Grassmarket

First mentioned in the Registrum Magni Sigilii Regum Scotorum (1363) as "the street called Newbygging [new buildings] under the castle", the Grassmarket was, from 1477, one of Edinburgh's main market places, a part of which was given over to the sale of horses and cattle (the name apparently deriving from livestock grazing in pens beyond its western end).

Of the West Bow at the north-east corner, considerably altered in the Victorian period, he wrote, "This street, which is called the Bow, is generally full of wholesale traders, and those very considerable dealers in iron, pitch, tar, oil, hemp, flax, linseed, painters' colours, dyers, drugs and woods, and such like heavy goods, and supplies country shopkeepers, as our wholesale dealers in England do.

"[2] From 1800 onwards the area became a focal point for the influx of Irish immigrants and a high number of lodging houses appeared for those unable to pay a regular rent.

[3] As a gathering point for market traders and cattle drovers, the Grassmarket was traditionally a place of taverns, hostelries and temporary lodgings, a fact still reflected in the use of some of the surrounding buildings.

In the late 18th century the fly coach to London, via Dumfries and Carlisle, set out from an inn at the Cowgate Head at the eastern end of the market place.

Closure of the female hostel at the junction of West Port and the Grassmarket around 2000 in combination with an overall gentrification, capitalising on the street's location, began to truly change the atmosphere.

Closure of the public toilets at the east end (a focal point for "jakeys" - drunken-down-and-outs) and comprehensive re-landscaping in the beginning of the 21st century has transformed the character of the area.

An inscribed flagstone in the central pavement in front of the White Hart Inn indicates the spot where a bomb exploded during a Zeppelin raid on the city on the night of 2–3 April 1916.

The area was urbanized in the late 15th century, with the division of the land into burgage-plots and construction of a tenement, at the same time the market place was established in Grassmarket.

One obdurate prisoner's refusal to escape death by swearing loyalty to the Crown prompted the snide remark by the Duke of Rothes that he had chosen to "glorify God in the Grassmarket".

A popular story in Edinburgh is that of Margaret (or Maggie) Dickson, a fishwife from Musselburgh, whose husband left, possibly press-ganged, to join the Royal Navy.

Maggie had gone to work in an inn in the Borders, and was hanged in the Grassmarket in August 1724, at the age of 22 or 23, by hangman John Dalgliesh[9] for murdering her illegitimate baby there by drowning it or placing it in the river Tweed at Kelso, shortly after the birth.

After the hanging, a doctor declared Dickson dead, and her family argued with the medical students, who then were only allowed to dissect criminal corpses,[9] so her body was taken back to Musselburgh on a cart.

[10] In later life (and legend), she was referred to as "hauf-hingit Maggie" and attracted curiosity as she was seen back in the Grass-market in October 1724, with an item about a crowd forming to see her in the Scots Magazine.

Boswell, convinced of his client's innocence and citing Maggie Dickson's miraculous recovery, hatched a plan to recover Reid's corpse immediately after execution and have it resuscitated by surgeons.

As this apparatus was always arranged before dawn, it seemed as if the gallows had grown out of the earth in the course of one night, like the production of some foul demon; and I well remember the fright with which the schoolboys, when I was one of their number, used to regard these ominous signs of deadly preparation.

[13] The City Improvement Scheme of 1868 cleared many of the slums and widened streets such as West Port, and the western group of buildings all derive from this plan.

A further improvement plan in the 1920s by the City architect Ebenezer MacRae skilfully closed many of the gaps with faux Scots Baronial blocks, ironically all built as council housing.

[18][19][20] For most of its history the Grassmarket was one of the poorest areas of the city, associated in the nineteenth century with an influx of poor Irish and the infamous murderers Burke and Hare.