St Andrews, Kirk Hill, St Mary's Church

The Church of St Mary on the Rock — St Mary's Collegiate Church — stood on the seaward side of St Andrews Cathedral in Fife, just beyond the precinct walls at the spot called Kirkheugh or Kirkhill, where the modern North Street and South Street converge above the harbour. Known by a variety of names across the centuries — St Mary of the Culdees, Kirkheugh, the Church of St Mary of Kilrymont — it holds a singular distinction in Scottish history: formally erected as a college of secular priests in the 1240s, it was the first collegiate church in the Kingdom of Scotland, and the kingdom's only secular college before the fourteenth century. The church did not long outlast the Scottish Reformation, and today only its cross-shaped foundations survive on the headland.

Its origins reach far deeper than the 1240s. St Mary's represented the corporate continuation of the Céli Dé — "vassals of God", anglicised as Culdees — the ancient association of clergy attached to the monastery of Kilrymont, as St Andrews was first known. Burials in the vicinity of Kirkheugh pre-date even the alleged eighth-century foundation of that monastery, pointing to a small religious community on the headland from the sixth century, and a number of tenth-century cross-slabs have been found in the grounds. The Kirkheugh site may indeed have been the original location of the religious settlement, before Bishop Robert built a new cathedral church slightly to the west — the building whose remains constitute St Rule's Tower.

Through the twelfth century and into the thirteenth, the Céli Dé served a side altar in the cathedral, headed by an abbot; the only one whose name survives is Gille Críst, "abbot of the Céli Dé", recorded between 1172 and 1178 feuing out lands to the steward of the Bishop of St Andrews. Until the foundation of the Augustinian priory in 1140, the Céli Dé and the seven clerics known as the personae were the cathedral's only known clergy. The new Augustinian canons were intended to supplant them: Pope Eugenius III confirmed in 1147 the Augustinians' right to elect the Bishop of St Andrews, and a further papal bull of the same year ordered that as each Céle Dé died, an Augustinian should take his place. Bishop Robert — himself an Augustinian from Nostell — likely intended the Céli Dé to be absorbed entirely, their property folded into the new Cathedral Priory. It did not happen. The Céli Dé endured, and in 1199 the priory recognised their holdings as permanent.

What followed, in the argument of Professor G. W. S. Barrow, was one of the more intriguing power struggles of the medieval Scottish church: from the episcopates of Roger de Beaumont and William de Malveisin, the bishops of St Andrews promoted the Céli Dé as a second cathedral chapter — a counterweight to the Augustinian prior and canons, much as the archbishops of Canterbury, Baldwin and Hubert Walter, had attempted with a secular college of St Thomas, or as successive archbishops of Dublin had done when John Comyn created a collegiate church at St Patrick's that his successor Henry de Loundres raised into a second cathedral. The Céli Dé appear in close alliance with the bishop in repeated disputes with the prior: between 1202 and 1216 Bishop William de Malveisin absolved a sentence of excommunication the prior had imposed, and in 1220 the papal legate Master James was commissioned by Pope Honorius III to resolve a dispute between the Augustinians and Bishop William with "certain clergy of St Andrews commonly called Céli Dé". From 1239, when they took part — at the king's insistence — in the election of David de Bernham, the Céli Dé claimed the right to participate in episcopal elections. The claim came to a head in 1253: after Bishop David's death the Augustinian chapter elected Robert de Stuteville, but the Céli Dé and Archdeacon Abel de Gullane protested to the papacy that the election was invalid because the Céli Dé had been excluded. Gullane was a papal chaplain, and Pope Innocent IV quashed Stuteville's election and appointed Gullane bishop — though no judgment was ever given on the underlying right.

By 1250, in Barrow's account, the Gaelic-speaking Céli Dé had gradually been replaced by the clerks and personal dependents of the early thirteenth-century bishops, most of them from France or England, and the community had moved to the church of St Mary with the status and rights of a secular college — the transformation probably completed in 1248 or 1249, when St Mary's is first mentioned as an institution separate from the cathedral. The first known provost was Master Adam de Malkarviston, attested on 7 November 1250, presiding over six canons; old habits died hard, and the church was still being called "St Mary's of the Céli Dé" in 1344. St Mary's became an official royal chapel between 1286 and 1296, and remained the Chapel Royal of Scotland until the erection of the new Chapel Royal at Stirling in 1501. A papal privilege of 26 January 1386, granted at the petition of King Robert II, admitted the Provost of St Mary's to the chapter of St Andrews as one of its three secular dignitaries alongside the two archdeacons, with a stall in the choir, a place in chapter, and a voice in the election of the bishop. In the 1440s the college's Chancellor was briefly added to the cathedral chapter too, though the arrangement was dissolved within two decades.

The college's endowments mapped both its ancient roots and its later patrons. In the time of Bishop Henry Wardlaw there were eight prebends — probably "Cairns and Cameron", "Kinglassie and Kingask", Lambieletham, "Durie and Rumgally", Kinkell, Kinaldy, Fetteresso and Strathbrock. Lambieletham had been held by the Céli Dé since the twelfth century, obtained in exchange for Strathkinness, and Kinkell had been under their control in the 1170s; Fetteresso and Strathbrock were Wardlaw's own additions of 1425 and 1435–36. Arbuthnott, Ballingry, Benholm and Dysart were added later in the fifteenth century, Idvies in the sixteenth, and by the Reformation there were allegedly thirteen prebends. The list of provosts runs from Adam de Makerstoun through William Comyn, the soldier-cleric Hugh Kennedy, and James Lermont, to Robert Buchanan, who held office until 1618, after which the provostry passed into the possession of the Archbishop of St Andrews in 1625.

The end came quickly. According to the chronicler John Lesley, the church was pulled down by reforming Protestants in June 1559, in the iconoclastic storm that also gutted the great cathedral beside it. The extant foundations show a cross-shaped church without aisles, its choir longer than its nave — the nave representing the earliest of three detectable building phases — with the altar at the eastern end of the choir; the sedilia on the southern wall, the sacristy, and the accommodation of the canons and provost are all lost. What remains today is a green headland between the cathedral ruins and the sea, where the outline of Scotland's first collegiate church — and perhaps fourteen centuries of Christian worship before it — is traced in stone upon the grass.