VII. MEDIEVAL ECCLESIOLOGY…

VII. MEDIEVAL ECCLESIOLOGY

The subject of Medieval Ecclesiology is much too comprehensive to be treated with attention proportionate to its extent, and the importance justly ascribed to it, in the compass of a single chapter. But some notice of it is indispensable to the completeness of any systematic treatise on Scottish antiquities; and in attempting this it becomes once more necessary to glance at the ethnological elements on which depend the transition from the earlier and simpler characteristics already noticed. Whatever value be attached to the attempts advanced in the previous chapter to give some precision to the history of Primitive Scottish Ecclesiology, little doubt can now be entertained that throughout the whole period of Celtic rule in Scotland and Ireland, a peculiar character pervaded the native arts, and greatly modified the forms of Christian architecture introduced from Italy along with the new faith. Long, however, before Thorfinn subjected the Celtic population of the north to the Norwegian yoke, and sanctioned Macbeth's usurpation of the throne of the Southern Picts, the Teutonic races from the south were securing a footing in the Lothians. From the middle of the seventh century the limits of the kingdom of Northumbria extended to the Forth, and though the Angles maintained their varying northern frontier only by a constant warfare with the Picts and Scots, yet the population must have become almost entirely Teutonic before the recognition of Egbert of Wessex as bretwalda or chief ruler of England, in 829. In 867, the Danes, a different branch of the Scandinavian race from the old Scottish Northmen, conquered the kingdom of Northumbria, and it is not till after the accession of the Saxon Athelstane, in 925, that we again find it partially and temporarily incorporated with the southern kingdoms. With these portions of English history we have little further to do than simply to note the evidence they furnish of the same remarkable changes having affected the population of the Scottish Lowlands which divided the races of the south into Weals and Engle-kin, or Celtic and Teutonic; Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, being comprehended from a very early period under the common name of Englen or English. The changes which followed on the Danish conquest again temporarily isolated Northumbria, where Harold Harefoot established a separate kingdom; and when Macbeth secured the concurrence of Thorfinn in his accession to Duncan's throne, he included in his dominions a large portion of the Scottish Northumbria. To this succeeded the accession of Malcolm Canmore, Duncan's eldest son, a prince of the old Celtic race, but sharing also through his mother in the Anglo-Saxon blood, educated at the Court of Edward the Confessor, and restored to the throne of his fathers chiefly by the aid of the Northumbrian Saxons.

The establishment of Malcolm on the Scottish throne dates from the year 1058; but four years prior to this he had succeeded, with the aid of his uncle, Siward, Earl of Northumberland, and a Saxon army, in driving Macbeth beyond the Forth, notwithstanding the strenuous aid of the Northmen, with whom a large portion of the native Celtic race were then closely allied. From this important epoch in our national history dates the commencement of that remarkable revolution known by the name of the "Saxon Conquest." The Norman triumph at Hastings greatly accelerated its progress. Already the Scottish Court was the resort of numerous Anglo-Saxon nobles and leaders, whose services had given them claims on the Scottish Crown, and whose retainers accompanied them to settle on their new possessions in the Scottish Lowlands. But the Norman invasion drove many more to seek from the northern ruler the shelter which he had found in his adversity at the English Court; nor must we forget that his own barbarous policy helped to colonize his southern territories. Leaguing, when it suited his purpose, against the Norman aggressors, he wasted the country as far as Durham in 1070, bringing back with him so many prisoners of both sexes, that an old chronicler remarks,--"So great was the number of captives, that for many years they were to be found not only in every Scottish village, but in every Scottish hovel."[627] Thus by the most opposite means was a Saxon population invested in the possession of the Lothians. Norman adventurers followed, dissatisfied with the Conqueror's rewards, as the Saxons of old blood were impatient of the Norman yoke. The Saxon Edward, it will be remembered, had Norman blood in his veins, spent his early years in Normandy, and when he at length attained to the English Crown, surrounded himself with Norman barons and churchmen, and bestowed on them some of the highest preferments in the kingdom. At his Court, therefore, Malcolm could acquire no such prejudices against the Norman as animated the expatriated followers of Harold. To him the discontented Norman baron with his hardy men-at-arms would be as welcome as the Saxon thane with his faithful retinue. Both found a ready portion in the fertile Lothians, in an age when even the multitude of children were "as arrows in the hands of a mighty man." It was a peaceful and nearly bloodless revolution, yet by it this northern kingdom was more completely transformed than by all the protracted struggles of Roman, Pict, or Northman. The sceptre was still swayed by a prince of the Celtic line; but the power was passing away for ever from the last independent representatives of the nomade colonists of Europe.

The victory at Hastings was far less effectual in making England Norman than in making Scotland Saxon. In this respect the usurpation of Macbeth, which drove Malcolm to seek refuge and to acquire his education at the English Court, exercised a remarkable influence on the future history of both countries, and prepared in requital, a home for the southern Saxon, which has proved the birthland of the most vigorous offshoot of the race. But chief among the Anglo-Saxon fugitives is the noble princess, sister of Edgar Atheling, who brought to the Scottish throne the civilisation as well as the hereditary rights of the race of the Confessor. The earlier years of Malcolm's reign appear to have exhibited all the fiercest characteristics of a disputed succession; and it is probable that during the long years of conflict between Northman, Celt, and Saxon, the native arts and civilisation were greatly deteriorated. Its ecclesiastical system had suffered no less than its civil arts. The church of St. Columba had been spoiled of its temporal possessions, and had parted with many of its canonical usages, including the celibacy of the clergy, that mainspring of the medieval church, which appears to have been so heartily favoured by the good Abbot of Iona. It is no part of the plan of this work to embrace ecclesiastical controversies, or to attempt to settle disputed questions relative to the precise doctrines and practice of the ancient Culdees. So interesting an inquiry could only be injured by a superficial notice of the modern disputes relative to their Episcopal or Presbyterian constitution, and the ancient ones about the tonsure and the times of observing Easter. Trivial as such controversies may be thought by some, they appear to have involved questions of higher moment, including that of the independence of the Celtic Church. The neglect, if not the entire abnegation of the celibacy of the clergy for a considerable period prior to the Saxon Conquest, is, however, indisputable; and the orthodox grandniece of the Confessor, in giving her hand to Malcolm Canmore, plighted troth with the legitimate grandchild of an Abbot of Dunkeld. To assume the primitive purity or simplicity of our early northern Church on such grounds would be erroneous. It is sufficient for our present purpose to know that it differed in various important respects from the Roman Church of western Christendom. The peculiar features which have attracted our notice in previous chapters originated chiefly from the isolation of the Scottish Church and nation; but that isolation was now to come to an end. The Princess Margaret became the queen of Malcolm Canmore, and the sharer of his throne. Her gentle spirit, not untinctured by the asceticism of the age, softened the fierce passions of her husband, and made his wild nature bend obedient to her will. The grandniece of the Confessor became the reformer of the Scottish Church, and the redresser of its abuses. Provincial councils were summoned at her command, at which Malcolm became the interpreter between the Saxon queen and his Celtic clergy. Her great aim was to assimilate the Scottish Church to that of England, and indeed of Rome, neither of which it would seem to have greatly resembled. To her we chiefly owe the eradication of the Culdees, (Gille-de, servant of God,) the successors of the first recluses and monks who established religious fraternities in Scotland, and who differed latterly from other orders probably more in their laxity as to monastic observances than on points of faith. Yet there were not wanting among them even then some worthy representatives of their primitive missionary founders. The Chartulary of St. Andrews, which furnishes some curious evidence of their absorption, partly by conformity and partly by force, into the new orders of canons regular, also affords some insight into these primitive religious societies not unsuited to awaken regrets at their arbitrary extinction. The sons of St. Margaret, Edgar, Alexander, and David, though differing in nearly every other respect, concurred in carrying out the reformation by which the Scottish Church was restored to uniformity with the ecclesiastical standards of the age. Worthy descendants of the Confessor, they not only made the Church of England their model, but frequently selected their spiritual directors from its clergy, preferred English priests to the bishoprics, and peopled their abbeys with its monks. The "Saxon Conquest" was in truth even more an ecclesiastical than a civil revolution, and the evidences of its influence are still abundant after the lapse of upwards of seven hundred years. In the period which intervened between the landing of the fugitive Saxon princess at St. Margaret's Hope and the death of her younger son David, nearly all the Scottish sees were founded or restored, many of the principal monasteries were instituted, their chapels and other dependencies erected, and the elder order of Culdee fraternities and missionary bishops for the first time superseded by a complete parochial system. It was David I. who ejected the brethren of St. Serf established on the secluded little isle of Lochleven, and merged both that and the Culdee house of Monymusk into the new priory of canons regular of St. Austin established at St. Andrews. We read with no little interest the brief inventory of the Lochleven library, thus unscrupulously seized by the "soir sanct." Among its sixteen volumes were the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the three books of Solomon, a Commentary on the Song of Solomon, and another on the book of Genesis:[628] no discreditable indication of the studies of these recluses of Lochleven, whom some have inclined to rank among the Protestants of their age. But old things were then passing away under the guidance of reformers not less zealous than those of the sixteenth century. An entire change, moreover, necessarily resulted from the novel relations subsisting between the northern and southern kingdoms. The seat of Scottish civilisation had hitherto been chiefly in the north and west, while the Lothians and the southern dales had been but a debatable land--the battle-ground oftener than the secure possession of the Pictish or Scottish kings. On this very account great facilities existed for its settlement by the southern fugitives, ready to hold it of the Scottish crown by feudal military tenure, and to defend it against the aggressions of the new power established in England. A charter preserved in the treasury at Durham, and belonging at latest to the very commencement of the twelfth century, furnishes interesting illustration of the new elements of strength and progress infused into the kingdom by the colonization of its southern districts. The charter relates to the founding of the church of Edenham, on the north bank of the Tweed, in the rural manse of which the poet of the Seasons was born in the year 1700,--one also of the many results which have flowed from that old deed of piety, executed five centuries before. The settler is Thor the Long, probably neither of Saxon nor Norman blood, but a descendant of one of Hardacnute's Danish followers, who established himself on the banks of the Tweed by invitation of Edgar, the son and successor of Malcolm. The charter thus describes at once the royal grant and the pious gift of the new settler, and may very happily serve to illustrate the process of Teutonic colonization of the Scottish Lowlands: "To all the sons of holy mother Church, Thor the Long, greeting in the Lord: Be it known that Aedgar, my Lord, King of Scots, gave to me Aednaham, a desert; that with his help and my own money I peopled it, and have built a church in honour of St. Cuthbert; which church, with a ploughgate of land, I have given to God, and to St. Cuthbert and his monks, to be possessed by them for ever."[629] Such was in reality the process by which the "Saxon Conquest" was accomplished. No wonder that it should be unnoticed by contemporary chroniclers, and remain a puzzle to historians who esteem wars and regal successions the sole indices of the past. It was wastes not men that had to be conquered, and therefore the victory is chronicled alone in such brief parentheses as that of the Edenham charter.

It is easy to see how complete a change must necessarily have taken place on the ecclesiastical architecture of Scotland at the period of its receiving so great an impulse. The Christian arts, introduced to a great extent along with the new faith from Ireland, had hitherto been modified chiefly by local influences. The reformation effected by Queen Margaret and her sons abruptly arrested the development of a peculiar native style, and made the architecture of England as well as its ecclesiastical system supply the new Scottish model. With the elevation of the Saxon princess to the Scottish throne, we for the first time discover a chronological coincidence in the styles of the ecclesiastical architecture of Scotland and England. In the sixth year of the reign of Malcolm II., the grandfather of Duncan, i.e., in 1010, according to a charter of doubtful value, which has been the subject of no little diversity of opinion,[630] he gave to God, the blessed Mary, and all the saints, the church of Mortlach or Murthelach, in perpetual gift, erecting it into an Episcopal see, in obedience, as it is said, to a vow made in the immediate vicinity of the church when battling with the Norwegian Invaders. In its present form the charter seems to be unworthy of implicit credit, yet the circumstantial accounts of Fordun and Boece agree with it in every essential point, and it appears reasonable to assume that its most important features are not without some authority and historical value. David I. translated the see from Mortlach to Old Aberdeen in 1125, endowing it for the first time with revenues proportionate to the dignity of the bishopric. It appears, however, if we may so far trust the charter, that Mortlach was the seat of a religious foundation prior to the honours conferred on it by the victorious Malcolm, the humble church of which was elevated, in fulfilment of the royal vow, to the rank of a cathedral. At such a date we might expect a building corresponding to those of which the remarkable relics remain at Abernethy and Brechin; and even yet, though sorely defaced by modern additions, the venerable parish church of Mortlach is believed to include portions of the primitive cathedral. The holes are pointed out where the victor is affirmed to have caused the heads of three of the vanquished Norse leaders to be built into the wall as a votive offering: a singular but sufficiently characteristic memorial of the ferocious spirit of the age, though resting on little better authority than local tradition. "At whatever time," says the Old Statist, writing about 1795, "three skulls may have first been put there, there they surely were; and not longer than about thirty years ago was the last of them picked out and tossed about by the school-boys."[631] The former proportions of the church were ninety feet long, including a chancel of twenty-seven feet, while its greatest breadth was only twenty-eight feet. Within the last twelve years great alterations and additions have been made, with the usual inattention to the ancient features of the venerable edifice. The original walls are very massive. The windows, where unaltered, are extremely narrow and deeply splayed internally, the work probably of the new era which we have now to consider, though it is not impossible that some portions of the original church of Mortlach may still remain.[632]

It was about the year 1070--the precise date is uncertain--that Malcolm Canmore wedded the gentle and pious Saxon princess, whose amiable disposition insensibly softened the rugged nature of her husband, and swayed him by the influence of a most sincere affection, till he became the docile minister of her will. We possess a narrative of the private life of Malcolm and his Queen, on the authority of Turgot the confessor of the latter, who had frequent opportunities of intimate intercourse with both. Amid the austerities and superstitions which belonged less to the individuals than the age, it is impossible not to admire the rare picture of domestic charity and kindly affections which it discloses. It was at Dunfermline, according to Turgot, that the auspicious marriage of Malcolm and Margaret took place; and one of the first works of the queen was to found a church in the place where her nuptials had been celebrated, which she dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and enriched with many costly gifts. Such was the origin of the Benedictine Abbey of Dunfermline, though it can scarcely admit of doubt that some church or chapel existed at this chosen place of royal residence prior to the foundation of St. Margaret. The editor of the "Registrum de Dunfermelyn" remarks, "The original church of Canmore, perhaps hot of stone, must have been replaced by a new edifice when it was dedicated in the reign of David I. If any part of that structure remain, it must be little more than the foundations. Age, or the accidents of a rough time, or the increasing consequence of the house, gave rise to an enlarged and more magnificent structure about the middle of the thirteenth century."[633] It cannot be difficult, I think, to shew that such conclusions are erroneous, and at least totally inadmissible in reference to the sombre and impressive nave of Dunfermline, the oldest and perhaps most interesting specimen of the Romanesque style now remaining in Scotland. But the whole reasoning proceeds on the imperfect views hitherto entertained of the state of civilisation and the progress of the arts in Scotland previous to the commencement of its medieval era, dating from the reign of Malcolm, when for the first time both its civil and ecclesiastical institutions were assimilated to the rest of Europe.

So far from Malcolm Canmore's church being probably of wood, there are some of the most substantial early Romanesque structures in England which there is good reason for ascribing to the same builders who erected the Church of the Holy Trinity at Dunfermline, in the lifetime of its pious foundress. Malcolm was present at the laying of the foundation stone of Durham Cathedral by the confessor and biographer of his own pious queen, on the 11th of August 1093, shortly before his last fatal rupture with England; and his son Alexander witnessed the deposition of the relics of St. Cuthbert in the same sacred edifice in 1104. No one who has had the opportunity of examining both Durham and Dunfermline, can have failed to observe the remarkable correspondence of their character and details. The same massive and dissimilar piers: the same chevron, spiral, and billet mouldings distinguishing the compartments of the nave: the same chamfered cushion capitals to the heavy cylindrical shafts: as well as a marked conformity in many minor details, all point to a common origin for Durham Cathedral and Dunfermline Abbey. St. Finnan, a monk of Iona, is said to have built the first church of Lindisfarne, a timber erection, and the original seat of the see of Durham, in the seventh century. Scottish missionaries twice introduced the faith into Northumberland; Iona and Melrose supplied successive heads to the southern house; and even after the Conqueror compelled the chapter to receive a bishop of his appointment of Norman blood, the intimate relations between the see and the northern abbeys appear to have been very temporarily interrupted. In so far as greater plainness and massive simplicity afford any ground for assigning priority of date, the argument is in favour of the greater antiquity of Dunfermline Abbey, which must have been far advanced, if not indeed finished, according to the original design, before the foundation of the Cathedral at Durham was laid in 1093, as the death of both of the royal founders took place before the close of the year; and they were buried there before the rood altar. Perhaps the fact of their interment there, and not in the choir,--to which the bodies of both were translated with solemn ceremonial and, according to the old chroniclers, with miraculous attestations of their enduring affection,[634] four years after the canonization of St. Margaret in 1246,--may be thought to afford presumptive evidence that the abbey choir was then incomplete. This, however, is by no means probable, as the choir was always the part of the church first built. But it was no doubt with a view to receive into a structure worthy of so sacred a depository the relics of the sainted queen that the choir was remodelled according to the prevailing First-pointed style of the thirteenth century. We possess a curious proof that even the reconstruction of the choir was effected, not by demolishing and rebuilding the whole, but merely by remodelling the original masonry of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,--a process of common occurrence with nearly all the large cathedral and abbey churches; for by a bull of Pope Innocent IV., dated September 15, in the seventh year of his pontificate,[635] (1250,) he dispenses with the reconsecration of the abbey, because the walls of the former church for the most part still remained.[636] No doubt the nave also underwent some modifications, of which it now bears evidence, but all its essential features can be assigned to no other period than that of the original foundation.

To the same early period must be assigned the erection of the interesting little chapel of St. Margaret in the Castle of Edinburgh, which it was my good fortune to rediscover a few years since, when converted to the vile use of a powder magazine, after its very existence had been lost sight of for upwards of a century.[637] Some of its characteristic details have been thought rather to belong to the later period of the Romanesque style; but a careful examination of the simple capitals of the jam-shafts, and the low relief of the mouldings on the chancel arch, has satisfied me that there is no evidence in its structure inconsistent with the idea of its being the oratory of Queen Margaret, which, according to Barbour, she caused to be decorated with a painting of prophetic import, still remaining in his day,[638] (obiit 1396.) The plain coved vault of the apse, and the small roundheaded and entirely unornamented windows, so different from the later work of Dalmeny or Leuchars, confirm this opinion. By a charter bearing date 14th February 1390, King Robert II. endowed the altar of the chapel of St. Margaret the Queen, in Edinburgh Castle, with a yearly rental of eight pounds, but which was subsequently transferred to the chapel of St. Mary the Virgin, in the same fortress, probably erected at that period, and only demolished towards the close of the last century.[639] The great improbability of the oratory of Queen Margaret having been demolished, and so small and plain a chapel built in her honour either in the reign of Alexander or David, seems to render the conclusion unavoidable, that the interesting little chapel of St. Margaret is directly associated with the pious queen, to whom there can be little doubt Shakespear alludes in Macbeth, though he makes Macduff speak of her not as the wife but the mother of Malcolm:--

"The queen, that bore thee, Oftener upon her knees than on her feet, Died every day she lived."[640]

The portions which remain of the original Romanesque structure of Alexander I.'s foundation on Inchcolm, erected about 1123, are characterized by the same unornate simplicity; nor is it till the reign of David I. that we have any certain examples of the highly decorated late Romanesque work. Even in the Abbey of Jedburgh much of the original work is heavy and plain, compared with the singularly rich details which lighten the solid masses of Kelso Abbey. Of Holyrood Abbey, founded by David I. in the same year with that of Kelso, comparatively little use can be made in fixing the chronology of Scottish medieval architecture. From its vicinity to the capital, and its long occupation by the Court, every invading army spoiled or burnt it, and almost every abbot made some new additions or repairs, till it has become a complete ecclesiological enigma. In the cloister doorway, on the south side of the nave, it presents undoubted remains of the original foundation of David I. The west tower, the arcades in the aisles, and various other portions, indicate that the main walls of the building belong to the transition-period, prior to the complete development of the First-pointed style; most probably in the minority of Alexander III. The great west doorway and the centre aisle are in the very best style of late First-pointed; while the external north wall and its richly decorated buttresses, as well as various additions on the south side, are reconstructions of Abbot Crawfurd, who succeeded to the abbacy in 1457, as appears from his arms still visible on various parts of the new work. The unique windows of the west front, with segmental arches and nondescript tracery, though bearing some resemblance to portions of the palace in Stirling Castle, ascribed to the reign of James IV., will, we suspect, be more correctly assigned to the era of his unfortunate descendant, Charles I., whose cipher is carved on the beam of the great doorway below. The beautiful arcade of early but unusually rich First-pointed work, and with sculptured heads in the spandrils, which adorns the west front of the tower, is in some respects unique, and is certainly unsurpassed in the richness of its details by any contemporary work.

