manor, and the founder?s own mother and wife, and
of all the faithful dead, was specially directed, at
the commencement of each season of Lent, to exhort
the people to say one Pater Noster and the
salutation of the angel to the blessed Virgin Mary
for the souls of the same persons.? (? New Stat.
Account.?)
The provostry of Corstorphine was considered
a rather lucrative office, and has been held by
several important personages. In the beginning of
the sixteenth century it was held by Robert Cairn-
CORSTORPHINE CHURCH, 1817. (After a# Efcking 6 /a?nes SRnv of Rdishw.)
present state of affairs.? Cairncross was Treasurer
of Scotland in 1529 and 1537.
In 1546, John Sandilands, son and heir of Sir
Janies Sandilands, knight of Calder (afterwards
Preceptor of Torphichen and Lord $t. John of
Jerusalem), found surety, under the pain of ten
thousand pounds, that he would remain ?in warde,
in the place of Corstorphine, colege, toun, and
yards yairof, until he passed to France.? His
grandmother was Mariotte, a daughter of Archibald
Forrester of Corstorphine.
cross, whose name does not shine in the pages of
Buchanan, by the manner in which he obtained the
Abbacy of Holyroed without. subjecting himself to
the law against simony.
one meanly
descended, but a wealthy man, bought that preferment
of the king who then wanted money, eluding
the law by a new sort of fraud. The law wasthat
ecclesiastical preferments should not be sold j
but he laid a great wager with the king that he
would not bestow upon him the next preferment
of that kind which fell vacant, and by that means
lost his wager but got the abbacy.? This was in
September, 1528, and he was aware that the Abbot
William Douglas was, as Buchanan states, ? dying
of sickness, trouble of mind, and grief for the
Robert Cairncross,? he states,
In March, 1552, the Provost of Edinburgh, his
bailies, and council, ordered their treasurer, Alexander
Park, topay the prebendaries of Corstorphine
the sum of ten pounds, as the half of twenty owing
them yearly (? furth of the commoun gude.?
In 1554, James Scott, Provost of the Church of
Corqtorphine, was appointed a Imd of Session,
and in that year he witnessed the marriage contract
of Hugh Earl of Eglinton and Lady Jane Hamilton
daughter of James Duke of Chatelherault.
Conspicuous in the old church are the tombs of
the Forrester family. TEe portion which modem
utility has debased to a porch contains two altar
tombs, one of them being the monument of Sir
John Forrester, the founder, and his second lady,
probably, to judge by her coat-of-arms, Jean Sinclair
