Burgh Muir
The Burgh Muir is the historic term for an extensive area of land lying to the south of Edinburgh city centre, upon which much of the southern part of the city now stands following its gradual spread and more especially its rapid expansion in the late 18th and 19th centuries. The name has been retained today in the partly anglicised form Boroughmuir for a much smaller district within Bruntsfield, vaguely defined by the presence of Boroughmuir High School, and, until 2010, Boroughmuirhead post office in its north-west corner.
In terms of today's street names, the historic muir extended from Leven Street, Bruntsfield Place and Morningside Road in the west to Dalkeith Road in the east, and as far south as the Jordan Burn and east to Peffermill, thus covering an area of approximately five square miles. The names of the historic roads that bounded it were the "Easter Hiegait", corresponding to Dalkeith Road, and the "Wester Hiegait" corresponding to Bruntsfield Place and Morningside Road.
The last surviving open space of the former burgh muir is Bruntsfield Links, a public park adjoining the Meadows to the north.
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 given to the city as common land by David I in the 12th century and feughed by a decree of James IV in 1508. The open space was used for grazing cattle which would be driven there through the Cowgate 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 given at the same time as the founding of Holyrood Abbey in the 12th century, the abbey charter 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 of St. Giles, 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 donated 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 given 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, 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, 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 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. They passed through numerous hands down the centuries, including Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell and Walter Scott of Buccleuch, 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 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.
James IV's charter of 1508
The land outwith the exempted portions began to be feued in the early 16th century. The Burgh Records record that in 1490 "...all the haill counsale, deikynis , and community consentit to the assedatioun of the space of the burrowmuir", but it was not until 1508 that a Royal Charter issued by James IV gave the Council licence to feu, stipulating that "the foresaid lands shall be leased in feu-farm as aforesaid, and their heirs and all dwellers on the same lands be subject to the jurisdiction of our foresaid Burgh, the Provost, Baillies and Officers thereof, present and to come, and that they repair every week with their victuals and other goods to the market of our said Burgh..." A Council enactment of 30 April 1510 obliged the feuars "to build upon the said acres dwelling-houses, malt-barns, and cowbills, and to have servants for the making of malt betwixt and Michaelmas 1512; and failing their doing so, to pay £40 to the common works of the town, and also to pay £5 for every acre of three acres of the Common Muir set to them". The Scottish lawyer and antiquarian William Moir Bryce, writing in an age influenced by the Temperance Movement, thought this a "strange obligation", but it made sense at a time before piped urban water supplies, when beer was the common drink in preference to water drawn from lochs and wells which often proved injurious to health.Clearing the land
The feuing of the Muir led to the rapid clearing of the remaining woodland on the muir, to dispose of which more easily the council granted anyone fronting their tenement with wood the liberty of extending the front by seven feet into the street. The resulting timber frontages were followed by wooden fore-stairs which reduced the width of the street even more. According to the 18th-century historian William Maitland, "...the buildings which before had stonern fronts were now converted into wood, and the Burgh into a wooden city". An English visitor William Brereton, commented in 1635 on what he perceived as the hideous effect of these wooden frontages,Here they usually walk in the middle of the street, which is a fair, spacious, and capacious walk. This street is the glory and beauty of this city: it is the broadest street and the longest street I have seen, which begins at the palace, the gate whereof enters straight into the suburbs, and is placed at the lower end of the same. The suburbs make an handsome street; and indeed the street, if the houses, which are very high, and substantially built of stone, were not lined to the outside and faced with boards, it were the most stately and graceful street that ever I saw in my life; but this face of boards, which is towards the street, doth much blemish it, and derogate from glory and beauty; as also the want of fair glass windows, whereof few or none are to be discerned towards the street, which is the more complete, because it is as straight as may be. This lining with boards, and this encroachment into the street about two yards, is a mighty disgrace unto it, for the walls are stone; so, as if this outside facing of boards were removed, and the houses built uniform all of the same height, it were the most complete street in Christendom.
One of the last timber-fronted houses at the corner of the West Bow and the Lawnmarket was demolished as late as 1878 as part of city improvement measures.
Feuing the land
A record survives from 1511 listing the first 16 feuars who were each given three acres of land on the north side of the burgh loch, divided into a half-acre lot for building and two and a half acres of farmland. This was followed by a further 27 lots granted in 1530, mainly for the South Muir, but including one to the widow of Walter Chapman situated just north of the convent at "Seynis". Over time most of the South Muir plots came into the possession of the Dick family as owners of the Grange estate. The list of feuars in 1530 also survives, albeit with some gaps.In 1586, the council, led by Provost William Little, decided on a further round of feuing by auctioning lots on the Wester Muir and Easter Muir which extended down the southern slope of the muir as far as the Pow Burn. The Wester Muir comprised the lands which developed by a process of sub-leasing, known in Scots Law as subinfeudation, into the districts of Greenhill, Burghmuirhead and Morningside. The Easter Muir comprised the lands which developed likewise into the districts of the Grange, Blackford, Mayfield and Newington.
The feuing of the Grange Estate was sanctioned by a private act of Parliament, , which allowed its owner, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, to feu land for the building of residential villas; the first being constructed in 1845.
The Marchmont district, lying directly south of the Meadows, developed on land first feued by the Warrenders of Bruntsfield in 1869.