Burgh Muir - General History

General History

The burgh muir was part of the ancient Forest of Drumselch, used for hunting and described in a 16th-century chronicle as originally an abode of "hartis, hindis, toddis and siclike maner of beastis". It was gifted to the city as common land by David I in the 12th century and cleared of woodland by a decree of James IV in 1508. The open space was used for grazing cattle which would be driven there through the Cowgate (literally, "cow road") from byres within the town walls where the cows were milked.

No record of David I's gift of the burgh muir has survived, many of the burgh records having been lost during the Wars of Independence and when the Earl of Hertford sacked the city in 1544. It is possible that it was gifted at the same time as the founding of Holyrood Abbey in the 12th century, the abbey charter (c.1143) containing the first mention of Edinburgh as a royal burgh.

Three areas of the muir were exempted from the city's jurisdiction, due to having been previously granted under separate Royal Charters: the Grange (church-held farmland) of St. Giles ("Sanct Gilysis Grange"), and the Provostry lands of Whitehouse and Sergeantry lands of Bruntsfield, both held from the Crown by royal officials.

The Grange lands were forfeited in the reign of David II and awarded to Sir Walter de Wardlaw, Bishop of Glasgow, passing to his kin, the Wardlaws, until 1506, and then to the merchant, John Cant, whose family owned them until 1632. Cant gifted 18 acres of his land to help establish the Dominican nunnery of St. Catherine of Siena in 1517, intended to provide for widows of some of the nobility slain at Flodden in 1513. This was the last convent established in pre-Reformation Scotland, from which the surrounding area of Sciennes took its name. A small Chapel of St. John the Baptist built c.1512-13 by Sir John Craufurd, a prebendary of the Grange of St. Giles, as a hermitage for vagabonds, was gifted to the Sisters by him for use as their conventual chapel. It is believed to have stood on the site later occupied by Sciennes Hill House. In 1632, the lands held by the Cants passed to another merchant family, the Dicks (later Dick Lauder), who inhabited Grange House until the 19th century. Increasingly empty and neglected after 1848, the house was demolished in 1936.

The Bruntsfield lands, held originally by the King's Sergeant, Richard Broune (hence Brounisfield, later Bruntsfield), were granted by Robert II to Alan de Lawdre in 1381. The Lauder family sold them to the merchant John Fairlie in 1603, whose family sold them in turn to Sir George Warrender, a Bailie and later Lord Provost of Edinburgh, in 1695. His descendants signed the estate over to Edinburgh Corporation (Council) in the 1930s. The second Bruntsfield House on the site, dating from the time of the Lauders in the 16th century, still stands.

The Whitehouse lands have had a more complex history. Records show that prior to 1449 they were held by a family of the surname Hog before coming into the hands of Lord Chancellor William Crichton in the reign of James II (c.1449). They passed through numerous hands down the centuries, including Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell (1581) and Walter Scott of Buccleuch (1594), until they were increasingly subfeued in the 19th century, the feudal superiors being, from 1890 onwards, two brothers named Reid. One feuar was the Order of Ursulines which established St. Margaret's Convent (now the Gillis Centre) in 1834, the first Catholic institution established in Scotland since the Reformation.

When the Earl of Hertford attacked Edinburgh in 1544 as part of what was later called the 'Rough Wooing' the original Bruntsfield House was burned to the ground, and it is generally assumed that a similar fate befell the Grange and Whitehouse, as one of Hertford's men wrote, "And the nexte mornyge, very erly we began where we lefte, and continued burnyge all that daye and the two dayes nexte ensuing contynually so that neyther within the wawles nor in the suburbes was lefte any one house unbrent..." It is unclear whether the convent at Sciennes suffered.