Dance Cadgers in the Canongate 909

The Canongate is the last part of the Royal Mile as it races downhill from Edinburgh Castle and begins to flatten out just before it reaches the Palace of Holyrood House. In 1128, under a royal charter of David I, who founded Holyrood Abbey, a community of Augustinian canons regular settled a village between the city wall and the abbey. The word “gate” is not a gate or a portal, but the Scots for street. The entry into the city from the Canongate was through the Netherbow Port. Form its establishment until 1856, the Canongate was a separate burgh with its own elected magistrates.

When the palace was built by James IV beside the abbey and Scottish monarchs took up their residence there, the Canongate became less religious in aspect and rather more courtly as the nobles who could not find accommodation in the palace built their own magnificent mansions, surrounded by gardens in what was then a thickly wooded area. There were to be found Moray House, Huntly House, Queensberry Hose and Acheson House, to name only a few. In 1603 James VI, great-grandson of the builder of the palace, went to London as James I and he took his court with him. From that time, the Canongate began to decline by slow degrees from the setting for the life of fashion into an aristocratic slum. However, in 1769, the Canongate still counted among its illustrious inhabitants two dukes, sixteen earls, two dowager countesses, seven lords, thirteen baronets and numerous other personages of power and influence.

From the time of its founding, the Canongate had another population, a shifting one that did not build houses there for they could not afford to do so. These were the “Abbey Lairds” for the Canongate, because of its religious establishment so close to the abbey, was a sanctuary for debtors who could only leave the area with any degree of safety on Sunday. Perhaps the most famous man to seek sanctuary there was the politically compromised and financially embarrassed Charles Philippe, the Comte d’Artois, later Charles X of France, who fled to Edinburgh by way of London in 1796.

An “S” set in the road and a stone cross called the “girth” marked the boundary of the area of sanctuary.

The cadgers who frequented the Canongate were the hucksters who with loaded ponies hawked their wares and goods through the streets of the burgh.