The cathedral of St. Magnus at Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, has already been referred to as an exceedingly interesting specimen of late Romanesque work, commenced about the year 1136; so that from the banks of the Tweed to these remote northern isles we find the Romanesque style universally adopted in the first years of the twelfth century. One curious and unique example of this period, however, must not be overlooked. The remarkable little church and tower of St. Rule, at St. Andrews, have excited scarcely less interest than the round towers of Brechin and Abernethy, and have been the subjects of equally vague speculations. The slender tower, measuring upwards of an hundred feet in height, by twenty feet eight inches in breadth at base, while the choir is only thirty-one and a half feet long,[641] is well calculated to arrest the attention, though the edifice is, as a whole, more remarkable for its singular and perfectly unique features than for the grace or consistency of its proportions. The remarkable excess in height over all the other measurements of the tower prevails, though to a less extent, in the entire design. The accumulated soil covers the bases of the columns of the chancel arch, and thus detracts from this peculiar characteristic of the primitive metropolitan cathedral; but even now, while the interior of the choir measures only nineteen feet ten inches in breadth, the present height of the chancel arch is twenty-one and a half feet, and that of the arch in the tower, formerly connecting the nave and choir, is twenty-four feet two inches; from the floor to the top of the side walls is twenty-nine feet seven inches, and to the apex of the original high-pointed roof, as shewn on the tower wall, is fifty-five feet five inches.[642] Assuming the existence of three steps at the chancel arch, we shall not probably err in adding to all the latter measurements at the least from four to five feet, thereby presenting a remarkably striking contrast to the very narrow proportions of the choir. The details are extremely simple. The sections of the piers and arch mouldings of the chancel figured here will suffice to shew that they partake somewhat of the meagreness of the larger features, while they are entirely devoid of the massiveness so peculiarly characteristic of the older Romanesque. Nevertheless, in this, as in other details of the building, the architect has shewn much ingenuity in economizing the limited means and materials at his command: the tenuity and apparent meagreness of design of the chancel arch, as seen in section, producing in reality an effect of greater breadth and solidity than a number of less distinct and boldly relieved features could have effected. The columns are finished by simple double-cushioned capitals, surmounted by a plain chamfered abacus, from which springs the arch, one of the most singular features of this curious building. Its details are shewn in the section, but the arch considerably exceeds a semicircle; and mounted on its lofty piers, with the tall, narrow tower beyond, presents a remarkable but by no means unpleasing effect. From the excessive height which prevails throughout all the most prominent features of the church of St. Rule, it possesses, as a whole, little in common with such sombre and massive structures as Kirkwall or Dunfermline, or with the more ornate little Romanesque churches of Leuchars or Dalmeny. Its walls, indeed, which have so well withstood the tooth of time, are only two feet seven inches thick. A careful examination of its details, however, leaves no room to doubt that it belongs to the twelfth century, when the older Romanesque was being modified by many novel additions prior to its abandonment for the First-pointed style; and there can be little risk of error in recognising in the church of St. Rule the basilica of Bishop Robert, the founder of the Priory of Canons Regular of St. Andrews, about A.D. 1144. The bishop had much to reform at St. Andrews ere either his new foundation or his Episcopal see were placed on the creditable footing in which he left them to his successor; and we may, with little hesitation, ascribe the singular proportions of the church of St. Rule to the desire of giving with his first slender means the utmost dignity that they admitted of to the metropolitan church. The early chapter seals of St. Andrews afford some of the few undoubted examples of a designed and tolerably accurate portraiture of an ancient church. The oldest of these, a seal attached to a charter A.D. 1160, but itself no doubt of a somewhat earlier date, shews the miniature cathedral as it probably originally appeared, with central and west towers, choir, and nave, but altogether of much smaller dimensions than the greater number of parish churches. The windows of two lights in the top of the tower may be compared to the plainer example, divided by a cylindrical shaft, with cushioned capital, and moulded base, in the lower part of the tower of Dunblane Cathedral, a fragment of the first cathedral of St. Blane, possibly of the time of Canmore, and certainly not later than the reign of Alexander I. But the lighter and more ornate style of those of St. Rule fully accord with the later date assigned to it here.

Specimens of Romanesque parish churches are by no means rare in Scotland. Besides those of Leuchars and Dalmeny may be named Duddingston, Ratho, and Borthwick, Mid-Lothian; Gulane, East-Lothian; Uphall, Abercorn, and Kirkliston, West-Lothian; St. Helen's, Cockburnspath, Berwickshire; Mortlach and Monymusk, Aberdeenshire; St. Columba's Southend, Kilchouslan, Campbeltown, and the beautiful little ruined church of St. Blane, on the island of Bute, with its Romanesque chancel arch and graceful First-pointed chancel; besides various others more or less perfect still remaining in Argyleshire--all presenting interesting features illustrative of the development of the Romanesque style in Scotland, and furnishing evidence of the great impetus given to church building at the period.

Such was the change effected on Scottish art by the remarkable historical events which gave the throne of England to the Norman invader, and established the descendants of the Saxon Alfred on that of Scotland. For nearly a century the ecclesiastical architecture of England and Scotland is one in style, coincident in date, and uniform in the character of details. This unwonted uniformity, however, is clearly traceable to causes the full effect of which was ere long modified by other influences. Soon after the introduction of the First-pointed or Early English style a marked difference is discoverable, and thenceforth the dates and peculiar characteristics of the ecclesiastical architecture of the two countries disagree in many essential points. Notwithstanding the adoption of the somewhat exclusive term Early English for the First-pointed style, it appears to have reached its limits at fully as early a period in Scotland as in England. The choir of Glasgow Cathedral, built by Bishop Jocelin, between 1188 and 1197, though not to be compared with the Cathedral of Salisbury in loftiness of proportions, or grandeur of effect as a whole, is certainly further advanced in the rich and finished character of its beautiful capitals and other varied details, though the English cathedral was not begun till A.D. 1220, or thirty-two years later than that of St. Kentigern. The crypt of Glasgow Cathedral, which formed the first work of Bishop Jocelin, is not surpassed by any structure of its class, and hardly indeed equalled by any other crypt in the kingdom. As a specimen of pure First-pointed work it is deserving of the most careful study; and the recent judicious restorations effected under the direction of the late Mr. William Nixon, have rendered it an object which the student of medieval architecture may visit with unqualified admiration and delight. So little has hitherto been done in the way of investigating the history or peculiar character of Scottish Ecclesiology, that very few examples have yet been assigned to their true date. It has been customary to ascribe the founding of the cathedral church of St. Andrews, for example, to Bishop Arnold, A.D. 1159-1163, and loosely to assume from this that a considerable portion of it was of that early date. But the mention by Wyntoun of his interment in the "auld kyrk,"[643] i.e., the church of St. Rule, must be accepted as some indication that the new cathedral had made no great progress at his death. The beautiful fragment of its choir which still remains may with little hesitation be ascribed to the later episcopate of Bishop William, A.D. 1202-1233; during whose occupation of the see we have evidence of considerable building being in progress. Specimens of pure First-pointed work are by no means rare in Scotland, ranging from the stately cathedral of St. Mungo, or the ruined abbey of Dryburgh, to the chancel of the lovely little church of St. Blane in the Isle of Bute. But with the exception of the magnificent fragments of the abbey of Aberbrothoc which still remain to us, no more characteristic specimen of the peculiar style which arose in Scotland in the reign of William the Lion can be referred to, than the three eastern bays added to the old Romanesque cathedral of St. Magnus, in the remote Orkneys. The details are indeed for the most part First-pointed, and the piers beautifully moulded and clustered shafts, but the arches that rise from them are of the same form as those of 1136, though also richly moulded in conformity with the style which superseded the Romanesque in the latter part of the twelfth century. Such work can neither be consistently classed with the true First-pointed, of which Glasgow Cathedral is a type, nor with the later Scottish Decorated. Down to the close of Malcolm IV.'s reign the ecclesiastical architecture of Scotland and England may be held to coincide alike in style and date: the Scottish First-pointed being upon the whole both earlier and more fully developed than the corresponding English style, according to the chronology assigned by Mr. Rickman. But with the first symptoms of transition the ecclesiastical architecture of Scotland begins to assume its peculiar characteristic features, marked by a return to the use of the semicircular arch, and a preference of circular to angular details, employed not indiscriminately or at random, but on a fixed principle, along with the consistent use of the pointed arch, and of details peculiar to the later styles. The fact of such peculiarities is more easily demonstrated than its cause. The intimacy and interchange of races with England under Malcolm Canmore, and the complete assimilation of the Church of Scotland to that of England, abundantly account for the uniformity of the English and Scottish Romanesque Period. Perhaps we shall not overrate the effect of the profuse zeal and liberality of David I., and the fruits of his example, in assuming that the very numerous specimens of beautiful late Romanesque work, on every scale, from cathedrals and abbeys, to simple little village churches, built almost entirely in his reign, may not have been without their influence in stamping some of its most marked types with an enduring authority on the national mind--in all periods of its history characterized by a certain tenacity of adherence to a favourite idea. Be this, however, as it may, the retention of the use of the semicircular arch, and of forms of the same type, after their abandonment in the ecclesiastical architecture of England, becomes the source of a style peculiar to Scotland, and which it has been too much the custom hitherto to regard as a mere provincialism little worthy of note. The worst fruit of this has been, that our ancient Scottish edifices have been remodelled in accordance with rules derived entirely from contemporary English models; and our architects have employed themselves for nearly half a century in deliberately obliterating the most characteristic features of native art.

The influence which stamped its character on the age of David I. was more ecclesiastical than civil. The intercourse with England, though not uninterrupted, continued during his reign and that of his imbecile successor sufficiently close and frequent to account for much similarity in the arts and manners of the two kingdoms; nor was it till the quarrel of William the Lion with Henry II., in 1172, his subsequent imprisonment, and the disputed claims of independence both of the Church and Crown, that the effectual alienation took place from which we may trace in part the divergence of Scottish from English models. The claim of the dependence of the Scottish Church on the English archbishops was probably more effectual than any civil change in severing the two Churches, with all that pertained to them. But before this lasting disruption took place, the First-pointed style had been fully developed, and was already expanding into the rudiments of the next transition. There were indeed constructed, to some extent contemporaneously, works in what may be correctly enough styled the Early English, or pure First-pointed style, of which Glasgow choir is an example, and others like the abbey of Aberbrothoc, essentially peculiar in many respects. To the latter I would propose to apply the term, Scottish Geometric, reserving for the more elaborate style, ultimately developed after the War of Independence, the name of Scottish Decorated.[644] The choir of Glasgow Cathedral exhibits a series of extremely interesting examples of the pierced interspaces of the First-pointed window, in which the tracery of the Decorated Period originated; while the nave of the same beautiful edifice, the work of Bishop William de Bondington, 1233-1258, is no less valuable as an example of the succeeding stage, where the grouped lancet windows have given place to a pointed arch divided by plain mullions and intersecting tracery into several lights, which again have in some cases been filled in with geometric figures, still very partially blended into a homogeneous or consistent whole. The circular arch, however, was never totally abandoned. In the chapter-house of the abbey of Inchcolm, for example, a beautiful little octagonal structure of two floors, the doorway is a semicircular arch, though with mouldings entirely of the later style; the chapter-house is lighted with small lancet windows, while the chamber above has corresponding apertures with semicircular heads. This preference of the semicircular arch, especially for doorways, was never afterwards laid aside. The great west entrance of the magnificent abbey of Aberbrothoc, founded by William the Lion in 1178, is an exceedingly rich and beautiful Scottish doorway of the period, presenting in its details the blending of forms derived both from the Romanesque and First-pointed styles. The entire building furnishes a most interesting example of the peculiarities of early Scottish Gothic, marking, as I conceive, the historic epoch in which the native styles had their rise. In the south transept, for example, this is exhibited with great freedom and variety of character. Three tiers of arcades decorate the wall: the lowest consists of a series of equilateral pointed arches, each filled with a cusped trefoil head, and ranging with and repeating the same mouldings is a small but finely proportioned semicircular headed doorway. The arrangement is exceedingly happy, admitting of the greater breadth of doorway without breaking the line formed by the top of the arcade, or disturbing the uniformity of its series of engaged shafts. So far from seeming to be incongruous, it has a most harmonious effect to the eye. Above this is a second arcade, composed entirely of the lancet arch; while the third, or highest tier, consists of a series of semicircular arches, forming the continuation of the triforium, so that the arrangement of the orders seems deliberately reversed. The pleasing effect of the whole can only be judged of when seen in situ.

Meanwhile the arts continued to progress, advancing towards more complete development of the medieval architecture, then common in all its most essential features to nearly the whole of Europe. The Canons of the General Council of the Scottish Church, in 1242, preserve to us a remarkable ordinance for an annual national collection throughout the kingdom in aid of the building of Glasgow Cathedral, the present nave of which was then in progress. The translation of the relics of St. Margaret to the choir of Dunfermline Abbey, in 1250, marks the completion of that interesting contemporary work,--now unhappily replaced by a pseudo-choir in the style of the year 1820. Works manifestly of the same period, and more markedly Scottish, are still common in many districts: as in parts of Dunblane Cathedral, of Paisley Abbey, Brechin Cathedral, the east end, and other portions of the Cathedral of the Orkneys, &c. But a great revolution was at hand, which abruptly severed the already loosening cords that for a time had brought the ancient kingdoms and the Churches of Scotland and England into unwonted unity of purpose and feeling. In 1285 died the wise and good king, Alexander III., leaving his kingdom to all the miseries of a divided regency and a disputed succession. Margaret of Norway, granddaughter of Alexander, an infant, at a foreign court, had been acknowledged the heir to the crown of Scotland very shortly before the sudden death of the king. Eric, king of Norway, alarmed at the dissensions among the Scottish regents, appealed to Edward of England to interpose, and thus commenced the series of memorable events in our national history, ending in the war of independence, which placed the Bruce upon the throne, and finally shut out England from all influence on Scottish policy or art. Thenceforth to have "an English heart" was the Scottish name for treason; and the term deliberately applied even in the Acts of the Scottish Parliament to their southern neighbours is "our auld enemies of England."

The year 1306, in which Robert Bruce ascended the throne of his ancestors, almost exactly corresponds with the date (1307) assigned by Rickman for the close of the First-pointed or Early English style. But meanwhile a period of division, anarchy, and bloody war, had lasted in Scotland for upwards of seventy years, during which the only arts that found encouragement were those of the armourer and the military architect; nor was this state of things brought to a close twelve years after the coronation of the Bruce, when, in the year 1318, the Pope, John XXII., the obsequious tool of England, renewed the excommunication of Clement V. against the king and all his adherents. The very registers and chartularies are ominously silent; though here and there we find evidence that the old spirit of pious largess to the Church was only temporarily overborne by the stern necessities of the time. Bishops and abbots meanwhile fought alongside of their fellow-countrymen in the foremost of the fight, or, like the good Abbot of Inchaffray, animated them to strike for liberty and independence. The results of all this are abundantly apparent in the earliest succeeding examples of ecclesiastical architecture. They partake of the mingled features of the First and Middle-pointed styles, and are in many cases characterized by a degree of plainness and meagre simplicity which renders the application of the term Decorated occasionally very inappropriate to what contain, nevertheless, the rudiments of the style. What marks them still more with a novel character are features such as the unusually small side doorways, the small windows, the single aisle, and, above all, the plain vault, whether pointed or round, all of which appear to be traceable to the almost exclusive devotion to military architecture by the builders of that age. The Church was then militant in a peculiar sense, and found it difficult to reassume the fitter and more becoming garb of peace.

The plainest, as well as the most ornate Scottish ecclesiastical structures subsequent to this date, almost invariably exhibit some interesting evidence of the adherence to the use of the semicircular arch, and its cognate forms, not only in doors, windows, and arcades, but in the tracery of pointed windows, which at length resulted in the peculiar style of Scottish Decorated Gothic. The Scots, in truth, did of necessity, and undesignedly, what the modern artists, especially of Germany, have affirmed in their practice to be indispensable to the revival of art. They returned nearly to the rudiments of pointed architecture, and wrought out a system for themselves. From this date the rules of English ecclesiology can only mislead the student of Scottish ecclesiastical architecture.

The choir of the singular church of the monastery of Carmelites or Whitefriars, at South Queensferry, founded by Dundas of Dundas in 1330, is an exceedingly interesting specimen of the simple style of the period. The windows, which are few and small, divided by plain mullions, with no other tracery than their bending into lancet and interspaces in the head; the roof a plain vault without groining, and with a singularly sombre look from its entire elevation above all the windows except at the east end, there being no aisles, and consequently no clere-story; the piscina, on the south side, a recessed pointed arch, neatly moulded, but without cusping or other ornament; the sedilia alongside of it, a flat-arched recess, rounded off at the angles by a segmental curve, and divided into three spaces only by pendant mouldings or cusps, too imperfect now to shew exactly what they may have been: all these are characteristic chiefly of the extreme simplicity of the details. But here also the semicircular arch occurs. The credence in the east wall, on the north side of the altar, is recessed with mouldings nearly similar to the piscina, and like it with all the mouldings sunk within the recess, but with a rounded instead of a pointed arch. The priest's door, on the south side of the choir, is of the same form externally, though square-headed within; and a plain ambry occupies the north wall, directly opposite to the piscina. The eastern gable of the church is decorated externally in a novel manner with a niche and various heraldic devices, probably of later date, and coeval with the nave and south transept, which are curious specimens of the Perpendicular style.[645] This extremely interesting example of an important period of Scottish Ecclesiology is generally overlooked, though it lies within a mile of Dalmeny, the favourite example of the parochial church architecture of the twelfth century. Its very existence is probably unknown to thousands who annually pass the neighbouring ferry, as it lies beyond the route of travellers going to the north.

The little ruined church of the village of Temple, East-Lothian, is another simple but pleasing specimen of the transition from the First-pointed to the Scottish Decorated style. Two long, narrow lancet windows, now blocked up, probably indicate the original character of the whole structure. The large east window is divided into three lights by mullions and intersecting tracery in the head, into the two largest openings of which plain circles are inserted. Still simpler is the arrangement in the smaller windows on the south side. They are divided into three lights, the mullions forming pointed heads at the two side lights; but instead of being continued so as to form intersecting tracery in the central space, a large circle is inserted between the pointed heads of the side lights, the lower segment of which finishes the head of the central light by its inverted curve. In this extremely simple combination may be traced the rudiments of the beautiful and richly decorated window in the south transept of Melrose Abbey. The same mode of filling up the head of the window with circles inserted in the intersecting tracery, may be seen on a large scale in the two great windows of the west front of Paisley Abbey, founded by Walter, the second of the family, Steward of Scotland, about 1163,[646] for monks of the Cluniac order of reformed Benedictines. It likewise occurs in some of the original windows of Glasgow Cathedral; while the partial development of the same simple combinations, into intricate and beautiful forms is most happily illustrated in the tracery of the south side of the nave, evidently an insertion of later date than the building, the north windows of which remain unaltered.

A decorated window in the west gable of Paisley Abbey, belonging to a period fully a century later than the lower portion of the same front, exhibits the preference for the circular instead of the ogee arch, which would have been combined with the other features of its tracery in any English example of the style. The round-headed light is found to prevail alike in the plainest and the most ornate tracery, from the abandonment of the First-pointed style about the middle of the thirteenth century, till the final close of Scottish medieval ecclesiology in the troubled reign of James V. The curious but remarkably simple window figured here is one of the original ones in the nave of the beautiful little collegiate church of Corstorphine, near Edinburgh, founded by Sir John Forrester in 1429. But it is not in such minor features as tracery heads only that the rounded arch is employed. Throughout the whole period from the introduction of the Scottish geometric Gothic, in the reign of William the Lion, till the abandonment of medieval art, it continued to be used interchangeably with the pointed arch wherever convenience or taste suggested its adoption. In the triforium of Paisley Abbey one of the most remarkable examples occurs of its use in common with the later form of arch in the main features of the architectural design. Corresponding in breadth to each bay of the nave is a large semicircular arch spring from short clustered columns, with moulded capitals, nearly resembling those of the plainer First-pointed pillars of the nave. The rich mouldings of the triforium arch are recessed to the same depth as the pointed arches below, and are again subdivided by a slender clustered column into two pointed and cusped cinquefoil arches, with a quaterfoil in the space between. A similar arrangement, though executed in a less ornate style, occurs in the nave of Dunkeld Cathedral, the work of Bishop Robert de Cardeny, 1406,[647] while the practical end in view may be observed in the nave of Holyrood Abbey, where a constructive semicircular arch is thrown from pillar to pillar at the same elevation, though there concealed by the triforium screen. The object in both cases obviously was to throw the principal weight upon the supporting columns of the centre aisle. These examples serve to shew the interchangeable use of the round and pointed arch by the Scottish architect as it best suited his purpose, or harmonized with the general arrangements of his design. So also in the doorways, the clere-story windows, and the tracery, the rounded arch is systematically used in the Scottish Decorated period interchangeably with the later pointed forms. But the taste for rounded forms also manifests itself in other ways: in circular turret stair-cases, as at Linlithgow, and formerly in that attached to the beautiful south porch of St. Giles's, Edinburgh; and again in the vaulted roofs of belfry towers, where the converging ribs meet in a large open moulded circle, as at St. Giles's, Edinburgh, St. Michael's, Linlithgow, the collegiate churches of Seton and Torphichen, and till recently in the rich groining, springing from large half figures of angels bearing shields and scrolls, of the plain west tower of Glasgow Cathedral,--most injudiciously removed to restore the west front to a uniformity which but poorly repays the idea of size and elevation formerly conveyed by the contrast between the central and west towers.

Examples of the semicircular-headed doorway are of constant occurrence throughout the whole Scottish Decorated period, accompanied with the utmost variety and extent of decoration. The west door of the Abbey Church, Haddington, is a very pleasing example of two orders repeating the favourite roll-and-fillet moulding, with a deep hollow between filled with floriated decoration. It is divided into two doorways by a central shaft, and both it and the jam-shafts have richly floriated capitals and moulded bases. The triple, round-headed windows of the tower, and indeed the whole style of its decoration, are no less markedly characteristic of the peculiarities of the Scottish Decorated period. A still more beautiful doorway, of similar construction, formed, till the year 1829, the entrance to a chapel added to the south aisle of the collegiate church of St. Giles at Edinburgh in 1387. It is now rebuilt between two of the pillars of the central tower, but shorn of many of its finest adjuncts. Similar illustrations might be greatly multiplied, as in the vestry door of the cathedral at Iona, filled in with a trefoil arch; in the beautiful cloister doorway of Melrose Abbey; in the gracefully proportioned priests' door of the collegiate church of Seton, on the south side of the choir, adorned with the arms of Sir William Seton on a shield couche, about the year 1400, but more probably the work of his son; who was buried there in 1441; and in the richly decorated south doorway of Holyrood Abbey, with ogee canopy, and flanking buttresses, the work of Abbot Crawfurd about 1458. The same form of doorway was to be seen, accompanied with several varieties of detail, in the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh, founded by Mary of Gueldres, the widow of James II., in 1462, and recklessly demolished in the progress of the North British Railway operations in 1848. In some respects this was the finest example of late decorated work in Scotland. The entrance from the north transept to the chantry chapel, latterly used as the vestry, was by a neat round-headed doorway, with a simple roll-and-triple-fillet moulding, with a broad hollow externally running continuously round the arch, and with a hood-mould enriched with flowers in the hollow, springing from moulded corbels.

