Why buy one, small, cheaply-finished, semi-basement, 1 bed flat for £290k when you can buy 2?

But let’s not just be cynical here. It’s an interesting placename is Coinyiehouse (not Coinyie House, or Coinyie-House as given on the street signs, those are modern abberations); from the Scots coinyie (coinage), from the French cuigne. In even older times it would have been spelled with the letter yogh (ȝ) as cunȝie. Interestingly, in Scots the word not only means coinage, but also the corner of a building – from where we also get the word quoins. These words all come from the same Old French cuigne, which originally meant a wedge or keystone. It was the wedge-shaped die used for striking coins that saw the word come to be applied to monetary tokens.

The placename is both ancient, as this was the site of the Royal Scottish Mint from 1574 to 1707 (in earlier buildings, demolished around 1871) – but is also quite recent – it was only so name Coinyie-House Close as recently as 1981, when the square was redeveloped. For this reason the yogh has been replaced with a “y” rather than the traditional “z”, to avoid mispronouncing it as Coinzie.

Prior to 1574, the Mint had been in Edinburgh Castle, but that was destroyed by the English during the Lang Siege of the Marian civil wars, which was ironic as it had been moved there from outside Holyrood Abbey in 1559 for its own safety! The rebuilt Mint reputedly had extremely thick walls and the reason for the courtyard in the middle was so that it could be lit by windows from within, and not the street, to provide additional security.

There is a single photograph of the original building of the “new” Mint, attributed to 1887 but these buildings were demolished 16 years before that date. Above the door is the inscription “Be Mercyfull to Me, O God, 1574“, which places this building as one being the property of George Heriot which was intended by him to form his hospital. On its first floor was the meeting chamber of the Mint, where metals would be assayed, and its upper storeys were residences and chambers for its officials.

The pictures below show coins of the £ Scots currency from the reign of James VI which would have been struck here; any earlier coins struck in Edinburgh pre-date the Mint being in this location. A Merk was 2/3 of a pound. The reason a coin of a value as high as £20 was needed was because the Scots pound was considerably weaker than the English; on the Act of Union in 1707 there were 12 Scottish pennies to the English. It is for this reason that the Gaelic word for penny is Sgillin, which is the same as the Gaelic word for Shilling. When the currencies were re-valued, the old word for a (Scottish) Shilling was applied to the (New, English) Penny, as they had the same value. The word survived decimalisation and is in use to this day.

When James VI moved to England to taken up that Crown as James I, the Scottish Mint continued in operation. Although it would be closed down after the Act of Union, it did continue to operate for a while to assist with the re-coinage scheme of silver (Sterling) coins post-1707. This process was overseen by an exacting man of the name Sir Isaac Newon, Master of the (English) Royal Mint. The new coins used Troy ounces (12 per £) rather than Scots ounces (16 per £).

Under the watchful eye of officials from the London, 103,346 Troy pounds in Crowns, half-Crowns, Shillings, and Sixpences were minted in Edinburgh with a value of £320,372 between 1707-1709. These coinsstruck in Edinburgh can be identified by the small letter E under Queen Anne’s likeness on the head side and were the last coins which were minted in the country.

The modern Coinyie-House Close actually does not lie on the site of the Mint at all, it is slightly to the north. The Victorian schoolhouse that later became the Panmure St. Ann’s Centre occupies the southern range; the former school playground, now a car park, occupies the rest of the footprint.

But it’s not just Edinburgh District Council’s street naming committee which put the Mint in the wrong location. The 1849 Ordnance Survey town plan puts the Mint in the correct place, which should have been easy as the buildings were still there, but if you look at later surveys after demolition (1893 and 1944) then they have migrated the site of it north into the open courtyard within the tenements. Notice also the widening of Blackfriar’s Wynd into Blackfriar’s Street in this period, which cause the demolition of the ancient Cardinal Beaton’s House and an entire street of decrepit old tenements. It was this same Improvement Scheme of 1867 which saw the south range of the block on the Cowgate demolished (and the buildings on the opposite side of the street too) to widen it.

Fortunately, before the Mint was demolished a number of artists paid the square a visit to paint and sketch it. The name “Mint” puts in mind a grand structure, the reality was more plain, surrounded by a ramshackle collection of late medieval and Stuart period buildings and tenements.

From the post office directory for 1824 we can see that the Mint was home to a whole range of different crafts and trades:

• Peter Begbie, Last Maker
• James Burn, Lacemaker (In Skene’s lower Sketch he has “W. Burn” on the sign above the 1st floor windows)
• John Foster, Chimney-piece Maker (In Skene’s upper sketch he has “J. Forest” above the door)
• John Kettle, Grocer
• James Murray, Wright
• J. Peterkin, Japanner (Japanning is a black lacquering process to protect wood and metal)
• Andrew Wilson, Smith

Our modern Coinyie-House Close is not built on the Mint at all, but on the the former United Industrial School for Boys, itself in a 17th century structure. This was inspired by Thomas Guthrie’s “ragged school” – a mixture of education, feeding and training in basic but practical skills for work – but offering an education that was not strictly Presbyterian. Indeed part of the founding ethos of the school, and the reason it used the word “united” in its name, was a reflection of its cross-denominational status. It was open to Catholic and Protestant children and its foundation was partly in response to what its founders saw as an imaginary problem of “religious difficulty” which was being used to justify denominational segregation in Scottish education. This marked it out as fairly unique for the time; it pre-dated the nominally non-denominational School Board Public Schools. The religious education of the school was denominational, being conducted in separate rooms by separate Catholic and Protestant teachers. To satisfy the bodies which provided the School’s funding, the religious teachers were paid out of their own separate funds and not the revenues of the school.

