Modern experience has shown that it is not by any means chimerical to expect, that we may yet recover, from various quarters, and from quite unexpected sources, too, writings and documents of much interest and importance in relation both to British and to Scottish Archæology. Of that great fossil city Pompeii, not one hundredth part, it is alleged, has as yet been fully searched; and, according to Sir Charles Lyell, the quarters hitherto cleared out are those where there was the least probability of discovering manuscripts. It would be almost hoping beyond the possibility of hope to expect that in some of its unexplored mansions, one of the rich libraries of those ancient Roman times may turn up, presenting papyri deeply interesting to British antiquaries, and containing, for example, a transcript of that letter on the habits and character of the inhabitants of Britain which Cicero himself informs us that he desired his brother Quintus to write, when, as second in command, he accompanied Julius Cæsar in his first invasion of our island;—or a copy of that account which Himilico the Carthaginian, had drawn up of his voyage, some centuries before the Christian era, to the Tin Islands, and other parts northwards of the Pillars of Hercules;—or a roll of those Punic Annals which Festus Avienus tells us that he himself consulted when (probably in the fourth century) he wrote those lines in his "Ora Maritima" in which he gives a description of Great Britain and Ireland.
The antiquaries of Scotland would heartily rejoice over the discovery of lost documents far less ancient than these. Perhaps I could name two or three of our colleagues who would perfectly revel over the recovery, for instance, of one or two leaves of those old Pictish annals (veteres Pictorum libri) that still existed in the twelfth century, and in which, among other matters, was a brief account (once copied by the Pictish clerk Thana, the son of Dudabrach, for King Ferath, at Meigle) of the solemn ceremony which took place when King Hungus endowed the church of St. Andrews, in presence of twelve members of the Pictish regal race, with a grant of many miles of broad acres, and solemnly placed with his royal hands on the altar of the church a piece of fresh turf in symbolisation of his royal land-gift. We all deplore that we possess no longer what the Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx, and the monk Joceline of Furness possessed, namely, biographies, apparently written in the old language of our country, of two of our earliest Scottish saints—St. Ninian of Whithorn, and St. Kentigern of Glasgow; and we grieve that we have lost even that Life of St. Serf, which, along with a goodly list of service and other books (chained to the stalls and desks), was placed, before the time of the Reformation, in the choir of the Cathedral of Glasgow, as we know from the catalogue which has been preserved of its library.
But let us not at the same time forget that Scottish archæological documents, as ancient as any of these, have been latterly rediscovered, and rediscovered occasionally in the most accidental way; and let us not, therefore, despair of further, and perhaps even of greater success in the same line. Certainly the greatest of recent events in Scottish Archæology was the casual finding, within the last two or three years, in one of the public libraries at Cambridge, of a manuscript of the Gospels, which had formerly belonged to the Abbey of Deer, in Aberdeenshire. The margin and blank vellum of this ancient volume contain, in the Celtic language, some grants and entries reaching much beyond the age of any of our other Scottish charters and chronicles. The oldest example of written Scottish Gaelic that was previously known was not earlier than the sixteenth century. Portions of the Deer Manuscript have been pronounced by competent scholars to be seven centuries older.
The most ancient known collection of the laws of Scotland—a manuscript written about 1270—was detected in the public library of Berne, and lately restored to this country. In 1824, Mr. Thomson, a schoolmaster at Ayr, picked up, on an old bookstall in that town, a valuable manuscript collection of Scotch burghal laws written upwards of four centuries ago.
Sometimes, as in this last instance, documents of great value in Scottish Archæology have made narrow escapes from utter loss and destruction.
I was told by the late Mr. Thomas Thomson—a gentleman to whom we are all indebted for promoting and systematising our studies—that a miscellaneous, but yet in some points valuable collection of old vellum manuscripts was left, at the beginning of the present century, by a poor peripatetic Scottish tailor, who could not read one word of the old black letter documents which he spent his life and his purse in collecting. Being a visionary claimant to one of the dormant Scottish peerages, he buoyed himself up with the bright hope that some clever lawyer would yet find undoubted proofs of his claims in some of the written parchments which he might procure. Sir Robert Cotton is said to have discovered one of the original vellum copies of the Magna Charta in the shop of another tailor, who, holding it in his hand, was preparing to cut up this charter of the liberties of England into tape for measuring some of England's sons for coats and trousers. The missing manuscript of the History of Scotland, from the Restoration to 1681, which was written by Sir George Mackenzie, the King's Advocate, was rescued from a mass of old paper that had been sold for shop purposes to a grocer in Edinburgh. Some fragments of the Privy Council Records of Scotland—now preserved in the General Register House—were bought among waste snuff-paper.[15] Occasionally even a very small preserved fragment of an ancient document has proved of importance. Mr. Robertson informs me that, in editing the old Canons of the Scottish Church, he has derived considerable service from a single leaf of a contemporary record of the Canons of the sixteenth century, which had been used and preserved in the old binding of a book. This single leaf is the only bit of manuscript of the Scotch sixteenth century Canons that is known to exist in Scotland.
In 1794 eight official volumes of the Scottish Secretary of State's Register of Seisins were discovered in a bookseller's shop in Edinburgh, after they had remained concealed for more than 185 years.
Among the great mass of interesting Scottish manuscripts preserved in our General Register House, there is one dated Arbroath,—April 1320;—perhaps the noblest Scottish document of that era. It is the official duplicate of a letter of remonstrance addressed to Pope John XXII. by the Barons, Freeholders, and Community of Scotland, in which these doughty Scotsmen declare, that so long as a hundred of them remain alive, they will never submit to the dominion of England. This venerable record and precious declaration of Scottish independence, written on a sheet of vellum, and authenticated by the dependant seals of its patriotic authors, was detected by a deceased Scottish nobleman in a most precarious situation; for he discovered it ruthlessly stuck into the fire-place of his charter-room.
Contested points in Scottish Archæology and history have been occasionally settled by manuscript discoveries that were perfectly accidental.
After the blowing up of the Kirk of the Field, the only one of Darnley's servants that escaped was brought by the Earl of Murray before the English Council, and there gave evidence, implying that Queen Mary—that ever-interesting princess, who has been doubtlessly both over-decried by her foes and over-praised by her friends—was cognisant of the intended murder of her husband, inasmuch as, beforehand, she ordered an old bed to be placed in Darnley's room, and the richer bed that previously stood in it to be removed. Nearly three hundred years after that dark and sordid insinuation was made, a roll of papers was casually found, during a search among some legal documents of the early part of the seventeenth century, and one of the leaves in that roll contained a contemporary and authenticated official return of the royal furniture lost by the blowing up of the King's residence. Among other items, this leaf proved, beyond the possibility of further cavil, that the bed which stood in Darnley's room was, up to the time of his death, unchanged, and was not, as alleged by Mary's enemies, an old and worthless piece of furniture, but, on the contrary, was "a bed of violet velvet, with double hangings, braided with gold and silver (ung lictz de veloux viollet a double pante passemente dor et argent)."