Another small round-headed doorway, with a similarly decorated hood moulding, but with engaged jam-shafts with moulded capitals and bases, latterly blocked up, had formed the entrance to the north transept; and a large one, of like construction, but with the rich mouldings in the jams carried round the head of the arch, without capitals, was placed within a groined porch formed in the angle of the south transept, and formed the principal entrance to the church. The decorations of this fine doorway consisted entirely of a series of filleted quarter-roll mouldings, continued round the recess of the doorway without any break. The most beautiful portion of the whole building was the richly decorated groined roof of the choir and apse, with its vaulting shafts springing from corbels sculptured into all manner of grotesque forms of imps, grinning masks, and caricatures of monks and friars, such as the one here figured, which projected nearly over the site of the old high altar, as if in purposed mockery of the rites on which it seemed to look down. Yet above these unseemly drolls rose the ribbed groins of the beautiful roof, in its eastern portion especially, hardly to be surpassed in chaste design or elaborately varied details. In this point, however, it more nearly approximated to the usual arrangement of English roofs, being enriched with clustering ribs and bosses, and divided by transverse pointed arches into vaulted bays. The most striking peculiarity in the Scottish stone roof-work is the use of the single vault instead of the transverse groined vaulting, deemed essential elsewhere to ecclesiastical roofing. In its earliest and simplest forms, as in the choir at South Queensferry, it differs in no way from the contemporary baronial halls, as at Borthwick or Crichton, from which it appears to have been directly derived. It is probable, however, that pictorial decoration was employed to relieve its otherwise bald surface, as was certainly the case in the baronial halls, traces of which still remain both at Borthwick and Craigmillar. It continued in use to the last in this very simple form, where little decoration was required, as in the muniment room of the church of the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh, while the choir of the same building presented one of the chastest and richest specimens of a groined vault in Scotland.

The single vaulted church roof, so like that of the baronial hall, may be very fitly traced to the almost exclusive occupation of Scottish builders, for nearly a century previous to its introduction in military architecture. But while retaining its form they speedily learned to restore it to harmony with the decorated work below. The chapel of St. Mirinus, more frequently termed the sounding aisle, attached to the south side of Paisley Abbey, furnishes a remarkably beautiful specimen of a ribbed roof of this simple form, treated with great variety, and an ingenious adaptation to the variations in the walls from which it springs, which shews how entirely the architect was familiar with this style of vaulting, so little known elsewhere. The choir of the collegiate church of Bothwell, founded by the grim Earl of Douglas in 1398, is another very fine example, in which the richness of details abundantly proves that economy had no influence in the choice of this favourite form of ceiling. Another magnificent specimen of the richest style of Scottish decorated Gothic is Lincluden Abbey, the work of the same grim Earl; but its graceful vaulting-shafts no longer sustain the branching ribs of stone. The choir at Seton is a plainer and less complete example. Only the eastern portion, including the apse, is decorated with moulded ribs, which spring from sculptured corbels, and meet in the ridge rib, where they are tied by equally fine bosses at the intersections. George, second Lord Seton, is said by the historian of the house of Seton to have "pendit the choir and biggit the vestry," about the year 1493;[648] but the chronology of this work is manifestly wrong in some places, and is altogether a very unsafe guide for the ecclesiologist. In nearly all those examples no side aisles exist, and they are indeed very generally confined in Scotland to the largest collegiate and abbey churches, being introduced evidently less for ornament than for use, where an unusual amount of space was required. Occasionally even the semicircular arch is employed in the roof, as in the Lady Chapel at Roslin, where the greater elevation of the pointed arch would be objectionable from its peculiar position. The choir of the beautiful little cross-church of St. Monance, Fifeshire, finished apparently in 1369, furnishes an interesting example of the transition to the transverse vaulted roof, the ridge ribs of the cross-vaults being bent down about half-way from the centre, where they diverge from a boss into three groin ribs, the centre one springing nearly from the top of each window, which is as usual considerably below the vaulted roof. The choir-roof of the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh, A.D. 1462, may be considered as marking the period when the peculiar Scottish vaulted roof was generally abandoned, though more than one interesting example of its use at later dates remain to be noticed. It is retained in the older portion of the north aisle of the choir of St. Giles's Church at Edinburgh, while the two eastern bays, as well as the beautifully groined centre aisle, the work of the same period as the collegiate foundation of Mary of Gueldres, are in conformity with the newer style.

The same convenience which suggested the use of the round instead of the more elevated pointed arch, also occasionally led to the use of the still more depressed segmental arch, as in the chantry doorway at Bothwell; or even to the two-centred flat arch with segmental curves, as in the great doorway of the beautiful screen and organ-loft at Glasgow, and in a smaller doorway, the work of Abbot Crawfurd, circa 1460, now built into the east arch of the north aisle of Holyrood Abbey. The segmental arch is most frequently employed in monumental recesses, as at St. Bridget's Douglas, St. Kentigern's Borthwick, and in the choir at Seton; but other Scottish churches exhibit the semicircular arch employed for the same purpose, as in the magnificent tomb of Margaret, countess of Douglas, at Lincluden, and in the recesses under the great north and south windows of the transepts at Seton. One of the most beautiful Scottish examples of a late segmental arched doorway, which is figured here, is that of the vestry or chantry chapel of Bothwell Church, Lanarkshire.

The window tracery of the same period, and accompanying the other features of the Scottish Decorated style already described, partakes of the like character and forms. The pointed window-head is subdivided by round-headed lights, and these again are filled in with foliated details, the result of which is exceedingly pleasing in the best examples, from the striking contrasts produced by the combination of pointed and circular forms, as well as from the flowing tracery frequently resulting from the union of the two, and producing the pear-shaped light which predominates in Scottish Decorated tracery. This latter source of expression has led some writers to describe Scottish tracery as exhibiting an approximation to the French flamboyant style. Nothing, however, can be more unwarranted. The ogee form is almost never designedly adopted, and even seems to be often purposely avoided, as in the Paisley window already cited, and in many similar examples. The window figured below, from the south aisle of the nave of Dunkeld Cathedral, is a very characteristic example of the mode of introducing the circular and semicircular forms, to modify the ogee tracery lines which so greatly predominate in the true French flamboyant. The multiplication of descriptions of minute details of tracery could, however, very partially serve to convey any distinct idea of the peculiar characteristics of Scottish window tracery. The woodcut of one of the windows on the south side of the nave of St. Michael's Church, Linlithgow, may suffice as a characteristic illustration of the most familiar combinations of the style. Another though greatly inferior example of the same class of Scottish Decorated tracery from Melrose, is engraved in the Glossary of Architecture. (Plate CCXLVIII., vol. iii.) One remarkable Scottish specimen of ecclesiastical architecture must not be omitted to be noticed, as a singular instance of the local peculiarities developed by the building materials of particular districts. The west front of the cathedral of St. Machar at Old Aberdeen, is chiefly curious as shewing the form which the style assumed when produced with the intractable granite of the country. Its erection dates about 1380-1400;[649] but instead of one large west window, divided by light monials and tracery into numerous lights, the breadth of front is filled in with a series of tall, narrow, lancet-like, but round-headed windows, with no other ornament than a cusped trefoil in the head. The towers on either side are equally simple and unornate, and are chiefly interesting as genuine specimens of granite Gothic, of which the modern town exhibits some more ornate, but greatly less satisfactory examples.

Another peculiar use of the semicircular arch is in clere-story windows, as in the choir of the remarkable little cathedral of Iona, built by Abbot Finlay, in the reign of Robert the Bruce, i.e., prior to 1329;[650] in the nave of Sweetheart Abbey, erected, according to Fordun, in 1275; and in the large collegiate church of St. Michael at Linlithgow, perhaps added after the conflagration of the church mentioned by Fordun as occurring in 1424. The latter windows are divided by a neat mullion into two lights, with trifoliated pointed heads. In this church may be also noted the occurrence of corby-stepped gables, a favourite feature of Scottish domestic architecture, occasionally transferred to ecclesiastical edifices. Interesting examples of the tall, narrow, round-headed window, occur in the private chapel of the neighbouring palace. Among the decorations of Linlithgow Church should also be noted the shields attached to the columns, and wrought into the bosses of the roof. These are of frequent occurrence in Scottish churches. They abound in the beautiful ruin of Lincluden Abbey; and are also employed in a peculiar manner as decorations of the capitals of pillars, where they have frequently an exceedingly bold effect, as in the eastmost pillars of St. Giles's choir at Edinburgh, and also in the Rothesay chapel, in the nave, where large shields, blazoned with royal and noble arms, project from the cardinal faces of the abaci, and overhang the lower mouldings of the capital.

No mention has yet been made of the celebrated collegiate church of Roslin, founded by William St. Clair, Earl of Caithness, in 1466, because it has hitherto been usual to regard it as an altogether unique architectural monstrosity. It will be seen, however, from the preceding sketch of the most characteristic peculiarities of the Scottish Decorated style, that many of the most remarkable features of Roslin Chapel are derived from the prevailing models of the period, though carried to an exuberant excess. The circular doorway and segmental porch, the dark vaulted roof, and much of the window tracery, are all common to the style. Even the singular arrangement of its retro-choir, with a clustered pillar terminating the vista of the centre aisle, is nearly a repetition of that of the cathedral of St. Mungo at Glasgow. Various portions of other edifices will also be found to furnish examples of arrangement and details corresponding with those of Roslin, as in the doorway of the south porch and other features of St. Michael's, Linlithgow, and also in some parts of the beautiful ruined church of St. Bridget, Douglas. It is altogether a mistake to regard the singularly interesting church at Roslin, which even the critic enjoys while he condemns, as an exotic produced by foreign skill. Its counterparts will be more easily found in Scotland than in any other part of Europe. It is a curious fact, worthy of note in passing, that only twenty-two varieties of mason's marks occur throughout the whole building, indicating perhaps the number of skilled workmen to whose elaborate art we owe its intricate and endless variety of sculptured details. Among these, notwithstanding the many descriptions and drawings which have been made of the chapel, it is little known that there exist the remarkable series of medieval religious allegories--the seven acts of mercy, the seven deadly sins, and the dance of death: the latter including at least twenty different groups and scenes--as strange a story as was ever told in stone.

From some of the few dates which have been given it will be perceived that the close of the Scottish Decorated period is as totally disconnected with that of England as is the development of its peculiar and most characteristic features. The large collegiate church of St. Giles at Edinburgh, the cathedral of the bishopric during the brief period of the existence of the see, exhibited, till its recent remodelling, a most interesting progressive series of examples of this style, from its simplest to its latest pure state. The destruction of so much of this by the misdirected zeal of modern beautifiers is a source of just regret to the Scottish ecclesiologist, as the dates of many of the additions were ascertainable, and afforded a safe guide in tracing out the gradual development of the style. But enough still remains in the interior to be well worthy of study. The oldest portion is the north aisle of the choir, with its longitudinal vault, shewing what was the style of the centre aisle of the nave previous to 1829, and also of the choir prior to the erection of the present beautiful clere-story about 1466. The date of the north aisle may not improbably be yet ascertained precisely; meanwhile, in the absence of such evidence, its mouldings and other details appear to justify the assignment of its erection immediately after the burning of the church and town by Edward III. in 1355. A charter of David II., dated A.D. 1359, confirms under the great seal the endowment of the altar of St. Catherine there with the upper lands of Merchiston. Like the neighbouring abbey, however, it was repeatedly spoiled, burned, repaired, and rebuilt. In the archives of the burgh a contract is still preserved made in the year 1380 between the Provost and certain masons to vault over a part of the church,--probably the simple but fine ribbed vault of the nave demolished in 1829. A small aisle of two bays, built between the north transept and a fine late Romanesque porch,--only defaced in the latter end of the last century, and finally demolished in our own day,--appeared from its style to be of nearly the same date. The woodcut shews the singular sculptures on one of the bosses in the eastern bay, which appeared from the original painted glass formerly in its window to have been the chapel of St. Eloi, the patron saint of the ancient corporation of Hammermen.

In 1385 the church was again burned by the army of Richard II.;[651] and in 1387, as appears by the agreement with "Johne Johne of Stone and Johne Skayer, masounys," still preserved among the city archives, the five chapels were added on the south side of the nave. One of these included the beautiful porch and doorway already described, which is required by the contract to be "in als gude maner als the durre standand in the west gavyl of ye foresaid kyrk."[652] From this, therefore, we may presume that the great west door--demolished as appears from the burgh records, along with the whole west wall in 1561--was also in the favourite Scottish form of the rounded arch. Various entries in the accounts of the Great Chamberlain of Scotland, rendered at the Exchequer between the years 1390 and 1413, shew that the cost of the restoration of the main building had been borne by Government, while the city was engaged in extending it by the addition of a second aisle on the south side of the nave; and to this period there can be no hesitation in assigning the present south aisle of the nave,--closely corresponding in style to the five chapels built in fulfilment of the contract of 1387. The next addition was a second aisle added to the north side of the nave, forming two bays to the west of the ancient Romanesque porch defaced in 1760. This beautiful little fragment still remains, with its light and elegant clustered pillar adorned with large blazoned shields on a rich foliated capital, from which spring the ribs of its groined roof and the arches which connect it with the adjoining aisle. The heraldic devices on the shields supply a clue to the date as well as to the singularly interesting associations connected with this portion of the church, from which I have given it the name of the Rothesay Chapel. They consist of the arms of Robert Duke of Albany, second son of Robert II., and of Archibald fourth Earl of Douglas, two Scottish nobles found acting in concert only on one other occasion, when David Duke of Rothesay was starved to death in the dungeon of Falkland Palace, A.D. 1401. It seems only a legitimate inference to assume that this chapel may have been founded by them as an expiatory offering for that dark deed, and a chaplain appointed to say masses at its altar for their own and their victim's souls. A Parliament holden at Holyrood, 16th May 1402, enacted the solemn farce of examining them as to the causes of the prince's death, and a public remission was drawn up under the King's seal, declaring their innocence in terms which leave no doubt of their guilt.[653] It amply accords with the spirit of the age to find the two perpetrators of this ruthless murder, after having satisfied the formalities of an earthly tribunal, proceeding to purchase peace with heaven.

The next addition to the Collegiate Church was the Preston aisle, added to the south side of the choir by William Prestoune of Gortoune in 1454, agreeably to a charter setting forth the great labour and charges of his father, "for the gettyn of the arme bane of Saint Gele--the quhilk bane he freely left to our moyr Kirk of Saint Gele of Edinburgh." The curious charter has been repeatedly printed.[654] The chaste and highly decorated groining of this portion of the church shews the progress of the style, which is still farther illustrated by the beautiful clere-story and east bays of the choir, added about the year 1462,[655] at which time the burgh records furnish evidence of considerable work being in progress. The latest addition to the metropolitan church, with the exception of the rebuilding of the beautiful crown tower in 1648, was the addition of a third aisle of two bays, in 1513, between the south transept and the porch erected on the south side of the nave in 1387. This formed a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Gabriel the Archangel. It was an example of great value to the Scottish ecclesiologist, as shewing the adherence to the Decorated style, and its increasingly elaborate yet chaste adornment with richly sculptured groining, at that late period, one hundred and thirty-six years after the date assigned by Rickman for its abandonment in England. Unhappily only a mutilated fragment of this most interesting addition to the building survived the operations of 1829. The favourite and beautiful Scottish crown towers must also be noted, still preserved in St. Giles's, Edinburgh, King's College, Aberdeen, and the Tolbooth of Glasgow, but once also surmounting the towers of St. Michael's, Linlithgow, the Abbey Church of Haddington--styled from its beauty the Lamp of the Lothians--and also, as seems probable from its appearance, the lofty tower at Dundee. Nothing could more effectually demonstrate the total freedom of our native architects from all English influence than this remarkable disagreement in the chronology of the styles practised in the two kingdoms; nor must it be forgot that the passion of the previous sovereign, James III., was for architecture, and that his favourite councillor and companion was his architect, Cochrane, who fell a victim to the jealousy of the rude Scottish barons, excited by the marks of royal favour he received. In no country of Europe was architecture more zealously encouraged than in Scotland during his reign. Our Scottish poet Drummond somewhat quaintly sums up his character in terms more censorious than might have been expected from his own dalliance with the muses: "He was much given to buildings and trimming up of chapels, halls, and gardens, as usually are the lovers of idleness; and the rarest frames of churches and palaces in Scotland were mostly raised about his time: an humour, which though it be allowable in men which have not much to do, yet it is harmful in princes."[656] There was still less need to go to foreign sources for instruction or for artistic models during the prosperous reign of James IV., the favourer of learning and the arts; the patron of our greatest national poets, Dunbar, Kennedy, Gawn Douglas, and others of the Scottish Makars; of Chepman the introducer of the Scottish printing-press; and indeed the encourager of all the most liberal pursuits of a chivalrous age. Under his more popular rule, architecture was encouraged no less royally than in that of his father, and excited the Scottish nobles to emulation instead of jealousy.

Dunbar's noble poem of the THRISSILL AND THE ROIS commemorates the reunion of Scotland and England in the affiancing of James IV. to the Princess Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. of England in 1501; and it is curious to note how completely coincident with this is the manifestation of the influence of English models on the contemporary architecture of Scotland. The Perpendicular or Third-pointed English style appears in Scotland as a mere exotic, too temporarily tried to be properly regarded as a national style, and when used at all, employed contemporaneously with the pure native Decorated work. The earliest, and if I mistake not the only entire example of a Third-pointed building in Scotland is the parish church of Ladykirk, on the banks of the Tweed, built by James IV. in the year 1500. It is a somewhat stiff and formal structure externally, betraying the introduction of an unfamiliar style. In the interior, however, the features of the older native models predominate, and the plain single vaulted arch is especially remarkable in connexion with other details of a style which was wont in the hands of the southern architect to expend its utmost exuberance in pendants, bosses, and fan-tracery on the groined roof. The magnificent perpendicular work of the eastern portions of Melrose Abbey, however, exhibit no such formality or plainness, though probably a nearly contemporary structure. The arms of Andrew Hunter, abbot of Melrose, prior to 1453, are cut on one of the buttresses of the Decorated nave. John Fraser, a later abbot, promoted from Melrose to the see of Ross in 1485, completed the cathedral at Fortrose; the pure and elaborate Decorated work of which admits of no unfavourable comparison with Melrose nave, and shews that we must look to a later date, and most probably to the following century, for the introduction of perpendicular details in the completion of its choir. In the valuable little fragment of the roof of the latter, fortunately still standing, where all else is gone, we once more see the influence of Scottish taste modifying the characteristics of the new style. Here too, instead of the fan-tracery and pendants of contemporary English roofs, is the Scottish single vault, enriched only with additional ribs and bosses, but preserving the favourite feature of carrying the roof completely above the side lights, and making it depend for illumination upon the great east window. The few other examples of Scottish perpendicular work which exist are scarcely sufficient to admit of any general deductions. The semi-hexagonal apse, both at Linlithgow and Stirling, shew it modified at a later date by native peculiarities, derived from the favourite Decorated style, and in the latter--ascribed to Cardinal Beaton--also exhibiting a singular introduction of the round-headed lights of the earlier period, into the tracery of large perpendicular windows, as well as a peculiar adaptation of the Scottish vaulted roof. Both, however, must be regarded as late and somewhat debased examples. Along with these may also be noted the occasional use of the square-headed window, as in the chantry chapel of the church of the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh, and in the clere-story of St. Mary's at Leith, both destroyed within the last few years. The singular church at South Queensferry furnishes a very curious example of some of the features of perpendicular Gothic applied in a novel fashion to an ecclesiastical edifice. The north wall appears to have been almost entirely occupied by the buildings of the monastery, so that it is destitute of ornament, and only pierced with one small pointed window of one light at the east end of the choir, near to which a round-headed door--now blocked up--has communicated with the attached buildings. There is no indication of a north transept having ever existed. Both the nave and south transept are entirely lighted with square-headed windows. That of the transept is divided into three lights, neatly cusped in the head. The west end of the nave is furnished with a window in the same style, while the door, which is small and plain, is at the west end of the south side; two other square-headed windows of two lights fill up this side of the nave, and a large and heavy rectangular tower, measuring in greatest breadth, from north to south, across the length of the church, occupies the intersection of the transept with the nave and choir. Altogether the church is more curious than admirable as a late specimen of Scottish medieval art.

While this transient attempt at the naturalization of the English Tudor style of architecture in Scottish art has thus left some few enduring traces, it is worthy of note that its most characteristic feature, the four-centred arch, is nearly, if not quite unknown in Scotland, otherwise than as a modern exotic which figures in the favourite perpendicular rifacciamentos of ecclesiastical facades, wedded too often to the bald church or meeting-house with about as much congruity as the ill-assorted pair that figure in Hogarth's well-known wedding scene. Whatever might have resulted under more favourable circumstances, the new style was destined to no full development in Scotland. By a charter dated 1st August 1513, Walter Chepman, burgess of Edinburgh, memorable as the introducer of the printing-press to Scotland, founded and endowed an altar in the south transept, or "Holy Blood Aisle" of St. Giles's Church, "in honour of God, the Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and all saints." It was a period of national happiness and prosperity, in which learning and the arts met with the most ample encouragement. Only one brief month thereafter all this was at an end. James and the chief of his nobles lay dead on Flodden Field; Scotland was at the mercy of Henry VIII.; the Crown devolved to an infant; and faction, ignorance, and bigotry replaced all the advantages of the wise and beneficent rule of James IV. It is not by slow degrees, but abruptly, like the unfinished page of a mutilated chronicle, that the history of Scottish medieval art comes to an end. Yet the favourite forms and mouldings of the Decorated Period lingered long after in the domestic architecture of the country. The ornamental ambries found in the castellated mansions, and even in the wealthier burghal dwellings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partake so much of the character of earlier ecclesiastical features, that they are frequently described as fonts, stoups, or piscinæ; and even when standing, as is their usual wont, by the side of the huge old fashioned fire-place, they have been assumed to afford evidence that the domestic halls and kitchens of our ancestors were their chapels or baptistries. Some few of these relics of obsolete tastes and manners still linger about the old closes of Edinburgh, though now rapidly disappearing before the ruthless strides of modern innovation. The vignette shews the form of one of these ornamental ambries from a singular antique mansion in the Old Town of Edinburgh, which bore the date 1557, and was believed to have been occupied for a time as the residence of the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise. Another large chamber in the same building bore evidence of having been at one time used as a private oratory, and in it was a curious and still more highly decorated niche, which, however, exhibited somewhat of the debased excesses pertaining to that closing period in which the pure Gothic passed into the picturesque but lawless style of the Elizabethan age. Nevertheless its pierced stone-work served to illustrate the lingering adherence to the earlier national style of window-tracery far down into the sixteenth century.

Into the characteristics of the later baronial and domestic architecture of Scotland it is impossible to enter here, though some of their peculiarities well merit the increased degree of attention they are now receiving. The picturesqueness of the turret stairs, with their lintels decorated with monograms and armorial bearings, and inscribed with quaint legends and pious mottos; the crow-stepped gables, finials, and dormer windows, and the singular overhanging carved "timber lands" of the old streets and closes of Edinburgh, are familiar to all. Some of their features might still be borrowed with advantage to our modern street architecture; but for the most part they are only valuable as the memorials of a period and state of society which has for ever passed away.

