Publication Account
Date 1951
Event ID 1097741
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1097741
54. The Tailors' Hall and associated buildings, 137 Cowgate.
The article which follows has been based upon a report on the buildings prepared expressly for the purposes of this Inventory by two former members of the Commission, the late Mr. Thomas Ross, LL.D., and the late Professor G. Baldwin Brown, and published in full in The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, xi,pp. 125 ff.
Apart from St. Giles' Church and the Magdalen Chapel, the Tailors' Hall is the most important building now surviving in Edinburgh that possesses a connection with the life of the mediaeval trade-corporations. As the Magdalen Chapel became the home of the Hammermen's Incorporation, so the Tailors' Hall, as its name implies, belonged to the Incorporation of Tailors and was their corporate seat. The earlier history of the site is beyond the scope of this article, but the following points, which have been drawn from a variety of documents,* are of general interest.
The site passed into the Tailors' hands, in two parcels, in 1620. At that date there stood upon it several buildings, some of them apparently ruinous, with two courts or yards. The Hall was built at once, on the S. side of a court which was probably the same as one of those mentioned in the charters, and was completed by 1621. The buildings that stood, until 1940,** between the court and the Cowgate followed more than twenty years later. By 1755 the Tailors' property is shown, by a fire-insurance policy, to have consisted of “…their Tenements in the form of a Square on the South side of the Cougate opposite to the Meal Mercat Edinr, Stone and Slated, viz., a fforeland fronting the Cougate Consisting of four Stories and Garrets occupied by Thomas Trotter Breuer & oyrs not Exceeding Eight hundred pounds Sterling. A Tenement on the East Side of the Court but Separate from the aforesaid not Exceeding Two hundred pounds money forsd. A Tenement Adjoining the South Gavel of the last mentioned which is Us'd for Conveening the Incorporation in the third Storie. The two Stories below are us'd as Malt Lofts occupied by Thomas Trotter aforesaid not Exceeding four hundred pounds. A Tenement adjoining the West Gavel of the last mentioned Used for Malt Barn or Granaries not Exceeding fourty pounds. Breu-house& Malt Kiln adjoining on the West Side of the Court Separate from the aforesaid Buildings not Exceeding sixty pounds all Stone and Slated…”
The foregoing references to brewing are of some interest, as the brewing industry, which seems to have been established in this part of the City by the end of the sixteenth century, has maintained itself there down to the present day. In the eighteenth century another part of the premises was occupied by a printer, while the Hall itself, during the second quarter of that century, was used intermittently as a theatre. In the early nineteenth century one, at least, of the rooms served as a school. In 1801 the Argyle Brewery acquired the whole ofthe Tailors' property in the Cowgate with theexception of the building numbered I I on Fig. 269,which the Incorporation reserved to itself.
It is interesting to record that the meeting of 27th February, 1638, at which the draft of the National Covenant was approved, was held in the Hall; also that during the Cromwellian period the Hall was used as a court-house by the Commissioners administering the forfeited estates of the Royalists.
[see RCAHMS 1951, 105-109, for an architectural description of the Tailor’s Hall, and the buildings that formerly faced the Cowgate that were demolished in 1940]
RCAHMS 1951
*For information on sources, and for fuller details than can be given here - particularly regarding the history of the site before its purchase by the Incorporation of Tailors - see O.E.C., xi, pp. 125-43 and 158-71.
**These buildings were demolished while the present article was in preparation.
