St Mary Magdalene’s Chapel

St Mary Magdalene’s Chapel

Little is known about the medieval chapel of St Mary Magdalene. Sixteenth-century property records indicate that it was located within the cathedral precinct, probably a little way to the south of what we now call St Rule’s Church (then more commonly known as the ‘old church’). According to a document from 1571 ‘the garden of the chapel of St Magdalene with the chapel itself’ stood just to the west of a house and garden held by David Peblis (a former canon at the Cathedral Priory). Both properties seem to have been bounded on the north by ‘the cemetery of the old church’. Several small buildings with gardens can be seen in this area on the late sixteenth-century Geddy Map of St Andrews. It is likely that the chapel stopped serving a religious purpose at the Reformation (so a few years before the description from 1571). The garden of St Magdalene continues to appear in property records during the 1580s. However the name seems to have disappeared by the late seventeenth century. Near the start of the twentieth century the antiquarian David Hay Fleming noted the discovery of stones from a Norman arch and part of the base of an ‘Early English clustered column’ a little south of St Rule’s which he felt ‘may be regarded as indicating the site of St Magdalene’s Chapel’. However efforts in the 1960s to find further remains in this area were not successful.

sacredlandscapesoffife

Bess Rhodes

Site

196

05/10/2021

(1) David Hay Fleming, St Andrews Cathedral Museum (Edinburgh, 1931), p. xv. (2) David Hay Fleming, The Reformation in Scotland: Causes, Characteristics, Consequences (London, 1910), pp. 613-614. (3) Derek Hall and Catherine Smith, ‘The Archaeology of Medieval St Andrews’, in Michael Brown and Katie Stevenson, eds, Medieval St Andrews: Church, Cult, City (Woodbridge, 2017), p. 197. (4) George Martine, Reliquiae Divi Andreae: Or the State of the Venerable and Primitial See of St Andrews (St Andrews, 1797), p. 192. (5) Historic Environment Scotland, Canmore entry for ‘St Andrews, St Magdalene’s Chapel’: https://canmore.org.uk/site/34298/st-andrews-st-magdalenes-chapel [Accessed 12 May 2021]. (6) University of St Andrews Library, UYSL110/PW/108.

cm x cm x cm

current,56.33940502297029,-2.7854328106495605;

St Mary Magdalene’s Chapel

TEXT

Building

418

1

Catholic