Embedded in the history of Scotland

DUNFERMLINE is a place embedded in the history of Scotland. Visitors to the town will see the unique tower of the Abbey Church with letters forming the words ‘KING ROBERT THE BRUCE’ set in the parapet, close to where Bruce’s mortal remains are buried here (apart from his heart, which is in the burial ground of Melrose Abbey). This tower is also a signpost to the ruins of the abbey founded in the 12th century by David I, one of the sons of Malcolm Canmore and the Anglo-Saxon Princess Margaret, who fled to Scotland following the invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066.

To the west of the present Abbey Church is the nave of the church of David’s abbey. Though much altered externally, this building is one of the finest examples of Norman architecture in Scotland. Its dramatic interior has massive cylindrical columns comparable with those of Durham Cathedral.

After the Reformation, it was adapted to form the parish church of the burgh, and continued as such until the present church was built in 1818-21 as the former nave was too small to accommodate the population of a growing town. .

The new church was designed by James Gillespie Graham, the leading Scottish church architect of the period. It is on the site of the choir of the 12th-century church, abutting the nave, whose southern door gives access to the rear of the new building. The building has windows in the English Perpendicular style characteristic of Graham’s work; internally the unusually tall space has plaster vaults supported on tall columns, with galleries on three sides. To the south of the church are the ruins of the abbey domestic buildings, and further west is the former guest-house, converted into a palace for Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI. Like the nave, these buildings are now in the care of Historic Environment Scotland, and are open to the public.

To the west of the abbey buildings, across the Tower Burn, is Pittencrieff Park with the remains of a tower supposed to have been built by Malcolm Canmore in the 11th century. I now quote a passage from The Imperial Gazetteer of Scotland, Volume 1, edited by the Rev John Marius Wilson, and published in the 1850s:

At the request of his queen [Margaret], Malcolm [Canmore] founded and endowed, in the vicinity of his own residence a monastery for 13 Culdees, which, with its chapel, was dedicated to the Holy Trinity. The date of Malcolm’s foundation must have been between 1070, when he was married, and 1086, when he and his queen made extensive grants to the church of the Holy Trinity. Malcolm’s sons Ethelred and Edgar also bestowed lands upon this church, and Alexander I [King of Scots] granted various lands to it, and is said to have finished the church; and his queen Sibilla [or Sybilla, sister of Henry I of England], also conferred lands upon it. …David I, who ascended to the throne in 1124, in accordance with his policy in other parts of the kingdom, not only added greatly to the wealth of the monastery, but introduced into it a colony of the Benedictines or Black Monks, from Canterbury in England; and for the purpose of making the change of rules under which they were brought more agreeable to the Culdees, he raised it to the dignity of an abbey’.

The first abbot was brought up from Canterbury. The foundations of the Culdees’ church can be seen below the floor of the nave, material reminders of a likely link with the earliest days of the Church in Scotland, St Ninian’s mission to the Southern Picts from what is now western France. ¤

This article appears in the September 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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