"The John Knox House is an historic house in Edinburgh, Scotland, reputed to have been owned and lived in by protestant reformer John Knox during the 16th century, but known not to have been (Knox's house was on Warriston Close, where a plaque correctly marks the site).
The house itself was built from 1490 onwards, featuring a fine wooden gallery and hand-painted ceiling. It belonged to the Mossman family, Edinburgh goldsmiths who refashioned the crown of Scotland for James V. Over the next few centuries many decorations and paintings were added, and the house and its contents are now a museum.
The building is owned by the Church of Scotland and is now administered as part of the new, adjacent Scottish Storytelling Centre.
It has only been known as "John Knox's House" since the mid-19th century, at which time Victorian romantics sought to find sites of historic occurrences. This house looked old enough, but no research was done at the time to establish the rights or wrongs of the claim. The house was owned by a prominent Catholic at the time of Knox. It is unlikely he ever visited the house, but he would have been familiar with it."
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A nearby information marker provides some additional information about this historic house:
"John Knox House, to your left, and Mowbray House, behind you, are probably the oldest houses in Edinburgh. They give us some idea of what Edinburgh looked like around 1600. The earliest parts of these houses are medieval, but buildings in Edinburgh were always being extended and altered. The front of John Knox House was built in about 1556 for James Mosman, a goldsmith whose father made the Scottish crown, and his wife Mariota Arres. You can see their initials in the plaque on the wall.
The couple also decorated their house with a sundial showing Moses; this was a popular image of the time, though more common in nobles' courts than commoners' houses. Perhaps the Moses sundial was a way of showing what fashionable company James Mosman kept as a respected craftsman.
John Knox, an important and controversial religious reformer in Scotland during the 1500s, may never have lived here. But the tradition that this was his house saved it from being demolished in improvement schemes. You can find out more about the house, John Knox, and James Mosman inside.
Both these houses were on the edge of the walled city of Edinburgh. Down the road, at the junction with St. Mary's Street, stood the main entrance gate - the Netherbow Port. You can see its outline marked by brass tiles in the road."