Extract from Rosslyn

Chapter 11 - The Chapel of the Grail

Any understanding of the mysteries of Rosslyn chapel lies in the character and learning of its creator, William, Earl of Orkney, and the European influences of his time. Although he was the designer of his Temple of Solomon and Grail chapel, his masons with their own creative carvings were messengers of the later lodges of the crafts and guilds. For, as Father Hay attested, Earl William 'caused artificers to be brought from other regions and forraigne kingdoms, and caused dayly to be in abundance of all kinde of workemen present, as masons, carpenters, smiths, barrowmen, and quarriers, with others.' And 'for the space of thirty-four years before, he never wanted great numbers of such workmen.'

A carved shield supported by two kneeling men in the chapel testifies to the two spendid marriages of William St Clair. The first and third quarters bear a ship and an engrailed cross for Orkney and Rosslyn, while the second has a lion passant and the last, a bleeding heart, the arms of the Earl's first wife, Lady Elizabeth Douglas. The second wife of the widower was Margaret Sutherland, who bore him a son and heir, Oliver, who would complete the work on the chapel. A second son William would become the Earl of Caithness and die on Flodden field.

The masons were also used to strengthen the castle as well as the chapel. Over the 'great dungeon' of five stories built by his father along the cliff face confronting the Esk river, Earl William erected another chapel within the walls and the two towers, called Robin Hood and Little John, where the gypsy armourers could hold their summer fairs and practise their archery. He also had built the bridge into the castle and many 'French features', such as galleries and projecting chambers and turrets. These ornaments were fit for his second wife, who was known as 'the Princess' and was held 'in great reverence, both for her birth, and for the estate she was in'. Indeed, 'none matched her in all the countrey, save the Queen's Majesty.'

More rebuilding had to be done after 1447, when part of the castle burned down because of a bedroom fire. The Earl's chaplain managed to save four great trunks of his papers by throwing them down. The Earl 'was sorry for nothing but the loss of his charters and other writings' but he became cheerful when he knew they were spared. This fire was the first of many destructions of the records of the St Clairs on land and by sea. The savaging of the writs and manuscripts by shipwreck and English armies and Protestant mobs has obscured the history of Rosslyn and its founders.

Above all, as a latter-day King Solomon, Earl William concerned himself with justice and mercy. These quantities were rarely displayed in that rough age, but as Father Hay witnessed:

Earle William was a man of rare parts, haveing in him a mind of most noble composition, a perceing witt, fitt for managing great affairs; he was famous not only for moral virtue and piety, but also for military discipline, in high favour with his Prince, and raised the greatest dignitys that in those times a subject had. He was averss from putting criminels to the rack, the tortures whereof make many ane innocent person confess himself guilty, and then with seeming justice be executed, or if he proive so stoute as in torments to deny the fact, yet he comes off with disjoynted bones, and such weaknes as rendres himself and his life a burthen ever after.

Earl William frequently visited France and Burgundy. He was a member of their two most prestigious orders, the Knights of the Cockle and the Knights of the Golden Fleece. Both were dedicated to a final crusade to recapture Constantinople and Jerusalem, although this sacred adventure would never take place. The insignia of the Cockle referred to the clamshell, which pilgrims wore on the road to Santiago de Compostela: it is reproduced in Rosslyn chapel. Earl William also wore the medals of the militant St Michael and St James, for the Knights of Santiago had fought alongside the Knights Templars in many crusades from northern Spain to clear the country of the Moors and the Jews, an ethnic and religious cleansing achieved at the end of the 15th century by the conquest of Granada.

The Knights of the Golden Fleece were the invention of the remarkable Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, the rival to the French Crown at that time. Above all, he was the mellow swansong of his age. As Huizinga wrote in his masterpiece, The Waning of the Middle Ages:

'The choice lay, in principle. only between God and the world, between contempt or eager acceptance, at the peril of one's soul, of all that makes up the beauty and the charm of earthly life. All terrestrial beauty bore the stain of sin... All aristocratic life in the later Middle Ages is a wholesale attempt to act the vision of a dream. In cloaking itself in the fanciful brilliance of the heroism and probity of a past age, the life of the nobles elevated towards the sublime.'

In this sumptuous decline of a period, every ideal demanded a concrete shape. Each vision sought expression in an image, which would make it solid. This changed the stark definition of forms in Norman architecture to the flamboyant Gothic styles of the end of the Middle Ages. Simplicity was replaced by a luxuriant imagination, although still in the pursuit of saintliness. And William, Earl of Orkney, was the rich embodiment of those mystical beliefs and extravagances.

As a whole, the Collegiate Church of St Matthew resembles the Burgundian churches of the Cistercian Order and the neighbouring abbey at Melrose. As well as ribbed vaults above the altar, the barrel vaulting supports the only stone carved roof in all of northern Europe. The ornate decorations also appear to derive from the Church of Rome near Abbeville, the Porch at Louviers in Normandy, and the Savoy Mausoleum in Bresse, where Flemish sculptors worked, some of whom may have progressed to Rosslyn.

Certainly at Melrose Abbey, the contemporary master builder Jean Morow brought along his compagnonnages of European masons. Still carved into the stone there is his Masonic epitaph:

SA YE CVMPAS GAYS EVYN ABOVTE S VA TROVTH AND LAVTE SALL DO BVT DIVTE BE HALDE TO YE HENDE Q° IOHNE MORVO. [As the compass goes evenly about, so truth and loyalty shall do without doubt. Look to the end quoth John Morow.]