St Giles’ Files Ep.07:
The National CoveRant
In this episode, Stephen attempts to explore some of the lesser discussed aspects of the National Covenant of Scotland; Who signed it, is it a better document than we can produce now, what does the Covenant tell us about our historiography and most importantly, was is signed in blood?
Further Information:
So, this is our copy of the Covenant. It’s actually a digital scan of our facsimile, hence the fold lines. If you click it, you’ll get to a PDF. Here you can see some small black text amongst the writing- this gives you a few examples of what the text says. It’s easier to see on the PDF (you might need to zoom in a bit). Circled are the names of Montrose, and the promised spelling of Wemyss.
And this is a section of the actual document that has been zoomed in. You can see here how one could mistake this for some old blood.
As mentioned in the podcast, you’ll see the difference between our copy and the copy in the National Museum of Scotland: https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/collection-search-results/?item_id=284100