I'm Bruce Fummey. A while back I read a book about the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on the
ingenuity of an empire, the invention of America, the promotion of rational thought,
and the creation of the modern world. The book was called 'How the Scots Invented the Modern World'.
So if the Scottish Enlightenment invented the modern world, today I want to show you where it
was invented. If you're interested in the people, places and events in Scottish history, then click
the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen, in the meantime, let me tell you a story.
In August every year, as a grassroots stand-up comic, I walked the streets here of this High Street,
as it transformed into a sardine tin of festival goers, street performers, leaflet distributors, and
frustrated Edinburghers, who were just trying to go about their business in the heat of an
inconveniently sunny day. However, August 1696 was apparently very cold, and as a group of young men,
boys really, walked past the Tron Church here, one of them said it was so cold he'd rather be in hell
for a heat. Now I've often seen this known event cited as the shocking moment that defined a change.
The student, Thomas Aitkenhead, found himself on a charge of blasphemy, and this, and other comments
sceptical as 17th Century Presbyterianism, saw the 18 year old hanged on the 8th of January 1697.
This form of austere Presbyterianism has always presented a dichotomy for me. Living just down the Royal
Mile behind me, and preaching in St Giles, up the hill, John Knox had no truck with dancing, drinking,
card playing, theatre or Christmas, but it seems to me, that his desire for a literate population,
who could read the Bible for themselves, led to a more educated populous, rational thought, and
the questioning of some of the very tenets of Christianity that he espoused. The century that
followed the execution of Thomas Aitkenhead, was the century of Scottish Enlightenment, when French
Philosopher, Voltaire, said 'It's to Scotland that we look for our ideas of civilization'.
So what was it like, this Scotland that built the modern world? It was like this; dark closes (alleyways)
running off the Royal Mile, down to the Cowgate on one side, and the fetid sewage swamp of the Norloch,
on the other Princes Street Gardens is way nicer, but they wouldn't come for another century. This
is Flesh Market Close. It's fair to assume that on the ground floor here, people
sold flesh, but the building above would have towered upwards, way beyond that which was safe.
Night-time Edinburgh had its dangers too, which is why at night, the gate over the entranceway at each
end was closed, and this was called a close. Now remember, these were houses teetering on a rock.
This wasn't a convenient riverside place with a river running by, to provide a ready supply
of water, it had to be hand carried up the stairs, and when finished with,
it had to somehow get back down again. Gardyloo (from the French, Gardez l'eau - mind the water). Aye, gardyloo yourself!
So poor folk would live at the very top, where safety was minimum, and carrying a maximum,
or they would live on the ground floor here, alongside the day's doings. It would be thrown
out of every one of the 10 to 12 floors above onto the street here, in fact sometimes
if you continue down the close towards the train station, even today you can still get a whiff of ...
pish. Homes were cramped and overcrowded. The gentry and the proles lived cheek by jowl on
different floors in the same closes. Outshone by London, Paris and Vienna, there's no way that a dark,
dingy, overcrowded Capital City, with no running water, on Europe's northern fringe
could change the world and how it thinks. Unless it had an unusually literate population,
and some place for these literati to meet. As the 18th Century spawned a literate population,
that wanted to meet to discuss ideas of philosophy, religion, science and morality,
they couldn't do it in their cramped houses, here in Edinburgh. They met in taverns and coffee houses.
In fact, if you wanted to meet your bank manager, your solicitor, your jeweller, your doctor, there's a fair
chance that you'd do it in a tavern or a coffee house. Now the difference between the two was far
less well-defined than it is today. Your doctor may have been drinking coffee, but he was just
as likely to be swilling claret, and be pished, but coffee was new, it was exotic. Now today there's a
coffee shop at the entrance to Parliament Square, but the first coffee house opened in Parliament
Square in 1673. Before long there were 23 coffee houses in and around Parliament Square. In the
early days, the only place international traders could get coffee, was from the Yemeni Highlands.
