The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland

by Sir Daniel Wilson

Rothesay Chapel, St. Giles.

The next addition to the Collegiate Church was the Preston aisle, added to the south side of the choir by William Prestoune of Gortoune in 1454, agreeably to a charter setting forth the great labour and charges of his father, "for the gettyn of the arme bane of Saint Gele—the quhilk bane he freely left to our moyr Kirk of Saint Gele of Edinburgh." The curious charter has been repeatedly printed.[654] The chaste and highly decorated groining of this portion of the church shews the progress of the style, which is still farther illustrated by the beautiful clere-story and east bays of the choir, added about the year 1462,[655] at which time the burgh records furnish evidence of considerable work being in progress. The latest addition to the metropolitan church, with the exception of the rebuilding of the beautiful crown tower in 1648, was the addition of a third aisle of two bays, in 1513, between the south transept and the porch erected on the south side of the nave in 1387. This formed a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Gabriel the Archangel. It was an example of great value to the Scottish ecclesiologist, as shewing the adherence to the Decorated style, and its increasingly elaborate yet chaste adornment with richly sculptured groining, at that late period, one hundred and thirty-six years after the date assigned by Rickman for its abandonment in England. Unhappily only a mutilated fragment of this most interesting addition to the building survived the operations of 1829. The favourite and beautiful Scottish crown towers must also be noted, still preserved in St. Giles's, Edinburgh, King's College, Aberdeen, and the Tolbooth of Glasgow, but once also surmounting the towers of St. Michael's, Linlithgow, the Abbey Church of Haddington—styled from its beauty the Lamp of the Lothians—and also, as seems probable from its appearance, the lofty tower at Dundee. Nothing could more effectually demonstrate the total freedom of our native architects from all English influence than this remarkable disagreement in the chronology of the styles practised in the two kingdoms; nor must it be forgot that the passion of the previous sovereign, James III., was for architecture, and that his favourite councillor and companion was his architect, Cochrane, who fell a victim to the jealousy of the rude Scottish barons, excited by the marks of royal favour he received. In no country of Europe was architecture more zealously encouraged than in Scotland during his reign. Our Scottish poet Drummond somewhat quaintly sums up his character in terms more censorious than might have been expected from his own dalliance with the muses: "He was much given to buildings and trimming up of chapels, halls, and gardens, as usually are the lovers of idleness; and the rarest frames of churches and palaces in Scotland were mostly raised about his time: an humour, which though it be allowable in men which have not much to do, yet it is harmful in princes."[656] There was still less need to go to foreign sources for instruction or for artistic models during the prosperous reign of James IV., the favourer of learning and the arts; the patron of our greatest national poets, Dunbar, Kennedy, Gawn Douglas, and others of the Scottish Makars; of Chepman the introducer of the Scottish printing-press; and indeed the encourager of all the most liberal pursuits of a chivalrous age. Under his more popular rule, architecture was encouraged no less royally than in that of his father, and excited the Scottish nobles to emulation instead of jealousy.

