EDINBURGH MERCHANTS AND MERCHANDISE IN OLD TIMES.
I do not propose, on this occasion, to carry your minds back to a very remote period, for, truth to tell, Scotland was not distinguished for commerce at an early date. You will not be surprised if I briefly remark that we hear nothing of trade in Leith harbour till the reign of Bruce, and have reason to believe that it hardly had an existence for a century later. Dr Nicolas West, an emissary of Henry VIII., visited Scotland in 1513, just before the battle of Flodden, and he tells us that he then found at Leith only nine or ten small topmen, or ships with rigging, which, from his remarks, we may infer to have all been under sixty tons burden. There was then but a meagre traffic carried on with the Low Countries, France, and Spain—wool, skins, and salmon carried out; and wine, silks, cloth, and miscellaneous articles imported: matters altogether so insignificant, that there are but a few scattered references to them in the acts of the national parliament. One may have some idea of the pettiness of any external trade carried on by Edinburgh in the early part of the sixteenth century, from what we know of the condition of Leith at that time. It was but a village, without quay or pier, and with no approach to the harbour except by an alley—the still existing Burgess Close, which in some parts is not above four feet wide. We must imagine any merchandise then brought to Leith as carried in vessels of the size of small yachts, and borne off to the Edinburgh warehouses slung on horseback, through the narrow defiles of the Burgess Close.
It chances that we possess, in our General Register House, a very distinct memorial of the traffic carried on between Scotland and the Netherlands at the close of the fifteenth century. It consists in the ledger of Andrew Halyburton, a Scottish merchant conducting commission business for his countrymen at Middleburg, and conservator of the Scotch privileges there. It extends from the year 1493 to 1505. Andrew acted as agent for a number of eminent persons, churchmen as well as laymen, besides merchants, receiving and selling for a commission the raw products of the country, chiefly those just named—wool, hides, and salmon—and sending home in return nearly every kind of manufactured article which we could suppose to have then been in use. It appears that even salt was then imported. Wheel-barrows were sent from Flanders to assist in building King’s College, Aberdeen. There were cloths of silk, linen, and woollen; fruits, spiceries, and drugs; plate and jewellery; four kinds of wine—claret, Gascony claret, Rhenish, and Malvoisie. Paper is often named; and there is mention of pestles and mortars, basins of brass, chamber-mats, beds of arras, feather-beds, down-pillows, vermilion, red and white lead, and pins. John of Pennycuik imports the image of Thomas-à-Becket, bought from a painter at Antwerp. More than one tombstone is shipped to a Scotch order from Middleburg. Once there is a ‘kist of buikis’ for a physician at Aberdeen. The account between Halyburton and the Abbot of Holyrood may be cited as an example of its class in this curious tome. For ‘my lord,’ as Halyburton calls him, he sells the wool of the sheep which ranged the Abbey’s pastures in Tweeddale, and the skins and hides of the sheep and cattle which were slaughtered for the table at Holyrood. He buys in return claret and other wines, apples, olives, oranges, figs, raisins, almonds, rice, loaf-sugar, ginger, mace, pepper, saffron, and large quantities of apothecaries’ wares. Amongst other customers, we find Walter Chapman, the first printer in Scotland, and John Smollett, the ancestor of the great novelist of the last century. Halyburton appears to have often visited Edinburgh, settling old accounts, and arranging new ventures. Each account has the name of ‘Jhesus’ piously superscribed; and where the customer was a trader, the merchant’s mark, which was cut upon his boxes or inscribed upon his bales, is copied into the ledger. The volume is surprisingly like a ledger of the present day, even in the particular of binding; but it gives, on the whole, the idea of a poor and narrow range of traffic—the traffic of a rude country, producing only raw articles, and few of them, and dependent for all above the simplest which it consumed, upon foreign states.[1]
About the time referred to in this volume, the central line of street between the West Bow and Nether Bow was the chief place of merchandise in Edinburgh, the Cowgate and Canongate being more specially the residence of the nobility, gentry, and great ecclesiastics. There were two chief classes of goods dealt in, each mainly confined to a particular section of the street. What was called Inland Merchandise, or Inland’sh Goods—namely, yarn, stockings, coarse cloth, and other such articles made at home—were, by a charter of 1477, ordained to be sold in the upper part of the street, then without a special name, but which is subsequently referred to as the Land-market—apparently an abbreviation of Inland Market, from the description of goods sold in it. Down to recent times, such goods continued to be chiefly sold there, by people occupying laigh shops, and on a certain day exposing their wares by ancient privilege on the open street. The remainder of the High Street was chiefly devoted to a superior class of traders, calling themselves Merchants, dealers in imported wares of various kinds, and each occupying a booth or shop, besides whatever other warehouses in more retired situations. Wholesale and retail dealers alike passed under this name, as is still, indeed, the case to a considerable extent in Scotland, where it has always been remarked that there was a peculiar liberality or courtesy in the distribution of names and titles. We frequently hear in the journalists and chroniclers of the old time, of the Merchants Buithes, or shops. The only other kind of shops in those days was the kind called krames, generally very small, made out of mere angles of property, or insinuated between the buttresses of St Giles’s Kirk, and chiefly devoted to the sale of toys and other petty articles. We often hear of krames, of kramers (that is, krame-keepers), and kramery (that is, small wares sold in krames) in the familiar histories of that age, and in old titles. Dunbar, the early Scottish poet, describes these shops very aptly as
‘Hampered in ane honey-kaim,’
close to St Giles’s Church. Fixing our attention, meanwhile, on the class of traders called merchants, we find that their booths were in general small places, situated behind the open arcade which then ran along the greater part of the High Street on both sides. The whole front of one of these booths, consisting of folding boards, was opened by day—one board being drawn up, another let down, one or more folded back sideways, so as to display the interior to the passer-by. On a bench or counter within the front-wall, goods were laid out to attract attention; in some instances, there were also stands set out for the display of wares under the shelter of the arcade in front. As the merchant sat in his open booth, there were sights presented to him different from what he would now see: amongst others, rival nobles meeting on the causey, with their respective bands of armed followers, and fighting out their quarrels with sword and buckler, and the more deadly hagbut, to quell which our traders were enjoined by civic statute of 1529, to keep each in his booth ‘ane axe, or twa, or three, after as they have servants,’ and to be ready to use them. If we are to believe Dunbar, he saw ‘the gait’ filthy, and full of clamorous beggars, milk, shell-fish, and puddings sold at the Cross and the Tron, and vile crafts everywhere more prominent than his own respectable merchandise. In the town of Berne, in Switzerland, you can see precisely the same structural arrangements still existing along both sides of the principal street, which further reminds one of ancient Edinburgh by its name of Kramgasse.
