We have now arrived at the Bow-foot, about which there is nothing remarkable to be told, except that here, and along one side of the Grassmarket, are several houses marked by a cross on some conspicuous part—either an actual iron cross, or one represented in sculpture. This seems a strange circumstance in a country where it was even held doubtful, twenty years ago, whether one could be placed as an ornament on the top of a church tower. The explanation is that these houses were built upon lands originally the property of the Knights Templars, and the cross has ever since been kept up upon them, not from any veneration for that ancient society, neither upon any kind of religious ground; the sole object has been to fix in remembrance certain legal titles and privileges which have been transmitted into secular hands from that source, and which are to this day productive of solid benefits. A hundred years ago, the houses thus marked were held as part of the barony of Drem in Haddingtonshire, the baron of which used to hold courts in them occasionally; and here were harboured many persons not free of the city corporations, to the great annoyance of the adherents of local monopoly. At length, the abolition of heritable jurisdictions in 1747 extinguished this little barony, but not certain other legal rights connected with the Templar Lands, which, however, it might be more troublesome to explain than advantageous to know.
GRASSMARKET
from west end of Cowgate.
THE GALLOWS STONE.
In a central situation at the east end of the Grassmarket, there remained till very lately a massive block of sandstone, having a quadrangular hole in the middle, being the stone which served as a socket for the gallows, when this was the common place of execution. Instead of the stone, there is now only a St Andrew’s cross, indicated by an arrangement of the paving-stones.
This became the regular scene of executions after the Restoration, and so continued till the year 1784. Hence arises the sense of the Duke of Rothes’s remark when a Covenanting prisoner proved obdurate: ‘Then e’en let him glorify God in the Grassmarket!’—the deaths of that class of victims being always signalised by psalm-singing on the scaffold. Most of the hundred persons who suffered for that cause in Edinburgh during the reigns of Charles II. and James II. breathed their last pious aspirations at this spot; but several of the most notable, including the Marquis and Earl of Argyll, were executed at the Cross.
As a matter of course, this was the scene of the Porteous riot in 1736, and of the subsequent murder of Porteous by the mob. The rioters, wishing to despatch him as near to the place of his alleged crime as possible, selected for the purpose a dyer’s pole which stood on the south side of the street, exactly opposite to the gallows stone.
Some of the Edinburgh executioners have been so far notable men as to be the subject of traditionary fame. In the reign of Charles II., Alexander Cockburn, the hangman of Edinburgh, and who must have officiated at the exits of many of the ‘martyrs’ in the Grassmarket, was found guilty of the murder of a bluegown, or privileged beggar, and accordingly suffered that fate which he had so often meted out to other men. One Mackenzie, the hangman of Stirling, whom Cockburn had traduced and endeavoured to thrust out of office, was the triumphant executioner of the sentence.