9 Key Events That Shaped Stirling: Part 2 The Burgh and Beyond (Part B… The Rough Wooing to The British Empire)
Guest blog post by Dr Murray Cook, Archaeologist
As part of the Stirling 900 celebrations for my personal selection of the 9 events that shaped Stirling before the burgh and then a further 9 events that shaped the burgh. This is the second part but I’m afraid it was all too big so am having to split the second blog into two parts (A and B). Part A can be read here.
5 Henry VIIth’s The Rough Wooing
The Allan’s Primary School Bastion
The importance of Stirling to Scotland is reflected by its burgh walls, which are famously the best preserved in the country. They were designed and built in a rush in 1547/8 to prevent Protector Somerset, England’s regent following the death of Henry VIII forcing the infant Mary Queen of Scots to marry Henry’s heir Prince Edward, know as The Rough Wooing. This had been started by Henry but had a gear change under Somerset. While the wall was only built on the south of the city the north was protected by Stirling Bridge with two bridge gates and a network of deep drains and bogs and of course the River Forth. The only section of these ditches ever found was in 2016 when excavation revealed a truncated ditch surviving to 10 wide and 1.3m deep section near Stirling train station that had survived under a swimming pool, which implies it was originally at least 2m deep. However, over time the land to the north was cleared and farmed and so Stirling became more and more open to attack.
Astonishingly, Stirling’s wall has never been properly recorded, we don’t know its surviving length or how many gun loops it has or how these were intended to function. The wall has the potential to be of international significance and is an excellent example of a Renaissance style defence architecture.
So much of Stirling’s Wall survives as our economy declined in the 17th century following the Union of the Crowns and it remained the same size in 1750 as it had been in 1550. Thus, the wall never faced the development pressures that Edinburgh or other more successful burghs did. In the 19th century with the introduction of the railway Stirling became a fashionable town for Glasgow merchants and the remains of the wall were preserved in a boulevard between the medieval old town and the new Victorian suburb, King’s Park.
We think Stirling’s wall was only ever seriously besieged once: during the Jacobite campaign of 1746 when Bonnie Prince Charlie’s southern army sought winter quarters and to control Stirling’s strategic castle. Stirling was surrounded by Jacobites from the end of December but the town’s siege began on the 2nd January. A negotiation by an exchange of letters between the burgh and the Jacobites took place from the 6th to 8th January. In reality this was a standoff, Bonnie Prince Charlie demanded the town surrender while General Blackney, the castle’s governor demanded they fight. The people in the town were caught behind defences to the south while to the north as the Burgh Council subsequently protested ‘everyone knows that the north part of the town of Stirling is open and without walls, having only some low fences encompassing gardens and parks’. After much debate they concluded that to continue to defend Stirling ‘would be a dangerous and fruitless attempt’ and that they feared Jacobite reprisals. To encourage a decision and to underline their martial prowess the Jacobites fired 27 cannon shot into the city. With the decision to surrender made General Blackney took the town’s militia and guns to the castle remarking ‘Gentlemen, as your Provost and Baillies think the town not worth their notice to take care of it, neither can I. I will take care of the Castle.’ So began the last ever siege of Stirling Castle, which while unsuccessful was the base from which the Jacobite won at the Battle of Falkirk Muir.
Musket ball damage on the side of Cowane’s Hospital possibly from the 1746 siege.
6 James VI and Stirling’s Biggest Ever Witch Trial
I don’t believe in witches but in Scotland we executed a higher proportion of our population for this non-crime than anyone else in Europe. The City Heritage Trust has produced a very good blog on the back ground. My colleagues in the Council Archives drill down to a letter from King James VI demanding to further interrogate some poor soul from Stirling found to be a witch.
James is my focus a king crowned in Stirling, raised without a mother’s love in grip of leaders of the Reformation. He was obsessed with witchcraft and believed that the Devil was out to get him. MacBeth, Shakespeare’s only Scottish play is written for him, the witches in the play are not wiccans or traditional healers, they are agents of evil, intent on overthrowing the state and causing chaos and pain. These are the witches James believes in and he sets the tone, he makes it not just fashionable to hunt for witches but also a national strategic necessity. If you want to find out what he thought and why women were apparently more susceptible to the Devil why not read his Demonology.
But let’s not dwell on him anymore…..let’s ask why there is no memorial for Stirling’s witches and in particular Bessie Stevenson at the Wellgreen?
7 James Guthrie and The Covenantors
Did you know there was a time in Scotland when the state executed people for their religious beliefs and Church of Scotland Ministers led an armed revolt? What the… ? It’s a complex issue that I’ll just touch on here. Basically, Charles I, Charles II and James VII were quite big on central authority and wished to control how people worshipped. These authoritarian tendencies led to Charles I being executed, the Scots then backed Charles II in an invasion of England to regain his throne on the basis of guarantees of religious freedom (The National Covenant) which led to the Covenanters. They lost the Battle of Dunbar[1] and Cromwell invaded, establishing the Commonwealth.
