St Leonard’s Chapel, St Andrews

St Leonard’s Chapel, St Andrews

St Leonard’s Chapel has a long and varied history. The Culdees may have had a pilgrim hospital on this site in the Early Middle Ages. In the 1140s the hospital and its property were given to the newly founded St Andrews Cathedral Priory. An association with St Leonard is first recorded in the thirteenth century, when the hospital was still serving pilgrims visiting the shrine of St Andrew. At some point between 1250 and 1413 St Leonard’s came to be a parish church, but remained under the control of the Cathedral Priory. By the beginning of the sixteenth century pilgrimage to St Andrews had declined and the hospital was providing shelter to a group of elderly poor women. In 1512 the old women were removed and a new university college dedicated to St Leonard was founded on the site. Significant sections of the chapel appear to date from this time, and the arms of one of the college’s founders (Prior John Hepburn) can be seen on a buttress on the south side. In 1747 St Leonard’s College joined with St Salvator’s College to create the United College (which was based in St Salvator’s Quad on North Street). This union led to major changes. The congregation of St Leonard’s removed to St Salvator’s Chapel in 1761. The university sold the St Leonard’s buildings a little while later, but excluded the chapel from the sale. No longer used as a place of worship it was partly dismantled, and by the time Samuel Johnson visited St Andrews in 1773 the former chapel was being used as ‘a kind of green-house’. During the nineteenth century the wider St Leonard’s buildings became a school, and some conservation work was done on the chapel. In 1910 the church was re-roofed, and after the Second World War it once again became a university chapel. Services are celebrated here each week during term time.

sacredlandscapesoffife

Bess Rhodes

Site

77

21/05/2021

(1) John Herkless and Robert Kerr Hannay, eds, The College of St Leonard: Being Documents with Translations, Notes and Historical Introductions (Edinburgh, 1905). (2) Richard Fawcett, ‘The Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture of St Andrews as a Channel for the Introduction of New Ideas’, in Michael Brown and Katie Stevenson, eds, Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 75-78. (3) Ronald Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (4th edn. Dundee, 2002), pp. 110-112. (4) Samuel Johnson, ‘A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland,’ in Peter Levi, ed., A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (London, 1984).

cm x cm x cm

current,56.339254951019086,-2.7897579966884227;

St Leonard’s Chapel, St Andrews

TEXT

Building

158

1

Catholic,Church of Scotland