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Edinburgh in 1544 117
It is to be regretted that our author was not gifted with a
more graphic pen ; his description is terse and bald to a degree,
but it is better than nothing and is valuable in a way. It can be
supplemented by references to a very interesting plan or bird'seye
view of the town taken from the Calton Hill. This has
generally been assigned to the year 1 544, and is supposed to have
been made by some member of Hertford's invading force. Above
*
is Holyrood written the words the Kyng of Scottis palas,'
a
name which we it may suppose retained, though there had been
no King of Scots for two years before the date mentioned. It
represents the city stretching in two wide streets from the gate
of the Castle, before which is a cannon, down to the Nether Port.
St. Giles' is in the centre of the High Street, quite in its proper
position, and the Church of St. Mary in the Fields to the south, on
the site of the present university. Further east, on the confines of
the town proper, is another church with a pointed steeple, probably
that of the Dominicans or Black Friars. The Nether Port is
shown as a handsome gate with a tower on either side, and
beyond this, stretching down to the Palace, is the Canongate with
trees and gardens to the south. It is curious that all the town
within the walls is represented as having red or tiled roofs, while
the roofs of the Canongate are coloured dark grey or slate colour ;
it is probable, however, that this is intended to indicate that
the houses outside the walls were thatched, and not tiled. The
contour of Arthur's Seat and is
Salisbury Crags very fairly
delineated, the immediate foreground being taken up with the
Calton Hill, with five divisions of Hertford's troops marching
across it with banners flying and accompanied by twelve guns.
Such was the town itself in the middle of the sixteenth century,
just before the great invasion. But, we may ask, what sort of
people lived there ? Who were the men who bought and sold,
who loved and laughed, who fought and quarrelled in its streets ?
To reconstruct the is
locality easy enough, but to revivify the
people is a more difficult task. It is impossible to guess with any
certainty at the number of the population, but within its rather
narrow limits it was a crowded town, and with all its dust and
other
disagreeables, which were not a few, it must have been a
picturesque and stirring scene. Picturesque, that is to say,
in our
eyes, and looking at it from our point of view, for I do not
suppose the idea of the picturesque ever entered into the heads of
any of the inhabitants of that day. The dress of the day amongst
the nobles and upper classes was magnificent ; one has only to