Before quitting the interesting subject of medieval architecture as developed in Scotland, some notice of the ancient and mysterious fraternity of Free Masons seems necessary in order to embrace one important source of that singular progressive unity of purpose traceable throughout the various stages of medieval ecclesiology. While Free Masonry was denounced in many countries of Europe, and was placed for a time under the ban of the law by Henry VI. of England, its chief protector, it appears to have met with no check or restraint in Scotland; and having been made the subject of special royal favour by James I., it has ever since continued to be cherished here with greater zeal than in almost any other country of Christendom. With its modern existence, however, apart from the practice of the art, we have here as little to do as with its extravagant claims to an antiquity nearly coeval with the art of building. We can trace the association of masons into guilds or corporations in some parts of Europe at the very dawn of medieval art. In Lombardy such a free guild of masons was established in the tenth century; and the craft is believed to have first obtained footing in England under the Saxon king, Athelstane, about the same period.[657] In Normandy we only discover the rise of such an association in the middle of the twelfth century; but the practice of secret combination obviously emanated from an ecclesiastical source. The whole system of guilds originated, in part at least, in the necessity of preserving and extending such speculative and practical knowledge as may now be safely committed to the press. Such a security for the safe keeping of traditional knowledge was specially required in regard to architecture, which depends so entirely on combined operations, and needs the assistance of the chief branches of science which were carried to any perfection during that period. The whole decorative arts of the medieval era were subordinate to architecture, and it was essentially the handmaid of the Church. Ecclesiastics were at once its patrons and the chief practisers of its highest branches, so that the establishment of an order which embraced within its fellowship all the practical artificers as naturally sprung from the requirements of the Church as its various monastic fraternities. Hence, wherever any great ecclesiastical work was to be carried on, a guild of masons was organized, which no doubt soon embraced practitioners of every requisite branch of art. Accordingly we still find in Scotland that the oldest masonic lodges are at Dunfermline, Elgin, Melrose, Kilwinning, Arbroath, Glasgow, and other sites of remarkable early ecclesiastical edifices, while generally some parish churches or other minor ecclesiastical edifices still exist within the surrounding district, betraying traces of the same workmanship as the parent edifice. To the oneness of belief by which medieval Christendom was held together under its common head, and to the practical unity of the ecclesiastical corporation which constituted the Church, apart from the laity, may be traced the rise and gradual development of the successive styles of Gothic architecture. But to the operations of the masonic lodges within their several districts must be ascribed the local peculiarities and provincialisms which may be detected grouping around almost every great abbey or other remarkable ecclesiastical structure. The geographical and political isolation of Scotland, which gave to its Church a degree of independence unknown to most other countries of Papal Christendom, as well as its very partial share in the great movements of medieval Europe, including the crusades, all tended to give additional importance to those local influences which in other countries were more subordinated by external sources of change. To this source, therefore, we can hardly err in referring much of the peculiar character ascribable to Scottish Ecclesiology, which it is attempted here to reduce to some system.

The revived interest in the study of medieval architecture, added to the happy substitution of investigation for the older and more convenient practice of theorizing, have led to considerable attention being directed to the singular marks or symbols, apparently the works of the original builders, which are observable on all ancient churches. That masons' marks are old as the building of the Pyramids is undoubted. They were discovered by Colonel Howard Vyse on forcing his way into the chambers of construction of the great pyramid, where there cannot be a doubt no human being had been before since the completion of its vast masonry. Similar marks have also been observed on Roman altars and on structures of an equally early era. The most, however, that can now be inferred from such is the invariable practice of each workman marking the stone he had cut, which remains in use in our own day to distinguish the work of different individuals. But much more than this appears to be deducible from the medieval masons' marks. "The fact that in these buildings it is only a certain number of the stones which bear symbols; that the marks found in different countries (although the variety is great) are in many cases identical, and in all have a singular accordance in character, seems to shew that the men who employed them did so by system, and that the system, if not the same in England, Germany, and France, was closely analogous in one country to that of the others."[658] The observation and collation of these marks have accordingly become objects of interest, as calculated to aid in the elucidation of the history of the medieval masonic guilds. It is not, however, sufficient merely to detect the occasional identity of single mason-marks on different and widely distant buildings. The following, for example, includes, I believe, the entire set of mason-marks to be found on Roslin Chapel. Of these the first, Δ, is only to be found on the altars and piscinæ, and the two adjoining ones around the doors. A comparison of these with the mason-marks of Gloucester Cathedral, Malmsbury Abbey Church, Furness Abbey, &c.,[659] will shew that several of the symbols are common to all these; but this can lead to no conclusion. Many of the subordinate lines added to regular figures are still recognised among the craft as additions given to distinguish the symbols of two masons when the mark of a member admitted from another lodge was the same as that already borne by one of their own number. If, however, the entire series, or the greater number of the marks on one building could be detected on another apparently of the same age, it would be such a coincidence as could hardly be ascribed to any other cause than that both were the work of the same masonic lodge. I should anticipate, for example, that such would be found to be the case, to some considerable extent, on the oldest portions of Dunfermline and Lindisfarne Abbeys, and Durham Cathedral. The united cooperation of a very few zealous labourers may soon bring such a question to the test, if sufficient care is taken to discriminate between the original work and the additions or alterations of subsequent builders. Meanwhile, when so much zeal is displayed in the collection of Roman potters' stamps, medieval pilgrims' signs, tradesmen's and tavern tokens of the seventeenth century, and even the more recent provincial copper coinage, it may suffice to suggest that the collection of complete sets of mason-marks from ecclesiastical edifices,--discriminating those belonging to portions of different dates,--may furnish a clue to the influence of masonic guilds on the development of successive styles, or the prevalence of remarkable provincial peculiarities.

We obtain from Father Hay's "Genealogie of the Sainte Claires of Rosslyn," a curious account of the assembling of the needful band of artificers for the building of the collegiate church founded by William Saint Clair, Earl of Caithness:--

"His adge creeping on him," says the genealogist, "to the end he might not seem altogither unthankfull to God for the benefices he receaved from him, it came in his minde to build a house for God's service, of most curious worke, the which that it might be done with greater glory and splendor, he caused artificers to be brought from other regions and forraigne kingdomes, and caused dayly to be abundance of all kinde of workemen present: as masons, carpenters, smiths, barrowmen, and quarriers, with others; for it is remembered that for the space of thirty-four years before, he never wanted great numbers of such workmen. The foundation of this rare worke he caused to be laid in the year of our Lord 1446; and to the end the worke might be the more rare: first he caused the draughts to be drawn upon Eastland boords, and made the carpenters to carve them according to the draughts thereon, and then gave them for patterns to the massons, that they might thereby cut the like in stone.... He rewarded the massones according to their degree."--Genealogie of the Sainte Claires of Rosslyn, p. 26.

From this curious notice it would seem that the Earl was himself the chief designer and architect to whose ingenuity and inventive skill we owe the remarkable and unique example of masonic art which still remains at Roslin. Nor is this at all improbable. He was devoted to building, in an age in which it became one of the most favourite pastimes, and indeed engrossing pursuits of the Scottish kings. The Saint Clairs continued, according to some authorities, from this early date to be recognised as the chiefs of the whole body of Scottish Free Masons, till in 1736 William St. Clair, Esq. of Rosslyn, resigned into the hands of the Scottish lodges the hereditary office of Grand Master, which, however, he continued to hold till his death. The evidence of the creation of this office in the person of the founder of the collegiate church of Roslin is defective, and the entire narrative of Father Hay must be received with caution, though professedly derived from original manuscripts. Of the existence, however, of the hereditary office of Grand Master in the younger branch of the St. Clairs, which terminated on the death of William St. Clair of Rosslyn in 1778, there can be no question; and of the early connexion of the St. Clairs with the masonic fraternity, there seems equally little reason to doubt. On this account, therefore, the set of mason-marks given above from the remarkable memorial of their masonic skill which still exists at Roslin, possesses peculiar interest. While, however, we find in Father Hay's curious notice that artificers were brought from foreign kingdoms, that is not to be misunderstood as indicating that either the design or entire execution of this remarkable edifice is to be ascribed to a foreign guild. The same was done by Wykeham, in order to secure the perfect execution of his own magnificent designs, and in one or two of the mason-marks the additions may be traced which probably indicate the admission of a stranger using, with a difference, the symbol already belonging to some brother of the local guild. The very small number of varieties, however, is remarkable, though it of course only embraces one class of the numerous artificers employed. The conclusions indicated by the traditions of the craft, and the direct evidence which their works supply, seem equally opposed to the ideas too hastily adopted by some enthusiastic elucidators of medieval free masonry, that travelling lodges continued to perambulate Europe, devoting their artistic skill to supply the wants of the universal church, so that we might look for precisely the same details being repeated in contemporary works of the Norman architects of Sicily and of the Orkney Islands, or of Drontheim. We do indeed find in the eighth century the Pictish king sending for builders to rear a fitting edifice at Abernethy after the Roman manner, and, to the last, skilled artificers were doubtless sought far and near--with the ready facilities for foreign correspondence which the Church then exclusively possessed--whenever any work of unusual importance was to be executed; but long before the sons of St. Margaret had commenced their magnificent foundations, the corresponding demands for the aid of the free mason in every country of Christendom had removed all necessity for the maintenance of peripatetic missionary guilds. The order, however, flourished under this abundant patronage; nor did the localization of its guilds interrupt that mutual recognition of members of the privileged fraternity by means of which Gothic architecture continued for upwards of four hundred years to be a living art, expanding and developing itself under ever varying but progressive forms of fitness and beauty.

We have witnessed in our own day an attempt to resuscitate medieval architecture by a retrogression altogether opposed to the spirit of the old builders, in whose hands it grew like a thing of life that returns not upon the work of earlier years. Its results have been of value in securing the restoration of many crumbling memorials of the past; and in Scotland our best architects have yet much to learn in the same reverent spirit, ere we can hope to see our national historic monuments of medieval art preserved, instead of being defaced and obliterated by the superinduction of spurious French or Anglo-Gothic details--a restoration that "means the most total destruction which a building can suffer; a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed."[660] But a national style of architecture was never reproduced by such means. It must grow up like the oak, unforced and in its native soil; and, when thus originating, its living forms become the embodiment of the polity, social history, and religious faith of the nation. Yet architecture is on this very account essentially a practical art, and even in the most gorgeous medieval cathedral a sense of fitness, and ideas of direct utility, may be traced as controlling powers influencing the whole design. From this overruling utilitarian spirit sprang the element of picturesqueness, which we look for in vain in modern Gothic. The old cathedral or abbey has here a chapter-house, there a transept or cloister, a chantry chapel, vestry, or porch, introduced simply because it was required, though harmonized with all the skill of a perfect artist into an integral part of the architectural design. In the modern Gothic everything is balanced, proportioned, and reduced to strict rule and formality, but it is lifeless as the men of the old centuries to which it properly belongs. As to modern Protestant cathedrals, with "long-drawn aisles," constructed for no possible end connected with the worship for which they profess to be designed, they are manifest absurdities, which proclaim the lifelessness of the art in which they have originated. The national peculiarities traceable in medieval architecture are among the most remarkable evidences that it was a living art. Like a transplanted flower, it was modified everywhere by the soil and climate: the classic elements which are seen pervading that of Italy; the substantial yet ornate but impure grandeur of that of Spain; the compact, consistent, harmonious completeness of that of Germany; the rich but lawless exuberance of the French Flamboyant; the stately progression of the beautiful English Decorated into the profusely overlaid, yet still strictly defined Perpendicular; and the massive but comparatively plain and unchanging Scottish Decorated--all manifest peculiarities which pertain to the several nations with which they originated. "The essential modifications of architecture in each age and country must depend in part on the natural materials, localities, and in part on the artificial forms, social, civil, and religious, on the acquired habits and manners of the peculiar nation for which it labours, and the changes in these must produce corresponding variations in architecture."[661] The revivalist who seeks to reproduce the creations of the past in defiance of these manifest laws by which they existed in harmony and just adaptation to their geographical or social adjuncts, will find his self-imposed task not much less hopeless than to reanimate the fossil Mastodon or Dinotherium. But meanwhile the geologist, without seeking to reanimate these extinct vertebrata, learns much regarding the past from the investigation of their colossal remains, and so too may the archæologist see into the living spirit of the medieval era by the earnest study of its creations, though he hopes better things of his own age than that it should expect perfection in those immature centuries, or seek for life in the beautiful sepulchres wherein they lie entombed.

The consecutive view given above of the progressive development of the various styles of ecclesiastical architecture, accompanied as it is with some few elements for the construction of a chronological series of examples, is sufficient, at least, to bear out the views advanced in reference to the independent character and individuality of Scottish Ecclesiology. It would be easy to multiply references to examples of the various peculiar features referred to, but what is far more wanted is the ascertainment of a larger number of well authenticated dates of existing work. Even of the cathedrals and great abbeys scarcely anything is known, though now that so many of the Scottish chartularies are published, and as a valuable adjunct to them, their seals are being systematically described, we may hope to discover, by a comparison with the armorial sculpture of our ecclesiastical structures, a sufficient number of dated examples by which to test the whole. Meanwhile, the following table is offered with great diffidence, and merely as some probable approximation to the true chronological arrangement of the Scottish styles, placing alongside of it the English classification of Rickman, as adopted with some later modifications, in the Fifth Edition of the Glossary of Architecture, to shew the extent of coincidence or disagreement. I shall be glad to find it speedily superseded by a system much more complete; but anything which supplies the elements of a recognised nomenclature and orderly classification will be of some use as a help towards cooperation among Scottish ecclesiologists. The styles distinguished here as First-pointed and Geometric are to some extent synchronous, depending perhaps on the native or foreign education of the ecclesiastics by whom the works were prosecuted;--a remarkable circumstance, and probably without a parallel in the history of medieval art. We find William de Bondington of Glasgow, for example, in the last year of his episcopate, adopting the ritual and customs of Sarum as the constitution of his cathedral.[662] It need not therefore excite our surprise to find the portion of the nave executed under his superintendence bearing an equally close affinity to the Sarum model, then in progress. Scottish First-pointed differs very little from the Early English, whereas the Scottish Geometric has no parallel elsewhere, and in Scotland entirely superseded the other at a very early date. It is, therefore, manifestly indispensable to the prosecution of Scottish Ecclesiology, that what is peculiar to it shall receive a nomenclature of its own. It can only lead to uncertainty and confusion to continue to apply the term First-pointed[663] to such work as the east end of St. Magnus's Cathedral, where not only the pier and triforium arches are semicircular, but even the arch of the great east window is filled in with a rose of twelve leaves, and being left unpierced above, it is practically a round-headed light. A much more elaborate treatment of the subject would be necessary than is possible within the limits of a single chapter, in order to shew the peculiar mouldings and other characteristic details. In the Scottish Decorated, for example, cylindrical and octagonal piers are by no means uncommon; both pier arches and windows are very frequently composed simply of two or three plain chamfer orders. Square-edged hood-mouldings and string-courses are also common; and in the more ornamental piers the double-roll, and the roll and fillet mouldings almost invariably predominate. In the windows also--among the most expressive features of every style of Gothic architecture--one harmonious feeling is observable throughout the endless varieties of tracery, giving to them a national aspect not less marked than the physiognomy of their builders. The most prevailing characteristics are well represented in the example figured above, from one of the beautiful series of St. Michael's, Linlithgow. Similar windows, though varying in detail, occur at St. Monance, Fife, St. Mary's, Leith, at Mid-Calder and Duddingston, in the Abbey Church, Haddington, in the collegiate churches of Seton, Crichton, and Roslin, in Melrose Abbey, and the ancient church tower of Dundee. They also existed in both the collegiate churches of St. Giles and the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh; and are even found amid the traces of declining art in the beautiful chapels of King's College, Aberdeen, and Heriot's Hospital, Edinburgh--the latter of which has been assigned, without a shadow of evidence, as the work of Inigo Jones, the architect having in reality been William Wallace, styled in the treasurer's accounts and other authentic documents relating to its erection, by the old name of Master Mason. Such are some of the genuine characteristics of our native styles; but at Dunfermline, Dunblane, Corstorphine, or wherever the hand of the modern restorer has been, we find them displaced by perpendicular tracery, English mouldings and details, and the like evidences of irreverent ignorance.

MEDIEVAL ECCLESIOLOGY

|-------------------+---------+--------------+-----------------------| | SCOTTISH ECCLESIOLOGY. | |-------------------+---------+--------------+-----------------------| |REIGN. | A.D. | STYLE. |EXAMPLES. | |-------------------+---------+--------------+-----------------------| |Kings of the | | | | |Northern and | 400-843 |Scoto-Italian.|St. Magnus, Egilshay. | |Southern Picts, | | | | | | | | | |Kenneth MacAlpin |843-1057 | Scottic. |Round Tower, | |to Malcolm Canmore,| | |Abernethy. Round | | | | |Tower, Brechin. | | | | | | |Donald Bane, | 1093 | Romanesque, |Dunfermline | | | | 1070-1170, |Abbey--Nave. | |Edgar, | 1097 | prevailed |Inchcolm Abbey--part | | | | about |of the Dormitories | |Alexander I. | 1106 | 100 years. |St. Rule's Church. | |David I. | 1124 | |Jedburgh Abbey. | |Malcolm IV. | 1153 | |Kelso Abbey. | |William the Lion, |1165-1170| |Dalmeny Church. | | | | |Leuchars Church. | | | | | | |William, |1170-1214|First-pointed,|Glasgow | | | | 1170-1242, |Cathedral--Crypt and | | | | prevailed |Choir. | |Alexander II. | 1214 | about 70 |Dunblane | | | | years. |Cathedral--Nave. | |Alexander III. | 1249 | |Kilwinning Abbey. St. | | | | |Blane's, Bute--the | | | | |Chancel. | | | | | | |Margaret, Maid of | 1285 | Scottish |Aberbrothoc Abbey. | | Norway, | | Geometric, | | |John Baliol, |1292-1296| 1178-1285, |Paisley Abbey--Nave. | |Interregnum, |1296-1306| prevailed |Kirkwall | | | | about 100 |Cathedral--east end of | | | | years. |Choir. | | | | |Sweetheart Abbey, | | | | |Kirkcudbright. | | | | | | |Robert I. | 1306 | Scottish |Dunkeld | | | | Decorated, |Cathedral--Nave Aisles.| |David II. | 1329 | 1300-1500, |Melrose Abbey--Nave. | |Robert II. | 1370 | prevailed |Fortrose Cathedral. | |Robert III. | 1390 | about |St. Monance Church, | | | | 200 years. |Fife. | |Regency of Albany, | 1407 | |Bothwell Church. | |James I. | 1424 | |Lincluden College. | |James II. | 1436 | |St. Michael's, | | | | |Linlithgow. | |James III. | 1460 | |Trinity College, | | | | |Edinburgh. | |James IV. |1488-1500| | | | | | | | |James IV. |1500-1513|Perpendicular,|Melrose Abbey--Chancel.| |James V. | 1513 | 1500-1513. |Ladykirk. | |-------------------+---------+--------------+-----------------------|

|------------+---------+---------------| | ENGLISH. | |------------+---------+---------------| |REIGN. | A.D. | STYLE. | | | | | |Heptarchy. | 457-800 | | | | | | |Egbert to |800-1066 | Saxon. | |Harold II. | | | | | | | |William I. | 1066 | Norman, | |William II. | 1087 | or English | |Henry I. | 1100 | Romanesque, | |Stephen. | 1135 |prevailed about| |Henry II. |1154-1189| 124 years. | | | | | |Richard I. | 1189 |Early English, | |John. | 1199 |prevailed about| |Henry III. |1216-1272| 100 years. | | | | | |Edward I. | 1272 | Decorated | |Edward II. | 1307 | English, | |Edward III. |1327-1377|prevailed about| | | | 100 years. | | | | | |Richard II. | 1377 | Perpendicular | |Henry IV. | 1399 | English, | |Henry V. | 1413 |prevailed about| |Henry VI. | 1422 | 169 years. | |Edward IV. | 1461 | | |Edward V. | 1483 | | |Richard III.| 1483 | | |Henry VII. | 1485 | | |Henry VIII. |1509-1546| | |------------+---------+---------------|

FOOTNOTES:

[627] Sim. Dunelm. p. 201. Hailes' Annals.

[628] Liber Cart. Sanct. Andree, p. 43.

[629] Raine's North Durham, App. p. 38.

[630] Registrum Episcopatis Aberdonensis, Pref. xii.-xvi. Keith's Bishops, Append.

[631] Sinclair's Statistical Account, vol. xvii. p. 443.

[632] Not having had an opportunity of personally inspecting this interesting but little heeded Scottish relic, I have had to depend on the kindness of a local correspondent for the description of its present state. It appears to be early and exceedingly plain Romanesque work, with some later and many modern additions. Both in style and singularity of proportions it bears very considerable resemblance to the simple little Romanesque chapel of Kilcolmkill, in the parish of Southend, Argyleshire.

[633] Regist. de Dunferm. Pref. xxv.

[634] Wyntownis Cronykil, b. vii. chap. x.

[635] Regist. de Dunferm., p. 184.

[636] The reference is no doubt also to so large a portion of the original structure having been left entire, including the present nave: "Licet ecclesia vera post consecracionem ipsius per nobilioris structuræ fabricam fuit augmentata quia tamen proponitis quod antiqui parietes ejus pro majori parte in pristino statu perdurent. Vobis auctoritate præsentium indulgemus ut eisdem parietibus in pristino statu perdurantibus nonnullis vos compellere valeat ad eandem Ecclesiam propter hoc denuo consecrandam," &c.

[637] Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time, vol. i. p. 128.

[638] Barbour's Bruce, book vii. l. 1037; Dr. Jamieson's Edition, vol. i. p. 211.

[639] Memorials of Edinburgh, vol. i. p. 127. Notices of both chapels repeatedly occur in the Chamberlain's Rolls; but with an obvious confusion of the two--explicable perhaps on the supposition that the chaplain was bound to serve both altars. A curious notice of a meeting held in the chapel of the Castle of Edinburgh in 1447 occurs in the Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, vol. i. p. 367, No. 351.

[640] Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3.

[641] The dimensions of the choir of St. Rule's Church, as it now stands with the chancel demolished, are, extreme length externally thirty-one feet eight inches, breadth twenty-five feet, breadth of chancel arch within the inner pillars nine feet, present height of the chancel arch, the base of the pillars being covered, twenty-one feet four and three-quarter inches, present height of external wall thirty feet. The windows are small, round-headed, and quite plain, with a deep internal splay, and an external one of little more than one-fourth of the whole thickness of the wall. They measure in the daylight, or place for inserting the glass frame, six feet five inches high, and one foot eight inches broad.

[642] The marks of three successive roofs are traceable on the east wall of the tower.

[643] Wyntownis Cronykil, book vii. chap. 7.

[644] It might perhaps better coincide with the newer English nomenclature to characterize the Romanesque as First-round, the succeeding style as First-pointed; and then the Scottish style resulting from the two, as Second-round; and the peculiarly national style into which it was finally developed as Second-pointed. The great objection is the necessity of speaking in either case of Round-pointed, or of Pointed-round arches.