At Charles II’s restoration he reneged on his agreement and imposed his preferred style of worship on Scotland. Ministers objected to this and some even took up arms against the state (e.g. James Ure of Kippen) while others held outdoor worship meetings called Conventicles. The state organised increasingly brutal repression of these events, ministers were killed and went on the run and some even adopted disguises.[2] All of this ended in 1689 in what is called the Glorious Revolution, but that’s another story.
Stirling’s Old Town Cemetery features a series of statues celebrating Scottish Presbyterian leaders and martyrs. It includes James Guthrie and James Renwick, the first and last Church of Scotland ministers, killed by the state during the Covenanting Period, the core of which is known as The Killing Times, when over 100 ministers were killed.
James Guthrie had been the Minister at the Church of The Holy Rude, and after his execution his head lay on a pike in Edinburgh for 27 years. Cromwell described him as the ‘small man who would not bend’. He had actually been kicked out of his church by the congregation for not being radical enough. This of course meant that he missed out on Stirling’s largest ever witch trial (the one involving Bessie Stevenson above), which took place in March 1659. This dubious honour fell to his deputy, one Mathias Sympson, and may I say that I hope he’s rotting in hell.
[1] Now many of those captured by Cromwell’s army (Scots and Irish) were sent to the colonies as indentured labour. This was clearly a form of slavery but it was not the same as the enslavement of African and other peoples. Yes, the Scots and Irish prisoners had no choice, but Cromwell’s slavery (or rather indentured labour) ended at some point. For Africans and many others it did not end and their children were conceived in bondage and born as property.
[2] The son of one minister, John Blackadder, who died imprisoned on The Bass Rock, later became the Governor of Stirling Castle, clearly demonstrating the changing political winds! When John’s diary was first printed it showed him with a dark skinned child, possibly a servant or perhaps a slave, who was edited out of the later editions.
8 Burns, Decay and Corruption.
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The 25th of July 1603 was a very momentous day for Scotland – our King James VI became James I of England (leaving side the witch stuff!). Now whatever the ins and outs of the Union of the Crowns this was absolutely calamitous for Stirling, which went from being one of the most important places in Scotland to a regional backwater. The money began to leave and Stirling began to decay. By the late 18th century there were abandoned and collapsing houses, the incredible renaissance carved heads in James V’s magnificent palace had fallen off and the building was stripped to be converted to a barracks. As Burns’ angrily put it in a very risky poem[1] inscribed on a window in the Golden Lion a hotel in Stirling (still open today):
Here Stewarts once in triumph reign’d,
And laws for Scotland’s weal ordain’d;
But now unroof’d their Palace stands,
Their sceptre’s fall’n to other hands;
Fallen indeed, and to the earth,
Whence grovelling reptiles take their birth.
The injur’d STEWART-line are gone,
A Race outlandish fill their throne;
An idiot race, to honor lost;
Who know them best despise them most.[2]
In 1750 the town was more or less the same size as it had been in 1550. Edinburgh and Glasgow boomed: there was trade with the Empire and the Enlightenment, one of the world’s greatest intellectual movements. The cash from Empire played a decisive role in securing Scotland’s place in the Union. Stirling, however, wallowed in corruption and decay. The infamous Black Bond of 1771 was an agreement between city officials to divvy up positions and income between themselves. This was so bad that in 1773 the Council elections were declared void by the courts, ‘having been brought about by undue influence and corrupted practices’ and the Council was abolished until 1781.
The political corruption was combined with a physical one: a collapsing drainage and water system led to the streets functioning as open sewers; blood from the slaughterhouse in St John’s Street simply ran down the hill. Added to this was the old Scots custom of throwing human waste (or night soil) out the window, ‘garde loo’. This is famously described in Edinburgh by 18th century poet Robert Fergusson, Burns’ inspiration, where the results are described as flowers blooming each morning:
‘They kindly shower Edina’s roses,
To quicken and regale our noses’
In 1841, one Dr Forrest describes waste from some 60 or so prisoners in the jail, floating all the way to King Street as regular as clockwork with the daily slopping out, which created ‘The most offensive and disgusting odour’. Of course, this fed into the water supply which was already wholly inadequate. There are 18th century descriptions of people queuing for several hours to get water for the day and one person counted over 200 pails and buckets waiting to be filled.
The upshot was of course disease, misery and death. We have covered the plague of 1606 and the cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1837, where Dr Forrest was a heroic and key player. There are also accounts of guards being stationed at gates to deter strangers and at the end of the 19th century Stirling had the lowest life expectancy and highest infant mortality in Scotland. Of course all of this was aided by the flight of the middle classes from the old town to newer developments to the north (Bridge Street) and south (Allan Park) of the city. What was left, the dens and wynds of the Top o’ The Town, became a core of disease, poverty and crime. Its subsequent demolition in the 1940s and 1960s was an attempt to end this cycle.
Eventually, by 1848, a clean water supply was established from a new reservoir near Touch above Cambusbarron. The campaigning efforts of Dr Forrest were again instrumental. However, not all doctors were such good eggs and famously another Dr Forrest (the good doctor’s second cousin) was interested in illegally obtaining fresh corpses for dissection practice. He bribed the local gravedigger James McNab and his pal Daniel Mitchel to steal the corpse of newly buried Mary Stevenson.
