Feb. 21.
1681.
A company of distracted people was this day brought into Edinburgh, under the guardianship of a troop of dragoons. They were commonly known as the Sweet Singers of Borrowstounness, from their noted habit of frequent chanting of psalms. The religious exasperations of the times, the execution of a Bo’ness man named Stewart, with two others, on the preceding 1st of December, and perhaps in addition to these causes, the terrors diffused by the comet, had now produced in that little town an epidemic mania of a type only too well known. These people felt as if all was wrong in church and state, and professed to deny all kinds of institutions, even the names of the days of the week; nay, the commonest social obligations, as that of working for one’s own bread. They protested against taxes, confessions, and covenants; disowned the king and his government; and called for vengeance on the murderers of the two late martyrs, Stewart and Potter, whose blood they carried on a handkerchief. They ran up and down the town in a furious manner, sometimes uttering prayers which consisted chiefly of curses invoked against individuals, more frequently singing psalms of lamentation (74th, 79th, 80th, 83d, and 137th) for the sins of the land. Such of the females as were married deserted their homes and husbands, and if the husband, in his endeavours to win his wife back to rationality, took hold of any part of her dress, she indignantly washed the place, as to remove an impurity. They followed a gigantic fellow, commonly called Muckle John Gibb, but who passed among them under the name of King Solomon, and at length, ‘leaving their homes and soft warm beds and covered tables,’ six-and-twenty of them went forth from their native town, notwithstanding the entreaties of weeping husbands, fathers, and children, calling on them to stay; ‘some women taking the sucking children in their arms to desert places, to be free of all snares and sins, and communion with all others, and mourn for their own sins, the land’s tyranny and defections, and there to be safe from the land’s utter ruin and desolation by judgments; some of them going to the Pentland Hills, with a resolution to sit there to see the smoke and utter ruin of the sinful, bloody city of Edinburgh.... Immediately after they came to these desert places, they kept a day of fasting and confessing of their sins one to another; yea, some of them confessed sins which the world had not heard of, and so not called to confess them to men.’—Pat. Walker.
1681.
Even the Whig clergymen who had gone to the wilderness rather than own an uncovenanted king, were surprised at the more extreme feelings of the Sweet Singers. Walker tells how he was with the Rev. Mr Cargill at Darmead Muirs, when the Gibbites were ‘lying in the Deer Slunk, in the midst of a great flow-moss betwixt Clydesdale and Lothian about a mile distant.’ Gibb and another man came armed, and held a conference with Mr Cargill in a barn, but it led to no good. After resting a while, the chief of the Sweet Singers rose in haste and went to the muir all night. ‘I well remember,’ says Walker, ‘it was a cold easterly wet fog.’ Cargill was shocked by the state of mind he had found them in. They were afterwards all taken by a troop of dragoons at the Woolhill Craigs, betwixt Lothian and Tweeddale, a very desert place, and carried to Edinburgh, where the men were put into the Canongate Tolbooth, and the women into the Correction-house, where they were soundly scourged. After a little time, these poor people cooled down somewhat, and were one by one set at liberty. Walker says the most of them ultimately returned to their right mind, and he had had some edifying conversations with them since.
Mar. 1.
1681.
Articles used in clothing in Scotland had hitherto been almost wholly of home manufacture. As in Sweden to this day, the great bulk of the people spun their own wool and flax, each family for itself, and had the yarn woven into cloth by the village webster. There were as yet but the merest attempts at a manufacture of cloths or hosen for general sale and use. We have seen a modest attempt made by certain foreigners in Edinburgh so early as 1609.[281] It is stated that in the reign of Charles I., there were cloth-works on a small scale at Newmills in Haddingtonshire, at Bonnington near Edinburgh, and at Ayr. That at Newmills was in a thriving condition till Dundee was stormed and sacked by Monk in 1651, when a store of its cloth was taken, and the troubles soon after closed the work.[282] Latterly, it could scarcely be said there was any general manufacture of articles of attire except at Aberdeen. There one George Pyper had a number of country-people engaged in working stockings with the needles, paying them at the rate of five groats (equal to 1-2/3d. sterling) a pair for the making; and he raised the working to such a fineness in some instances, ‘that he hath given twenty shillings sterling and upward for the pair.’[283] In this province there was also a manufacture of plaiden stuffs and fingrams, which was the more meritorious as the wool was mostly brought by sea-carriage from the southern parts of the kingdom. It is related that a Mr Barnes, ‘a substantious merchant in Edinburgh,’ thought he might make a saving by getting the same stuffs made in his own neighbourhood, and have an advantage over the Aberdeen merchants in sending out his cloth to the Dutch market. But, on trying an experiment with ‘ten sea-packs of plaiden, which might be worth £20,000,’ he found that he had scarcely produced his cloth at as low a rate as that at which the Aberdeen merchants sold theirs. The explanation, which he obtained from Mr Alexander Farquhar, a merchant in Aberdeen, might be worthy of Mr Babbage’s attention for a new edition of his Economy of Manufactures. It was, that the people who worked these cloths in the north ‘had not by far such entertainment as his [Mr Barnes’s] servants had—they oftener drank clear spring-water than ale.’ When Mr Barnes heard this, he gave up his manufacture. Of late years, even this frugally conducted manufacture, which had in some years brought a hundred thousand rix-dollars into the country, and greatly facilitated the payment of rents, was much decayed—the goods reduced to half their wonted prices, and yet not the half exported that was—and all from a cause also of much significance in the philosophy of business—namely, ‘deceitful mismanagement,’ leading of course to loss of confidence, and a consequent checking of orders.
The faculties for business which the Duke of York possessed in so respectable a degree, seem to have now begun to tell upon the country in which he found a refuge. While joining in the unhappy severities dictated by the Privy Council against the poor Whigs, he gave attention to the solid interests of the nation at large, and had consultations with such men of mercantile spirit as the country then possessed, with a view to the planting of cloth-factories similar to those which had long been realising good results in England. It was pointed out that the making of the better kinds of cloth within the country was becoming a matter of most serious concernment, because, owing to the great drain of money which was occasioned by the importation of such cloths from the south, ‘English money was not to be had under 6 or 7 per cent., scarce at any rate,’ and exchange between Edinburgh and London had risen against the former place as high as 12 or 15 per cent. ‘Our four-merk pieces,’ it was added, ‘the best coin of our kingdom, were almost wholly exported, and above £20,000 sterling in dollars left the country in the year 1680.’