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THE GUILD LIBRARY
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SCOTTISH CATHEDRALS AND ABBEYS.
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SCOTTISH CATHEDRALS AND ABBEYS
[Illustration: _From Photo by T. & R. Annan & Sons._
GLASGOW CATHEDRAL.]
SCOTTISH CATHEDRALS
AND ABBEYS
BY
REV. D. BUTLER, M.A.
ABERNETHY, PERTHSHIRE
AUTHOR OF 'THE ANCIENT CHURCH AND PARISH OF ABERNETHY,' 'JOHN WESLEY AND
GEORGE WHITEFIELD IN SCOTLAND,' 'HENRY SCOUGAL AND THE OXFORD METHODISTS'
WITH INTRODUCTION BY THE
VERY REV. R. HERBERT STORY, D.D., LL.D.
PRINCIPAL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
LONDON: A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE
EDINBURGH: R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED
PUBLICATION AGENTS FOR THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND
1901
PREFACE
In preparation for this Guild Book I wrote an account of every
pre-Reformation structure in Scotland of which any remains now survive,
but the prescribed limits of the series necessitated a selection. The
Scottish cathedrals are all here treated, with representative collegiate
and monastic buildings. Reference is also made to parish churches that
represent the architecture of the various periods indicated in Chapter
II. A survey of Scottish mediæval architecture will be found in pp.
194-206 that may enable readers to take a comprehensive view of the
whole. A study of those treated in particular will lead to a study of
those treated of necessity in general, and illustrate the idea that the
history of the Scottish Church is the history of the ideality and faith
of the Scottish people, and that the one cannot be separated from the
other. A healthy present must always be bound by a natural piety to the
past that has made it, or at least helped it to be what it is, and this
study may enable readers to realise more that the Church of Scotland has
a great and glorious past that begins with the days of St. Ninian and
St. Columba. The past has much to teach the present, and the narrative
of historical facts is not without suggestiveness to the varied life and
work that characterise the Church of Scotland to-day.
I desire to express my indebtedness to the investigations of many
workers, which I have striven to recognise in the many references
throughout the work, but most of all I am indebted to Messrs. MacGibbon
and Ross in their colossal work, the _Ecclesiastical Architecture of
Scotland_--a book of national importance.
D. B.
MANSE OF ABERNETHY,
PERTHSHIRE, _14th January 1901_.
CONTENTS
GLASGOW CATHEDRAL _Frontispiece_
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
CHAP.
1. RELATION OF CELTIC CHURCH TO ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 1
2. SCOTTISH ARCHITECTURE 4
NORMAN ARCHITECTURE 7
TRANSITION STYLE 8
FIRST POINTED PERIOD 9
MIDDLE POINTED PERIOD 10
LATE POINTED PERIOD 11
3. CATHEDRALS--
ST. ANDREWS 13
GLASGOW 22
DUNKELD 35
ABERDEEN 37
MORAY 40
BRECHIN 44
DUNBLANE 47
ROSS 52
CAITHNESS 54
GALLOWAY 56
LISMORE 59
ISLES 60
(KIRKWALL) ORKNEY 69
4. COLLEGIATE CHURCHES--
INTRODUCTION 76
BIGGAR 77
BOTHWELL 77
ST. NICHOLAS (NEW ABERDEEN) 78
KING'S COLLEGE (OLD ABERDEEN) 80
ROSLIN 85
CHAPEL ROYAL (STIRLING) 88
ST. GILES' (EDINBURGH) 89
ST. MARY'S AND ST. SALVATOR'S (ST. ANDREWS) 102
5. SCOTTISH NORMAN PARISH CHURCHES--
DALMENY 102
LEUCHARS 104
MIDDLE POINTED--
LINLITHGOW 105
HADDINGTON 107
LATE POINTED--
ST. JOHN'S (PERTH) 108
DUNDEE 113
STIRLING 114
ST. LEONARD (ST. ANDREWS) 116
HOLY TRINITY 117
6. SCOTTISH MONASTICISM 119
ST. ANDREW'S PRIORY (AUGUSTINIAN) 123
HOLYROOD ABBEY " 124
JEDBURGH " " 129
DRYBURGH " (PRAEMONSTRATENSIAN) 134
DUNFERMLINE " (BENEDICTINE) 139
PAISLEY " (CLUNIACENSIAN) 148
KELSO " (TYRONENSIAN) 169
ARBROATH " " 177
MELROSE " (CISTERCIAN) 184
7. GENERAL SURVEY OF SCOTTISH MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE--
NORMAN 194
TRANSITION STYLE 197
FIRST POINTED PERIOD 198
MIDDLE POINTED PERIOD 201
LATE POINTED PERIOD 203
APPENDIX--
DEFINITION OF LEADING ARCHITECTURAL TERMS 209
INTRODUCTION
This book is designed to render to Scottish Churchmen the special
service of presenting to them, in a brief but comprehensive survey, the
record of their ecclesiastical history which is engraved in their
ecclesiastical architecture. There is no record so authentic as that
which is built in stone. There is none so sacred as that which attests
and illustrates the religion of our forefathers. Much of that record has
perished: enough remains to engage our reverent study and our dutiful
care. Foreign war and rapine have wasted and destroyed our heritage of
sacred places. Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose, and Haddington fell before the
English invader. Iona was ravaged by the Dane, while yet the island
formed part of a Scandinavian diocese. Internal lawlessness and tribal
fury have wrought like disasters. Elgin, once "the fair glory of the
land," stands a forlorn monument of the savagery of a Highland chief.