The disturbed grave was discovered and a riot ensued, but Forrest fled before he could be arrested. Sometime later there was a rumour that the more famous Edinburgh graverobber William Burke – of Burke and Hare fame – had moved in to St Mary’s Wynd. After a frantic house to house search revealed no trace of the miscreant, things calmed down.
[1] He had arrived within 10 years of the conversion and the poem, with its seditious tone haunted his later life and he revealed that he had been ‘… questioned like a child… and blamed and schooled for my… Stirling inscription’.
[2] A slightly later, more romantic and less angry version of the same sentiment was penned by James Hogg:
‘Stirling… but I love thee more
For the gray relics of thy martial towers,
Thy mouldering palaces and ramparts hoar,’
9 Change, Railway and Empire
However, throughout the same period there was also change and expansion. After 1745 Scotland had peace and slowly but surely even Stirling began to enjoy the fruits of both Empire and the industrial revolution. This had a series of enormous impacts on the city and wider region, which were transformed almost beyond recognition as wealth was clawed from the ground.
The biggest of these changes were to the bogs east and west of Stirling and their transformation into fertile farmland. This work had been going on for centuries,[1] but it rapidly scaled up in the 18th century through the actions of dozens of small lease holders, derogatorily called Moss Lairds.[2] They were offered 38 year leases and given timber to build a house and enough oatmeal for a year. They paid no rent for the first seven years, after which rent slowly rose over time. One of main landowners was the judge Lord Kames of Blair Drummond, who was also a leading figure of Edinburgh’s Enlightenment. He confirmed that slavery was illegal in Scotland 1777 and supported one of my heroes David Hume.[3] Kames and his son heavily invested in the process and cut a three-mile channel right across the Carse from Blair Drummond to the Forth. The water was drained by an enormous water wheel, The Great Mill of Torr, which was demolished in 1870. The Kames’ seem to have cleared around 1500 acres of peat in their time.
Once the land had been cleared of peat, it was still too acidic to grow crop and so lime had to be spread across it. Lime had been quarried and burnt (to turn it to quicklime) for centuries from the upper stretches of the Bannockburn, though traditional methods were no longer enough to meet demand. Vast quantities of limestone was transported, often by boats, and burnt on the land it was to fertilise. Now, burning limestone is a nasty horrible business, the resultant material is anhydrous and will chemically react with the water in anything organic – the dust would literally blind you.
Whatever the human cost, it worked. A survey in 1811 confirmed that the cleared land at Blair Drummond was home to 764 men, women and children along with 264 cows, 166 horses, 375 hens, 30 pigs, 168 cats, and eight dogs. This was another part of the aforementioned agricultural revolution in Scotland. However, I suspect we might rather have the complete bog with all its biodiversity and safely stored carbon.
All of these businesses brought ever more money into Stirling and there were a series of improvements as a result. The very pleasant Back Walk was formalised in the late 18th century and there followed planting schemes, extensions and benches in the 19th century – there was even a ‘keeper of the walk’ from 1817 to 1860. Eventually, the path stretched from the Barras Yett[4] (the city gate) to Gowan Hill and the Beheading Stone and even in the late 18th century it was described by the local minister as ‘perhaps the finest thing of its kind that any place can boast of’’. It was clearly a great source of pride; there was however a wee problem. In the general improvements made around the town, the open sewers from the castle which once emptied onto Ballengeich Road (over James V’s wee path, which was by now very slippy) had been moved to the south side where they were supposed to run into cess pits, which would be emptied and used as fertiliser on King’s Park Farm. However, such was the smell that the workers refused and the charming aroma remained to enhance the genteel walk around the castle. Elsewhere, transport links were improved. The remaining gate on Stirling Bridge was removed as was the medieval Barras Yett ,which had once been flung open to welcome Bonnie Prince Charlie.
The second half of the 19th century saw a massive growth and Stirling doubled and then tripled in size. The railway came in 1848[5] and wealthy merchants from Glasgow wanted somewhere with clean air and brilliant views, so Stirling became a commuting town with the construction of King’s Park…at the time one of the wealthiest places on earth!
[1] There is a charter from 1314 to Robert The Bruce confirming the right to the Burgesses of Stirling to cut peat at Skeoch, which lies near the Bannockburn. This is also the location of one of Stirling’s earliest coal mines.
[2] I know the great-great grandchildren of a quite a few of them!
[3] As a confirmed atheist, Hume was denied promotion. On his death-bed Samuel Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, wanted to know if Hume would recant and ask for the Lord’s mercy. Hume did not and died affirming his beliefs. Whatever your view of faith, Hume was truly a brave man.
[4] This was where Wallace’s arm was supposed to have been placed, though it was more likely on Stirling Bridge. And just outside this location was where Stirling’s medieval lepers were based, as they were banned from the city.
[5] The first station was a simple wooden hut which led to numerous complaints from those commuting to Glasgow and Edinburgh. Readers will be pleased to learn that the great-great-great grandchildren of those commuters still find plenty to moan about regarding the train to this day.