William Nelson was a pupil in the High School of Edinburgh when one great cycle in its history was completed. It had occupied the site of the old Blackfriars’ Monastery for upwards of two hundred and seventy years. In 1555 the town house of Cardinal Beaton, at the foot of the Blackfriars’ Wynd, which continued to be one of the most interesting historical buildings in Edinburgh till its demolition in 1871, was rented by the city for the use of the Grammar School, while a building for its permanent occupation was “being biggit on the east side of the Kirk-of-Field,” the scene, a few years later, of Lord Darnley’s mysterious assassination. Its rector was David Vocat, a prebendary of the neighbouring collegiate church of St. Mary-in-the-Field; and under his rule the cloisters of the Dominicans, built for them in 1230 by Alexander II., gave place to the halls and playground of the High School boys. But it was a turbulent age, and before the century closed the Yards became the scene of a tragic event which retained a prominent place among the traditions of the school so long as it remained on the old site. In 1598 Bailie Macmoran, one of the city magistrates, was shot in a barring out of the schoolboys by William Sinclair, a son of the Chancellor of Caithness. The contemporary diarist, Birrel, notes that “there was ane number of scholaris, being gentlemen’s bairns, made a mutinie;” and on the poor bailie interposing, the schoolboy revolt ended in dire tragedy.
Great as were the changes that time had wrought on the locality where the old monastery of the Black Friars gave place to the City Grammar School, a flavour of historic antiquity pervaded it to the last. The episcopal palace of the Beatons, where the school work had been carried on for a time, still stood at the foot of the High School Wynd; and near by was the site of that of Gawain Douglas, who, while still provost of St. Giles’s collegiate church--
“In a barbarous age Gave to rude Scotland Virgil’s page.”
It was probably due to the vicinity of their lodgings that the poet interposed on behalf of the militant archbishop when, after the famous street feud of “Cleanse the Causeway,” Beaton had vainly sought sanctuary behind the altar of the Blackfriars’ Church, and, but for the interposition of the poet, would have been slain. His vigorous translation of the Æneid into the Scottish vernacular was a favourite with William Nelson in later years. But the associations of the locality in his school days were for the most part of more recent date.