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CATHEDRAL OF ST ANDREWS.

No portions of the great central tower, or of the main departments of this once majestic edifice are visible at a distance. Secondary pinnacles, or broken fragments of wall only raise their heads; yet even these run high up into the sky over the town, and give it, to a distance at sea, or from the surrounding hills, a spired and towered appearance, corresponding with its character as a cathedral city. The great proportions of these fragments forcibly remind one how vast and stately must have been the complete fane of which they were the secondary adjuncts, and how terrible must have been the popular whirlwind that swept the still greater masses into undistinguishable dust. The nearer we approach, the fragments become more ghastly, the scene more desolate. The town itself is becoming every day less in harmony with its ruinous neighbour. Not many years ago, edifices of mixed ancient architecture, projecting here and there into the streets, gave a decayed, almost obsolete air to all parts of the venerable city, which thus served better as an approach to the solemn ruins, than the modern houses for which they have been doomed to give

way.

Within the area of the cathedral grounds nothing has been done but what deserves commendation. The disjointed position of the fragments having made all attempts at restoration hopeless, the operations, conducted under the auspices of the Exchequer, were confined to the removal of earth and rubbish, and the strengthening of impending masses. Thus, instead of protruding from unseemly rubbish, the ruins rise out of a beautiful expanse of greensward, which the inhabitants of the town enjoy as a pleasure-ground. It is bounded towards the city by a new wall with cast-iron gates, but towards the sea the venerable fortified rampart of Prior Hepburn forms a more suitable protection. Within this cincture are the remains not only of the cathedral, and of the older church of St Regulus, but those of the affluent priory, which almost rivalled the archiepiscopal establishment in splendour. The remains of this edifice are scattered near the south transept and chapter-house of the cathedral. The clearing away of rubbish, which was not accomplished until the year 1826, has laid bare the bases of the pillars, and the traces of the foundation; so that, though only a very small portion of it rises to any great height, the general outline of the plan may be traced.

"It consisted," says an industrious local inquirer, "of a nave two hundred feet long, and sixty-two wide, including the two lateral aisles; a transept, with an eastern aisle, one hundred and sixty feet long; a choir, with two lateral aisles, ninety-eight feet long; and, at the eastern extremity, a Lady chapel thirty-three feet in length. The extreme length of the whole structure, measured inside the wall, is three hundred and fifty-eight feet. All that remains of the edifice is the east gable, part of the west front, the wall on the south side of the nave, and that of the west side of the south transept. In this last may still be seen the remains of some interlaced arches, and the ruins of the steps by which the canons descended from the dormitory to the church to perform their midnight services."*

Eastward of the doorway represented in our view of the Western Front, the lines of pillars of the nave may be traced upon the grass, and a considerable fragment of the wall of the

* Lyon's History of St Andrews, ii. 153.

CATHEDRAL of ST ANDREWS. 1-4.

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south aisle remains, showing the shape and dimensions of the windows, two of which our wood engraving represents. The six westmost windows of the row are pointed, but the remaining four are arched semicircularly; and towards the eastern end of the ruins, as being the earliest built, the characteristics of Norman architecture prevail. Two turrets, with windows of the same rounded character between them, mark the extremity of the choir; and here may be seen the terminations of the galleries, which passed through the triforium and clerestory. Since its destruction, extravagant notions appear to have been entertained of the magnificence of this edifice; and Slezer, in his "Theatrum Scotia," where he represents the ruins nearly in their present condition, states that it was reckoned the largest metropolitan church in Christendom-" Seven feet longer, and two feet broader than that of St Peter's at Rome, and was one of the best Gothic structures in the world, for its height, beautiful pillars, and the symmetry of the whole."

HISTORICAL SKETCH.

The foundation of the cathedral church was laid in the reign of Malcolm III., and the episcopate of Bishop Arnold, which lasted from 1159 to 1163. It is probable that during his life little progress was made in the work, which was not completed until a subsequent era in Scottish history. The earlier bishops of the see were connected by election with one of those communities of Culdees, whose doctrines and polity, and especially their connexion with a hierarchical system, are so much matters of bitter controversy that they can hardly be suitably discussed in a work like the present. Whether it be true or not that they derived their Christianity and their polity through a source different from that of Rome, their small communities were undoubtedly by degrees superseded or absorbed by the hierarchical and monastic institutions directly connected with the Popedom, which spread over the Christian world. The connexion of the Culdees with St Andrews became fainter and fainter, until the election of Bishop Abel in 1253, when it would appear that they were for the first time entirely excluded from voting. In 1298, they made an unsuccessful effort to regain their influence. The episcopate of William Fraser, which commenced in 1279, saw the beginning of Scotland's troubles in the wars with England, and the apparent extinction of national independence. We find that the last king before these events, Alexander III., standing before the high altar of the church, granted or confirmed to the bishop the right of coining money.† His successor, Lamberton, lived in times when the faith of ambitious men was subject to severe ordeals. He had given fealty to Edward, yet he secretly aided Bruce in his first attempts to raise a reaction in Scotland. On the 27th March 1306, he crowned the bold adventurer with a fillet of gold, hastily made for the occasion. But the hour of deliverance had not yet come; and the bishop was seized and imprisoned. He subsequently again made his allegiance to England, in satisfactory terms: and soon afterwards presided at an assembly of the clergy in Dundee, where the right of Bruce was asserted.