The founders had recognised the burgeoning Catholic population of the Cowgate was poorly served by educational institutions and what we might now term “social services”. This area was Edinburgh’s “Little Ireland”, where the Irish immigrant community made their home. The Catholic Church of St Patrick was (and is) after all just over South Gray’s close to the east.

In 1875, the attendance of the United Industrial School was 120 boys and 28 girls. Of its pupils, a majority of boys went on to enter the trades of shoemakers and tailors, and of girls, most when into domestic service. The United Industrial School attempted to teach its pupils specific trades rather than just monotonous skills such as net making and basket weaving; this was to try and give the children a practical outcome at the end of their education, and as a result try and maintain attendance . The next most frequent “career path” for both boys and girls was emigration, mainly to America in the 1850s.

A typical day in the life of a school child is given below. Note that each denomination is taken separately for prayer, catechism and bible class and on Sunday to their respective church services and Sunday schools:

The school opened in 1848, just a year after Dr. Guthrie’s first school. It was housed in a building known as the Skinner’s Hall, a 17th century L-plan hall which had been the meeting house of the Incorporated Trade of that name and more recently an Anglican Chapel.

As time progressed, the school roll became increasingly Catholic; a reflection of the demographic changes in the neighbourhood, and increasingly placed there “under detention”, i.e. by the courts for reformatory purposes. In the 1860s and 1870s, the school was improved and new workshops were provided. It came to occupy the wings to the south and west of it. To keep the costs down, the work was superintended by the Headmaster and all joinery work, and much of the other labouring, was carried out by the boy pupils.

The school became boys-only due to a declining intake of girls. It continued to expand on the site and provide a more wholesome range of activities including swimming and school bands. Despite the best efforts to continue to improve the school, the Home Office withdrew its funding in 1900 on account of them deeming the Cowgate an unfit situation into which to place the boys under detention. It closed at the end of that term and was sold, the trustees passing the excess funds to Dr Guthrie’s Original Ragged Industrial School. The closure caused an accommodation crisis in the city for the “ragged” boys and it was doubly unfortunate for the Catholic boys “under detention” as the next nearest industrial school certified to take them was St. Joseph’s, outside Tranent, to where 23 were sent.

The buildings did not go to waste, however, and were purchased by the Roman Catholic church for incorporation into St. Ann’s primary school for girls. In Scotland, it was not until 1918 that the R.C. church opted into the state-provided education sector; before this it was itself responsible for the education of the young of its denomination. The church had resisted the public School Boards formed in 1872 as it felt they were fundamentally Presbyterian in their religious outlook, despite being Non-Denominational on paper.

In the Cowgate, the R.C. Church had arrived in 1856 when it took over the former Cowgate Episcopal Chapel and consecrated it as St. Patricks’ Church. In the church hall they opened St. Ann’s School for girls and St. Patrick’s School for boys, but the authorities threatened to withdraw their funding unless better premises were found. As a result, two new school buildings were commissioned. The new St. Ann’s was built on the south portion of the old Mint site, perhaps somewhat appropriate given the last coins minted here were in the reign of Queen Anne (even if she was a committed Anglican herself). St. Patrick’s relocated to St. John’s Hill. After 1918, these schools were brought into the state system and remained R.C., but were not made co-educational until the 1940s.

The new St. Ann’s was by the Edinburgh City Architect, Robert Morham (not the School Board architect), so it both looks similar to other schools of this time, but also is distinctive in its own right. It opened in 1880.

St. Ann’s was to be refurbished and modernised in 1940s to allow for a rationalisation of R. C. schooling in the Old Town and Southside, which were rapidly being depopulated of families with children due to slum clearances. However the war intervened and this plan never bore fruit. The relentless demographic pressure on the school roll meant it was soon surplus to requirements, and it was closed by 1956, any remaining pupils moving to nearby St. Patrick’s before it too suffered the same fate.

The St. Patricks’ building was demolished, but Morham’s Victorian schoolhouse would lie vacant, being converted into a community centre in 1975 and 30 years after that part was converted into a special needs school under the name Panmure St. Ann’s. It became entirely devoted to the school in 2013 but was closed in 2017 due to cuts and a declining roll. It recently re-opened as a centre for homelessness services, taking it back to its roots as a place for the poorest and marginalised of the city.

The Panmure part of the name comes from Panmure House on Panmure Close, which you may have heard was once the home of one Adam Smith in the 18th Century. Smith lived in Panmure house from 1778 until his death in 1790 Later it was part of an iron foundry and after -WW2 the semi derlict building was bought in the by Roy Thomson, Lord Thomson of Fleet, a Canadian media magnate. He was the owner of The Scotsman newspaper and had it refurbished and converted into the Canongate Boys Club, which opened in 1957.

In 1970 Panmure House was listed and passed to the “care” of the Corporation of Edinburgh. They merged its services with that of St. Ann’s and closed it. Like many old buildings passed into Council stewardship, this would lead to it being left to rot and finding itself on the buildings at risk register! By the early 21st Century Panmure house was falling down, but was saved by a restoration for the Edinburgh Business School, a fitting home given the Smith connection.

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