of Henry
Kincaid of Wamston, by his first wife,
Margaret Ballenden, supposed to be a sister
I or relation. How long the Kincaids possessed
the lands is unknown, but about the middle
of the sixteenth century they seem to have
passed to Janet McMath, wife of William
Dick of Grange, and consequently, ancestress
of the Lauders of Fountainhall and Grange,
as shown in a preceding chapter.
~ A small fragment of the convent, twelve feet
high, measuring twenty-seven feet by twenty-four,
having a corbelled fireplace six feet six inches wide,
served-till within the last few years-as a sheepfold
for the flocks that pastured in the surrounding
meadow, and views of that fragment are still preserved.
The site of the convent was commemorated
by a tablet, erected in 1872, by George Seton,
Esq., representative of the Setons of Cariston,
,N1
In Pitcairn?s ? Criminal Trials ? we read
that in 1624 ?Harie Liston, indweller at the
back of the Pleasance, callit the Bak Row, was
delatit ? for assault and hamesucken on Robert
Young, ?( in his pease lands,? beside the Sciennes,
stabbing him, cutting his clothes, and drawing
him by the heels ?to ane brick vault in St.
Geillies Grange,? where he died, and was secretly
bhried; yet Liston was declared innocent by
RIOK OF THE RUINS OF THE CONVENT OF ST. KATHARINE,
SCIENNES, 1854. (Affirr a Drawing ay Ue Rvthm.) ?
the Court, and ?acquit of the slaughter and
murthour.?
In the Courant for 1761 ?the whole of the
houses and gardens at Sciennes, and the houses at
Goodspeed of Sciennes, near Edinburgh, at the
east end of Hope Park,? belonging to Sir Tames
Johnston (of Westerhall), were advertised for
sale.
The entrance-door of Old Sciennes House, entering
from the meadows, and removed in 1867, had
