Edinburgh

EDINBURGH

EDINBURGH. "Edinburgh, sir, is the metropolis of this ancient kingdom, the seat of law, the rendezvous of taste, and winter quarters of all our nobility who cannot afford to live in London." In these terms a newspaper correspondent of 1767 summarized Scotland's capital. To this list could be added the best educational facilities in Scotland—perhaps in Britain—including a fine university (founded in 1582) and a flourishing printing industry. Edinburgh had long been central to Scottish life. It had been the seat of the royal court until James VI (James I of England) moved to London in 1603, and the Scottish Parliament sat there until the Union of 1707 saw it subsumed into that of Westminster. The popular (as distinct from the political) Reformation in Scotland began with Edinburgh merchants and professionals in the 1560s. Other Scottish revolutions (1637–1638 and 1689–1690) were made in the capital. Scotland's cultural life concentrated there and much intellectual change originated there. Eighteenth-century Edinburgh was the cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment, a true "hotbed of genius" and a cultural hub of European significance.

Given a charter in the twelfth century, Edinburgh was a "royal burgh" with its own constitution or "set" and extensive trading privileges. At the time of the Reformation, Edinburgh and its suburbs or satellites had roughly 15–18,000 inhabitants; by the 1660s it contained 25–30,000 people and perhaps 45,000 by 1700: easily Scotland's largest city and the second largest in Britain after London at these dates. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Edinburgh was a compact settlement, perched on a narrow ridge leading east from the rock on which stood Edinburgh's medieval castle. One main street ran for approximately 1,300 meters down this ridge from the castle to the royal palace of Holyrood. Nearly 300 steep and narrow "closes" and "wynds" (alleys) issued off this street, now known as the "Royal Mile." Growing steadily from the fifteenth century, Edinburgh expanded rapidly in area and population from the mid-eighteenth century. Starting on the south side of the city, new neoclassical housing developments began in the 1750s, reaching their apogee in the celebrated northern "New Town" streets of the 1760s and beyond. By 1800 the expanded conurbation contained more than 80,000 people.

Edinburgh was easily the richest town in Scotland, and far more prosperous than its relative size would suggest. It was already Scotland's first town in economic terms by the early sixteenth century, a position it consolidated in the following 200 years. Edinburgh paid a third of the taxation raised from all the royal burghs of Scotland in the later seventeenth century and an equal share of total excise revenue in the 1720s—this from a city with a 4 to 5 percent share of the population. Through its port at Leith, Edinburgh conducted an extensive coastal and foreign trade with the rest of Britain and the North Sea, Baltic, and Atlantic coastlines. Its occupational structure was characterized by unusually large proportions of professionals (principally lawyers, but also medical men and educators) and of servants, testifying to its wealth and economic orientation. Among the rest of the seventeenth-century population, more than half were engaged in making textiles, clothes, or leather goods, about a quarter in building trades, and a sixth in food and drink. Edinburgh's less well documented suburbs may have been more concerned with manufacturing, but the capital was Scotland's principal service center. It was Scotland's undeniable economic leader until the late eighteenth century, when Glasgow outstripped it in both size and commercial dynamism, if not in social and cultural eminence.

See also James I and VI (England and Scotland) ; Knox, John ; Scotland ; Stuart Dynasty (England and Scotland) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Houston, R. A. Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660–1760. Oxford and New York, 1994. The only comprehensive study of the city for the early modern period.

Lynch, Michael. Edinburgh and the Reformation. Edinburgh, 1979. Deals with more than just religion.

Youngson, A. J. The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750–1840. Edinburgh, 1966. Reprinted many times, this is a classic study of the development of the "New Town."

R. A. Houston