One Reid, a mountebank, was at this time practising in Edinburgh. He
was popishly inclined, and actually, four days after this date, was
received into the Catholic church with one of his blackamoors; which,
Fountainhall tells us, was ‘a great trophy’ to the popish party, now in
the ascendency. On the date here noted, Reid had Scott of Harden and
his lady in court ‘for stealing away from him a little girl called the
_Tumbling Lassie_, who danced upon his stage; she danced in all shapes,
and, to make her supple, he daily oiled all her joints; and he claimed
damages, and produced a contract, where he had bought her from her
mother for £30 Scots. But,’ adds Fountainhall, ‘we have no slaves in
Scotland, and mothers cannot sell their bairns; and physicians attested
the employment of tumbling would bruise all her bowels and kill her;
and her joints were now grown stiff, and she declined to return.’ The
mountebank, though favoured by the chancellor on account of his popery,
lost his cause.--_Foun. Dec._
* * * * *
[Sidenote: MAY 1.]
[Sidenote: 1687.]
Being Sunday, a young woman of noted piety, Janet Fraser by name, the
daughter of a weaver in the parish of Closeburn, Dumfriesshire, had
gone out to the fields with a young female companion, and sat down to
read the Bible not far from her father’s house. Feeling thirsty, she
went to the river-side (the Nith) to get a drink, leaving her Bible
open at the place where she had been reading, which presented the
verses of the 34th chapter of Isaiah, beginning--‘My sword shall be
bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come down upon Idumea, and upon the
people of my curse, to judgment,’ &c. On returning, she found a patch
of something like blood covering this very text. In great surprise,
she carried the book home, where a young man tasted the substance with
his tongue, and found it of a saltless or insipid flavour. On the two
succeeding Sundays, while the same girl was reading her Bible in the
open air, similar blotches of matter, like blood, fell upon the leaves.
She did not perceive it in the act of falling till it was about an inch
from the book. ‘It is not blood, for it is as tough as glue, and will
not be scraped off by a knife, as blood will; but it is so like blood,
as none can discern any difference by the colour.’
Showers of blood are amongst the familiar prodigies by which mankind
were alarmed in days of ignorance and superstition. A writer of our
time remarks that it is most probable that these bloody waters were
never _seen_ falling, but that people, seeing the standing waters
blood-coloured, were assured, from their not knowing how else it should
happen, that it had rained blood into them. ‘Swammerdam,’ he goes on to
say, ‘relates that, one morning in 1670, great excitement was created
in the Hague, by a report that the lakes and ditches about the city
were found to be full of blood. A certain physician went down to one of
the canals, and taking home a quantity of this blood-coloured water,
examined it with the microscope, and found that the water was water
still, and had not at all changed its colour, but that it was full of
prodigious swarms of small red animals, all alive, and very nimble
in their motions, the colour and prodigious numbers of which gave a
reddish tinge to the whole body of the water in which they lived....
The animals which thus colour the water of lakes and ponds are the
_pulices arborescentes_ of Swammerdam, or the water-fleas with branched
horns. These creatures are of a reddish-yellow or flame-colour. They
live about the sides of ditches, under weeds, and amongst the mud;
and are therefore the less visible, except at a certain time, which
is the beginning or end of June. It is at this time that these little
animals leave their recesses to float about the water, and meet for the
propagation of their species; and by this means they become visible
in the colour which they give the water. The colour in question is
visible, more or less, in one part or other of almost all standing
waters at this season; and it is always at the same season that the
bloody waters have alarmed the ignorant.’--_Encyc. Brit., 7th ed._,
xix. 59. If we can suppose some quantity of the water so discoloured to
be carried up by a whirlwind, transported along, and afterwards allowed
to fall, such a fact as the depositing of blood-like stains on Janet
Fraser’s Bible might be accounted for.
[Sidenote: 1687.]
Medieval history is full of stories of blood being found on or in
the host, and of dismal misinterpretations of the phenomenon being
accepted. Several massacres of Jews have arisen from this cause alone.
Modern science sees the matter in its true light. In 1848, Dr Eckhard,
of Berlin, when attending a case of cholera, found potatoes and bread
within the house spotted with a red colouring matter, which, being
forwarded to Ehrenberg, was found by him to be due to the presence of
an animalcule, to which he gave the name of the _Monas Prodigiosa_.
It was found that other pieces of bread could be inoculated with this
matter. It is curious to reflect that, if Ehrenberg had been present to
examine a certain spotted host in Frankfort in 1296, and supposing his
rational explanations to be received, the lives of ten thousand unhappy
descendants of Abraham might have been saved.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: JULY 6.]
In compliance with ‘a general outcry and complaint’ from the public,
the magistrates of Edinburgh called up the butchers and vintners, and
fined them for extortion. It was in vain that these men set forth that
there was no rule or law broken, and that when they bought dear they
must sell dear. It was held as a sufficient answer to the butchers,
that they did exact large profits, besides using sundry arts to pass
off their meat as better than it was, and they _regrated the market_
by taking all the parks and enclosures about Edinburgh, so as to
prevent any from ‘furnishing’ but themselves. It was alleged of the
vintners, that they exacted for a prepared fowl triple what it cost
in the market; they sold bread purposely made small; they charged
twenty-four pence for the pound of sugar, while the cost to themselves
was eightpence, ‘and even so in the measure of tobacco.’--_Foun._
[Sidenote: 1687.]
Though the butchers formed one of the fourteen incorporated trades of
Edinburgh, their business was of a limited description, and indeed
continued so till a comparatively recent time, owing to the generally
prevalent use of meat salted at Martinmas, a practice rendered
unavoidable by the scarcity of winter fodder for cattle before the days
of turnip husbandry. Of the animals used, cattle formed but a small
proportion. John Strachan, a ‘flesh-cady’ or market-porter, who died
in 1791 in the 105th year of his age, remembered the time--not long
after that now under our attention--‘when no flesher would venture to
kill any beast [that is, bullock] till all the different parts were
bespoken.’[319] It may also be remarked that Pennant, in his _Tour in
Scotland_, 1772, tells us that ‘the gentleman is now living who first
introduced stall-fed beef into Perth.’ He adds, with strict truth:
‘Before that time the greater part of Scotland lived on salt meat
throughout the winter, as the natives of the Hebrides do at present,
and as the English did in the feudal times.’
A truer remedy for the alleged extortions of the butchers was soon
after hit upon by the Privy Council, in allowing meat to be brought
into town by ‘landward men’ not of the corporation. ‘Some,’ adds
Fountainhall timidly, ‘think that all [should be] permitted to bring
in bread every day,’ being the same case with that of the maltmen, who
were forbidden to form a deaconry.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: NOV. 24.]
The usual rule of the government in the two last reigns against
unlicensed printing, was now very rigorously enforced, in order to
prevent the issue of controversial pamphlets against the Catholic
religion. James Glen, bookseller in Edinburgh, was imprisoned by an
order from the Chancellor, for publishing a brochure called _The Root
of Romish Ceremonies_, designed ‘to prove popery to be only paganism
revived.’ It was a remarkable step for the government to take, while an
uncontrolled popish printer was at constant work in the palace. Perhaps
Lord Perth, who had become a Catholic (some say to please his wife,
some to please the king, no one to please himself), felt sore at a _bon
mot_ of Glen, which Fountainhall has thought worthy of being preserved.
The Council having (January 1686) issued an edict against the selling
of books reflecting on popery, and their macer having brought this to
Glen amongst others, he quietly remarked that ‘there was a book in his
shop which condemned popery very directly--namely, the _Bible_--might
he sell that?’
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1688.