Dunbar's noble poem of the Thrissill AND THE Rois commemorates the reunion of Scotland and England in the affiancing of James IV. to the Princess Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. of England in 1501; and it is curious to note how completely coincident with this is the manifestation of the influence of English models on the contemporary architecture of Scotland. The Perpendicular or Third-pointed English style appears in Scotland as a mere exotic, too temporarily tried to be properly regarded as a national style, and when used at all, employed contemporaneously with the pure native Decorated work. The earliest, and if I mistake not the only entire example of a Third-pointed building in Scotland is the parish church of Ladykirk, on the banks of the Tweed, built by James IV. in the year 1500. It is a somewhat stiff and formal structure externally, betraying the introduction of an unfamiliar style. In the interior, however, the features of the older native models predominate, and the plain single vaulted arch is especially remarkable in connexion with other details of a style which was wont in the hands of the southern architect to expend its utmost exuberance in pendants, bosses, and fan-tracery on the groined roof. The magnificent perpendicular work of the eastern portions of Melrose Abbey, however, exhibit no such formality or plainness, though probably a nearly contemporary structure. The arms of Andrew Hunter, abbot of Melrose, prior to 1453, are cut on one of the buttresses of the Decorated nave. John Fraser, a later abbot, promoted from Melrose to the see of Ross in 1485, completed the cathedral at Fortrose; the pure and elaborate Decorated work of which admits of no unfavourable comparison with Melrose nave, and shews that we must look to a later date, and most probably to the following century, for the introduction of perpendicular details in the completion of its choir. In the valuable little fragment of the roof of the latter, fortunately still standing, where all else is gone, we once more see the influence of Scottish taste modifying the characteristics of the new style. Here too, instead of the fan-tracery and pendants of contemporary English roofs, is the Scottish single vault, enriched only with additional ribs and bosses, but preserving the favourite feature of carrying the roof completely above the side lights, and making it depend for illumination upon the great east window. The few other examples of Scottish perpendicular work which exist are scarcely sufficient to admit of any general deductions. The semi-hexagonal apse, both at Linlithgow and Stirling, shew it modified at a later date by native peculiarities, derived from the favourite Decorated style, and in the latter—ascribed to Cardinal Beaton—also exhibiting a singular introduction of the round-headed lights of the earlier period, into the tracery of large perpendicular windows, as well as a peculiar adaptation of the Scottish vaulted roof. Both, however, must be regarded as late and somewhat debased examples. Along with these may also be noted the occasional use of the square-headed window, as in the chantry chapel of the church of the Holy Trinity at Edinburgh, and in the clere-story of St. Mary's at Leith, both destroyed within the last few years. The singular church at South Queensferry furnishes a very curious example of some of the features of perpendicular Gothic applied in a novel fashion to an ecclesiastical edifice. The north wall appears to have been almost entirely occupied by the buildings of the monastery, so that it is destitute of ornament, and only pierced with one small pointed window of one light at the east end of the choir, near to which a round-headed door—now blocked up—has communicated with the attached buildings. There is no indication of a north transept having ever existed. Both the nave and south transept are entirely lighted with square-headed windows. That of the transept is divided into three lights, neatly cusped in the head. The west end of the nave is furnished with a window in the same style, while the door, which is small and plain, is at the west end of the south side; two other square-headed windows of two lights fill up this side of the nave, and a large and heavy rectangular tower, measuring in greatest breadth, from north to south, across the length of the church, occupies the intersection of the transept with the nave and choir. Altogether the church is more curious than admirable as a late specimen of Scottish medieval art.

While this transient attempt at the naturalization of the English Tudor style of architecture in Scottish art has thus left some few enduring traces, it is worthy of note that its most characteristic feature, the four-centred arch, is nearly, if not quite unknown in Scotland, otherwise than as a modern exotic which figures in the favourite perpendicular rifacciamentos of ecclesiastical facades, wedded too often to the bald church or meeting-house with about as much congruity as the ill-assorted pair that figure in Hogarth's well-known wedding scene. Whatever might have resulted under more favourable circumstances, the new style was destined to no full development in Scotland. By a charter dated 1st August 1513, Walter Chepman, burgess of Edinburgh, memorable as the introducer of the printing-press to Scotland, founded and endowed an altar in the south transept, or "Holy Blood Aisle" of St. Giles's Church, "in honour of God, the Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and all saints." It was a period of national happiness and prosperity, in which learning and the arts met with the most ample encouragement. Only one brief month thereafter all this was at an end. James and the chief of his nobles lay dead on Flodden Field; Scotland was at the mercy of Henry VIII.; the Crown devolved to an infant; and faction, ignorance, and bigotry replaced all the advantages of the wise and beneficent rule of James IV. It is not by slow degrees, but abruptly, like the unfinished page of a mutilated chronicle, that the history of Scottish medieval art comes to an end. Yet the favourite forms and mouldings of the Decorated Period lingered long after in the domestic architecture of the country. The ornamental ambries found in the castellated mansions, and even in the wealthier burghal dwellings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, partake so much of the character of earlier ecclesiastical features, that they are frequently described as fonts, stoups, or piscinæ; and even when standing, as is their usual wont, by the side of the huge old fashioned fire-place, they have been assumed to afford evidence that the domestic halls and kitchens of our ancestors were their chapels or baptistries. Some few of these relics of obsolete tastes and manners still linger about the old closes of Edinburgh, though now rapidly disappearing before the ruthless strides of modern innovation. The vignette shews the form of one of these ornamental ambries from a singular antique mansion in the Old Town of Edinburgh, which bore the date 1557, and was believed to have been occupied for a time as the residence of the Queen Regent, Mary of Guise. Another large chamber in the same building bore evidence of having been at one time used as a private oratory, and in it was a curious and still more highly decorated niche, which, however, exhibited somewhat of the debased excesses pertaining to that closing period in which the pure Gothic passed into the picturesque but lawless style of the Elizabethan age. Nevertheless its pierced stone-work served to illustrate the lingering adherence to the earlier national style of window-tracery far down into the sixteenth century.

Ambry, Kennedy's Close.

Ambry, Guise Palace.