St. Andrews, Lindores, Perth, Paisley, and many others bear witness to
the reckless outrage which cloaked its violence under the guise of
religious zeal. Of all our spoilers this has been the most destructive.
The pretence (for it often was nothing else) of "cleansing the
sanctuary" not only robbed the Church of many a priceless possession,
but begat, in the popular mind, a ruthless disregard of the sacred
associations of places where generation after generation had worshipped
God, and a coarse indifference to the solemnity of His ordinances,
which made it easy for those who should have been the guardians of the
churches to let them fall, unheeded, into decay.
It is not uncommon, even yet, to find people who ought to know, and
perhaps do know, better, blaming Knox and his co-reformers for the
dilapidation and desecration of our ancient fanes. The blame belongs to
the "rascal multitude," and to the rapacious laymen who were served
heirs to the properties of the despoiled Church. What is the Church the
better for their enrichment? What has religion gained by it? The
Reformed Faith could have flourished none the less graciously if its
purified doctrine had been preached, and its reasonable worship offered,
under the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of
Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in
the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate;
St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is
the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is
effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on
the mainland used to hear when the north wind blew from Kirkwall?
Granted that ignorant superstition may have tainted the veneration in
which our fathers' holy and beautiful houses were held 400 years ago,
the iconoclasm which devastated them was not the remedy for it. The
revived interest in our old churches, which has asserted its influence
in such restorations as those of St. Giles, Dunblane, Linlithgow, St.
Vigeans, and Arbuthnott, is no revival of superstition. It is the
outcome of a more reverent spirit; of a deeper sense of the honour due
to God; of the conviction that we owe Him, in all that pertains to His
worship, the offering of our very best; and of a deeper consciousness
also of the supreme value of the Church's national position and
character, and of the duty of piously conserving whatever helps to
illustrate the historical continuity which binds its present to its
past. As regards this, nothing is so full of helpful stimulus as an
intelligent study of our ecclesiastical architecture. In it we can read
the lessons of the gradual growth of the Scottish nation from the
loosely connected tribal conditions of the ninth and tenth centuries
onwards to its consolidation under a settled monarchy; the development
of its commercial and industrial progress; its expanding relations to
the peoples of the Continent; and the vital changes in its political
life, and its religious system and belief, thence resulting. All these
have left their mark in those records which neither time nor revolution,
neglect nor violence, have been able wholly to destroy--the architecture
of our cathedrals, abbeys, and monasteries.
The primitive buildings of the early Celtic period of the Church have
long since disappeared. Their clay and wattles could not withstand the
wear and tear of time; only in a distant glen or lonely island can we
discover scattered traces of the beehive cell or simple shrine of the
anchorite or missionary. Few relics of the more substantial structures
of that time survive.
The Roman era of Church organisation superseded the Celtic; and with the
Roman dominance came the architecture of the Anglo-Normans, whom the
presence and policy of Margaret, saint and queen, attracted to Scotland.
It developed itself, always with some national characteristics of its
own, until the War of Independence broke off all friendly intercourse
with England.
Later came, in place of alliance with England, the alliance with France,
which lasted till the Reformation, and left its mark on many of the
pages of "The Great Stone Book," which chronicle for us the vicissitudes
of the past, the days of peace and prosperity, of war and penury, of
reviving national health and energy, of new combinations and ideas in
politics and statecraft, of spiritual decay and carnal pride and
ostentation. These annals can be deciphered by the patient student of
the walls and cloisters of the ancient churches and religious houses.
