It was formerly a custom with the boys to dress Heriot’s statue with flowers on the first of May, and to renew them on this anniversary festival when they received their new clothes.[202]
It should seem, therefore, that the floral adornment of the statue annually on this day, is derived from its ancient dressing on the first of May.
The statue stands beneath the centre tower of the north or principal front, and over the middle of a vaulted archway leading to the court-yard of the hospital. Grose says, the Latin inscription above the figure signifies, “that Heriot’s person was represented by that image, as his mind was by the surrounding foundation.”
George Heriot was jeweller to king James VI., subsequently James I., of England. He was born about June, 1563, eldest son to George Heriot, one of the company of goldsmiths in Edinburgh. The elder Heriot died in 1610, having been a commissioner in the convention of estates and parliament of Scotland, and a convener of the trades of Edinburgh at five different elections of the council. The goldsmiths were then the money-dealers in Scotland; they consequently ranked among the most respectable citizens, and to this profession the subject of this memoir was brought up by his father.
It appears that so late as the year 1483, the goldsmiths of Edinburgh were classed with the “hammermen” or common smiths. They were subsequently separated, and an act of the town council on the twenty-ninth of August, 1581, conferred on the goldsmiths a monopoly of their trade, which was confirmed by a charter from James VI., in the year 1586.
A century afterwards, in 1687, James VII. invested the goldsmiths with the power of searching, inspecting, and trying all jewels set in gold, in every part of the kingdom; a license to destroy all false or counterfeit work; to punish the transgressors by imprisonment or fines, and seize the working tools of all unfree goldsmiths within the city.