Clan Sinclair · 1446
Rosslyn Chapel
Sir William Sinclair, third and last Earl of Orkney, founded the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew at Roslin, seven miles south of Edinburgh, in 1446. The carving programme that followed ran for forty years and produced an interior of unique density: every pillar, boss, archstone and capital crowded with foliage, angels, beasts, biblical scenes and faces, including forms some have read as American maize and aloe carved decades before Columbus. The Apprentice Pillar in the south-east of the chapel carries the building's most famous folk-story, of a master mason who killed his own apprentice with a mallet on returning from Rome to find the boy had carved the pillar from a dream. Templar and Masonic associations have been read into Rosslyn for two centuries; the chapel has carried them all and remains itself.
Some buildings are commissioned to flatter a line. A few are commissioned to outlast it. The founder who chooses the second knows what he is buying. He is buying time in the only currency that has ever paid out: dressed stone, deeply cut, on consecrated ground.
THE EARL ON THE LEVELLED GROUND
On the twenty-first of September, 1446, Sir William Sinclair, third and last Earl of Orkney, stands on the marked-out floor of his new collegiate church at Roslin. He is in his middle fifties. He holds, by treaty, the earldom of Orkney from the Norwegian crown; by service, the Lordship of Caithness from the Scottish crown; by patronage, the regard of the Roman church. Three kings of Scots have passed in his lifetime. The Sinclairs have outlived all three. He has come up the wooded valley of the North Esk this morning to see the foundation stones struck, and to set the carving programme. The walls are at his knee. The country to the south, the cliffs above the burn, is dressed in early autumn colour through the open arches of the unfinished west wall.
THE MORNING THE STONES WERE STRUCK
A trestle has been set against the south wall. On it lies the vellum sheet with the masons' design. Sir Gilbert Hay, master of the work, stands at his elbow with a stick of charcoal and a folded list. In Hay's pouch are six sketches of carved foliage from Glasgow Cathedral that he has been carrying three years against the chance the right founder would commission the right work. The masons, twenty of them, are at their tools along the levelled ground. The bishop's clerk is somewhere by the north door with a wax tablet and the costed estimate. The estimate accounts for an ordinary collegiate chapel: prophets in the corbels, the standard cycle of saints, plain ashlar between.
A SECOND OF TIME ON THE NORTH ESK
Sinclair looks at the vellum. He looks at the lime-marked piers. He looks at the cost. The masons of Aberdeen and Glasgow work to the cost: they carve what is paid for, and they leave the rest of the stone plain. That is the ordinary way of it, and the bishop's clerk is expecting the ordinary way. To depart from it is to triple the bill and to commit the house of Sinclair to forty years of carving on ground that may yet pass through wardship or forfeiture or a daughter's marriage out of the line. To hold to it is to raise another chapel like the chapels at Corstorphine and Seton and a dozen other lordly foundations, indistinguishable in a century, forgotten in two. He weighs the cost in his head against the line. The line has not outlasted three of its kings already. Stone outlasts kings. He has the thought clean and entire, in the time it takes Hay to lift the charcoal from the vellum, and he turns to the master mason and says it. Every surface. Foliage to begin, then the prophets in the corbels, then the angels in the bosses, then the green men in the springers; any man on the team with a face worth keeping, put him in the south aisle. I want it crowded. Hay does not flinch. Hay has been waiting for the answer. He nods, and reaches into his pouch for the Glasgow sketches.
THE PILLAR IN THE SOUTH-EAST
Hay raises the question of the heavy pier in the south-east, by the place marked for the Lady chapel. He has a design from Burgundy: vines round a column, carved deep in the round, the kind of work that wants a particular hand. Sinclair looks at the marked floor and answers, in plain Scots, that the pier is to be carved as Hay has it. If they get the carver, they will get the carver. If the carver does the work from a dream, they will not stop him. Hay folds the Burgundy sheet back into the pouch. The bishop's clerk, at the north door, writes nothing down. The decision is between the earl and the master, and the stone, and the forty years.
THE FORTY YEARS
The chapel was forty years building. The carving runs to thousands of figures: foliage on every surface, prophets in the corbels, angels in the bosses, green men in the springers, the apostles, the seven virtues and seven vices, the dance of death, beasts and instruments and the faces of men who worked the stone. The pillar in the south-east was carved as Hay had it from Burgundy: four serpents at the base, a vine spiralling the column, leaves cut separately and pegged in. Among the foliage of the Lady chapel are forms some have read as American maize and aloe; if the readings hold, they predate Columbus by half a century. The botanical readings are contested. The carvings remain.
THE INTERLUDE OF THE APPRENTICE
The chapel acquired, in the telling, a story of its own making. A master mason, sent to Rome to study the model for the great pillar, returned to find that his apprentice had carved it in his absence from a dream, and killed the boy with a mallet for the insult of his finishing it first. The faces of master and apprentice were set in the corbels above the south aisle, and a visitor today can pick them out. The story is medieval folk material, not record; what is recorded is the pillar itself, and the two faces, and the silence of the stone between them.
THE LONG LOOK BACK
Sir William Sinclair was buried under the chancel of the chapel he had founded. His son sold Orkney back to the Scottish crown in 1470 to settle the marriage portion of Margaret of Denmark, and the earldom passed out of the line. The Reformation closed the chapel for worship; Cromwell's troopers stabled their horses in the nave; the roof went, and was replaced, and went again. From the eighteenth century onward the chapel attracted Templar and Masonic readings, intensifying after Walter Scott set a verse of The Lay of the Last Minstrel in its aisles, and again, on a different scale, after the publication of The Da Vinci Code in 2003, after which the annual visitor numbers tripled and have stayed there. The Sinclair family did have a documented part in the early Scottish freemasonic tradition; the Templar claim is weaker. The Sinclairs hold the chapel still, through the Rosslyn Chapel Trust.
WHAT THE STONE WAS FOR
The hour at which a man sets the measure of his line is rarely the hour of a battle. More often it is the hour at which he looks at an estimate, and decides what the estimate is for. The line that wanted to be remembered for the thing of stone is, six centuries after the laying of the foundation, remembered for the chapel. Inside the south-east pier, where the vine climbs to the capital and the four serpents bite their own tails at the base, the pegged leaves still hold.