To the founders and the owners of the latter, and chiefly to the great
orders of the Augustinians, the Benedictines, and the Cistercians, we
owe many of our noblest remnants of the past--all of them unhappily
ruined; for the popular violence of the sixteenth century raged more
fiercely against the monasteries than against the cathedrals. To the
Episcopal system of government, introduced under Margaret, we owe the
bishops' churches or cathedrals.
The life and thought of the Church at the present day, move far enough
apart from either prelacy or monasticism to allow us to look at each
with an impartial eye, and to consider whether in its abolition we have
parted with aught that it would have profited the Church to retain.
The monasteries, at first the homes and shelters of charity and
learning, had, before the sixteenth century, waxed fat with unduly
accumulated wealth, become enervated with luxury and corrupt through bad
government. They were swept away, their possessions secularised, and
their communities broken up. But with them disappeared two things which
were of great price: a large and liberal provision for the poor, and a
comprehensive scheme of Education. The monastery gate was never shut
against the suffering and the needy. The monks were indulgent landlords
and kind neighbours; the sick benefited by their medical skill; the
indigent could always look to them for eleemosynary aid; the houseless
wanderer was never sent empty away. Those great centres of friendly
helpfulness and charity were planted all over the land. No doubt the
gift of indiscriminate alms to every applicant would tend to abuse and
lazy beggary; but a scheme of sympathetic and well directed aid
thoughtfully administered would not. _Abusus non tollit usum._ The
scandals of the monasteries did not justify the robbery of the destitute
for the benefit of the secular supplanters of the monks. The
Kirk-sessions of the Reformed Kirk did their best to take the place of
the former guardians and kindly benefactors of the poor, but their funds
were scanty; the old wealth had fallen into tenacious hands; and schism
and sectarianism finally necessitated the transfer of the care of the
poor from the Church to the State.
Could the ancient system have been reformed and not destroyed, the
poverty of the country would have been less grievous than it is to-day;
the Church's relation to the poor more intimate; and the method of
relief pleasanter to the recipients than that which makes them familiar
with the grim charity of the Poor's House, the Inspector, and the
Parochial Board.
The monasteries were the seats of a general system of higher education.
The burghs had their own independent seminaries; the "song schools" were
more closely connected with the churches in town and in country; but the
highest grade of education was found in the monasteries. Before the
foundation of any of the universities they supplied the place both of
secondary school and university, and trained the youth, especially of
the higher ranks, until prepared to go out into the world, as they
constantly did, speaking the "lingua-franca" of all scholars, and
carrying Scottish energy, genius, and scholarship into the halls and
cloisters of many a college and many a monastery, from Coimbra to
Cracow, from Salerno to Upsala. These schools all perished with the
downfall of the monasteries; and consequently we cannot, to this day,
cope with the great public schools of England, or adequately supply the
blank in our educational system created by their spoliation and
abolition. Here, too, wise reform might have spared and remodelled what
misguided zeal, allied with unprincipled greed, destroyed.
With the ruination and impoverishment of the cathedrals, an element in
the Church's life inseparable from them, and most salutary and useful,
ceased to be. The bishops' deprivation of an authority they had too
often disgraced and misused, vested the government of the Church in the
presbyterate; and the national sentiment approved of the change. But
there was no necessity for upsetting the whole cathedral system, and
rooting out the whole cathedral staff, because the bishop was turned
adrift. Had the Canonries been spared, an immense boon would have been
secured for the Reformed Church. Had the stipends attached to them not
been alienated, the Church would have possessed, at all its most
important centres, a staff of clergymen chosen for their ability and
worth, for their learning and power of government and organisation,
aiding the minister in his work, or enriching the theological literature
of their time. With them might have been associated younger men, either
under their supervision as candidates for the ministry, or as
probationers acquiring practical knowledge of its duties and
requirements. The cathedral would have stood out, in its city, great or
small, as the Mother Church--holding forth the model of devout ritual,
of earnest and learned teaching, of zealous work. How vastly superior
its influence would have been, spiritually, intellectually, socially, to
that of struggling _quoad sacra_ churches, with their ill-paid clergy,
or "missions" in charge of worse-paid probationers, it is, I think,
needless to point out. But the possibility of such an institution passed
away when the cathedrals were desecrated, and their revenues were
"grippit"--to use Knox's phrase--by the ungodly robbers of the Church.
