280 Scottish Life in the 17TH Century. 



Street, a little south of the shop of Messrs Kennedy & Co., 

 seedsmen, stood the old Tolbooth and Council Chambers, which 

 were erected in 1627. The Meal Market was also in High 

 Street, on the space, I suppose, now occupied in the summer 

 season by the gardeners' stands, and the Fish Cross was near it. 

 A little above the site of the Midsteeple, on the spot occupied b} 

 a jeweller's shop, was a one-storey building, with the Town 

 Cross on its flat roof. There was only one place of public 

 worship in the town, St Michael's Church. It was not, of 

 course, the present edifice; that dates from about the middle of 

 the 1 8th century ; and it appears to have been " a church without 

 a steeple." It had been the Roman Catholic Church of the 

 town, and after the Reformation it was occupied by a Protestant 

 congregation. There had been two other pre-Reformation 

 churches in the town — one, the Church of Our Lady, near where 

 is now the office of the Bank of Scotland in Irish Street ; the 

 other, the Church of St Thomas, the site of which I have seen 

 variously given as between St Michael Street and the river, and 

 as in High Street, near the Coffee House. There was also, on 

 the eminence now crowned by St Mary's Church, a chapel 

 erected by the sister of Robert Bruce in memory of her husband. 

 Sir Christopher Seton, who had suffered death on the spot, at 

 the hands of the English troops ; but this little church was never, 

 I fancy, used to any considerable extent as a place of public 

 worship, and since the Reformation both it and the churches of 

 St Thomas and Our Lady had been closed. None of the public 

 buildings was of imposing appearance, if we except the castle, 

 and it was in a partly ruinous state. 



Regarding the dwelling-houses the Lord Provost of Glasgow 

 and one of the city bailies, who passed through the town in 

 1688, have left this record: That they were either composed of 

 mud walls strengthened b}' upright wooden posts, or were built 

 of stone laid in clay and thatched with straw or heather. The 

 shops, say the same observers, were small and ill-lighted, with 

 naked walls, seldom plastered, and often not even floored or 

 paved. Of the dwelling-house accommodation of the rural 

 population the same visitors give us the following picture : — 

 " Many of the farm houses were built in part and some altogether 

 of turf, or of mud, plastered on stakes and basket work. The 

 window was composed of a few panes of glass and two boards 

 that opened like shutters for the admission of air. On the small 

 farms part of the dwelling-house was occupied by the cattle, 

 which generally entered by the same door with the family — the 

 one turning by the trance-door to the kitchen, the other the 

 contrary way to the byre or stable. The people in the kitchen 

 could see but to the byre and the cattle saw ben to the kitchen. 

 The houses of the labourers consisted of a single unceiled apart- 

 ment, with clay floor, unclean and full of holes." The 



