Grey Friars, St Andrews

Grey Friars, St Andrews

During the late Middle Ages an Observant Franciscan friary was located on a large plot of land between Market Street and North Street (where Greyfriars Garden now stands). The friary was founded by Bishop Kennedy in the mid-fifteenth century. The Observant Franciscans were committed to both personal and institutional poverty, and largely survived on gifts of food, money, and clothing from pious members of the public. They had a strong preaching tradition, and in the sixteenth century several friars from St Andrews resisted the spread of Protestant ideas, including helping prosecute heretics. Indeed, in 1539 Friar Simon Maltman, the warden of the St Andrews Franciscans, was sent to advise the Archbishop of Glasgow on how to conduct a heresy trial. Maltman also preached at the last major heresy trial in Scotland before the Reformation – which resulted in the execution of Walter Myln outside St Andrews Cathedral. However, the friars were fighting a rear-guard action. In May 1559, with religious rebellion sweeping Scotland, the Franciscans handed over their friary in St Andrews to the local urban authorities. Despite this, the buildings were attacked by Protestant activists a month later. Shortly afterwards the friars fled to Continental Europe. The Franciscan friary was the only one of St Andrews’ mid-sixteenth-century Catholic institutions where none of the churchmen converted to Protestantism.

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Bess Rhodes

Site

66

21/05/2021

05/21/2021 03:35:01 pm

(1) Bess Rhodes, Riches and Reform: Ecclesiastical Wealth in St Andrews, c.1520-1580 (Leiden, 2019), pp. 19-20, 36, 107-108. (2) Bess Rhodes, ‘Augmenting Rentals: The Expansion of Church Property in St Andrews, c.1400-1560’ in Michael Brown and Katie Stevenson, eds, Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Woodbridge, 2017), p. 228.

cm x cm x cm

current,56.340525545376195,-2.7988962828021617;

Grey Friars, St Andrews

TEXT

Building

142

Catholic