In the middle of the eighteenth century the ruinous roof of the Abbey, ill repaired, fell in, carrying with it the ancient arches. The ruins were desecrated, filled with rubbish and insulted, the coffins of the dead were stolen, and the skulls and bones of kings and queens lay exposed, exhibited—were carried away, and lost. Among them was the gentle Madeleine who had kissed the “Scottis eard.” Holyrood Abbey had survived over six centuries the invasions of the wanton English, only to be laid in ruins by the citizens of Edinburgh themselves.
CHAPTER III
THE CHURCH OF ST. GILES:
GAVIN DOUGLAS, JOHN KNOX, AND JENNY GEDDES
Age to age succeeds,
Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,
A dust of systems and of creeds.
Tennyson.
THERE is a saying that no one who has suffered an Episcopalian childhood knows the story of Jonah and the gourd, and that the reply given is invariably, “Jonah and the gourd? The gourd? What about a gourd? I know all about the whale, of course!” It is observable that the ordinary tourist who visits Edinburgh associates St. Giles’s Church with the one incident of Jenny Geddes throwing her stool at the dean—an incident of which it might be submitted that, like the connection between Jonah and the whale, it was perhaps not the most dignified, though certainly an uncomfortably dramatic, moment of its history. The Church of St. Giles, like the prophet, had had other experiences—which is perhaps not wonderful when one recollects that it was in all probability the parish church of “Edwinsburch” in the ninth century. It was certainly there in the days of David I., when Edinburgh was a cluster of huts, built of the wood and thatched with the boughs of the forest of Drumsheugh, with its dominating fortress up on the rock, its great Abbey down on the plain, and half-way on the slope between them the beautiful little massive early Norman Church. From its belfry, as the sun rose high over the Forth beyond the Calton Hill, the bell would toll the pious Scots to Matins, or to Vespers when it sank red at the back of their Castle.
This early parochial church—probably built on the site of a still older church, and that again maybe on the site of some heathen temple—was, on the 6th of October 1243, in the reign of Alexander II., dedicated to St. Giles by David de Bernham, Norman Bishop of St. Andrews.[22] The church, like all other buildings in Edinburgh, suffered much at the hands of the English Edwards, of Richard II. of England, and of Henry VIII. of England; and the marks of the flames of those ruthless invaders are still visible on the pillars of the choir. If it was misused by the “auld enemy,” it was—until the Reformation—well treated by its own people. It was restored from Richard’s fire, and building went on until Flodden. In 1387 five chapels were added on the south of the Nave, “thekyt” with stone, by three well-paid Scottish masons, on the model