[645] However the proposed nomenclature of English ecclesiologists may answer their native style, it is impossible to adapt it to Scotland. First-pointed is undoubtedly preferable to Early English, when we can shew still earlier Scottish. Middle-pointed, however, is a most inconvenient and unsuitable term to our Scottish Decorated, where many of its most characteristic forms are circular; and Third-pointed becomes a misnomer, where, as in the nave and transept of South Queensferry the only pointed arch is a small plain benatura on the east side of the door, which is placed on the south side of the nave. The windows are square-headed, and the door round-headed. The roof has been open timber work.

[646] Regist. Monast. de Passelet. Preface.

[647] Vitæ Episcoporum Dunkel., p. 16.

[648] Historie of the House of Seytoun.

[649] The choir of the cathedral, now utterly demolished, appears to have been the work of Bishop Alexander de Kyninmund, 1356-1380. An interesting indenture relating to its progress is printed in Regist. Episcop. Aberdon. A.D. 1366, vol. ii. p. 59. The same collection contains two Papal bulls, granting indulgences to contributors towards the building of the nave, A.D. 1379, 1380. The succeeding bishop Henry de Lichtoun completed the nave, and built the west towers.

[650] Vitæ Episcoporum Dunkel. p. 13.

[651] Wyntown, b. ix. c. vii.

[652] Maitland's Hist. of Edin. p. 270.

[653] Tytler, vol. ii. p. 427. Hume of Godscroft's House of Douglas, p. 118.

[654] Archæol. Scot. vol. i. p. 375.

[655] The armorial shields on the pillars include the Royal arms, those of France, of the Queen Dowager Mary of Gueldres, who died in 1462, of the celebrated Bishop Kennedy, of Alexander Napier of Merchiston, comptroller of the household, and vice-admiral of Scotland,--Temp. James I. and II., (erroneously ascribed by me in the Memorials of Edinburgh, vol. ii. p. 162, to the Countess of Lennox,) of Thomas de Cranston, Scutifer Regis to James II., &c.

[656] Drummond of Hawthornden's History of the Jameses, p. 61.

[657] Antiq. of Free Masonry in England. J. O. Halliwell, Esq.--Archæol. vol. xxviii. p. 444.

[658] "On certain marks discoverable on the stones of various buildings erected in the Middle Ages." By G. Godwin, Esq.--Archæol. vol. xxx. p. 117, accompanied with plates of masons' marks.

[659] Archæol. vol. xxx. Plates VI. VII. IX. X.

[660] Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 179.

[661] Hope's Historical Essay on Architecture, p. 458.

[662] Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, vol. i. p. 166.

[663] It is so described in the "Ecclesiological Notes on the Isle of Man," &c., an interesting and intelligent note-book, (p. 96); but no reader would ever guess from the description, that excepting in some of the minor details, it bears no resemblance to any known specimen of English First-pointed work.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. ECCLESIASTICAL ANTIQUITIES

Notwithstanding the systematic eradication of every relic associated with the rites or dogmas of the old faith, carried on by the Scottish Reformers of the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical remains are still preserved in sufficient number to furnish out a much ampler list than the limits of this work can embrace. The recumbent effigy, for example, is to be met with in many districts of Scotland, sometimes mutilated and defaced, but not unfrequently still exhibiting evidences of refined taste and delicacy of manipulation pertaining to the best epoch of medieval art. Perhaps no work of the period is more characteristic of the change from the age of the tumulus builders than the recumbent effigy of the Christian knight. It is one of the most significant memorials of the mild influences of a purer faith on the arts and sepulchral rites of the race. The armour and weapons of war are indeed still there, but the sword is in its sheath; the position is that of repose; and not unfrequently the hands are clasped in the attitude of devotion, the symbol of prayer. The majority of these medieval monuments belong to the fifteenth century, and some of those which occur in Iona and the Hebrides are altogether peculiar in costume and style of art. There is little, however, to distinguish the greater number of the Scottish from the English recumbent effigies, unless one peculiarity be worth noting, seemingly characteristic of a national luxuriousness which is little applicable to the rude barons of the Scottish middle ages. The crested tilting helmet, which is the most frequent pillow of the recumbent English knight, is of rare occurrence in Scotland, being more generally replaced by a richly sculptured cushion. It is needless, however, to multiply illustrations of a point involving no more than a conventional formula of art.[664] Sepulchral brasses, though now almost unknown in Scotland, may once have been little less abundant than the recumbent effigy. The "Oxford Manual" mentions only one, that of the Stuarts of Minto, in the nave of Glasgow Cathedral; bearing the date 1605. To this solitary example, however, one or two additions can still be made. The "restorations" of the collegiate church of St. Giles at Edinburgh in 1829, compassed, among other lamentable defacements, the destruction of the tomb of "The Good Regent," including the brass engraved with the figures of Justice and Faith, and the epitaph from the pen of George Buchanan.[665] The brass has fortunately been rescued, and is preserved in the possession of the Hon. John Stuart, one of the lineal descendants of the Regent, James Earl of Moray, by whom steps have been recently taken with a view to its restoration. A charter granted by the city of Edinburgh to William Preston of Gortoun, in 1454, in acknowledgment of his father's invaluable gift of "the arme bane of Saint Gele," preserves the record of at least one other brass that once adorned the same ancient church, though long since gone, with so many other of its most interesting features. It is described as "a plate of brase, with a writ specifiand the bringing of that relik be him in Scotland, with his armis." A small mural brass still remains in part of the church of St. Nicholas, Aberdeen, known as Drum's Aisle, bearing two shields of arms--the one bearing the three banded bunches of holly leaves for Irvine; and the other three pales for Keith. It surmounted the recumbent effigy of Alexander Irvine, third of the ancient family of Drum, who fell at the battle of Harlaw in the year 1411, and of his wife Elizabeth Keith, daughter of the Lord Robert de Keith. The knight is in full armour, but crowned with a chaplet of flowers, and his feet resting on a lion; while the lady's feet are supported by a dog. The monument has obviously been executed during their lifetimes, from the blanks still remaining on the brass, which tell, amid all the pomp of these anticipatory sepulchral honours, that no pious hand was found to grave the few simple additions requisite to have made of the dumb tablet a true memorial of the dead. The imperfect inscriptions are,--

~Hic sub ista sepultura jacet honorabilis et famosus miles dns Alexander de Irvyn Secund qdz dns de Droum de Achyndor et Forglen qui obit. ... die mens ... anno dni MCCCC..~

~Hic etiam jacet nobilis dna dna Elizabeth Keth filia quan dni Roberti de Keth militis Marescalli Scocie uxoris dci dni dni. Alexander de Irvyn quæ obit ... dic mens ... Anno dni MCCCC..~

Principal Gordon, of the Scots College, Paris, describes in his "Remarks on a Journey to the Orkney Islands," made in 1781, the monument of Bishop Tulloch, the brass of which--"a plate of copper full length of the grave"--was carried off by a party of Cromwell's soldiers.[666] More recent plunderers have removed, within the last twenty years, a brass which had escaped the hands of previous devastators of the monastery of Inchcolm, in the Frith of Forth. Nor is it altogether impossible that others may even now remain safe under the protection of more modern flooring, or superincumbent debris. The floor of St. Mary's Church at Leith was removed in the course of extensive alterations effected on it in 1848, and was found to cover the original paving with inscriptions and armorial shields of early date. On the repair and reseating of Whitekirk parish church, East-Lothian, a few years since, a large stone slab, which now lies in the adjoining churchyard, was removed from its original site in the chancel, and disclosed a remarkably fine matrix of what appears to have been the full sized figure of an ecclesiastic, with canopy and surrounding inscription. Similar matrices are even now by no means rare. One of large size lies in the barn-yard of the Abbey Farm, in the vicinity of the ruins of North-Berwick Abbey. Another has been recently exposed within the area of the nave of Seton Church, East-Lothian. Others are to be seen at Aberbrothoc, Dunfermline, and Dunblane, the last exhibiting traces of a large ornamental cross. One of unusual dimensions, which lies in the chancel of the cathedral of Iona, is traditionally assigned to Macleod of Macleod. The representation of the full length figure of a knight in armour may still be traced, with his sword by his side, and his feet resting on some animal. It has been surrounded with an inscription on an ornamental border, and tradition adds, was completed by a plate, not of brass but of silver.[667]

Incised slabs are still more common. Some of those at Iona especially are characterized by peculiar beauty and great variety of design. Nearly the whole of the north and south aisles of the nave of Holyrood Abbey are also still paved with incised slabs, including those of various ecclesiastics, engraved with floriated or Calvary cross, and generally with the paten and chalice on each side, or with the chalice only, resting on the long limb of the cross. Roslin Chapel has a curious example of an incised monumental slab, representing a knight in full armour. In the church of Kinkill, Aberdeenshire, Sir Robert Scrimgeour, high constable of Dundee, who fell at the battle of Harlaw in 1411, is similarly portrayed at full length; and in the south aisle of the church of Foveran, in the same county, two knights in complete armour are represented on one slab, under an ornamental canopy. Examples also occur at Dalmally and other ancient ecclesiastical sites in Argyleshire and the Western Islands, but these are sufficient to illustrate this class of medieval sepulchral memorials.

Stone coffins are no less abundant, but also rarely marked by any peculiar features; the later Scottish sepulchral rites being no doubt for the most part such as were common to medieval Europe. One of the most interesting discoveries of this class was made during recent repairs of the nave of Dunfermline Abbey. In the centre of the nave, towards its east end, a stone coffin of the form and dimensions of those of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was found under the paving. On removing the lid it disclosed a singular leathern shroud, which remained in good preservation, although the body it was intended to protect had long mouldered into dust. The prepared leathern skin is double, and has been wrapped entirely round the body, like the bandages of a mummy; it is laced across the breast, and stitched with a strong leathern thong entirely up the back from the neck to the heels, and along the soles of the feet. It has been removed to the Dunfermline Museum, where it is preserved suspended in a glass case--in some respects a more eloquent memento mori than the Egyptian's "imperishable type of evanescence:" a shroud which has escaped the mortality of the corpse within its folds. The coffin has been assigned by local antiquaries as that of Edward, the eldest son of Malcolm Canmore; but there is no evidence to justify multiplies the evil tenfold, the Rev. J. S. Howson, on comparing it with the numerous sculptured crosses of the district, so faithfully described by him in the Cambridge Camden Society's Transactions, and finding that "the scroll-work on the bell-case, and the figure of our Saviour, are closely similar to the corresponding representations on the Argyleshire crosses," jumps to the conclusion that they also must needs be Scandinavian.[668] The very opposite conclusion would seem unavoidable, were it not that this idea of the supremacy of Scandinavian art in Scotland has superseded reasoning, and maintains its ground in defiance of evidence. History leaves no room to doubt that the Scandinavian invaders devastated and destroyed many native works, and greatly retarded the full development of the arts of civilisation of the Scottish Christian era. Scottish antiquaries certainly display a truly forgiving spirit in crediting them with the invention of what little escaped their sacrilegious ravages. I cannot avoid characterizing the supplementary observations on the Kilmichael-Glassrie bell-shrine in the Archæologia Scotica, which have furnished the basis of the later conclusions, as extremely foolish. A woodcut, copied from an edition of King Olave Tryggiason's Saga, printed in 1665, and with a scutcheon of the debased form only introduced in the seventeenth century, is gravely produced as an ancient representation of the Norwegian king, in order that by comparing his crown with that worn by the crucified Saviour on the bell-case, its decided Scandinavian character may be seen. The crown is neither more nor less than the common one, surmounted by three fleurs-de-lis, which, had a native origin been sought for it, might have been seen along with the Maltese or Greek cross patée, referred to in the same article, on almost any Scottish silver coin from Malcolm Canmore to James IV., when it is for the first time superseded on our native currency by a close crown. It is no less common on contemporary English, and indeed European coins; and as an argument, one way or other in the present question, is utterly valueless. On equally inconclusive grounds the Greek cross patée is pronounced to be Scandinavian. In proof of the thorough consistency of its form with the usages of the early British Church centuries before the first Scandinavian convert had abandoned the Pagan creed of his fathers, it may suffice to observe that it closely corresponds to the beautiful gold cross found in a grave in the Cathedral of Durham, on the breast of an ecclesiastic, believed, at the time of its discovery, to be that of St. Cuthbert, which would assign it to the seventh century. It is sufficient for our purpose, however, that both its style and the circumstances under which it was discovered equally prove its great antiquity and its native workmanship, points perhaps hardly requiring to be discussed.[669] The "well-known Runic knots" are next quoted, these being what we are familiar with on decorative borders of Irish MSS., some of which date two centuries prior to the first known descents of Scandinavian Vikings on our shores, and which are no less common on Anglo-Saxon MSS. and relics, on Anglo-Norman and Scottish Romanesque architecture, and indeed predominated in the prevailing style of ornament for a time throughout Europe. Lastly, we have a figure copied from an ancient "Runic monument," representing a person ringing a large suspended belfry-bell, measuring--if any proportion is preserved--about three feet in height.[670] This, therefore, can manifestly have no possible bearing on the history of the little Scottish hand-bell, or rather bell-case, which measures somewhat less than six inches high.

It is not difficult to shew that bells were in use in Scotland upwards of four centuries before the conversion of St. Olaf and his Norwegian Jarls. They were indeed introduced by the first Christian missionaries, and summoned the brethren of Iona to prayer, while yet the gloriosum cœnobium of the sacred isle was only a few wattled huts. The reference which Adomnan makes to St. Columba's bell, when he had notice that King Aidan was going forth to battle, sufficiently indicates the use of it for that purpose:--"Sanctus subito ad suum dicit ministratorem cloccam pulsa. Cujus sonitu fratres incitati ad ecclesiam ocius currunt."[671] We have as little reason for supposing that the frail currach of St. Columba was freighted with a ponderous church bell, as that the first monastery of Iona was distinguished by a lofty belfry tower. But the little hand-bell of the primitive bishop would abundantly suffice to summon together the band of pioneers in the wilderness of Iona. If the annexed engraving does not represent the identical bell of the Scottish Apostle, it is one consecrated to him, and sufficiently primitive in its character to have called together the family of Iona to their orisons, beneath the osier groins of the first cathedral of the isles. It is the bell of St. Columbkill, now in the collection of John Bell, Esq. of Dungannon. The original, which measures nearly seven inches in height, was preserved for many generations in the family of the M'Gurks, from whose ancestors the parish of Termon-Maguirk, in the county of Tyrone, takes its name.[672] This bell was held by the native Irish even of the present generation in peculiar veneration, and though usually called by them the Clog na Choluimchille, or bell of St. Columbkill, it also bore the name of Ꝺɩɑ ꝺɩoᵹ̇ɑɭꞇuꞅ, or God's Vengeance, alluding to the curse implicitly believed to fall on any who perjure themselves by swearing falsely on it. This bell was used until very lately, throughout the county of Tyrone, in cases of solemn asseveration; but much of its essential virtue must have exhaled on its transference to the repositories of the antiquary. The Kilmichael-Glassrie bell, now in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, appears to have closely corresponded to the simple iron clag figured above. Within the beautiful brass shrine figured on Plate VI. is a rude iron bell, so greatly corroded that its original form can only be imperfectly traced; yet this, and not the shrine, was obviously the chief object of veneration, and may indeed be assumed with much probability to be some centuries older than the ornamental case in which it is preserved. The name of Dia Dioghaltus, or God's Vengeance, specially appropriated to the bell of St. Columba, is applicable to all the relics of this class, which we shall find were among the most venerated objects of the primitive Celtic church.

It remains to be seen if any such ecclesiastical implements or symbols of office ever pertained to the Scandinavian Church, though it is not improbable that they may have been in general use throughout the earlier Christian countries of Europe some centuries before Scandinavia abandoned the creed of Odin. In Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, at any rate, we have abundant evidence of their ancient prevalence, and of the great sanctity universally attached to them; and, indeed, in Ireland, from whence the bell of St. Columba, as well as so much else that pertains to the early Christianity of Scotland, appear to have been derived, the small consecrated bell is still comparatively common. In the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy there are eighteen different examples, including several of an exceedingly primitive character. One of the most remarkable, though not the earliest, of these is the inscribed Cɭoᵹ ḃeɑnuɩᵹhꞇ̇e, or Blessed Bell, called by Dr. Petrie the Bell of Armagh, which may serve as an example of this singular class of ecclesiastical Celtic relics. Giraldus Cambrensis, in his Welsh Itinerary, refers to the universal veneration with which these portable bells were regarded in Scotland and Ireland, as well as in Wales, remarking that men were more afraid of swearing falsely by them than by the Gospels, because of some hidden and miraculous power with which they were gifted, as well as for fear of the saint to whom they pertained. The following account of this unique relic furnished to me by Mr. Bell of Dungannon affords a singularly lively illustration of the superstitions with which such relics have been regarded even in our own day:--

"The bell of Ballynaback, better known as the Clog beanuighte, was preserved in a family named Henning, whose residence is on the low road between Lurgan and Portadown, in the county of Armagh. Unlike other ancient Irish quadrilateral bells it bears on one of its sides an incised inscription, which renders it interesting, since the Church of Rome permitted only a cross or the image of the patron saint to be engraved on such ecclesiastical bells. It would be idle to attempt recounting the miraculous judgments visited on such as profaned or violated the oaths taken on the bell, or the wide-spread desolation which befell such as were anathematized by it; for, early in the twelfth century, as we are told by Meredith Hanmer, William of Winchester, by the authority of Celestine II., in a council held at London, brought in the use of cursing with bell, book, and candle, 'which liked the Irish priests well, to terrifie the laytie for their tithes.'

"Paul Henning was the last keeper of the Clog beanuighte; and when any of his connexions died it was rung by him in front of the namna gul, the old women who, according to the Irish fashion, caoine and bewail the dead. It was an ancient custom to place the bell near any of the Hennings when dangerously ill. I visited Mrs. Henning, the widow of Paul Henning, on her deathbed. She lay in a large badly lighted apartment crowded with people. The bell, which had remained several days near her head, seemed to be regarded by those who were present with much interest. The vapour of the heated chamber was so condensed on the cold metal of the bell, that occasionally small streams trickled down its sides. This 'heavy sweating' of the bell, as it was termed, was regarded by every one with peculiar horror, and deemed a certain prognostication of the death of the sick woman, who departed this life a few hours after I left the room. The agonized bell, I was told, had on many previous occasions given similar tokens as proofs of its sympathy on the approaching demise of its guardians."

The object of such profound veneration is now safely deposited in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin. The inscription upon it--✠ Oꞃoɩꞇ ɑꞃ Chú mɑ Scɑ ch ṁ ɑɩɭeuo--has been thus read: Oroil ar chum ma scahan chun ecumn aileou,--A prayer for him who shaped my frame to sound Allelujah. Both the rounded form and the inscription on the Clog beanuighte, are evidence of its being of a later date than the simpler quadrangular form; and it is unhesitatingly assigned by Dr. Petrie as a work executed towards the close of the ninth century.[673] The same quadrangular form of hand-bell is represented on some of the Irish stone crosses of the ninth and tenth centuries, and is also introduced in a curious group sculptured on the pediment of a remarkable little oratory called the Priest's Church, at Glendalough, which Dr. Petrie ascribes to the middle of the eighth century.[674] The following notice in the Annotations of Tirechan, in the Book of Armagh, is extremely interesting, as shewing the bell among the ecclesiastical gifts bestowed on Fiac, Bishop of Sletty, when St. Patrick conferred on him the episcopal dignity, and may therefore suffice to account for its possession by St. Columba as one of the most essential insignia of the pastoral office:--"Patrick conferred the degree of bishop upon him, so that he was the first bishop that was ordained among the Lagenians; and Patrick gave a box to Fiacc, containing a bell, and a menstir, and a crozier, and a poolire; and he left seven of his people with him."[675]

With such indubitable evidence of the use of the consecrated bell as one of the most essential ecclesiastical implements of the first missionary bishops, we can be at no loss to account for the origin of the beautiful relic found on the farm of Torrebhlaurn, in the parish of Kilmichael-Glassrie, Argyleshire. The accompanying accurate engraving (Plate VI.) renders any minute description unnecessary. It is an ornamental square case or shrine, attached to the bottom of which is a thin plate of brass pierced with a circular hole in the centre. Inside this case, but entirely detached from it, is the rude and greatly corroded iron bell. When first discovered it appeared to have been carefully wrapped in a piece of woollen cloth then almost entirely decayed. The hole in the lower plate is large enough to admit of the insertion of the finger, and was perhaps designed to allow of the bell being touched as a consecrated and miraculously gifted relic, without removing it from its case. Dr. Petrie remarks on the quadrangular form of the Irish portable bells as an evidence of their great antiquity, and refers to the inscribed one in the Dublin Museum as a remarkable example of the transition to the later circular form in the ninth century.[676] A bell of the oblong rounded form rudely fashioned out of a sheet of bronze, found at Marden, in Herefordshire, is engraved in the Archæological Journal.[677] The simplicity of its form and construction abundantly justify its assignment to nearly the same early period.

At no very remote date several of these ancient consecrated bells were to be found in Scotland, and evidence of the most satisfactory kind proves the former existence of others dedicated to primitive Scottish saints, nor is it at all improbable that some of these may still be preserved. The accompanying engraving represents one example manifestly of the earliest and most primitive form. It was obtained some years ago in Perthshire, and now forms one of the many valuable Scottish relics in the collection of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, Esq.; but unfortunately no clue exists to its original dedication or the local associations of its early history. This primitive bell measures four and a quarter inches in height, including the handle, and three and three-quarters, by one and three-quarters inches, at the mouth. It is fashioned out of a single plate of sheet-iron; and the ring which forms the handle externally projects internally, so as to form a loop, from which the clapper was suspended.

Though no representations of these singular relics of the Celtic church have been introduced on the sculptured crosses, they are figured on various early Scottish seals. The bell of St. Kentigern, the great apostle of Strathclyde, was an object of devout veneration at Glasgow for many centuries; and after forming a prominent feature in the armorial bearings of the archiepiscopal see, still figures in the modern city's arms. There has even been thought to be sufficient evidence to justify the belief of the original bell having escaped the indiscriminate destruction of sacred relics at the Reformation, from an entry in the accounts of the city treasurer for the year 1578, of a charge of two shillings "for ane tong to Sanct Mungowe's bell."[678] But it may be doubted if this could be the original bell of the western saint, which is figured on the ancient seal of the community of the city, used in the reign of Robert I., and also on the contemporary chapter seal, and described by Father Innes as on the burgh seal attached to a charter, now lost, of the year 1293.[679] On the former of these its form is very distinctly shewn, completely corresponding to the earliest square portable bells with looped handles. Its introduction on these seals attests the great reverence with which it was regarded; and various references both in the Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis, and in the Liber Collegii Nostre Domine, Glasguensis, MDXLIX, to the Campana Beati Kentegerni, abundantly confirm the evidence of its sanctity. It is also repeatedly referred to in the Aberdeen Breviary, as in the anthem appointed for the day of the apostle of Strathclyde:--

Visitat alma pii vite septenta loca Petri Presul campana cui seruit in ethere sacra.

