Edinburgh Arms

Seal or 'Coat of Arms' of Edinburgh

Seal of Edinburgh

EDINBURGH, or rather the Castle Rock, seems to have been called by the ancient Britons Myttyt;l Agned, meaning the H 11 of Agnes, but who this Agnes was is unknown, and Dineiddyn. At that period it is doubtful whether it was a fortified place, or simply a place of refuge. One legend narrates that when fighting was going on the daughters of the Pic ish kings used to be shut up in the castle, anq hence in Latin it was called Castru Puellarum, or the Castle of the Maidens, and the town which grew up around it as called Maidenburgh. In 617 Edwin, a Northumbrian Prince, recovered his ancestral kingdom of Deira, and by force of arms took possession of all the country known as the Lothians. The Castle Rock naturally attracted his attention from its strategical position, and tradition says that he built a castle thereon, with a town clustering under its base, and called the town, aft~r himself, Edwinsburgh. This name appears in 1128 in the foundation charter of Holyrood. In the reign of Indulp ,one of the Celtic kings, the town and castle together were called by one name-Dunedin-meaning either “the face of a hill,” or “the strength of Edwin.”

The Seal of the City may be described as follows A castle, triple-towered and embattled, masoned of the first, and topped with three fanes, windows and portcullis shut of the last, situate on a rock proper, and on a wreath is set for the crest an anchor wreathed about with a cable all proper. Supported on the right side by a maid richly attired, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders, and on the left by a doe or hind proper. Motto on an escroll beneath “Nisi dominus frustra.”

The crest alludes to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh being ex-officio, Admiral of the Firth of Forth. It is hardly necessary to say that the castle represents Edinburgh Castle, impregnably situated on the rock in the centre of the city.

The maid alludes to the legend of the daughters of the Pictish kings. Nisbet says that the Arms of Edinburgh are connected with its impregnable castle where the honourable virgins, the daughters of our sovereigns and of our nobility, were kept from the insults of the enemy in time of war.

The doe or hind refers to a legend connected with St. Giles, the patron saint of the city, and to whom the Parish Church of Edinburgh is said to have been dedicated as early as 854, and it is so recognised in a charter of King David II in 1359. St. Giles was an Athenian of royal blood, but eventually became a hermit, and took up his abode near the mouth of the Rhone. “Here,” says Mrs Jameson, in her “Sacred and Legendary Art,” “he dwelt in a cave by the side of a clear spring, living upon the herbs and fruits of the forest, and upon the milk of a hind, which had taken up its abode with him. Now it came to pass that the King of France (or, according to another legend, Wamba, King of the Goths) was hunting in the neighbourhood, and the hind, pursued by the dogs and wounded by an arrow, fled to the cavern of the saint, and took refuge in his arms; the hunters following on its track, were surprised to find a venerable old man, kneeling in prayer, and the wounded hind crouching at his side. Thereupon the King and his followers, perceiving that it was a holy man, prostrated themselves before him and entreated forgiveness. The saint, resisting all the attempts of the King to withdraw him from his solitude, died in his cave about the year 541.”

The motto seems to be an abridgement of the first verse of the 127th Psalm – “Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

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