It was dried, packed and sent to market. Then it was shipped from entrepots by dhow, across the Red
Sea to Jeddah, then by camel to Constantinople, or Alexandria, to be shipped to Europe. Often coffee
was smuggled to avoid duty, sometimes it was captured by pirates, and when it arrived here,
it was advertised in Edinburgh newspapers, named after the Yemeni port that it came from,
Mocha. Coffee made you alert and awake, more importantly it made you exotic. If you wanted to
be the picture of sobriety and sophistication, then you sipped coffee. It was like drinking an iPhone
12. Now six months from now, an iPhone 12 won't be exotic, but we'll still be drinking coffee. This
here, is Adam Smith. If we zoom in, we might just see in the distance, up the Royal Mile, the statue
of David Hume. Now enlightenment Scotland had way more luminescent people than just these two:
Adam Ferguson, John Adam, Robert Adam, Joseph Black, James Boswell, James Bruce, Thomas Carlyle, Adam
Ferguson, Francis Hutcheson, James Hutton, William Hunter, John Hunter, Lord Keynes, Thomas Telford,
James Watt, John Witherspoon, and many more. Even James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd and Rabbie Burns
the ploughman poet, but mainly Adam Smith and David Hume. They're the kind of guys
that internationally most people recognise all over the world from Scotland. They'd often meet
in one of Edinburgh's most celebrated coffee houses. John's Coffee House was opened in 1688,
in the east corner of Parliament Square here, next to the old Scottish Parliament. It even features
in a painting called 'The Parliament Close, and Public Characters of Edinburgh, 50 Years Since'
painted by John Kay. Now there's a really interesting, interactive website based on that painting and
I'll give you a link to that at the end. As I say, John's Coffee House didn't just sell coffee, one
of their specialities was Cauld Cock and Feather. This was a glass of brandy, and a bunch of raisins.
If you were standing here at midday, in the early 18th Century, you'd see a parade
of parliament clerks, leave the Parliament, and process like an officious conga line, across the
square and take their meridian refreshments at John's Coffee House, where rounds of brandy and
raisins were waiting for them, but John's Coffee House disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to it,
until now. The Court backpackers hostel here fits the location for John's Coffee House, but with no
sign of the dark basement rooms where the enlightenment's troglodyte intellectuals would gather,
and then somebody noticed that a wall contained what must have been a blocked up stairwell.
With the curiosity of one of those enlightenment intellectuals, they thought, let's break that down,
and when they did, they found a whole new world, that had lain hidden underground,
long forgotten, beneath the blocked off stairwell, but now it's open, and you and I are going to visit.
How ironic is it, that down the narrow closes of Edinburgh's Old Town, where Scotland brought
illumination to the world, we are now shining a light in a world, that for so many years, has been
in darkness. These are the rooms where the Clerks of Court would accept their meridian as recorded by
Walter Scott. In 1706, this was a meeting place for people who gathered to discuss and plan, what
they could do to prevent the odious Act of Union going through the Parliament next door. Who knows?
Maybe the Jacobites visited when they occupied Edinburgh in 1745. What we do know
is that in 1754, the famous portrait painter Alan Ramsay, approached two of his friends, Adam Smith
and David Hume, to suggest a society where intellectuals could meet to socialise, discuss
and debate. The purpose of the society would be 'by practice, to improve themselves in reasoning and
eloquence, and by the freedom of debate, to discover the most effectual methods of promoting the good
of the country'. It became known as The Select Society, and it included some of the very luminaries that
I mentioned earlier. One of the debates was over the rules of the society. David Hume found them
too formal, whereas James Boswell approved of their politeness. Now that may be a matter of opinion, but
what's certain is that when they gathered to write and collate the rules for the society, it was here.
Here in these dark basements of John's Coffee House, in Parliament Square in Edinburgh. From
here, that improvement and light spread, not just to the country, but to the world. It seems a long
way from the hanging of a young lad for making a blasphemous statement, a few yards down the street
six years before. In a second, there will be a link to a video about John Knox, who let's remember,
inadvertently created the Scottish Enlightenment situation, with that demand for a Bible reading,
literate nation, but before you go, what will this place be used for now that it has reopened?
They say that they're open to ideas, so if you're a Scottish patriot that wants to oppose the Union,
if you're a Parliamentary Clerk organising a lunchtime social, if you're a doctor running
short of surgery space, if you're a philosopher, thinker or self-improver, who wants to meet
like-minded people to change the world, this might be a cool place to do it, because this
is where Scotland changed the world the last time. You'll find out about 'John Knox, the Man
Who Made Scotland', here, and later on you can find that website at www.parliamentsquare
edinburgh.net In the meantime, tha mi an dochas gum bith lath math leibh. Tiorridh an drasda.