Ordnance gazetteer of Scotland > Volume 5

MELROSE
■entirely gone, and nothing can now be ascertained as to
their extent. A large portion of them must have been
removed to provide materials for the house that Com-
mendator Douglas erected in 1590, and subsequently the
-walls were, no doubt, used pretty much as a quarry for
■whosoever chose. The stones of the vaulted roof con-
structed over part of the nave in 1618 were obtained from
the same source, as were also those of the old town jail,
and materials for repairs at the mills and sluices — and in-
deed there is an old tradition that there is not a house in
the village but has in it stones taken from the monastery.
The author of the Monastic Annals of TeviotdaU speaks
of a lofty building of excellent masonry that was taken
down in 1695, and says it was supposed to have been
the bakehouse, as ' it contained several well-constructed
ovens, one over another in the different stories.' He
also mentions as having then been laid bare, ' a vaulted
passage or drain, of such dimensions that two or three
persons might easily walk in it abreast,' and passing
underground from this place to several other parts of the
convent. Milne, who was parish minister, and whose
Account of Melrose, was published in 1743, says that the
whole buildings were enclosed by a high wall about a
mile in circuit, and describes bases of pillars and other
traces of a building to the NE of the church. This was
probably the chapterhouse.
The present ruins of the church are evidently, in the
main, those of the building erected in 1322, though there
have been many subsequent alterations, and indeed the
"windows and upper walls to the E are probably sub-
sequent to the English devastation in 1385, while portions
may date even as late as 1505. We have already seen
that the building suffered great damage during Hertford's
invasions, and the Reformation happening very shortly
thereafter, there was no opportunity for the monks to
repair it before they had to quit altogether. Far from
a centre of population, no actual harm seems to have
been done to it, as to some of the other buildings of the
Old Church, in the actual progress of the Reformation ;
but after its desertion by its inmates, and its partial
■destruction, wind and weather probably did still more
injury. In 1618, when part of the nave came to be used
:as a parish church, the roof had to be closed up by the
unsightly vault of modern masonry that extends from
the crossing some 60 feet westward. * A great number
of the stone images of saints which filled the numerous
niches that adorn the walls, were left untouched till
1649, when they were almost all thrown down and
destroyed, why or by whose order is not known.
The church is cruciform, and stands E and W, the
total length in that direction being 258 feet while the
breadth is 79 feet. The transepts measure 130 feet
from N to S, and are 44 feet wide, while the one wall of
the square central tower that is still standing is 84 feet
high. The nave has had an aisle on each side, and to the
S of the south aisle there are eight small chapels separated
one from another by walls. 'The line of the pillars sup-
porting the arches dividing the nave from the aisles has
been continued by other two columns on each side, along
the sides of the choir, to the chancel and lady chapel.
Of these the two to the W, of which only the bases now
remain, supported the E wall of the centre tower, and
in a line with these a row of pillars has run along from
N to S, separating the transepts from, E of the S tran-
sept, the chapel of St Bridget, and, E of the N" transept,
the chapel of St Stephen. Square projections from
these, at the NE and SE angles of the choir, have also
formed chapels. Except at the corner of that to the
JNE, the walls of the transepts, chancel, and chapels are
still pretty entire, and several of the slender flying
buttresses remain. Of the pillars between the aisle and
nave only the four next the nave now remain, and along
these the elaborate groining of the roof over the S aisle
is intact. On the N side of the nave the bases of three
* When the present parish church was built in 1810, it waa in-
"tended that this vaulting should be removed, as well as the modern
Aral! at the W end of it ; but as this wotUd have given increased
,play to wind, it was thought better, in the interests of the delicate
tracery of the E and S windows, to allow it to remain.
MELROSE
pillars farther W are visible, while the nave itself is
covered over by the unsightly 17th century arching
already noticed. A small doorway, opening off the N
aisle, is the 'steel-clenched postern door' by which Scott
in the Lay of the Last Minstrel makes the old monk
introduce William of Deloraine to the church. It leads
out into the space where the cloisters have been, where,
on the walls, there are a number of false Gothic arches
of great beauty. The carving of the ornaments of these
is particularly well preserved and beautiful. ' There is
one cloister in particular,' says Lockhart, 'along the
whole length of which there runs a cornice of flowers
and plants, entirely unrivalled, to my mind, by any-
thing elsewhere extant. I do not say in Gothic archi-
tecture merely, but in any architecture whatever. Roses
and lilies, and thistles, and ferns, and heaths, in all
their varieties, and oak leaves and ash leaves, and a
thousand beautiful shapes besides, are chiselled with
such inimitable truth and such grace of nature, that
the finest botanist in the world could not desire a better
hortus siccus, so far as they go.' The roof is quite gone,
but there are holes along the walls for the beams. The
carving of the doorway itself that leads into the cloister
is particularly worthy of notice for its exquisite under-
cutting. Over the chancel and lady chapel the beauti-
ful groining remains, and in the wall, above the site of
the high altar, are the remains of the tracery — still
pretty entire — of the beautiful E window where Scott
has described the moon as shining
' Tlarough slender shafts of shapely stone.
By foliaged tracery combined ;
Thou would'st have thought some fairy's hand,
'Twi.xt poplars straight, the osier wand,
In many a freakish knot, had twined ;
Then framed a spell, when the work was done,
And chaut^ed the willow -wreaths to stone.' t
This window, which is 36 feet high and 16 wide, has
five mullions each 8 inches wide, with transoms, and
interwoven towards the top with very light and elegant
tracery. With this window is here associated the legend
connected in most of the other old ecclesiastical build-
ings with some of the pillars (see Roslin). Immediately
beneath the site of the high altar is the resting-place of
the heart of Robert Bruce, and to the S of it is a dark-
coloured slab of polished encrinital limestone, said to
mark the grave of Alexander II., who was buried near
the high altar in 1249. Other authorities, however,
maintain that it marks the burial-place of St Waltheof J
or Waldeve, who was the second abbot of the monastery
founded by King David, and that it is the slab placed
here by Ingram, Bishop of Glasgow (1164-74) who came
to Melrose, according to the Chronica de Mailros, to
open the grave after Waltheof had been buried for
twelve years, and found the body in perfect preservation.
Scott makes the old monk and William of Deloraine
seat themselves on it while waiting till the exact moment
for opening the tomb of Michael Scott should arrive.
t The description of Melrose by moonlight, with which the
second canto of the Lay of the Last Minstrel commences, is now
generally admitted to have been purely imaginary. Some of the
details, if real, could only have been described by one who had
been actually about the building at night, and this in Scott's case
does not seem to have been so. Old John Bower who was so long
the keeper of the abbey always stoutly maintained that Scott
never got the key from him at night, and so could never possibly
have been about the ruin by moonlight, and the 'great wizard'
is said himself to have once appended to the lines the additional
ones — somewhat apocryphal : —
* Then go and muse with deepest awe
On what the writer never saw.
Who x^-ould not wander 'neath tlie moon
To see what he could see at noon.'
Moore indeed maintained that Scott was much too practical a man
to go poking about the ruins by moonlight. Bower himself is
said in dark nights to have accommodated poetry-struck -risitors
by means of a lantern set on the end of a pole. Latterly he even
preferred his double tallow-candle to the moon itself. ' It does na
hcht up a' the Abbey at aince, to be sure,' he would say, ' but
then you can shift it aboot, and show the auld ruin bit hy bit,
whiles the moon only shines on one side.'
J St Waltheof was a son of the "wife of David I. by her first
husband, Simon, Earl of Huntingdon, and so the grandson ot
Siward Saxon Coimt of Northumberland.
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