An author of the seventeenth century affirms that the venerable relic survived even in the reign of Charles I.;[680] nor is there anything inconceivable in this, when so many others of the same kind are still preserved. But it is not at all probable that the bell on which the citizens of Glasgow, in 1587, expended two shillings in repair was of so unpractical a form as their old burgh seal proves the original campana of their patron saint to have been. More probably it was a large bell in the tower of St. Mungo's Cathedral, for the repair of which the specified sum might then prove amply sufficient, as appears from a somewhat earlier entry in the same Burgh Records: "Decimo Maii, 1577, to George Burell, for ane tag to þe towng of þe hie kirk bell, xxd."[681] From the inscription on the present great bell of the cathedral it appears that it was presented by Marcus Knox, a wealthy citizen, in 1594, the old one, after repeated repairs, having at length, it may be presumed, entirely given way. The woodcut represents another of these ancient Celtic relics, which, though preserved along with other memorials of Ireland's saints, in the valuable collection of Mr. Bell of Dungannon, pertains to one of the primitive apostles of his own native land, the celebrated Scottish missionary bishop, St. Ninian or St. Ringan. The Clog-rinny, or bell of St. Ninian, is rude enough to have been contemporary with the Candida Casa of Whithern in Galloway, and to have summoned to the preaching of the missionary bishop the first of the tribes of North Briton converted to the worship of the true God.[682]

The honour attached to the custody of the most sacred relics occasioned in various cases the creation of special offices, with emoluments and lands pertaining to their holders, and the transference of these to lay impropriators on the overthrow of the ancient ecclesiastical system, has led to the preservation of some few of the relics of primitive Scottish saints, even to our own day. But for the rude shock of civil war which, in the last century, involved so many of our oldest nobility in the ruined fortunes of the fated Stuart race, more of these might still have been in existence. Both the "Sacra Campana Sancti Kessogii," and the "Sacra Campana Sancti Lolani," were included among the feudal investitures of the earldom of Perth--a sufficiently significant proof of the value ascribed to them. They are referred to so recently as the year 1675.[683] Less reverential motives probably led to the preservation of the Clagan, or Little Bell of St. Barry, a favourite old Celtic saint who gives name to the district of Argyleshire where he is said to have ministered. This relic, which remained till the close of last century in the possession of the principal heritor of Kilberry parish, was somewhat larger, and probably of less hoar antiquity, than the primitive ecclesiastical memorials previously described. "The bell of St. Barry's Chapel," says the compiler of the Old Account of the Parish of South Knapdale, "is still in preservation at Kilberry Castle, and has been long prostituted to the ignoble purpose of summoning the servants of that family to their meals. It is inscribed with the saint's name in the Latin language and Saxon character, but unfortunately without date."[684] I learn on inquiry, from J. Campbell, Esq., the present proprietor of Kilberry Castle, that the ancient bell of St. Barry no longer exists. In a letter with which he has favoured me, he remarks,--"I have heard my father say that it fell down and cracked. The metal was recast into another bell, which is here now. I have heard him mention the inscription, but do not believe there was any copy of it kept." A remarkable stone cross, with the figure of our Saviour upon it, and numerous sculptured and incised tombstones, still remain around the site of the ancient chapel of St. Barry, the ruins of which were only demolished a few years ago. An inscription upon it bore that it had been plundered and burnt by Captain Pooley, an English rover, in 1513.[685]

More minute information relative to the preservation of another of the ancient Scottish saints' bells, as the evidence of hereditary right to the privileges attached to its custodier, is supplied by "The Airlie Papers," printed in the Spalding Miscellany. One of these is a formal resignation of the Bell of St. Meddan, by Michael Dauid, its hereditary curator, to Sir John Ogilvy; and the transference of it by him to his wife Margaret, Countess of Moray, of date 27th June 1447. It is followed by "the instrument of sessyn of the bell," dated twenty-one days later, from which we discover the substantial advantages pertaining to the custody of this relic. The Countess was thereby put in possession of a house or toft near the church of Luntrethin, which pertained to the bell, of which it formed both the title and evidence of tenure. "The instrument of sessyn" further describes the formal process of investiture, the Countess having been shut into the house by herself, after receiving the feudal symbols of resignation of the property by the delivery to her of earth and stone.[686]

The Aberdeen Breviary commemorates another Scottish bell, pertaining to St. Ternan, the apostle of the Picts, and presented to him by Pope Gregory the Great. It was preserved, with other relics of the saint, at the church which was erected over his tomb at Banchory, Aberdeenshire; and legal deeds of the fifteenth century are extant to shew the importance attached to the custody "of the bell of Sanct Ternan, callit the Ronecht,"[687]--a name most probably derived from the Gaelic Ronnaich, a poet, rannach, a songster, in allusion to its melodious sounds, though such is by no means a usual characteristic of these primitive bells, their clogarnach or tinkling being anything but musical. The Old Account of the Parish of Killin, in Perthshire, furnishes the description of the bell of another favourite Celtic saint--that of St. Fillan, who flourished in the middle of the seventh century--not only preserved, but had in reverence for its miraculous powers, almost to the close of the eighteenth century:--

"There is a bell belonging to the chapel of St. Fillan, that was in high reputation among the votaries of that saint in old times. It seems to be of some mixed metal. It is about a foot high, and of an oblong form. It usually lay on a grave-stone in the churchyard. When mad people were brought to be dipped in the saint's pool, it was necessary to perform certain ceremonies, in which there was a mixture of Druidism and Popery. After remaining all night in the chapel bound with ropes, the bell was set upon their head with great solemnity. It was the popular opinion that, if stolen, it would extricate itself out of the thief's hands, and return home ringing all the way. For some years past this bell has been locked up to prevent its being used to superstitious purposes."[688]

Pennant visited the locality, and describes the peculiar gifts of healing ascribed to the saint, but he does not appear to have known of his bell. Some portions of the ruined chapel exist, and the pool of Strathfillan remains as of yore, still distinguished by the peasantry as the Holy Pool, and even visited by some who have faith in its virtue; but if the bell is to be seen, it must be sought for among the treasures of some private collector. "It was stolen," says the author of the recent Account of Killin Parish, writing in 1843, "by an English antiquarian about forty years ago." Unhappily the old virtues of the bell had departed, or the saint no longer favours a faithless generation, else its potent clogarnach should long since have announced its return to Strathfillan.

On the Island of Inniskenneth, which is affirmed to derive its name from Kenneth, a friend of St. Columba, whom the prayer of the saint rescued from drowning--probably the St. Kenanach of Irish hagiology--there are the ruins of an ancient chapel of small dimensions, about sixty feet in length, and near to it the remains of a cross, with numerous tombstones both of early and recent date. Here, towards the close of last century, according to the Old Account of the Parish, an ancient bell, most probably that of St. Kenanach, and described by the Statist as "a small bell used at the celebration of mass," was then preserved in the chapel.[689] This example, it is possible, may still be preserved in private hands; and with so many evidences of the recent existence of these relics of the first preachers of the faith in Scotland, it is not unreasonable to conceive that others may also be in safe keeping among the heirlooms of the older Highland families, which a wider diffusion of a just spirit of reverence for our national antiquities may bring to light. Meanwhile, these notices suffice to shew that the beautiful bell found at Torrebhlaurn is by no means unique in Scotland. Probably none of the earlier Christian missionaries were without such a potent relic; and the only Scandinavian influence which history would justify us in connecting with them, is the diminution of their number and the spoiling and slaying of their owners, down to the comparatively late date of St. Olaf's conversion, and his mission to the Pagan Norsemen of the Orkneys, armed with more carnal weapons than the bishop's crosier and consecrated bell. With these venerable memorials of the first preachers of Christianity to the heathen Picts and Scots, may also be mentioned a more modern relic of the same class, a graceful little hand-bell, presented to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1783, but of which the previous history is unknown. It is decorated, in basso-relievo, on the one side with the temptation of Adam and Eve, and on the other with the crucifixion. It is no doubt also an old ecclesiastical bell, though belonging to a period long subsequent to the era of St. Kentigern or St. Fillan.

But another and still more interesting relic of St. Fillan, even than his bell, has descended safely to our own day. An English tourist of last century communicated to the Society of Antiquaries the following account of the crosier of St. Fillan, which, with the miracle-working bell of the Saint of Strathfillan, continued then to occupy the ancient scene of his ministration.

"At Killin, July 5, 1782, in the house of Malice Doire, a day-labourer, I was shewn what he called the Quigrich. It is the head of a crosier, formerly belonging to St. Fillan, who gave name to a neighbouring Strath. I entreat the Society to excuse the rudeness of the representation annexed, it being the hasty sketch of a traveller, particularly as it is only meant to lead them to the possession of the original. With it is shewn a copy of the king's letters of appropriation and security, which I have carefully transcribed. The neighbours conducted me to the envied possessor of this relic, who exhibited it according to the intent of the royal investment. A youth of nineteen, the representative of his father's name, and presumptive heir to this treasure, lay drooping in an outer apartment, under the last gasp of a consumption."[690]

The royal investment referred to in the letter is granted by James III., in the year 1487, and sets forth that "Forasmekle as we have understand that oure servitour Malice Doire and his forebears has had ane relick of Saint Filane, callit the Quigrich, in keping of ws and of oure progenitouris of maist nobill mynde, quham God assolyie, sen the tyme of King Robert the Bruys and of before, and made nane obedience nor answer to na persoun, spirituale nor temporale, in ony thing concerning the said haly relick utherwayis than what is contenit in the auld infeftment thareof, made and grantit be oure said progenitouris, we charge," &c.; and the royal letters accordingly go on to warrant the custodier of the precious relic to bear it through the country without let or hindrance, as his fathers were wont to do.

The owner of the Quigrich afterwards emigrated to America, carrying the ancient relic with him; and the following extract from a letter which I have recently received from the Rev. Æneas M'Donell Dawson, whose own immediate ancestors were for a time the guardians of St. Fillan's crosier, will shew that it is still in safety, though unfortunately severed from nearly all those national and local associations which confer on it so peculiar an interest:--

"The celebrated crook of St. Fillan is still in Canada, and in the keeping of the very family to whose ancestor it was confided on the Field of Bannockburn, when the king, displeased with the abbot for having abstracted from it the relics of St. Fillan previously to the battle, from want of confidence, it is alleged, in the success of the Scottish cause, deprived him of the guardianship.

"This family, it appears, lost possession of the crosier for a time, having disposed of it for a sum of money to an ancestor of my mother's family, who adhered to the ancient faith. Soon after this transaction, however, ceasing to prosper, and attributing their change of circumstances to their indifference to a sacred object that had been solemnly entrusted to them, they persuaded the purchaser, or rather the person who inherited the crosier from him, to part with it in their favour. I am not aware of the date of their removal to Canada, but I could ascertain it through the kindness of a gentleman resident in the same parish, who went to their house expressly to see the crosier, in order that he might be able to satisfy the friends with whom I was corresponding as to its identity. He learned also that they were in treaty some time ago with a Mr. Bruce of London--possibly the late Lord Elgin(?)--for, I must not say the sale of it, but its restoration to this country. £500 was the sum they named at that time as its ransom."

A subsequent, but equally unsuccessful effort, for the recovery of the Quigrich, was made by a gentleman who possesses estates within the favoured district sanctified of old by the labours of St. Fillan, but equally unfaithful as the bell of Strathfillan, it has failed to return to its ancient locality. The accompanying view is taken from the sketch above referred to, the general accuracy of which is corroborated by the correspondent already quoted. The crosier is of silver-gilt, and weighs about seven or eight pounds. It is hollow at the lower end for the insertion of the staff. On the other extremity, which is flat, a cross is engraved with a star on each side of it, and a large oval crystal is set in the front of the short limb. The simple form of this remarkable relic amply suffices to confirm the great antiquity assigned to it.

The ancient crosier of St. Molocus, another favourite Celtic saint, has in like manner escaped the ravages of time, and the iconoclastic zeal of the reformers of the sixteenth century, and after being preserved for centuries in the immediate vicinity of the cathedral of Lismore, has recently come into the possession of the present Duke of Argyle. It is known in the district by the simple name of the Baculum More, or big staff; and consists of a plain curved staff, formerly decorated with silver at the top, but long since spoiled of its costlier ornaments. The right of its curatorship, and probably also of bearing it before the bishops of Argyle, appears to have been hereditary, and conferred on its holders the possession of a small freehold estate, which remained in the hands of the lineal descendant of the old staff-bearer till within the last few years. This estate was latterly held under a deed granted by the Earl of Argyle in 1544, the ancient crosier being preserved in verification of the right, till it was recently delivered up, in return for new titles granted, in order to enable the late owner, the last of his race, to dispose of the freehold, which could no longer descend to his heirs. The original charter of confirmation grants,--"Dilecto signiffero nostro Johanni M'Molmore vic Kevir, et heredibus suis masculis de suo corpore legitime procreatis seu procreandis quibus deficientibus at nostram donationem reuerten. omnes et singulas nostras terras de dimidietate terrarum de Peynebachillen et Peynehallen extenden. ad dimidiatem merce terrarum jacen. in Insula de Lismor, cum custodia magni bacculi beati Moloci," &c.[691]

Two other ancient episcopal crosiers remain to be noticed, each of them associated with Scottish sees. The one here engraved was found, in its present imperfect state, along with a glove and other relics, in the course of some excavations in the choir of the cathedral of Fortrose, when a stone coffin was discovered, which doubtless contained the remains of one of the old bishops of Ross. This interesting relic was presented by Sir George Mackenzie to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1822, and is now preserved in their Museum. It retains traces both of colour and gilding, and though greatly decayed and imperfect, is still characterized by considerable elegance. It measures the segment of a circle of about five inches in diameter.

The other crosier referred to belongs to the ancient see of St. Magnus in the Orkneys, and likewise owes its preservation, like the relics of more primitive eras, to the medieval practice of depositing the symbols of the chief pastoral office beside the remains of the deceased bishop. During the progress of the recent judicious restorations in the choir of the cathedral at Kirkwall, in the month of August 1848, a modern flooring was removed, which concealed the bases of the columns and piers. Several ancient tombs were brought to light by this means, and in one place on the north side of the altar steps, a finely carved slab of stone was exposed. On removing this, a small vaulted chamber or cist was discovered, within which lay a skeleton greatly decayed, and beside it the crosier figured, carved in oak, and a chalice and paten, both roughly modelled, apparently in the common white wax frequently used in ancient seals. The chalice, though somewhat imperfect round the lip, is otherwise entire, but the paten is greatly injured, and both are little more than rude symbols of these most essential sacred vessels used in the service of the mass. The oaken crosier measures eleven and a half inches long as figured here, but it is notched at the lower extremity, evidently for the purpose of attaching it to a staff. The tomb has been supposed to be that of Thomas de Tulloch, circa 1422-1448--a date with which the style of ornament of the crosier very well agrees, but there is no sufficient evidence to enable it to be assigned with certainty to a particular individual. Nearly at the same time as these interesting episcopal memorials were brought to light, a very curious discovery was made of human remains inclosed in one of the pillars of the western or most ancient portion of the choir, at a height of nearly twelve feet from the floor. There was an indentation or cut in the skull, which, with the singular position of the vault, induced some of the northern antiquaries to hazard the conjecture that they had discovered the remains of their patron saint, the good Earl Magnus: a thing not altogether inconceivable. It was nearly at the same time that the tomb of William, the first resident bishop of the Northern Isles, was exposed, as already described.

The form of the ancient Scottish chalice, as indicated on early tombs, corresponds, as might be expected, to the general usage of the medieval Church. The wax model found in the supposed tomb of Bishop Tulloch at Orkney, indicates the same conformity to the prevailing fashions of the age. The peculiar arts, however, which modified the sepulchral and monumental sculpture, as well as the architecture of the primitive Scottish Church, doubtless also occasionally conferred equally characteristic forms on the sacred vessels and other articles of Church furnishing.

The chalice is figured on various early Scottish ecclesiastical seals, as well as on sepulchral slabs and other medieval sculptures. But an original Scottish chalice, a relic of the venerable abbey of St. Columba, preserved till a very few years since an older example of the sacred vessels of the altar than is indicated in any existing memorial of the medieval Church. The later history of this venerable relic is replete with interest. It was of fine gold, of a very simple form, and ornamented in a style that gave evidence of its belonging to a very early period. It was transferred from the possession of Sir Lauchlan MacLean to the Glengarry family, in the time of Æneas, afterwards created by Charles II. Lord Macdonell and Arross, under the circumstances narrated in the following letter from a cousin of the celebrated Marshal Macdonald, Duke of Tarentum, and communicated to me by a clergyman,[692] who obtained it from the family of the gentleman to whom it was originally addressed:--

"The following anecdote I heard from the late bishop, John Chisholm, and from Mr. John M'Eachan, uncle to the Duke of Tarentum, who died at my house at Irin Moidart, aged upwards of one hundred years:--

"Maclean of Duart expecting an invasion of his lands in Mull, by his powerful neighbour the Earl of Argyll, applied to Glengarry for assistance. Æneas of Glengarry marched at the head of five hundred men to Ardtornish, nearly opposite Duart Castle, and crossing with a few of his officers to arrange the passage of the men across the Sound of Mull, Maclean, rejoicing at the arrival of such a friend, offered some choice wine in a golden chalice, part of the plunder of Iona. Glengarry was struck with horror, and said, folding his handkerchief about the chalice, 'Maclean, I came here to defend you against mortal enemies, but since by sacrilege and profanation you have made God your enemy, no human means can serve you.' Glengarry returned to his men, and Maclean sent the chalice and some other pieces of plate belonging to the service of the altar, with a deputation of his friends, to persuade him to join him; but he marched home. His example was followed by several other chiefs, and poor Maclean was left to compete single-handed with his powerful enemy."

Such was the last historical incident connected with the golden chalice of Iona, perhaps without exception the most interesting ecclesiastical relic which Scotland possessed. Unfortunately its later history only finds a parallel in that of the celebrated Danish golden horns. It was preserved in the charter-chest of Glengarry, until it was presented by the late Chief to Bishop Ronald M'Donald, on whose demise it came into the possession of his successor, Dr. Scott, Bishop of Glasgow. Only five years since the sacristy of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church in that city, where it was preserved, was broken into, and before the police could obtain a clue to the depredators, the golden relic of Iona was no longer a chalice. Thus perished by the hands of a common felon a memorial of the spot consecrated by the labours of some of the earliest Christian missionaries to the Pagan Caledonians, and which had probably survived the vicissitudes of upwards of ten centuries. In reply to inquiries made as to the existence of any drawing of the chalice, or even the possibility of a trustworthy sketch being executed from memory, a gentleman in Glasgow writes:--"I have no means of getting even a sketch from which to make a drawing. Were I a good hand myself I could easily furnish one, having often examined it. It was a chalice that no one could look on without being convinced of its very great antiquity. The workmanship was rude, the ornamental drawings or engravings even more hard than medieval ones in their outlines, and the cup bore mark of the original hammering which had beaten it into shape."

The oldest existing Scottish relic of this class is the "Dunvegan Cup," celebrated by Sir Walter Scott in his "Lord of the Isles," and still sacredly guarded in the Castle of Dunvegan, in Skye, along with other Celtic heirlooms of the chiefs of MacLeod. "The Horn of Rorie More," says Scott, "preserved in the family, and recorded by Dr. Johnson, is not to be compared with this piece of antiquity, which is one of the greatest curiosities in Scotland." Its dimensions are nine inches and three quarters in inside depth, ten and a half in height on the outside, the extreme measure over the lips being four inches and a half. The engraving on Plate VI. is from a private plate in the possession of C. K. Sharpe, Esq., executed from a drawing by Mrs. MacLeod. Another, but much less accurate or minute view of this curious relic is given in the Archæologia, from a sketch by Mr. Daniell.[693] These will serve better than any elaborate description to convey a correct idea of its peculiar form. The material of the cup is wood, to all appearance oak, most curiously wrought and embossed with silver work. A series of projecting bosses appear to have been jewelled, and two or three of them still retain their simple settings. The ledge, the projecting brim, and the four legs which support the cup, are of silver, which with the other silver mountings appear to have been gilt. Around the exterior is an inscription in Gothic characters, which Sir Walter Scott deciphered nearly as follows:[694]--

~Ufo : Johis : Mich : Mgn : Principis : De : Hi : Manæ : Vich : Liahia : Mgryneil : Et : Spat : Do : Jhu : Da : Clea : Ill : Dea : Ipa : Fecit : Ano : Di : Ix : 93º Onili : Oimi :~

It may be thus extended:--Ufo Johannis Mich Magni Principis de Hi Manæ Vich Liahia Magryneil et sperat Domino Jhesu dari clementiam illi deæ ipsa. Fecit Anno Domini 993 Onili Oimi. The inscription is a curious specimen of early Celtic Latinity:--Ufo, the son of John, the son of Magnus, Prince of the Isle of Man, the grandson of Liahia Macgryneil, trusts in the Lord Jesus that mercy will be given to him in that day. Oneil Oimi made this in the year of God nine hundred and ninety-three. Within the mouth of the cup, on each of the four sides, is the sacred monogram, ~i.h.s.~, which, coupled with the tenour of the inscription, leaves little room to doubt, notwithstanding its unusual form, that it had been originally designed for a chalice, and gifted by Ufo for the service of the altar. The family legends of the Macleods associate it with some old traditional chief or hero, Neil Ghlune-dhu, or Black-knee, but it seems to have been a family heirloom from time immemorial.

