No relic now remains upon the door-posts of these old houses of the curious contrivance which preceded the door-knocker, and for the sight of a “tirle-pin” the stranger must needs go to the museum of the Royal Scottish Society of Antiquaries, to which the last example was long since removed, from an old house in the Canongate.
The origin of the tirle-pin, like that of many another Scottish custom, was French. It originated in France in the times of the Valois, in days when it was not etiquette to knock at the doors of royal personages. In face of this, courtiers were reduced to scratching with the finger-nails—a disagreeable sensation when practised upon wood, as any one who tries it may readily discover for himself. Perhaps from this cause, or because the scratching was not loud enough (or, perhaps, even because the polish began to disappear from the royal portals) this mechanical scratcher was invented. The fashion spread from France to Scotland in times when the two countries were linked in close ties of friendship. From the palace it spread down to the mansions of the nobles and the houses of the merchants, finally coming into general use. It was never acclimatised in England, although another kind of scratching was, if we may believe the satirists, who say that James the First and his Scottish followers imported the itch.
However, the tirle-pin is obsolete, but it did not disappear without leaving a trace of its existence in old Scots ballads; as, for instance, that of Sweet William’s Ghaist:—
There cam a ghaist to Margaret’s door,
Wi’ mony a grievous groan;
And aye he tirled upon the pinne,
But answer made she nane.Is that my father Philip?
Or is’t my brother John,
Or is’t my true love Willie
To Scotland now come home?
XXXV
A grim old town, Edinburgh, dominated by the ancient castle from its rock, bodeful with the story of a thousand years. Newer new towns have sprung up around it to south and west, and hem the old fortress in with a bordure of unhistoric suburbs, so that from the topmost battlements you see how small the original Edinburgh is, compared with its surroundings. Places of pilgrimage are not lacking in the old streets. There are John Knox’s house, one of the queerest, three-storied, and gabled, the very ideal of rugged strength; and the Parliament Square, once St. Giles’s churchyard, where “I K 1572,” on a stone in the pavement, marks the site of Knox’s grave. Passers-by walk over it, curiously fulfilling Johnson’s aspiration, made years before the churchyard was destroyed, by which he hoped that the dour Presbyterian was buried on a highway. While we are on the subject of tombs, let us mention that other place of pilgrimage, Greyfriars churchyard, that grisly place where Robert Louis Stevenson was accustomed in his youth to make assignations with parlour-maids. Few places so grim as a Scottish burial-ground, and Greyfriars is of these the grimmest. Dishevelled backs of houses look down upon the mouldering tombs, and kitchens and living-rooms open into the houses of the dead. Rusty iron railings, bolts and bars, guard the blackened and broken mausoleums and give the pilgrim the weird idea that the living have taken extraordinary precautions to imprison those who are never likely to break out. The only living things here are the foul grass that grows within the sepulchral enclosures, and the demon cats of an heraldic slimness that haunt the churchyard in incredible numbers, and stealing victuals from the neighbouring houses, gnaw them within the tombs. Many martyrs for religion have their resting-place here, together with those who martyred them. Persecutors and persecuted alike rest here now.
Sympathies will ever be divided between the Covenanters and their oppressors. As you read how they upheld their faith and signed their names to the Covenant in this gruesome yard of Greyfriars, so ominously on that flat tombstone which even now remains, you are fired with an enthusiasm for those rejecters of a liturgy alien from their convictions, and can curse “Claverse” with the best of those who do not forget the heavy ways of “bonnie Dundee” with them. But the Covenanters were as intolerant with those when they came to rule. The men of both sides were men of blood. The strain of intolerance remains, and the tomb of that other persecutor of the Covenanters, Sir George Mackenzie, has always been, and still is, with the people “bloody Mackenzie’s.”