We do not know exactly when St Peter’s Chapel was founded. However, in 1212 there was a reference to ‘two houses by the sea beside the chapel of St Peter’ in a legal dispute between the archdeacon and cathedral of St Andrews. A later document from…
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 ruins of the medieval church of St Mary’s on the Rock (also called St Mary’s Kirkhill)
stand on the cliffs looking out over the North Sea. This headland has been a place of importance since prehistoric times, and several Iron Age graves have…
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…
During the early nineteenth century the parish church of Holy Trinity on South Street became too small for the growing population of St Andrews. To address this problem, St Mary’s Church was built on the south side of what became known as St Mary’s…
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…
The parish of St Leonard’s has its origins in the Middle Ages. However, the congregation has only worshipped in the current St Leonard’s Church on Hepburn Gardens since the early years of the twentieth century. From 1761 until 1904 the parishioners…
St Serf’s Roman Catholic Church was built in 1922 after the opening of new pits at Valleyfield and Blairhall in the early twentieth century saw a large increase in the population of Culross and the surrounding villages. It was located in High…
The Free Church in Culross was formed in 1846, and in the following year, with the support Mr Cunninghame of Balgownie, a church was built on the Low Causeway in the west of the town. A renewal of mining operations in the area around Culross in the…
Shortly after the Reformation, the presbytery, transepts choir and tower of the Abbey were converted into the parish church of Culross. This situation was formerly recognised by an Act of Parliament in 1633. In 1642 the church received a significant…
The chapel of St Kentigern in Culross was founded in 1503 by Robert Blacadder, Archbishop of Glasgow (1484-1508). Kentigern, or Mungo as he is commonly known, was believed to have been born in Culross. According to the Vita St Kentigerni (composed in…
The old parish church of Culross lies around 800 metres to the north west of the burgh. It was first recorded in 1217 when it was gifted to the monks at the newly founded abbey in Culross. Most of the structure was built in the twelfth or thirteenth…
The Abbey of Culross was founded in 1217 by Maol Choluim I, Earl of Fife (1204–1228), who was himself buried in the church in 1228x1229. Dedicated to St Mary and St Serf, it housed monks of the Cistercian order, a reformed order founded in the late…
Although Culross only enters the written record in the 1200s, it is clear from archaeological evidence that a community had existed there long before that date. The burgh’s early religious history is associated with St Serf, an important local saint…
After the Jacobite rising of 1715 the British government became increasingly suspicious of Scottish Episcopalians. Ministers in the Scottish Episcopal Church were required to take an oath renouncing the Stuart claim to the throne and promising to…
The accession of George I to the British throne was soon followed by a rebellion backing James Francis Edward Stuart’s claim to be king instead. James (also known as the Old Pretender) was a Roman Catholic, but he received support from many Scottish…
When Presbyterianism was re-established in 1690 the Scottish Parliament also passed legislation banning Christmas. In 1712 this ban was lifted and the British Parliament legalised keeping Christmas in Scotland. However, most Presbyterians remained…
The British government was initially more tolerant of Episcopalians than the Scottish Parliament had been. In 1711 the laws against Episcopal marriages and baptisms were removed and new legislation ordered that Episcopalians were not to be disturbed…
Lobbying from Scottish aristocrats led to the passing of the Church Patronage Act. This stated that the old patrons of Scottish parishes (typically large landowners) could influence the appointment of Church of Scotland ministers. The move was deeply…
After much debate, the parliaments of Scotland and England passed legislation to create a new Kingdom of Great Britain. The Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh closed. Until the twentieth century legislation on Scottish religious affairs became the…
Many of Fife’s Episcopal clergymen were removed from their parishes by the restoration of Presbyterianism. In 1695 the Scottish Parliament passed a law forbidding displaced Episcopal clergy from performing marriages or baptisms under pain of…
In 1689 King James VII was replaced as ruler of Scotland by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. Soon afterwards the Scottish Parliament (which had backed William and Mary) passed an act abolishing the authority of bishops. In 1690…
Archbishop James Sharp was a divisive religious leader. Many Presbyterians felt that he had sold out the Church of Scotland by agreeing to become archbishop of St Andrews. Sharp rigorously enforced the religious changes imposed by Charles II and…
In 1660 the English invited Charles II to return as king. Shortly afterwards Charles set about overturning the religious changes of the previous decades. In 1661 the Scottish Parliament passed the Rescissory Act which got rid of all the laws passed…