I have written these few pages to serve as an introduction to what
follows, from the hand of my friend, Mr. Butler. The Committee of the
Guild asked me to prepare a volume on the most notable of our ancient
churches; and finding that other engagements stood in the way of my
doing so, I recommended that the work should be entrusted to Mr. Butler,
of whose ability to do it well I felt confident. Having read what he has
written, I find my confidence was not misplaced, and that his treatment
of the subject is most instructive, thorough, and exact. It will add to
the reputation he has already gained by his history of his own parish of
Abernethy on Tay, and his books on Wesley in Scotland, and on Henry
Scougal; and will prove an invaluable guide to all students of our
historic churches, cathedral, collegiate, and monastic.
R. H. S.
SCOTTISH CATHEDRALS AND ABBEYS
CHAPTER I
RELATION OF CELTIC CHURCH TO ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
The period begun by the influence of Queen Margaret (1047-1093),
continued by her sons and their successors on the Scottish throne, and
culminating in the Scottish Reformation of 1560, is that with which this
book deals.
The old Celtic Church of Scotland was brought to an end by two
causes--internal decay and external change. Under the first head, notice
must be taken of the encroachment upon the ecclesiastic element by the
secular, and of the gradual absorption of the former by the latter.
There was a vitality in the old ecclesiastical organisation, but it was
weakened by the assimilation of the native Church to that of Rome in the
seventh and eighth centuries, which introduced a secular element among
the clergy; and the frequent Danish invasions, which may be described as
the organised power of Paganism against Scottish Christianity,
grievously undermined its native force. The Celtic churches and
monasteries were repeatedly laid waste or destroyed, and the native
clergy were compelled either to fly or take up arms in defence; the
lands, unprotected by the strong arm of law, fell into the hands of
laymen, who made them hereditary in their families, and ultimately
nothing was left but the name of abbacy, applied to the lands, and that
of abbot, borne by a secular lord. Under the second head--external
change--may be noted the policy adopted towards the Celtic Church by the
kings of the race of Queen Margaret. It consisted (1) in placing the
Church upon a territorial in place of a tribal basis, in substituting
the parochial system and a diocesan episcopacy for the old tribal
churches with monastic jurisdiction and functional episcopacy; (2) in
introducing the orders of the Church of Rome, and founding great
monasteries as counter influences to the Celtic Church; (3) in absorbing
the Culdees or Columban clergy into the Roman system, by first
converting them from secular into regular canons, and afterwards by
merging them in the latter order.[1] King David especially founded
bishoprics and established cathedrals, equipped with the ordinary
cathedral staff of deans, canons, and other functionaries, and
monasteries equipped with representatives of the monastic orders. Thus
the native Celtic Church, undermined by internal decay, was extinguished
by external change and a course of aggression which rolled from St.
Andrews until it reached the far-off shores of Iona. All that remained
to speak of its vitality and beneficence to the people of Scotland
consisted of the roofless walls of an early church, or an old churchyard
with its Celtic cross; the names of the early pastors by whom the
churches were founded, or the neighbouring wells at the old foundations,
dedicated to their memory; the village fairs, stretching back to a
remote antiquity, and held on the saint's day in the Scottish calendar;
here and there a few lay families possessing the church lands as the
custodiers of the pastoral staff or other relics of the founder of the
church, and exercising a jurisdiction over the ancient "girth" or
sanctuary boundary such as the early missionaries instituted in the days
when might was right, and they nobly witnessed to the right against the
might.
The new policy was connected with the introduction of the orders of the
Roman Catholic Church, and with the building of cathedrals and abbeys.
This movement commenced with the close of the eleventh century, and
continued to the middle of the sixteenth; it embraced all the time when
the Church of Scotland was guided by the regime of Rome, although it is
to be recalled that the Scottish Church never ceased to maintain a
native independence--its heirloom from the ancient Celtic Church. This
independence, manifested on important historical occasions throughout
mediæval times, at last found its national embodiment in the Reformed
Church of 1560.
Scotland was divided into thirteen dioceses--St. Andrews, Glasgow,
Dunkeld, Aberdeen, Moray, Brechin, Dunblane, Ross, Caithness, Galloway,
Lismore or Argyll, the Isles, and Orkney; but before sketching the
history and architecture of each of the thirteen cathedrals, it will be
necessary to indicate the general features of the various periods of
Scottish architecture itself, as it is of this movement the structures
themselves are all an expression.