The use of wooden vessels as chalices was, for obvious reasons, abandoned at an early period, so that the calices lignei became in later ages a proverbial illustration of the obsolete simplicity of primitive ages. "We may now take up that old regrait," exclaims Fountainhall, in moralizing on the immense wealth first acquired by the Church, about A.D. 600, "when ther ware calices lignei ther ware then sacerdotes aurei, but now when our chalices are of gold and silver, we have got ligneos sacerdotes."[695] Vessels of wood, even though mounted and jewelled, like the Dunvegan chalice, were very early disused in the services of the altar; and the mazer cup or maple bowl constituted one of the most prominent implements in the conviviality of the Middle Ages. The name indeed ceased at an early period to be exclusively reserved for those manufactured from the wood of the maple tree, from whence the mazer had derived its name, and was at length applied to all drinking cups of a certain class, of whatever material. Among the beautiful examples of medieval art recently exhibited at the London Royal Society of Arts, was a beautiful mazer bowl of silver-gilt, of fifteenth century workmanship, which belongs to Oriel College, Oxford. Of the same class also, probably, were some of the Scottish cups enumerated in a curious inventory of the treasure and jewels of James III., "fundin in a bandit kist like a gardeviant," among which are the "FOURE MASARIS, CALLIT KING ROBERT THE BROCIS, with a cover," and again, "the hede of silver of ane of the coveris of masar." The same "Collection of Inventorys of Royal Wardrobe and Jewell-house," from 1488 to 1606, furnishes some interesting minutiæ in regard to the royal plate and jewels, and the consecrated vessels for the service of the altar. Besides the mazers, there is "ane cowp callit king Robert the Bruce coupe, of silver owirgilt,"--another pleasing evidence of the reverence with which the name of the saviour of his country continued to be regarded. The royal plate and jewels are of an exceedingly curious and costly character, while among the "chapell geir" we find "ane chesabill of purpour velvot, with the stoyle and fannowne, orphis, twa abbis," &c. Another of "crammosie velvot, furniset with a stole and a fannoun only;" another "of black velvot, with croce upoune it, broderrit of clayth of gold." Altar cloths, broidered and jewelled; "ane challeis and ane patene gilt;" "ane caise of silver for the messbreid, with ane cover;" "ane litil cors with precious stanis;" "ane lytill box of gold with the haly croce, send be the Duk of Albany to the kingis graice;" "ane croce of silver, with our Lady and Sanct Johne, gilt." Of silver, "ouregilt," in Edinburgh Castle, "twa chandleris, ane chalice and ane patine, ane halie watter fatt," &c.; "ane bell of silver;" "ane bassing; ane laver of fyne massy gold, with thrissillis and lelleis crounit upoun the samen," &c. The list indeed, of which these are only a few illustrations, greatly exceeds what might have been anticipated at a period succeeding many years of national disaster and suffering. It is to be regretted that scarcely a solitary example of the medieval Scottish "chapell geir," or of the royal mazer, or convivial bowl, remains to illustrate the usages of our ancestors. We learn, however, from these old inventories, that there was no lack of either, and also that the value attached to the mazer cup dates in Scotland, as elsewhere, from a very early period. This probably originated in part from superstitious feelings, arising from some special virtue attached to the wood of the maple tree. But its close grain, the beauty of its variegated surface, and its susceptibility of high polish, were doubtless the chief reasons for its continued use as the material for the pledge-cup and wassail bowl; and when it was replaced by other woods, or even by the precious metals, the old name was still retained. The woodcut represents a mazer of very simple form, and probably of an early age, made not of the maple but the ash, a tree famed of old for many supernatural qualities. It was found in the deep draw-well, in the ruined castle of Merdon, near Hursly, built by Bishop Henry de Blois, A.D. 1138.[696] The ciphus de mazero frequently figures among the household effects of citizens of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and is no less commonly alluded to by the elder poets, as in Robert de Brunne's version of Wace's Brut, written in the latter part of the thirteenth century, where "mazers of rich price" are specified among the gifts bestowed by king Arthur on his foreign guests. The mazer figures also in the inventory of goods of the Sheriff of Nottingham, taken by "Lytell John," as printed by Wynken de Worde, in the popular black-letter ballad,--"A Lytell geste of Robyn Hode;" and it is thus introduced in the fine old Scottish ballad of "Gill Morice,"

"Then up an' spak the bauld baron, An angry man was he; He's ta'en the table wi' his foot, Sae has he wi' his knee, Till siller cup an' mazer dish In flinders he garr'd flee."

The mazer cup was evidently regarded as a family heirloom, and as such inscribed with quaint legends and pious aphorisms, and sometimes decorated with rich chasing and carving, as Chaucer has so beautifully described in the "Mazer yrought of the maple," mentioned in his Shepherd's Callender. The quaint simplicity, both of the devices and inscriptions of many of the wassail bowls, furnishes curious illustration of the manners and ideas of the age to which they belong. Our forefathers had a pious, but withal a very convenient fashion, of uniting religion with their daily sports, and even, as it might seem, seeking to sanctify their excesses. Both Chaucer and Dunbar wind up their freest versions of the Decameron with a pious couplet, and in like spirit the old toper invoked the Trinity on the rim of his wassail bowl, and engraved the mystic saint Christopher within it. The woodcut represents a very beautiful mazer of the time of Richard II., now in the possession of Evelyn Philip Shirley, Esq, M.P. It is made of highly polished wood, apparently maple, and hooped with a richly embossed rim of silver gilt, on which is inscribed, as shewn in the annexed fac-simile of a portion of the "edgle of sylver," the following characteristic invocation:--

From the tenor of such legends frequently inscribed on these ancient cups, it has not been uncommon to describe them as sacred vessels, designed only for use in the service of the Church. Thus a maple cup, bearing the date 1608, was forwarded for exhibition at a meeting of the British Archæological Association in 1848, as a chalice;[697] and another, apparently of the same character, made in the year 1611, was shewn to the members of the Archæological Institute in 1850, which it was also conjectured "might have served in some rural parish as a chalice."[698] Such cups, however, were by no means rare in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and though frequently inscribed in terms calculated to suggest such a sacred character, there will generally be found some accompaniment in the legend or devices no less characteristic of mirth and good fellowship. On the 4th January 1667, Mr. Pepys notes in his gossiping Diary, having "last of all, a flagon of ale and apples, drunk out of a wood cup, as a Christmas draught, which made all merry." Fountainhall in his "Decisions," records some curious notes of an action brought by Sir Alexander Ogilvie, afterwards Lord Forglen, in 1685, against Sir Alexander Forbes of Tolquhoun, for stealing a gilded mazer cup out of his house, which was afterwards accidentally discovered in the hands of a goldsmith in Aberdeen, with whom its careless owner had left it some years before for repair. From such glimpses as we recover of the history of the litigants, neither of the old Scottish baronets seem characters likely to have gifted chalices, even of maple or ashen wood, though probably well fitted to match with Secretary Pepys in discussing a "Christmas draught." One quaint, but very beautiful allusion, however, is made by an old Scottish writer to the mazer cup, referring to it metaphorically, as to a sacramental chalice. The passage occurs in Zacharie Boyd's "Last Battell of the Soule," published at Edinburgh in 1629. "Take now," says he, "the cup of salvation, the great Mazer of His mercy, and call upon the name of the Lord."

A curious wooden cup, in the collection of W. B. Johnstone, Esq., bearing the date 1611, serves to illustrate the character of the pious legends graven on the mazers of the seventeenth century,--not unsuited in part for the decoration of a sacramental chalice, but also accompanied with other devices and allusions, which leave no doubt of the real destination of the mazer for the convivial board. Its height is nine inches, and its greatest circumference, a little below the brim, nineteen inches. The outer surface of the bowl is divided into ornamental compartments, within which are grouped the lion, unicorn, stag, ostrich, hedgehog, dog, and cock, with trees, flowers, &c. The ostrich is represented regaling himself with a horse-shoe![699] Around the rim, bowl, stem, and even on the lower side of the stand, the carver has indulged his moralizing vein, both in prose and verse. The inscription on the bowl reads,--

THE FOUNTAYNE OF ALL HEALTH AND WEALTH AND JOYES, TO THIRSTY SOULES HE GIVETH DRINK INDEED; SUCH AS TURN TO HIM FROM THEIR EVILL WAYES SHALL FINDE SOUND COMFORT IN THEIR GREATEST NEEDE; BUT EVILL WORKERS THAT IN SINNE REMAINE, THEY ARE ORDAYNED TO ETERNALL PAYNE. FOR EVERY ONE OF US SHALL BE REWARDED ACCORDING TO OUR WORKES; THEREFORE REPENT UNFAYNEDLY AND AMEND.

Round the rim of the stand are the words and date:--THEY THAT SEEKE AFTER THE LORD SHALL PRAYSE HIM, THEIR HARTS SHALL LIVE FOR EVER. 1611.; and then on the underside of the stand the cup thus takes up the hortatory strain, in a mixed vein, in propria persona:--

MISSUSE ME NOT ALTHOUGH I AM NO PLATE; A MAPLE CUPP THAT IS NOT OUT OF DATE. DRINKE WELL, AND WELCOME, BUT BE NOT TOO FREE, EXAMINE WHETHER THAT IN CHRIST YOU BE; IF THAT YOUR FAITH BE TRUE, AND FIRM, AND SOUND, THEN IN ALL GOOD WORKS YOU WILL STILL ABOUND. SO RUN THAT YE MAY OBTAYNE.

There was perhaps a little quiet humour lurking in the mind of the carver when he inscribed these latter excellent and very practical maxims on the underside of the stand, where it is only possible to peruse them when the cup is empty! It will be seen that this maple cup bears a very close resemblance to the contemporary vessels of the same class referred to in the Journals of the Archæological Association and of the Institute. Their odd devices and quaint inscriptions are not unworthy of note by the historian as indicative of the old Puritan spirit manifesting itself in this simple guise during the reign of James, preparatory to its stern outbreak in that of his son.

These spurious chalices of modern date have led us somewhat beyond the legitimate bounds of the subject, though they cannot be considered quite undeserving of a passing notice. Only one other early Scottish relic remains to be noted,--a small brass box, closely resembling several which have been found at various times in England, and have been supposed to be pyxes, intended to hold the chrism, or by some as designed only for containing pigments or unguents. Two similar boxes discovered at Lewis are engraved in the Archæologia, and described as small bronze pyxes;[700] and another found at Lincoln is figured in the Archæological Journal.[701] The remarkably close resemblance of these to the Scottish example manifestly points to some common purpose for the whole; and the latter is of special value as supplying the means which are wanting in the others of making some approximation to the precise age to which they belong. It was found about the year 1818, near Dalquharran Castle, in the parish of Daily, Ayrshire, filled with coins of David II. of Scotland, Edwards I. and II. of England, and two counterfeit sterlings of the Counts of Flanders and Porcieu. It is now in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries.

Few as are the examples of Scottish ecclesiastical relics which we can now refer to, they are more than we might reasonably anticipate in a country where the fanes and altars of the medieval church have lain in ruins for so many centuries, and even the existence of a single ruined church pertaining to its primitive Christian era may be still liable to dispute. Though such remains are of less esteem as sources of information relative to the periods to which they belong than the objects of earlier eras, they will not be regarded by the intelligent historian as altogether devoid of value in relation to the peculiar arts and customs or the degree of civilisation of ages, concerning which much obscurity has still to be removed.

FOOTNOTES:

[664] A pretty large list of Scottish monumental effigies might still be made. Descriptions of monuments furnished to me by the Rev. J. H. Hughes, and George Seton, Esq., include nearly sixty, many of which contain two recumbent figures, and to these considerable additions might be made, while many more empty niches suffice to shew where others once have lain.

[665] Memorials of Edin. vol. ii. p. 169.

[666] Archæologia Scotica, vol. i. p. 260.

[667] Graham's Monuments of Iona, p. 19. Plate XXXIII.

[668] Transactions Cambridge Camden Soc. vol. i. p. 177.

[669] Akerman's Archæological Index. Plate XIX. fig. 6.

[670] Archæol. Scotica, vol. iv. p. 122.

[671] Smith's St. Columba, p. 45.

[672] The word Termon implies church lands, and is also used in the sense of a sanctuary.

[673] Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland, 8vo, p. 252.

[674] Ibid., pp. 247, 251.

[675] Menstir, a reliquary; poolire, a leathern bookcase or satchel. Vide Dr. Petrie's illustrations, ibid., pp. 336-342.

[676] Eccles. Architecture of Ireland, 8vo, p. 252.

[677] Archæological Journal, vol. v. p. 329.

[678] Burgh Records of Glasgow. Mait. Club, p. 104.

[679] Regist. Epis. Glasgu., Plates II. and V.

[680] Davidis Camerarii de Scotorum, &c., Paris, 1631. Note in Liber Col. Nost. Dom. Glasgu.

[681] Burgh Records of Glasgow, p. 100.

[682] Among the valuable ecclesiastical bells in Mr. Bell's collection are those of St. Ringan, St. Ruadan, St. Columba, St. Patrick, and the celebrated Bearnan brighde, or gapped bell of St. Brigid, so called from the gap or injury which tradition affirms it to have received when flung by St. Patrick in the midst of the venomous reptiles which he was banishing from the green isle!

[683] Inquis. at Capit. Dom. Regis Retornatum Perth., NN. 708, 880.

[684] Sinclair's Stat. Acc., vol. xix. p. 318.

[685] MS. Letter from J. Campbell, Esq. of Kilberry Castle.

[686] Airley Papers, Spalding Miscellany, vol. iv. pp. 117, 118.

[687] Regist. Episc. Aberdon., vol i. pp. 327, 328; Spalding Miscellany, vol. iv. Pref. p. xxii.

[688] Sinclair's Stat. Acc. vol. xvii. p. 377.

[689] Sinclair's Stat. Acc., vol. xiv. p. 208.

[690] Archæol. Scot., vol iii. p. 289.

[691] The Charter is printed in full in the Reliquiæ Antiquæ Scoticæ, No. xxxv. p. 150.

[692] Rev. Æneas M'Donell Dawson.

[693] Archæologia, vol. xxii. Plate XXXIII.

[694] I have ventured on two slight alterations of Sir Walter Scott's reading of the original inscription, which seem indispensable for making sense of it. What he calls "the puzzling letters Hr," there can be little doubt is the Celtic Hi, or island. The concluding words of the first part, which Sir Walter renders illdra. ipa, and then extends to illorum opera, somewhat to the confusion both of derivation and grammar, become by the simple substitution of an e for an r--letters nearly similar in the old Gothic character--ill. dea. ipa, fully admitting of the rendering above suggested. Not having seen the cup myself, I must leave the date for determination by some future observer; but from the character of the lettering it is probable that it will prove at least a century later, the ix. being more likely an m, which would assign it to the memorable year in which Malcolm, Margaret, and Edgar died. Vide note E., Lord of the Isles.

[695] Fountainhall's Historical Notices, Bann. Club, vol. ii. p. 498.

[696] Archæol. Journ., vol. iii. p. 361.

[697] Journal of the Archæological Association, vol. iv. p. 403.

[698] Archæological Journal, vol. vii. p. 81. Vide also vol. vi. p. 189.

[699] This quaint version of an old popular error forms the crest of more than one Scottish family, but there is no indication of its being introduced on the mazer as a heraldic device, or symbolic reference to its original owner.

[700] Archæologia, vol. xxxi. p. 437.

[701] Archæological Journal, vol. vi. p. 71.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IX. MISCELLANEOUS ANTIQUITIES

The numerous relics which illustrate the arts and manners of the Medieval Period have already furnished English and foreign antiquaries with copious materials for large and valuable treatises on single selected departments, nor is the field of Scottish medieval art greatly less productive. It is not, however, designed in this closing chapter to do more than select a few characteristic examples of a very miscellaneous character, which are worthy of a passing glance in a treatise on Scottish Archæology, though they pertain to a branch of the subject which can only be satisfactorily dealt with in detached monographs. Of medieval personal ornaments it would be vain to attempt the most cursory enumeration in a closing chapter; but their value as elements of medieval history is altogether different from those of the primitive periods heretofore referred to. Whatever exhibits to us the artistic skill, the ingenuity, and the personal habits of a past age, cannot be without interest to the historian; but we manifestly stand in a very different position in relation to those accessories of history when dealing with comparatively recent and literate ages.

One branch of medieval art--the fictile ware--naturally possesses peculiar attraction to the Archæologist, as the offspring of the primitive arts already minutely considered. So far as may be judged of Scottish medieval pottery from the few examples preserved, it does not greatly differ from contemporary English fictile ware. One curious specimen found in 1833 at Perclewan, in the parish of Dalrymple, Ayrshire, is described as "a pitcher of earthenware like that represented in prints in the hand of the woman of Samaria, at the well of Sychar."[702] It is glazed, as is most usual with medieval pottery, of a greenish colour, and is curiously decorated on the front with the face and hands of a man in relief. From the description it appears to bear a close resemblance to a fictile vessel found at the bottom of an old well, discovered under the foundation of houses in Cateaton Street, City, London, taken down in 1841.[703]

Several fine specimens of medieval pottery were dug up a few years since on the estate of Courthill, in the vicinity of Dalry, Ayrshire, and are now in the possession of the proprietor, Andrew Crawford, Esq. Nearly at the same time a remarkable antique sword was discovered at Courthill. The blade, which was of iron, was so greatly corroded that only a fragment of it could be removed; but the handle is of bronze, in the form of a dragon, and is described as characterized by considerable elegance.

Fragments of pottery, of a similar character to the most abundant class of early English medieval pottery, were dug up at a considerable depth, during the progress of excavations on the Castlehill of Edinburgh in 1849, for constructing a large reservoir, but they were unfortunately too much broken by the workmen to admit of any very definite idea being formed of their shape. The annexed woodcut is from an example in my own possession, which was dug up a few years since in the ancient tumular cemetery in the neighbourhood of North-Berwick Abbey, East-Lothian. It measures eleven and a quarter inches in height, and about five and a half inches in greatest diameter, and is covered, both externally and internally, with the usual greenish glaze, common on contemporary English pottery. Various similar specimens appear to have been discovered in the same locality, but in most cases only to be destroyed,--such coarse earthenware being naturally regarded as scarcely worth the trouble of removing. The example figured here represents a small but very curious specimen of Scottish fictile ware, in the collection at Penicuick House, of the precise age of which we have tolerably accurate evidence. It was found on one of the neighbouring farms in the year 1792, filled with coins of Alexander III., and of Edward I. and II. of England. It measures only three and three quarters inches in height; and is perforated at nearly uniform intervals with holes, as shewn in the engraving. It is of rude unglazed earthenware, and is unsymmetrical, as represented here.

Another class of relics found in considerable numbers at North-Berwick, as well as in various other districts, are small tobacco pipes, popularly known in Scotland by the names of Celtic or Elfin pipes, and in Ireland, where they are even more abundant, as Dane's pipes. The woodcut represents one of those found at North-Berwick, the size of the original. To what period these curious relics belong, I am at a loss to determine. The popular names attached to them manifestly point to an era long prior to that of Sir Walter Raleigh and the Maiden Queen, or of the royal author of "A Counterblast to Tobacco," and the objects along with which they have been discovered, would also seem occasionally to lead to similar conclusions, in which case we shall be forced to assume that the American weed was only introduced as a superior substitute for older narcotics. Hemp may in all probability have formed one of these. It is still largely used in the East for this purpose; but Mr. C. K. Sharpe informs me that even in his younger days it was common for the old wives of Annandale to smoke a dried white moss gathered on the neighbouring moors, which they declared to be much sweeter than tobacco, and to have been in use before the American weed was heard of. I leave the subject, however, for further investigation, only adding one or two examples of the circumstances under which these Elfin pipes have been found. The ancient cemetery at North-Berwick is in the vicinity of a small Romanesque building of the twelfth century, and close upon the sea shore. Within the last fifty years the sea has made great encroachments, carrying off a considerable ruin, and exposing the skeletons of the old tenants of the cemetery, along with many interesting relics of former generations, at almost every spring tide. Notices of similar discoveries of the Elfin pipe occur in several of the Scottish Statistical Accounts under various circumstances, but some of them certainly suggestive of their belonging to a remote era: e.g.--

"Many of the ancient British encampments appear in the parish [of Kirkmichael, Dumfriesshire.] Upon some of these being opened ashes have been found, likewise several broken querns or hand-mills, and in one of them, upon the farm of Gilrig, with a partition crossing it, and which seems to have been occupied during later times, there was dug out a sword having a basket-hilt, but so much covered with rust that it was impossible to form any accurate opinion respecting its antiquity. There was also seen a number of pipes of burnt clay, with heads somewhat smaller than that of the tobacco-pipe now in use, swelled at the middle and straiter at the top."[704] Again,

"Till lately, one of those remarkable monuments of antiquity, called standing stones, stood at Cairney Mount, (parish of Carluke, Lanarkshire,) but the hope of finding a hidden treasure induced some rude hand to destroy it. It is supposed to have stood at the side of a Roman road passing from Lanark across the bridge of the Mouse beneath Cartland Crags.... A celt or stone hatchet; Elfin-bolts, (flint and bone arrow-heads); Elfin pipes, (pipes with remarkably small bowls); numerous coins of the Edwards, and of later date, have been found in the neighbourhood."[705] An example is also noted of the discovery of a tobacco pipe in sinking a pit for coal at Misk, in Ayrshire, after digging through many feet of sand.[706]

Some of the Scottish and Irish Elfin pipes are even smaller than the example figured above, and seem still better adapted for the recreations of "the good people" to whom their origin is popularly ascribed. Others are ornamented with patterns in relief, and many of them, though not generally of the very smallest size, are stamped with figures or devices. One example in the possession of Mr. C. K. Sharpe, found at a depth of many feet on the Castlehill of Edinburgh, bears the impress of the initials [Illustration: TB L]; and of upwards of seventy specimens in the collection of Mr. Bell of Dungannon, some are stamped R D, and on others are the letters G Λ, C L, [Illustration: o oHo], and I P.

The annexed woodcut represents a still more curious relic, apparently pertaining to the same class of objects, though greatly more primitive in form and construction. It appears to be a tobacco pipe fashioned in red sandstone in the form of an animal's head, and with the perforation for inserting the straw or reed by which it must have been completed, made obliquely through one of the eyes. It was found in digging a drain at the village of Morningside, at the base of the Pentland Hills, where numerous traces of primitive population have been brought to light, and was presented to me by Dr. David Skae, Physician of the Royal Asylum there. It is figured here about two-thirds the size of the original.

