The Architectural Context of the Border Abbey Churches in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

Summary

The grouping of major monastic houses along Scotland’s border with England must always have been one of the most impressive concentrations of medieval church architecture to be found anywhere in Britain, and several of them have retained highly imposing structural remains. The Augustinian abbey at Jedburgh has preserved the shell of its church, and the plan of its conventual buildings has been recovered and laid out following excavation. At Dryburgh the Premonstratensian abbey in a loop of the Tweed survives as an outstandingly beautiful, if fragmentary, ruin. Of Kelso’s Tironensian abbey the chief remains are the greater part of its extraordinary western crossing and transept, which stand almost to full height. The Cistercian abbey of Melrose has much of those parts of the magnificent late medieval church that had been completed by the Reformation, together with the excavated footings of one of the most extensive complexes of conventual buildings to have been archaeologically explored in Scotland. The choir of Coldingham’s Benedictine priory is still roofed and in use as the parish church, and there are significant portions of its conventual buildings. In addition, there are the remains of a number of smaller foundations. Parts of the Cistercian nunnery church of St Bothans are to be detected in the parish church of Abbey St Bathans. Fragments of another Cistercian nunnery, at Eccles, may be seen around the garden walls of a house adjacent to the parish church. Peebles Trinitarian friary has the shell of the western two-thirds of its church and the footings of the main nucleus of its monastic buildings. The site of Jedburgh Observant Franciscan friary has recently been excavated, and its foundations are displayed in a public garden.

One reason that a number of these churches have survived as well as they have is because parish worship continued to be housed in parts of them after the Reformation, a function that two of them still accommodate. The parochial use of the others came to an end in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: in 1773 at Kelso, in 1784 at Peebles, in 1808 at Melrose, and in 1875 at Jedburgh. But by that stage growing interest in medieval architecture meant that efforts were then made to preserve what had survived.