s's, swaying as with great blasts and currents of
religious feeling the minds of the great congregation that filled the
aisles of the cathedral, it is to be doubted whether Edinburgh was a
very agreeable habitation in those days of early fervour, when the
Congregation occupied the chief place everywhere, and men's thoughts
were not as yet distracted by the coming of the Queen. During this
period there occurs a curious and most significant story of an Edinburgh
mob and riot, which might be placed by the side of the famous Porteous
mob of later days, and which throws a somewhat lurid light upon the
record of this most triumphant moment of the early Reformation. The
Papists and bishops, Knox says, had stirred up the rasckall multitude to
"make a Robin Hood." We may remark that he never changes his name for
the mob, of which he is always sternly contemptuous. When it destroys
convents and altars he flatters it (though he acknowledges sometimes a
certain ease in finding the matter thus settled for him) with no better
a title. He was no democrat though the most independent of citizens. The
vulgar crowd had at no time any attraction for him.

It seems no very great offence to "make a Robin Hood": but it is evident
this popular festival had been always an occasion of rioting and
disorderly behaviour since it was condemned by various acts of previous
Parliaments. It will strike the reader, however, with dismay and horror
to find that one of the ringleaders having been taken, he was condemned
to be hanged, and a gibbet erected near the Cross to carry this sentence
into execution. The _Diurnal of Occurrents_ gives by far the fullest and
most graphic account of what followed. The trades rose in anxious
tumult, at once angry and terrified.

"The craftsmen made great solicitations at the hands of the provost,
John Knox minister, and the baillie, to have gotten him relieved,
promising that he would do anything possible to be done saving his
life--who would do nothing but have him hanged. And when the time of
the poor man's hanging approached, and that the poor man was come to
the gibbet with the ladder upon which the said cordwainer should
have been hanged, the craftsman's children (apprentices?) and
servants past to armour; and first they housed Alexander Guthrie and
the provost and baillies in the said Alexander's writing booth, and
syne come down again to the Cross, and dang down the gibbet a