In the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries there is a curious collection of Irish "Danes' pipes," precisely similar in form to those found in Scotland. A variety of examples of the same kind, found both in England and Ireland, are also figured in the Dublin Penny Magazine,[707] along with certain "clay pipe-stoppers, evidently appendages to pipes with small bowls," but which those who can still remember the obsolete fashions of the past generation have no difficulty in recognising as the periwig curlers of much more recent times than the Danes, if not the Elves! The conclusion arrived at by the writer in the Dublin Penny Magazine is, that these Danes' pipes are neither more nor less than tobacco pipes, the smallest of them pertaining to the earlier years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, when the rarity and value of tobacco rendered the most diminutive bowl sufficiently ample for the enjoyment of so costly a luxury. From this he traces them down to the reign of Charles II., by the increasing dimensions of the bowl. It is not improbable that these conclusions may be correct, notwithstanding the apparent indications of a much earlier origin, which circumstances attendant on their occasional discovery have seemed to suggest. The following description of a curious Scottish memorial of the luxury would, however, seem at least to prove that we must trace the introduction of tobacco into this country to a date much nearer the discovery of the New World by Columbus than the era of Raleigh's colonization of Virginia. The grim old Keep of Cawdor Castle, associated in defiance of chronology with King Duncan and Macbeth, is augmented, like the majority of such Scottish fortalices, by additions of the sixteenth century. In one of the apartments of this later erection, is a stone chimney, richly carved with armorial bearings and the grotesque devices common on works of the period. Among these are a mermaid playing the harp, a monkey blowing a horn, a cat playing a fiddle, and a fox smoking a tobacco pipe. There can be no mistake as to the meaning of the last lively representation, and on the same stone is the date 1510--the year in which the wing of the castle is ascertained to have been built.[708]

The arms and armour are no less characteristic of the medieval than of earlier periods, and are not without minuter national details well worthy of note. There was indeed from the very commencement of the Scottish medieval period in the eleventh century, to the final disarming of the Highland clans in 1746, two completely diverse modes of warfare and military accoutrement prevailing in Scotland. The old Celtic population, occupying for the most part the Highland fastnesses, retained many of the usages of their forefathers under partially modified forms, and even in the decoration of their weapons and defensive armour preserved the ancient style, which is still traceable on the Pictish monuments of Scotland. Many of the circular Highland targets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries present exactly the same interlaced knotwork as may be seen on bosses and limbs of early crosses, and even on relics belonging to the last Pagan era. A mere glance, however, at a few characteristic examples must suffice here; and among these none is more noticeable than the old claymore with reversed guard, which is sculptured on so many of the ancient tombstones of Iona and of the Western Isles. In the portrait of James I. of Scotland, which accompanies the old folio edition of the Scots Acts, the king bears a weapon of this description. It occurs, however, on tombs of a much earlier period, and is now very rarely to be met with. One good small example is in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, and another larger and very fine specimen, the handle of which is here engraved, is in the valuable collection of W. B. Johnstone, Esq. The claymore is figured in the sculptures both of Iona and Oronsay with a considerable variety of details. In some the blade is highly ornamented, and the handle varies in form, but all present the same characteristic, having the guards bent back towards the blade. A curious variety of this peculiar form is seen in a fine large two-handed sword preserved at Hawthornden, the celebrated castle of the Drummonds, where the Scottish poet entertained Ben Jonson during his visit to Scotland in 1619. It is traditionally affirmed to have been the weapon of Robert the Bruce, though little importance can be attached to a reputation which it shares with one-half the large two-handed swords still preserved. The handle appears to be made from the tusk of the narwhal, and it has four reverse-guards, as shewn in the cut. The object aimed at by this form of guard doubtless was to prevent the antagonist's sword from glancing off, and inflicting a wound ere he recovered his weapon, and in the last example especially it seems peculiarly well adapted for the purpose. Among the curious collection of ancient weapons in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, is a sword the blade of which measures thirty-two and a half inches long, and has a waved edge, returned a short way over the back. It was discovered among the ruins of Bog-Hall Castle, near Biggar, Lanarkshire; while the handle, which is made of the section of a deer's horn, and is still more remarkable than the blade, was found at a great depth in a morass, on the property of Sir Thomas G. Carmichael, Bart., in Tweeddale.

The later two-handed sword, though still so familiar to us, is perhaps the most interesting in an archæological point of view, of all the military relics pertaining to the Medieval Period. The huge, ponderous, and unwieldy weapon, seems the fittest emblem that could be devised, of the rude baron of the thirteenth century, who lived by "the good old rule" of physical force, and whose hardy virtues--not unsuited to an illiterate age--are strangely mistaken for the evidences of a chivalry such as later ages have not seen. Calmly reasoning from this characteristic heirloom, as we have done from those of remoter and less known periods, we discern in it the evidence of just such hardy, skilless, overbearing power, as history informs us was the character of the medieval baron, before the rise of the burgher class readjusted the social balance by the preponderance of rival interests. The weapon figured here is a remarkably fine and unusually large specimen of the old Scottish two-handed sword, now in the possession of George Seton, Esq., representative of the Setons of Cariston. It measures forty-nine inches in the blade, five feet nine inches in entire length, and weighs seven and a half pounds. But the chief interest of this old relic arises from the well-authenticated family traditions which associate it with the memory of its first knightly owner, Sir Christopher Seton of that Ilk, from whom some of the oldest scions of the Scottish Peerage have been proud to trace their descent. He was married to Christina, sister of King Robert the Bruce, whom he bravely defended at the battle of Methven. He was shortly after taken prisoner by Edward I., and basely hanged as a traitor. "So dear to King Robert was the memory of this faithful friend and fellow-warrior, that he afterwards erected on the spot where he was executed a little chapel, where mass was said for his soul."[709] Besides this fine example of a Scottish two-handed sword, may be mentioned that ascribed to Sir William Wallace, preserved at Dumbarton Castle; that of Sir John Graham of Dundaff, (slain 1298,) in the possession of the Duke of Montrose; another "Wallace sword" at Kinfauns Castle; and other specimens at Talyskir, in the Isle of Rasay; at Abbotsford; and in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries.

Among the most recent additions to the same collection is another remarkable weapon, which possesses undoubted historical value, and may be associated with more confidence with the great victory of Robert the Bruce than most of the relics that bear his name. It consists of the head of a battle-axe, of iron, coated with bronze, which is figured here. It was discovered in draining the morass at Bannockburn in 1785, and is considerably broken on the edge, evidently from its use upon the mailed panoply of the gallant knights who fought in that hard-stricken field. It measures eight and a quarter inches in length, and four and three quarters in height, from the point to the insertion of the haft.

Numerous other remarkable specimens of ancient Scottish arms and armour are preserved both in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries and in other public and private collections; but a mere reference to these without copious illustrations could be of little avail to the antiquary. The Scottish Museum includes a variety of specimens of the old quarrel-head, or Wallace Bolt, as it is generally termed; ancient swords, lance and spear heads, cross-bows, daggers, dirks, hunting knives, and the old Highland Lochaber-axe, with the more modern fire-arms, and other military accoutrements, including the singularly complicated purse-clasp, described by Sir Walter Scott as that of the celebrated outlaw Rob Roy, with four pistols ingeniously concealed in it for defence of the contents of the purse. Still more recent relics preserve associations with the victors of Prestonpans and the vanquished of Culloden Moor. But such objects belong perhaps fully more to the poet than to the archæologist, and are too frequently employed to add a fictitious interest to collections, the real use and value of which have yet to be appreciated.

Some remarkable pieces of ancient artillery also figure in Scottish history, one or two of which have escaped the perils of siege and the waste of time, though the most of them live only in the quaint records of Scottish chroniclers, like the famed Seven Sisters, cast by Robert Borthwick, the master-gunner of James IV., which did their last Scottish service on Flodden Field. A better fate has attended the still more celebrated Mons Meg, whose unwieldy proportions probably proved her safety, by inducing the impetuous king to leave her behind, when he carried the flower of Scottish chivalry to that fatal field. The ancient barrier gateway of Edinburgh Castle, built most probably soon after the siege of 1572, was surmounted with a curious piece of sculpture, occupying a long narrow panel, which is chiefly filled with representations of artillery and munitions of war, and among these Mons Meg plays a prominent part. The old-fashioned narrow wheel carriages of the sixteenth century having given place to more substantial modern artillery waggons, the highly ornamental but narrow gateway was demolished in the beginning of the present century, and one-half of its sculptured panel, figured here, now surmounts the entrance to the Ordnance Office in the Castle. At the left side is the famed Mons Meg--or, as she is designated in the list of ordnance delivered to Monk, on the surrender of the Castle in 1650, "The great iron murderer, Muckle Meg"--mounted, in all probability, on her "new cradill, with xiii stane of irne graith," which, as we learn from the Treasurer's accounts, was provided in 1497, not long after her safe return from the siege of Dumbarton Castle. This remarkable piece of ordnance is not cast like a modern cannon, but built of wrought iron hoops and bars, or staves, and with a narrow fixed chamber in the breach for containing the charge. It appears to be of enormous strength; but after doing good service for upwards of two centuries, both in peace and war, it burst on the 29th October 1680, when firing a salute in honour of James, Duke of York, on his arrival in Edinburgh; an occurrence which, as Fountainhall records, failed not to be regarded as an evil omen. This mode of fashioning artillery with separate staves and hoops is the oldest method of which we have any account, and was probably universally employed on the first introduction of gunpowder in constructing what our old Scottish poet designates, in the earliest known allusion to field artillery, crakys of war. This curious reference of the old metrical historian, Barbour, is to the first expedition of Edward III. against the Scots in 1327, and consequently may be accepted as fixing the precise date of the introduction of artillery into Scotland:--

"Twa noweltyeis that dai thai saw, That forouth in Scotland had been nane; Tymmris for helmys were the tane, That t'other crakys wer of war, That thai before heard never er: Of thai tua things thai had ferly That nycht thai walkyt stalwartly."

Among the specimens of ancient pieces of ordnance in the Scottish Museum is a curious pair of cannons, built in a similar manner to Mons Meg, with hoops and staves of iron, bound with copper, measuring each twenty-nine inches in length, and designed for mounting on one stock. This double cannon was formerly stationed on the walls of Wemyss Castle, Fifeshire, and is said to have belonged to the celebrated Scottish admiral, Sir Andrew Wood of Largo. Double guns of the same description, mounted on one carriage, are figured in the beautifully illuminated MSS. of Froissart, believed to have been executed about the beginning of the fifteenth century. They are also shewn on wheel carriages among the Scottish artillery at the battle of Pinkie in a very curious print belonging to the Bannatyne Club, entitled, "The Englishe victore agaynste the Schottes, by Muskelbroghe, 1547." Another piece of ancient artillery in the Scottish collection consists of a still more complicated group of cannons of similar construction, four being mounted on one carriage, and the whole united by an iron rod at the breach. They are evidently designed to be fired at once, so as to discharge a broadside on the enemy; and however tardy and inconvenient the reloading of these pieces may have been, the first broadside from a park of such artillery must have had no slight effect on an advancing foe.

The second half of the curious sculptured memorial of ancient Scottish artillery in Edinburgh, divorced from the group which includes Mons Meg, on the demolition of the barrier gateway in 1800, lay long neglected and buried in rubbish. It was at length rescued from impending destruction, and safely lodged in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries. It includes a singular group of ancient ordnance and warlike appliances; chamber pieces or patereros, with chambers or moveable breeches--frequently used separately for throwing small shot; bombards, chiefly employed for throwing great stones; a curious hexagonal cannon of large proportions, constructed, it may be presumed, of separate bars; hand-cannons, or the earliest class of portable fire-arms; with lintstocks, shot, barrels of powder, &c. Along with these are also large guns of symmetrical form, which may be presumed to represent brass cannon, as the art of casting cannon was introduced at a much earlier period than the date suggested for the rebuilding of the barrier gateway, though it is by no means improbable that the sculpture may have belonged to a still older structure. Cannon are said to have been cast even in the middle of the fourteenth century;[710] and a brass cannon is still preserved at Toulouse, made in the year 1438.

One other class of relics, singularly characteristic of medieval customs and civilisation, includes the instruments both of punishment and of torture, of which Scotland may lay claim to the questionable boast of having some peculiarly national examples. At a period when criminal punishment avowedly assumed the character of retaliation and revenge, and when torture was recognised as a legitimate means of eliciting evidence, Scotland was not behind the other countries of Europe in the full use of both. The execution at Edinburgh, in 1436, of the murderers of James I., the poet king, and especially the horrible scenes attending on the death of Sir Robert Graham and the Earl of Athole,--crowned, in fearful mockery, with a red-hot iron diadem as king of traitors,--sufficiently illustrate the ferocious spirit which went hand in hand with medieval chivalry. One of the most curious historical relics of this class is the Scottish Maiden, employed, so far as we know, for the first time in the execution of some of the inferior agents in the assassination of Rizzio. By this instrument were beheaded the Regent Morton, Sir John Gordon of Haddo, President Spottiswoode, the Marquis and Earl of Argyle, and many more of the noblest and best blood in Scotland. The Earl of Argyle is reported to have said, with a grave humour worthy of Sir Thomas More: it was the sweetest maiden he had ever kissed. It now forms one of the most remarkable national relics in the Scottish Museum, having, it may be presumed, performed its last office as the instrument of death. It is impossible to look without feelings of peculiar interest upon this ancient Scottish guillotine, so directly associated with the great of past ages; though the vindictive spirit which sought at times to give an added ignominy to a violent death cheated it of the blood of the gallant Kirkaldy, of Montrose and Warriston, as well as of others of lesser note, who figure in the Scottish chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Boots and Thumbkins are two instruments of judicial torture, especially associated in Scotland with the sufferings of the Covenanters during the reign of Charles II. Neither of them, however, were invented so recently. Torture, which the Roman law permitted only to be used in compelling the evidence of slaves, bore no such limitation in medieval Europe; and the name of the Question, commonly applied to it, abundantly shews the direct purpose for which it was employed. Examples of this barbarous mode of seeking to elicit the truth are frequently to be met with in the earlier Acts of Sederunt of the Court of Session: as in a case of suspected perjury, 29th June 1579, where the King's Advocate produces a royal warrant for examining "Jhone Souttar, notar, dwelland in Dundee, and Robert Carmylie, vicar of Ruthwenis, witnes in the action of improbatioun of ane reversioun of the lands of Wallace-Craigy; and for the mair certane tryall of the veritie in the said matter, to put thaim in the buttis, genis, or ony uther tormentis, and thairby to urge them to declair the treuth." One pair of thumb-screws in the Scottish Museum, of unusually large size, is said to have been the instrument employed by the authorities of the ancient burgh of Montrose for eliciting confession; and a ruder pair, of peculiar form, in the Abbotsford collection, is figured in the illustrated edition of the Waverley Novels.[711] Sir Walter Scott has given fearfully vivid life, in his "Old Mortality," to the tribunal of the Scottish Privy Council, where such horrible appliances were last in vogue. Happily they too are consigned to the cabinet of the antiquary, telling of times which are, we may hope, as truly left behind as the aboriginal Stone Period, with its primitive arts and superstitions, and its simple sepulchral rites.

The Scottish JOUGS and BRANKS are old instruments of punishment, popularly associated, for the most part, with judicial visitations of a more homely and less revolting character than those previously referred to, though not altogether free from sterner associations. The jougs, which consist of an iron collar attached by a chain to a pillar or tree, form the corresponding Scottish judicial implement to the English Stocks: applied, however, not to the legs or arms, but to the neck. They are still to be met with attached to the porch of our older village churches, or occasionally to some venerable tree in the surrounding churchyard, their application having been most frequently reserved in the olden time for the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline. The woodcut represents a fine old pair of jougs, the property of Sir William Jardine, Bart., which were found imbedded in a venerable ash tree, recently blown down, at the churchyard gate, Applegirth, Dumfriesshire. The tree, which was of great girth, is believed to have been upwards of three hundred years old, and the jougs were completely imbedded in its trunk, while the chain and staple hung down within the decayed and hollow core. The more usual form of the jougs is simply a flat iron collar with distended loops, through which a padlock was passed to secure the culprit in his ignominious durance. Along with this may be mentioned a singular and probably unique relic of old Scottish judicature, preserved in the Museum of the Scottish Antiquaries, to which it was presented in 1784. It consists of the brass collar of a Scottish slave of the eighteenth century. The collar is inscribed in accordance with the terms of the following verdict, which shews that the case was not singular; and having been dredged up in the Frith of Forth, it seems sufficiently probable that the unhappy victim may have chosen death in preference to the doom from which there was no other release.

"At Perth, the fifth day of December 1701 years, the Commissioners of Justiciary of the south district, for securing the peace of the Highlands, considering that Donald Robertson, Alexander Steuart, John Robertson, and Donald M'Donald, prisoners within the Tolbooth of Perth, and indicted and tried at this court, are by verdict of the inquest returned, GUILTY OF DEATH; and that the Commissioners have changed their punishment of death to perpetual servitude; and that the said pannells are at the court's disposal. Therefore the said Commissioners have given and gifted, and hereby give and gift, the said Alexander Steuart, one of the said prisoners, as ane perpetual servant to Sir John Areskine of Alva, recommending him to cause provide an collar of brass, iron, or copper, which by his sentence or doom, (whereof an extract is delivered to the magistrates of the said burgh of Perth,) is to be upon his neck with this inscription: ALEXR. STEUART, FOUND GUILTY OF DEATH FOR THEFT, AT PERTH, THE 5TH OF DECEMBER 1701, AND GIFTED BY THE JUSTICIARS AS A PERPETUAL SERVANT TO SIR JOHN ARESKINE OF ALVA; and recommending also to him to transport him from the said prison once the next week; and the said Commissioners have ordained and hereby ordain the magistrates of Perth, and keeper of their Tolbooth, to deliver the said Alexander Steuart to the said Sir John Areskine of Alva, having the said collar and inscription conform to the sentence of doom foresaid."[712]

From another deed of gift, it appears that Donald M'Donald was bestowed in like manner on John Earl of Tullibardine.[713] No doubt the other two were similarly disposed of by gift, if not by positive sale--so very recently was slavery a part and parcel of Scottish law: feudal customs, and the singular ideas incident to the peculiar social state of the Highlands, having remained little affected by all the changes wrought on the Lowland Saxon and the Southron, until the final overthrow of the clans on Culloden Moor abruptly broke the traditions of many centuries.

The BRANKS is another Scottish instrument of ecclesiastical punishment, chiefly employed for the coercion of female scolds, and those adjudged guilty of slander and defamation. It may be described as a skeleton iron helmet, having a gag of the same metal, which entered the mouth and effectually brankit that unruly member--the tongue.[714] It is an instrument of considerable antiquity, and has probably not unfrequently been employed for purposes of great cruelty, though in most examples the gag is not designed to wound the mouth, but only to hold down the tongue. In the Burgh Records of Glasgow, for example, under date of April 1574, "Marione Smyt and Margaret Huntare" having quarrelled, they appear, and produce two cautioners or sureties, "þat þai sal abstene fra stryking of utheris in tyme cuming, under þe pane of X lib., and gif thai flyte to be brankit."[715] One very complete specimen still preserved at St. Mary's Church, St. Andrews, is popularly known as the Bishop's Branks, and is usually said to have been fixed on the head of Patrick Hamilton and of others of the early Scottish martyrs who perished at the stake during the religious persecution of James V.'s reign. This tradition, however, is not borne out by history in the case of Hamilton, and is probably the addition of a later age, though the instrument may possibly have supplied both Archbishop and Cardinal Beaton with a ready means of restraining less confirmed recusants, and thereby nipping the new heresy in the bud. But the real origin of its present title is to be traced to the use of it in much more recent times, by Archbishop Sharp, for silencing the scandal which an unruly dame promulgated openly against him before the congregation. A view of the Bishop's Branks is given in the Abbotsford edition of The Monastery, where it is described as formerly kept at St. Mary's Church. It still remains there, in the custody of the sexton, and is regarded with such general interest as is likely to secure its preservation. The annexed woodcut is drawn from another example, which was discovered in 1848 behind the oak panelling in one of the rooms of the ancient mansion of the Earls of Moray, in the Canongate, Edinburgh. The term Branks, it may be added, is also used in Scotland to designate a rude substitute for a horse's bridle and bit, formed most frequently of a halter and stick. Some few years since the frightful instrument represented below was preserved in the old steeple at Forfar, where it bore the name of the Witch's Branks or Bridle, and is described in the Old Statistical Account of the parish of Forfar as the bridle with which the wretched victims of superstition were led to execution. The field, it is added, where they suffered is pointed out to strangers as a place of curious interest. The witch's bridle was carried off from Forfar to add to the antiquarian treasures of the late well-known collector Mr. Alexander Deuchar of Edinburgh. The date 1661 is punched on the circle, along with what seems to read ANGUS S.[716] The object aimed at in applying so dreadful a gag to those who were condemned to the stake as guilty of witchcraft and dealing with the devil, was not so much the purposed cruelty which its use necessarily involved, as to prevent the supposed possessors of such unearthly gifts from pronouncing the potent formula by means of which it was implicitly believed they could transform themselves at will to other shapes, or transport themselves where they pleased, and thus effectually outwit their tormentors. It furnishes a melancholy index of the barbarism which prevailed in our own country at so very recent a period, that educated men could be found to give credit to such follies, or that even among the most illiterate and rude, executioners could be enlisted to apply to a woman an instrument the very picture of which is calculated to excite a shudder.

It would not be difficult to add to these common instruments of punishment and of torture others equally characteristic of the spirit of the age, though not brought into such general use. Registers of various kirk-sessions recently printed by the Abbotsford Club, the Spottiswoode Society, and others of the Scottish literary book clubs, disclose much curious evidence of the petty tyranny and cruelty too frequently exercised by these courts in the enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline, most frequently by means little calculated to promote reformation or good morals. In these, however, as in the traces of earlier manners which we have sought to recover, the historian finds a key to the character of the age to which they belong, and indications of its degree of advancement in civilisation, such as no contemporary historian could furnish, since it supplies elements for comparing and for contrasting the present with the past, no less available than the rude pottery and the implements of flint or bone which reveal to us the simple arts of aboriginal races. The great difference in point of value between the two classes of relics is, that those more recent indices of obsolete customs supply to us only an additional element wherewith to test and to supplement the invaluable records which the printing press supplies, while the latter are the sole chronicles we possess of ages more intimately associated with our human sympathies than all the geological periods of the preadamite earth.

FOOTNOTES:

[702] New Statist. Account, vol. v. p. 279.

[703] Journ. Archæol. Assoc., vol. iii. p. 63.

[704] New Stat. Account, vol. iv. p. 71.

[705] Ibid. vol. vi. p. 581.

[706] Ibid. vol. v. p. 430.

[707] Dublin Penny Magazine, vol. iii. p. 29.

[708] Carruthers' Highland Note-Book, p. 154.

[709] Tytler, third edition, vol. i. p. 229; Robertson's Index, pp. 135-138. The outer wood-casing of the handle is modern, and incorrectly made in imitation of a small single-handed sword. That of the old two-handed sword was invariably nearly straight, so as to admit of the hand moving freely along it. The two-handed claymore figured on p. 682 is probably one of the very earliest examples of the transition to the later unwieldy weapon. The handle measures fourteen inches, and the blade three feet three and a half inches, in length.

[710] Archæologia, vol. v.; Ibid. vol. xxviii. pp. 383, 385.

[711] Abbotsford Edition, vol. ii. p. 24.

[712] From a copy in the possession of Alexander Macdonald, Esq.

[713] Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Perth.

[714] To brank, to bridle or restrain. Vide Jamieson's Scot. Dict.

[715] Burgh Records of Glasgow, p. 7.

[716] Sir J. G. Dalyell's Darker Superstitions of Scotland, p. 686.

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