The _girdle_--a round iron plate used for baking oaten cakes over a
fire--a household article once universal among the middle and humbler
classes in Scotland--was invented and first made at the little burgh of
Culross, in Fife. In 1599, King James gave the Culrossians an exclusive
privilege to make girdles, and this had been confirmed by a gift from
Charles II. in 1666. Nevertheless, a neighbouring gentleman, Preston
of Valleyfield, had kept girdle-makers (_craticularum fabros_) on
his barony, for which he was now challenged at law by the burghers of
Culross. He defended himself on various grounds; and the lords, before
decision, ‘recommended to Drumcairn to take trial if the girdle-makers
of Culross have any other trade or craft than that of making girdles,
and at what prices they sell the same; and likewise to try if the men
at Valleyfield do make sufficient girdles, and at what prices they make
the same, and if they have any other trade than making of girdles, &c.’
How the matter ended we do not learn.--_Foun. Dec._
* * * * *
About this time, an Englishman, apparently a military officer,
described Scotland from personal observation, and so has preserved for
us some general traits of the people.
‘Their drink,’ he says, ‘is beer, sometimes so new that it is scarce
cold when brought to table. But their gentry are better provided, and
give it age, yet think not so well of it as to let it go alone, and
therefore add brandy, cherry brandy, or brandy and sugar, and [this]
is the nectar of their country, at their feasts and entertainments,
and carries with it a mark of great esteem and affection. Sometimes
they have wine--a thin-bodied claret, at tenpence the mutchkin, which
answers our quart.’
It is evident from this that whisky as yet formed no conspicuous
indulgence among the Scottish people. They had come, however, to be
much given to another stimulant, which has ever since had a great
fascination for them. ‘They are fond of tobacco, but more from the
sneesh-box [snuff-box] than the pipe. And they have made it so
necessary, that I have heard some of them say, that, should their bread
come in competition with it, they would rather fast than their _sneesh_
should be taken away. Yet mostly it consists of the coarsest tobacco,
dried by the fire, and powdered in a little engine after the form of
a _tap_, which they carry in their pockets, and is both a _mill_ to
grind, and a _box_ to keep it in.’[320]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: 1689.]
The infatuated king had fled to France, the ministers of his will had
dispersed in terror, and a convention was about to meet and settle
the crown upon William and Mary, when a singular instance of private
revenge, recalling the rougher days of a century earlier, took place in
Edinburgh.
[Sidenote: 1689.]
Sir George Lockhart, long the most eminent counsel at the Scottish
bar--‘the most learned lawyer and the best pleader,’ says Burnet, ‘I
have ever known of any nation’--and now President of the Court of
Session, had had occasion, in the routine of judicial business, to
give an award in favour of the unhappy wife and children of Chiesley
of Dalry, near Edinburgh--a profligate man of violent passions, the
descendant of a noted fanatic of the time of the Civil War. The
sum assigned them from the husband and father’s estate was only
ninety-three pounds a year. Chiesley openly avowed a resolution to be
avenged on the judge; nay, he wrote to him, saying: ‘You have taken
the government of my family from me--I desire a remedy at your hands;
otherwise, I will not scruple to attack you at kirk or market;’ or
using words to that effect.
[Sidenote: 1689.]
On Sunday, the 31st of March--while the town was under the excitement
of the siege of the Castle by the troops of the new government--Sir
George Lockhart attended worship, as usual, in the New Church, a
portion of St Giles’s cathedral. Chiesley came armed, and endeavoured,
by money offered to the _bedral_, to get into Lord Castlehill’s seat,
which was just behind that of the President, being resolved there to
wreak out his vengeance, although certain to lose his own life in
consequence. Not succeeding in getting into this seat, he flitted
restlessly about the church till the conclusion of the service, when he
walked out, and preceded the Lord President to the head of the close
near by,[321] in which the latter had his residence. The President came
along, attended by Lord Castlehill and Mr Daniel Lockhart, and as he
entered the close saluted Chiesley, who gloomily returned his greeting.
To pursue the narrative of a contemporary: ‘My Lord Castlehill and
Daniel Lockhart convoyed him a piece down the close, and talked a while
with him, after which they both departed. The President called back the
last, and whilst Daniel was returning, Dalry approached, to whom Daniel
said: “I thought you had been at London,” without any other answer
than that he was there [that is, here] now. Daniel offered to take him
by the hand; but the other shuffled by him, and coming close to the
President’s back, discharged his pistol before that any suspected his
design. The bullet going in beneath the right shoulder and out at the
left pap, was battered on the wall. The President immediately turned
about, looked the murderer grievously in the face, and then finding
himself beginning to fail, he leant to the wall, and said to Daniel:
“Hold me, Daniel, hold me.” These were his last words. He was carried
immediately to his own house, and was almost dead before he could reach
it. Daniel and the President’s chaplain apprehended in the meanwhile
Dalry, who owned the fact, and never offered to flee. He was carried to
the guard, kept in the Weigh-house, and afterwards taken to prison. The
President’s lady, hearing the shot and a cry in the close, got in her
smock out of bed, and took the dead body in her arms; at which sight,
swooning, she was taken to her chamber. The corpse were laid in the
same room where he used to consult.’--_Father Hay._
The murderer was tortured, but confessed nothing, and in three days
he was hanging in chains at Drumsheuch; whence, however, his body was
stolen away by his friends. Within the present century, on enlarging a
cellar in Dalry house, a skeleton with some rusty irons about it was
found in the earth, and concluded to be the remains of Chiesley.
