St Mary’s College

St Mary’s College

The site of St Mary’s College on South Street has lengthy associations with religion and learning. In 1419 Robert de Montrose (one of the priests who served at St Mary’s on the Rock) donated a plot of land for ‘a College of Theologians and Artists in honour of Almighty God and especially of the Blessed John the Evangelist’. The first master of the College of St John was Laurence of Lindores – who also served as Inquisitor of Heretical Pravity for Scotland (in other words he was the chief official investigating religious dissent). From an early date St John’s College had its own chapel. Indeed the chapel may have predated the foundation of the College. By the early sixteenth century St John’s had fallen on hard times, and in the 1530s Archbishop James Beaton decided to refound it as a college dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The new St Mary’s College was intended to educate Catholic churchmen to fight heresy. During the 1540s Cardinal David Beaton invested in new buildings for St Mary’s. Masons from the royal palace at Falkland came to work on the college, and a marble altar for the chapel was imported from France. Further work was commissioned by Archbishop John Hamilton in the 1550s. There is some disagreement about whether building work on the chapel had been completed at the time of the Reformation. However, records in the university archives indicate that as early as 1546 St Mary’s College chapel was being used for official ceremonies. The Protestant policy of encouraging members of the university to worship with the residents of the town, probably brought an end to the religious function of the college chapel, and the Geddy map of about 1580 appears to show the building in ruins. Decorative fragments from the pre-Reformation chapel can be seen on the south side of Parliament Hall (which stands on the site of the former chapel). During the late sixteenth-century St Mary’s was reorganised as a Protestant college, and trained ministers for the Reformed Kirk. Today St Mary’s College is still the centre of Divinity teaching and research at the University of St Andrews.

sacredlandscapesoffife

Bess Rhodes

Site

198

05/10/2021

(1) Ronald Cant, The University of St Andrews: A Short History (4th edn. Dundee, 2002), pp. 17-20. (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. 73-75. (3) 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. 227. (4) Robert Kerr Hannay, ed., Rentale Sancti Andree: Being the Chamberlain and Granitar Accounts of the Archbishopric in the Time of Cardinal Beaton (Edinburgh, 1913), p. 123. (5) University of St Andrews Library, UYSM110/B15/6.

cm x cm x cm

current,56.33930488201158,-2.7939541561257424;

St Mary’s College

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Building

422

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Catholic,Church of Scotland