The Cross in Ritual, Architecture and Art

by Geo. S. Tyack

Modern improvements in the streets of our towns have cost us several examples that could ill be spared. It would be as foolish as futile to decry the opening out of narrow thoroughfares to the sweet influences of sun and air, or to grumble when growing towns make due provision for growing traffic; yet one cannot but regret the many ancient landmarks that these changes have swept away, nor can one doubt that, had a proper appreciation of their worth been felt, some means might have been found to preserve most of them.

But after all it was the bigotry of the Puritan epoch which robbed us of the greater part of our public crosses, just as it was the narrow views imported into the Reformation movement from foreign sources that were chiefly answerable for the disappearance of our roods and other church crosses.

Some method of classification being needful in treating of the various kinds of crosses, one has been adopted here which is practically useful, rather than strictly accurate. Churchyard crosses, included in the preceding chapter, form a division sufficiently distinct; others, which specially commemorate some person or event, as do the Eleanor Crosses and that at Neville’s Cross, near Durham, will compose another class to be considered in the next chapter, as memorial crosses. In our present one attention is called to those which were public, in the exclusive sense of being used for public purposes, such as markets, royal proclamations, and preaching; and finally, under the names of roadside and boundary crosses, will be included many stone crosses which cannot be grouped under any of these heads.

It is confessed that this classification is not scientific, inasmuch as the classes are not in all cases mutually exclusive. No doubt several of the market crosses, besides serving the usual purposes of such structures, enshrined the memories of departed worthies; and unquestionably many village and roadside crosses were originally erected as preaching places for the brothers of some neighbouring monastery, or for the use of itinerant friars.

For practical purposes, however, the above division of the subject will be found to serve.

To notice every cross of this public sort which has at some time adorned the streets and market-places of Great Britain, even if it were possible, would be after all the compiling of a mere tedious catalogue. It will be more interesting to take a few of the more important ones as types, referring to the others as occasion may arise.

For such a purpose no example can suit us better as illustrating the secular and civil uses to which these structures were put than the Market Cross, or “Mercat Croce,” of the northern capital. This venerable erection might indeed be truly named, borrowing an American expression, the “hub” of Scotland, round which for centuries has revolved the history, not of Edinburgh only, but of the whole kingdom.

It seems not improbable that the original of this cross belonged to the class of well-crosses to be referred to hereafter, and may have been placed there by the earliest teachers of the faith in the district, an old well existing not far from the present site under the name of the cross-well. But no certain allusion to a cross standing here is found before the year 1436, when we read of the assassins of King James I. of Scotland meeting their punishment “mounted on a pillar in the Market Place in Edinburgh.” Nearly three hundred years before this, however (in 1175), William the Lion ordered that “all merchandisis salbe presentit at the mercat and mercat croce of burghis,” which may well be taken to imply that the first burgh in the kingdom was not at that time without its “croce.” Our next reference is in a Charter of S. Giles’ Church, dated 1447, in which occur the words “ex parte occidentali fori et crucis dicti burgi,” and its use as a Market centre is clearly defined in a letter from James III. to his citizens, written in October 1477, in which he orders “all pietricks, pluvaris, capones, conyngs, checkins, and all other wyld foulis and tame to be usit and sald about the Market Croce and in na other place.”

No data remain from which to reconstruct with any certainty the ancient cross in the original form. The “pillar of the cross” now standing is the same as that named in the earliest historical notices of the structure, perhaps even the very one that was first set up, but whether it stood at the outset on an elevated platform as it now does and long has done, or whether it surmounted a flight of steps in the way usual in England, cannot be determined. In the reign of James III. great improvements were made in Edinburgh. The church of S. Giles, for instance, was enlarged and made collegiate, and its independence of all but papal jurisdiction was guaranteed by a Bull; it seems therefore not improbable that the same royal patron of the arts added at that time dignity to the city cross by building the lofty stone platform from which it could more unquestionably dominate the market. In 1555 some alterations were made in the structure, which are described as “bigging the rowme thereof,” which has been thought to imply that the open circles, which probably first supported this platform, were filled in so as to form the “rowme.” The following extracts from the accounts of the city treasurer at any rate imply that the enclosed base, entered beneath by a door, was standing shortly after this date. In 1560 we read “Item for ane band to ye Croce dur,” “Item for mending of ye lok of ye Croce dur;” and again in 1584, “5 Julii, Item, ye sam day given for ane lok to ye Croce duir, and three keyis for it.” An old birds-eye view of the city as it appeared in 1647 shews the main outlines of the building to have been then very similar to what we see it to-day.

This type of cross was peculiarly Scottish. A similar one remains in good condition at Prestonpans, and another very fine one at Aberdeen; Perth and Dundee had similar ones now unfortunately destroyed, and the capital itself had a second cross of like design in the Canongate. It may have been that the metropolitan cross was accepted as the model for the other burghs of the kingdom.