Scottish humour in relation to death and the grave. Resurrectionists. Tombstone inscriptions. ‘Naturals’ in Scotland. Confused thoughts of second childhood. Belief in witchcraft. Miners and their superstitions. Colliers and Salters in Scotland were slaves until the end of the eighteenth century. Metal-mining in Scotland.
A notable feature in Scottish humour is the frequency with which it deals with death and the grave. The allusions are sometimes unintentionally ludicrous, not infrequently grim and ghastly. The subject seems to have a kind of fascination which has affected people in every walk of life, more especially the lower ranks. But like most of the national characteristics, this too appears to be on the wane, and one has to go back for a generation or two to find the most pregnant illustrations of it. Dr. Sloan of Ayr, about forty years ago, told me that a friend of his had gone not long before to see the parish minister of Craigie, near Kilmarnock, and finding him for the moment engaged, had turned into the churchyard, where he sauntered past the sexton, who was at work in digging a grave. As the clergyman was detained some time, the visitor walked to and fro along the path, and at length noticed that the sexton’s eyes were pretty constantly fixed on him, to the detriment of the excavation on which the man should have been engaged. At last he stopped, and addressing the gravedigger asked, ‘What the deil are you staring at me for? You needna tak’ the measure o’ me, if that’s what ye’re ettlin’ at, for we bury at Riccarton.’
Mr. Thomas Stevenson, father of the novelist, told me that when the gravedigger of Monkton was dying his minister came to see him, and after speaking comfortable words to him for a while, asked if there was anything on his mind that he would like to speak out. The man looked up wistfully and answered, ‘Weel, minister, I’ve put 285 corps in that kirkyard, and I wuss it had been the Lord’s wull to let me mak up the 300.’[33]
THE RESURRECTIONISTS
When Chang, the Chinese giant, was exhibited in Glasgow, an elderly country couple went to see him. After gazing long at him, they retired without making any observation. At last, as they were going downstairs, the wife first broke silence with the remark: ‘Eh, Duncan, whatna coffin he wull tak.’
All over Scotland, and more especially in the lowlands, memorials remain of the time when graves were opened and coffins were rifled of their dead, to supply the needs of the dissecting rooms of the medical schools. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Shenstone, in protesting against this sacrilege, contended that the bodies of convicted malefactors should suffice for the needs of the medical profession—
If Paean’s sons these horrid rites require,
If Health’s fair science be by these refined,
Let guilty convicts, for their use, expire;
And let their breathless corse avail mankind.