St Nicholas Hospital

St Nicholas Hospital

The hospital of St Nicholas was founded as a refuge for lepers in the twelfth century. Because of fears of infection it stood a little to the south of the main built-up area of St Andrews, near the East Sands. As the prevalence of leprosy declined in the late Middle Ages the hospital became a more general shelter for the poor and sick. During the early sixteenth century the hospital was owned by St Andrews’ Dominican friars (who were based on South Street). Shortly after the Reformation St Nicholas Hospital (and its lands and revenues) were transferred to the St Andrews burgh council, with the intention they would continue to fund the care of the poor and sick. Poor residents of St Andrews still seem to have been living at St Nicholas in the late sixteenth century. At a subsequent (unknown) date St Nicholas stopped serving as a hospital and became an ordinary farm. The foundations of the medieval hospital were discovered by archaeologists in the late twentieth century during the building of the East Sands Leisure Centre. Excavations at this time also uncovered prehistoric human remains, the oldest of which were carbon dated to between 1530-1310 B.C., implying that there was an early cemetery in this area.

sacredlandscapesoffife

Bess Rhodes

Site

200

05/10/2021

(1) Derek Hall, ‘“Unto yone hospital at tounis end”: The Scottish Medieval Hospital’, Tayside and Fife Archaeological Journal, 12, (2006), p. 89. (2) 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. 202. (3) Bess Rhodes, Riches and Reform: Ecclesiastical Wealth in St Andrews, c.1520-1580 (Leiden, 2019), pp. 123, 130. (4) Simon Taylor and Gilbert Márkus, The Place-Names of Fife (5 vols, Donington, 2006-2012), vol. 3, pp. 528-529.

cm x cm x cm

current,56.33319159525061,-2.780689983076441;

St Nicholas Hospital

TEXT

Building

426

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Catholic