in 1507; and there had been a lingering of the craft in the town ever
since by patents or permissions, but on the very smallest scale. To the
“merchants” and “craftsmen” and their families there have to be added,
of course, the numerous dependents of both these classes of the
burghers, called in the simple language of that time their “servandis.”
Under that name were included not only the domestic servants of the
wealthier merchants, but also their clerks and business assistants, and
the journeymen and apprentices of the master-craftsmen, the last a very
unruly portion of the community and known collectively as “the
crafts-childer.” Imagine all these domiciled, as was then the habit,
with their masters, and stowed away somehow, “up and down in hole and
bore,” as one old document phrases the fact, in the workshops and
“lands.” Even then there remains to be taken into account the miscellany
of small retail traders, in shops and stalls, which such a town
required, with the peripatetic hucksters of fish and other provisions,
and the rabble of nondescripts, living by erratic and hand-to-mouth
occupations, and hanging on about the hostelries. All these too were
“indwellers” in Edinburgh, and housed in the wynds and closes in some
inconceivable manner. Moreover, as we learn too abundantly from the old
burgh records, actual vagrants and beggars, whether of the able-bodied
and turbulent variety, or of the cripple, diseased, and blind,
soliciting alms by obstreperous whining and by the exhibition of their
deformities, swarmed in Old Edinburgh with a persistency which all the
police efforts of the authorities, with examples of scourgings and
hangings for several generations, had been unable to repress or
diminish. Where _they_ lived in overcrowded Edinburgh only St. Giles’s
steeple could now tell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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