* * * * *
Here--for the present, at least--ends our record of domestic
occurrences and things in Scotland. It brings the life of the nation
from the rudeness of the middle of the sixteenth century down to the
comparative civilisation of the close of the seventeenth, when the
existing political system was nearly settled. A strange phantasmagoria,
beginning with the half mail-clad baron and his band of followers in
swords and pistols, and ending in the silken and embroidered gallant
in full periwig and a rapier for show. We have seen in the earlier
years of the period little regard for law amongst the people, and no
power in the government to enforce it. But gentlemen have latterly
rather fallen out of the custom of stabbing an enemy as he walked
the High Street. They no longer go in force and in ‘effeir of weir’
to assail a neighbour in his house, or throw lighted brands into it,
or drive off his horses and cattle, by way of making out a point of
legal satisfaction from him. The maintenance of any form of peace in
Aberdeenshire or Banffshire does not now wholly depend on the good-will
of the head of the Gordon family, himself a constant offender against
law in as far as he clung to the Romish religion. As regards the
protection of life and property, a great improvement has evidently
been effected. It is evident from many circumstances that, during the
whole time, there was a pressing tendency to improvement--partly to be
accounted for, doubtless, by the near neighbourhood of England. But it
was impeded by the almost incessant civil strife that was kept up in
consequence of the contention between two principles of ecclesiastical
polity--an assertion of infallibility and independence in the church on
the one hand, and an effort to bend this to supposed state necessities
on the other: men, in trying to make each other Episcopalians and
Presbyterians, almost ceasing to be Christians. Throughout this broil,
some fine traits of earnestness and self-devotion were evoked; but so
absorbing a concentration of the general mind on certain theological
or _quasi_-theological doctrines could not be healthful, could not be
favourable even to a sound spirit of religion, could not but check any
enlightened desire for material improvements. Hence, the population
was yet small and generally poor, and little had yet been done to
advance the arts of life. There had never yet been beyond the most
feeble attempts in any kind of manufactures: even such articles as
paper and woollen cloth had to be imported. No movement had yet been
even thought of for advancing any branch of rural economy. Scotland had
sent forth no voice in either literature or science; her universities
could not train either the lawyer or the physician. She had not a bank,
and there was not perhaps above half a million of coin in circulation.
No news-sheet had yet taken root in the country. A post system had
only existed on a small scale during the last twenty-five years. No
stage-coaches were yet permanently established between our towns, or
between Edinburgh and London. The most delicate lady, under noble rank,
had to perform journeys on horseback, and if she had not strength or
health to ride, she could not travel. No system of police existed in
any city of the realm.
In certain intellectual and moral respects, the country was in no
better state. The judge was understood to be accessible to private
persuasions; and even direct bribes were suspected. The people believed
as firmly in witchcraft as in the first principles of their religion,
and we are not yet come within thirty years of the last example of a
poor wretch burnt for mishaps that chanced to follow her evil wishes.
Gentlemen of ancient family and good account were not above using
the basest tricks or the grossest violence, in order to secure, by
marriage, the fortune of some hapless young heiress of eleven years of
age. Fallacies about markets and marketings were rife; monopolies and
patents over-rode the people and kept them in poverty, no man being yet
quite able to believe that there was room in the world for anybody but
himself. Having concluded about any matter of opinion, men could bear
with no dissent from that. It seemed to them the highest of earthly
duties, that the thing each felt as a religious error should be rooted
out, even though that could only be done by the extirpation of the
persons entertaining it. This was to be doing God service and saving
men from destruction; no one perceiving that the object aimed at was
never attained, or that, if attainable, it was an immorality to attempt
its attainment. Even the Claim of Rights, in which the sufferings
of Presbytery since 1660 were enumerated, and its claims asserted,
set forth among its demands that no popish book should henceforth be
allowed to be printed.
Such was the Scotland of 1689--an improvement upon the Scotland of
1560, though to no great extent. Perhaps, after all, if we consider
how surprisingly late are all the great discoveries, inventions, and
social arrangements for convenience; how gaslight, steam-machinery,
railways, and the electric-telegraph are of our own day; how lately
it is that mankind learned that air and water are gaseous compounds,
that gravitation arranges the worlds, that our own little earth passed
through a long and wonderful history before man came upon it; how it
is but as yesterday that the British people led the way in universal
liberation of industry, and unhappily have yet many obvious social
evils to be cured; we shall not greatly wonder that this land of
mountain and flood, seated far northward and off at a side, was no
better than it was at the close of the reign of the last James. We may
at least view congratulatingly one thing which has been made out--that
the bulk of the people shall be allowed to have, under sanction of law,
the style of external Christianity which they prefer; so that, anyhow,
it shall not be the majority which is persecuted. That attained--and
only smaller denominations treated with harshness--behold, the country
begins to make a real, though at first slow advance. In five years from
the settlement of its religious troubles, it has its first bank; in a
few years more, it has native newspapers. Other troubles or chances
of trouble being removed by a union with England, and the suppression
of all hopes in favour of a discrowned dynasty, commerce becomes
active; an improved agriculture commences; and nearly every kind of
manufacture for which England is distinguished, takes hearty root
with us. Scotsmen, frugally reared, and endowed with the elements of
learning at their parish-schools, go forth into every realm to take
leading positions. Literature and science are cultivated at home with
the most brilliant success. And the short period of a century sees
nearly every disadvantageous contrast between our country and her
neighbours obliterated.
* * * * *