At length, in the progress of improvement, there were some shops formed in a certain part of the High Street, having those open arcaded spaces in front closed up, leaving only a window and a door; and these places of business, by way of distinction, acquired the name of luckenbooths—that is, closed booths, a term, as you are all aware, which still gives a name to the portion of street referred to. Berne is now in exactly the same circumstances in this respect as Edinburgh was two hundred years ago, for there also we find a few shops of more ambitious character than their neighbours, with the fronts built up. It is very interesting thus to trace in continental towns of the present day a reflex of things long ago prevalent in our own city. I was amused, at Nuremberg, to find the Frauenkirke barnacled all round with little shops or krames, as I remember St Giles’s to have been, each petty shop, moreover, having its miniature house above, in one or more stories, affording a stifling accommodation to the traders, as was the case with several of the krame-shops of the old Parliament Close.
In Germany and Scandinavia, we still find traders who, while conducting a considerable wholesale business, and even a little banking, have also retail shops, generally placed towards the public street, and conducted by subalterns. I found such men in Iceland attending the parties given in the governor’s house, and evidently enjoying the local consideration due to their wealth and education. In Edinburgh, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were traffickers of this kind, some planted in the great thoroughfares, and some in more retired situations. They were, in some instances, men with pretensions to pedigree—men who took a prominent part in public affairs, entertained princes and sovereigns, founded families, and so forth. Thus, a Hamilton of the house of Innerwick, was what was called a merchant in the West Bow; he acquired lands—he fell as a gallant gentleman in Pinkie field; his eldest son was the ancestor of the Earls of Haddington; his second son, a secular priest, was rector of the University of Paris, and one of the council of the League who offered the French crown to the king of Spain in 1591. Contemporary with him, occupying a shop in the middle row of buildings alongside of St Giles’s Church, was a similar merchant, named Edward Hope; his father is believed to have been a Frenchman who came to Scotland in the train of the Princess Magdalen, daughter of Francis I., when she was wedded to James V. in 1537. While externally but a shopkeeper in the Luckenbooths, there can be no doubt that Edward Hope carried on foreign trade upon a considerable scale, and was a man of large means; of which last fact, his extensive mansion in Tod’s Close, Castlehill, stood a few years ago as good evidence. This worthy merchant was commissioner for Edinburgh in the parliament which settled the Reformation, and he afterwards, for Protestantism’s sake, bore the brunt of the Lady Mary’s gentle wrath. Through his elder son he was the ancestor of all the Hopes who have since stood so conspicuous in rank, in wealth, and in public service in Scotland; while from his younger son are descended the famous mercantile family of the Hopes of Amsterdam. In the latter part of the sixteenth century—that is, in the reigns of Mary and James VI.—notwithstanding the constant civil broils, and the false maxims by which commerce was to appearance protected or favoured, but in reality depressed—there appear to have been some considerable merchants in Edinburgh, and merchants really entitled to the name, being conductors of foreign traffic and dealers in wholesale. They generally had their establishments in some comparatively retired situation, in a close or wynd, near the centre of the city. In Riddell’s Close, Lawnmarket, there still exist the mansion and business premises of one of these considerable merchants, namely, Bailie John Macmoran. We are told by the church historian, Calderwood, that he was the greatest merchant of his day in Edinburgh, but disliked by the clergy, because of his carrying victual to Spain, thus endangering the souls of the Scottish mariners by contact with popery. His house is a good and not inelegant building forming a court, the entrance to which still exhibits the hooks for the massive gates by which it could be closed up at night and in times of danger. A stone projection over a window indicates an arrangement for pulleying up goods into an upper chamber. A large room or hall in which the queen’s brother, the Duke of Holstein, was entertained ‘with great solemnity and merriness’ in 1597, shews the wealthy state in which this merchant lived. John, who had been a servitor or dependent of the Regent Morton, whose treasures he assisted to conceal, was cut off in the middle of his prosperous career, by a pistol bullet fired at him by a High School boy, while he was exerting his authority as a magistrate in suppressing a barring-out.