Scottish Life in the 17TH Century. 27!> 



20th March, 1903. 



Chairman — Mr J. Barbour, Vice-President. 



Scottish Life in the i^th Century: Illustrated Specially 

 FROM Dumfriesshire and Galloway. 

 By Mr W. Dickie. 



I propose to make Dumfries the central point for a cursory 

 survey of the conditions of life in Scotland in the 

 seventeenth century. It is desirable as a preliminary 



to have some idea of the appearance and extent 

 of the town at that period. It is not possible to construct a 

 complete or perfectly reliable mental picture, but it may be 

 done with approximate accuracy. The town then was in its 

 main outlines wonderfully like what we may call the old town of 

 to-day. It consisted of the High Street; part of Friars' Vennel ; 

 the Kirkgate ; East Barnraws, somewhere in the neighbourhood 

 of the present Loreburn Street, and having as one of its boun- 

 daries the Loreburn, which figures in the motto of the burgh ; a 

 small street between these two called the Midraw, extending 

 from "the Rattan Raw," our present Chapel Street, on the 

 one hand, to what is now Queensberry Square on the other; the 

 Lochmabengate, now known as English Street ; and west of the 

 High Street, a street called the West Barnraws. And off the 

 various streets were, as now, numerous closes. Then there 

 was, of course, "the brig-en'," which has developed into Max- 

 welltown; and on the Troqueer Road there was a \illage known 

 as "the Toun of Troqueer." At the top of the High Street, on 

 the site of Greyfriars' Church, stood the castle, or rather 

 battlemented town house of the Lord Maxwells, which had been 

 in rather a dilapidated condition since 1570, when the town 

 was burned by an English force, under the Earl of Sussex and 

 Lord Scrope. The more ancient castle of Dumfries, in the 

 neighbourhood of Castledykes, had ceased to be a place of 

 strength. The Xew ^^'ark, a two storey building with some 

 slight pertensions to fortification, and commanding extensive 

 vaults for protection of the valuables of the citizens in times of 

 danger, stood on the south side of what is now Queensberry 

 Square ; and in the square were also the flesh market and the 

 slaughter-house. An extensive impro\ement was carried out 

 about 1770, when a new flesh-market was built and King Street, 

 or "the Wide Entry," was opened up. At the earlier period 

 to which our notes refer, part of the Greyfriars' Monastery, 

 which lay between Castle Street and St David Street, was still 

 standing; but it had been unoccupied for about a century, the 

 Reformation having suppressed it and other conventual establish- 

 ments. The Midsteeple had not been built. But on the High 