When the battle of Bannockburn concluded the war, the moment of triumph and national regeneration was deemed a suitable one for the consecration of the cathedral, which appears to have been then just completed, after the lapse of 150 years from its commencement. The ceremony took place on the 5th of July 1318, in presence of the great popular monarch and his chief nobility, accompanied by seven bishops and fifteen abbots.

The king endowed the cathedral with one hundred merks annually, subsequently redeemed by a gift of the church of Fordun, as an oblation for the great victory with which the patron

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saint of his country had blessed his arms.

Some of the nobles, and along with them the unstable bishop himself, liberally followed the royal example. Of the gifts made to the church by Bishop Trail, whose episcopate ended at the close of the fifteenth century, Wyntoun gives a more exact inventory than most readers will be inclined to peruse; beginning with "twa lang coddis" or cushions" of velvet," and ending with

"Of sylvyr the haly wattyr fate,

The styk of sylvyr he gave to that,
An ewar of sylvyr than gave he,
Of gold bawdekynnys he gave thre;
Twa brade ewaris of sylvyr brycht,
And owrgylt all welle at sycht."

Of Prior Haldenstane, who died in 1443, it is said, "He adorned the interior, as well with carved stalls, as with the images of the saints. The nave, which before had been covered in by James Bisset, his predecessor of good memory, but was still bare and unfurnished, he beautified throughout with glass windows and polished pavement; as also by supplying altars, images, and ornaments. He furnished the vestry with relics at great expense, repaired the former ones, and erected presses for containing them. The whole choir of the church, the two transepts, two sides of the square cloister, and the entrance to the chapter-house, he laid with polished pavement.

About the year 1472, the see of St Andrews was made metropolitan. It is singular that the precise date of this event is only approximated. No copy of the bull conferring the precedence is known to exist; and the circumstance that the honour was sought rather to satisfy the personal ambition of the bishop for the time-Patric Graham, than from any desire on the part of his order to possess a metropolitan, appears to have prevented the event from obtaining much public contemporary notice. Yet it obviated the possibility of interference by the Archbishop of York, which, in the absence of a metropolitan of their own, was a grievance to which the Scottish clergy had been often subjected. Henceforth the history of the cathedral of St Andrews, so long as the episcopal polity prevailed, is in a great measure that of the Church of Scotland.

St Andrews is intimately associated with many of the eventful and tragical scenes of the Reformation. The last archbishop but one, before the extinction of the Romish hierarchy, was the celebrated, and perhaps it may be said the notorious, Cardinal David Beatoun, whose execution of Wishart the martyr was so savagely avenged by his own slaughter in the capture of his castle. Those who had performed this deed sought to avert the consequences by defending themselves in the cardinal's stronghold, in which they stood a long siege, which gave few promises of success, until French engineers came to the assistance of the Scots, still very inexpert in the capture of places of strength. Prior John Hepburn, an ambitious ecclesiastic of the early part of the sixteenth century, who had struggled vigorously for the archiepiscopal chair, built the magnificent wall already mentioned, which protects the cathedral towards the sea, and sweeps round the area of the priory. This wall is strongly built, and its many towers, along with its niches for the images of saints, give it a partly defensive, partly ecclesiastical character. Surmounting a rock which lay opposite to the castle, on the other side of an indentation of the shore, it afforded, along with some of the surrounding steeples, a position from which the French gunners could point their cannon. They thus succeeded in a few hours in mastering the castle.

On the 11th of June 1559, Knox preached in the cathedral church. He had made a circuit,

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accompanied by the Earl of Argyle and the Lord James Stuart, afterwards the Regent Murray, through the towns in Fifeshire, and a considerable number of people followed him to St Andrews. The archbishop, John Hamilton, who was subsequently executed on a charge of accession to Darnley's murder, proposed to resist Knox's occupation of the pulpit with one hundred armed men. The Reformer was besought by his friends to desist from his intention; but hesitation and timidity were not among the defects of his character, and he accordingly preached, and, as he informs us, "did entreat of the ejectioun of the byaris and the sellaris furth of the tempill of Jerusalem, as it is writtin in the evangelistis Mathow and Johne; and so applyed the corruptioun that was thair to the corruptioun that is in the papistrie, and Christe's fact to the dewetie of those to whome God geveth power and zeall thairto, that alsweill the magistratis, the provest and bailies, as the communaltie for the most parte, within the toun, did agree to remove all monumentis of idolatrie, which also thay did with expeditioun.' Whether this "expeditioun" applied to the destruction of the cathedral building, as well as to the images and desecrations, is uncertain, and we have no distinct account of the manner, or even the precise time, in which it was destroyed.

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