In 1639 Scotland slipped into religious war. Supporters of the National Covenant (sometimes known as Covenanters) took up arms in defence of their beliefs. The response of Charles I to this crisis led to civil war across his three kingdoms – namely…
The 1630s saw growing tensions about religion in Scotland. At this time King Charles I tried to bring the Church of Scotland more in line with English practices. Charles firmly supported the role of bishops and wanted more elaborate services. In 1637…
As he grew older King James VI became opposed to the relatively democratic government of the Church of Scotland. He had bitter disputes with what he termed the ‘fiery ministers’ of the General Assembly. The king believed that Presbyterianism led to…
Reading the Bible formed a vital part of Protestant religious activity. In particular Protestants believed that people should have access to the Bible in their native language. Yet there were significant problems with many of the early translations…
The later decades of the sixteenth century saw ongoing tensions about how radical the Church of Scotland should be. Many of these arguments became focused around the question of church government. In 1592 the Scottish Parliament abolished the role of…
By the 1570s the Church of Scotland was adopting an increasingly hard line on religious festivals. In particular there was a campaign against celebrating Christmas (or Yule as it was often known in Scotland). At the beginning of 1574 the St Andrews…
For many years there were bitter debates about how the new Protestant Church of Scotland should be governed. In the 1560s each region had a superintendent who oversaw religious affairs and reported back to the General Assembly (an annual meeting of…
The Reformation Parliament of 1560 saw Scotland officially declared a Protestant country. However, it took time to establish the structures of a Reformed Church across the nation. Fife was at the forefront of this movement. Local church courts, known…
In the spring and summer of 1559 Protestant activists set out to ‘reform’ Roman Catholic churches. Influenced by strict Calvinist ideas on the wickedness of ‘idols’, they smashed statues, removed altars, and burned religious books. Once churches had…
During the 1550s a number of Roman Catholics worked to bring improvements to the Church in Scotland. Fife was at the heart of this movement, which was backed by John Hamilton, the new archbishop of St Andrews. This period saw efforts to improve the…
In the spring of 1546 the Roman Catholic archbishop of St Andrews, Cardinal David Beaton, was assassinated by a group of Fife lairds who opposed his religious and political policies. The murderers gained access to Beaton’s residence at St Andrews…
In 1517 the German academic Martin Luther published a series of criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church. Luther’s protest rapidly developed into an international religious crisis, which would ultimately lead to the creation of the movement we now…
In 1845 Hugh Ralph noted that one family in the parish belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, but it was not until 1971 that a RC congregation returned to Aberdour. The church was built in the Hillside area of Aberdour, close to the local school. It…
There is some debate as to when the Episcopal Church congregation was founded in Aberdour. In 1845 Hugh Ralph noted that there was one Episcopal family in the parish, but did not mention a church. It was certainly there by 1854 when it appears on an…
Shortly after the Great Disruption in 1843, a Free Church congregation was founded in Aberdour. They opened a church, called St Colme’s, in 1845, close to the location of the old parish church. By 1848 it had a congregation of 318. In 1900 it became…
The location of the church so close to their country seat at Aberdour Castle had been a point of contention for the Douglas family for some time, and in 1790 they successfully closed St Fillan’s and opened a new church in Wester Aberdour. It was…
James Douglas, earl of Morton (d.1493) founded St Martha’s hospital in Aberdour in 1474. However, by 1486 this project had not been realised, and the earl granted the lands and building to four Sisters of the Third Order of St Francis, Isobel and…
James Douglas, 1st earl of Morton (d.1493) founded St Martha’s hospital in Aberdour in 1474. It was located close to a holy well dedicated to St Fillan whose water was believed to cure nervous ailments, blindness, and deafness. The location of the…
The parish church of Aberdour first appears in the records in the twelfth century when it was the subject of a dispute between a local lord, William de Mortimer, and the Augustinian canons of Inchcolm. Substantial sections of the current building…
The placename Eglismartin (the ‘Church of (St) Martin’) in Easter Aberdour was first recorded in the fourteenth century. Names with the Eglis or Eccles element, short for Latin Ecclesiastes or Ecclesia (church), tend to indicate religious…
During the 1720s the popular preacher John Glas (a graduate of the University of St Andrews and minister at Tealing near Dundee) put forward a series of radical ideas including condemning the idea of a national church and regarding communion as a…
