Arbroath Abbey

Arbroath Abbey stands in the centre of Arbroath, in Angus, on red sandstone. The ruins are the remains, now mainly fragmentary, of a royal monastery planned by William the Lion, also called William I of Scotland, as his own burial place. He reigned from 1165 to 1214. The church was laid out with a two-bay aisle-less presbytery, a three-bay aisled choir, transepts with three-bay east chapel aisles, and a nave of nine aisled bays.

Three towers were intended, one over the crossing and two over the west bays of the nave aisles. What still stands in the greatest mass is the west front, with its twin towers, deep portal, and arcaded gallery. The lower east and south walls of the presbytery and choir survive, with the sacristy, the south wall and the lower west wall of the south transept, and the south wall of the nave. A second description measures the cruciform church at 276 feet, or 84 metres, long and 160 feet, or 49 metres, wide, and lists the sacristy, the southern transept, part of the choir and presbytery, the southern half of the nave, parts of the western towers, and the western doorway.

The national grid is given as NO 64332 41290, and the recorded extent is centred on NO 6432 4129.

William the Lion was born around 1142, during the reign of his grandfather David I. His parents were Henry of Scotland and Ada de Warenne. His Gaelic name is Uilleam an Leòmhann. He was also called Garbh, the Rough, and he was sometimes styled William I.

He was about ten when his father died in 1152, and he inherited the earldom of Northumbria. David died the next year. In 1157 William lost Northumbria to Henry II of England. His brother Malcolm IV died on 9 December 1165 at the age of 24, and William was inaugurated on 24 December 1165.

The reign is given as 49 years and as almost 49 years, the longest for a Scottish monarch before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. He was not called the Lion in his own lifetime. The name did not come from his character or from his fighting. It was attached to his flag, a red lion rampant with a forked tail on yellow, and the chronicler John of Fordun called him the Lion of Justice.

Another account takes the nickname from his adoption of the Lion Rampant, later the Royal Banner of Scotland.

After his accession he spent time at Henry II’s court, then quarrelled with Henry and in 1168 arranged the first definite treaty of alliance between France and Scotland. He was a principal figure in the revolt of 1173 to 1174, led by Henry’s sons, with brief help from Louis VII of France. Eleanor of Aquitaine is said to have promised him Northumberland. In 1174, on a raid in support of that revolt, he was surprised at Alnwick.

One account gives him only 60 men against an English 400. He charged, shouting that they would now see which of them were good knights, and he was unhorsed and captured by the troops of Ranulf de Glanvill. He was taken in chains to Newcastle, then Northampton, then Caen, and then Falaise. Another account places the prisons in Yorkshire, then Northampton, and then France, and says his feet were shackled beneath the belly of his horse.

Henry sent an army into Scotland and occupied it. The price of release is given as 40,000 Scottish marks, or £26,000, with the Scottish church subjected to the English church, and also as the surrender of Edinburgh and Stirling castles and an end to invading England. He signed the Treaty of Falaise. One date for that treaty is 8 December 1174.

On 10 August 1175 he swore fealty to Henry II at York Castle and became his liege man.

Thomas Becket, also called Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London, and later Thomas à Becket, was born on 21 December 1119 or in 1120 and died on 29 December 1170. He was Lord Chancellor from 1155 to 1162 and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162. His quarrel with Henry II over the rights of the church led to a trial in 1164, six years of exile under Louis VII, and a return in 1170. On 14 June 1170 Roger de Pont L’Évêque, Archbishop of York, with Gilbert Foliot, Bishop of London, and Josceline de Bohon, Bishop of Salisbury, crowned Henry the Young King at Westminster Abbey, a rite Canterbury claimed as its own.

In November 1170 Becket excommunicated the three. Four knights, Reginald FitzUrse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard le Breton, reached Canterbury on 29 December 1170 and killed him in the cathedral. He was canonised by Pope Alexander III on 21 February 1173 at St Peter’s Church in Segni. On 12 July 1174, during the same revolt, Henry did public penance at Becket’s tomb.

The capture of the Scottish king at Alnwick in July 1174 has been read as the saint’s intercession after that submission. William and Becket are thought to have been close friends since childhood, and William is also said to have known him personally as a young man at the English court.

The abbey was founded in 1178, and in another account around 1178, for Tironensian Benedictine monks from Kelso Abbey. It was William’s only personal foundation. The monks were asked to establish the house, and the king gave it independence from Kelso. The purposes named for it are a memorial to Becket, help in extending royal authority in the north-east, a demonstration of the right to rule, a calculated snub to Henry II after the captivity, and a burial church of his own.

Why Arbroath itself was chosen is not known. The Tironensians are described as the earliest of the reformed monastic orders introduced anywhere in the British Isles. David I, while still Earl of Huntingdon, is said to have brought them to Selkirk. Another account places their arrival about 1113, under David as prince of the Cumbrians, in the reign of his brother Alexander I, with the move from Selkirk to Roxburgh, the site of Kelso, in 1128.

Kelso was dedicated in 1143 to the Virgin Mary and Saint John, and Henry, Earl of Northumbria, William’s father, was buried there in 1152. Arnold, abbot of Kelso, founded the cathedral church at St Andrews. The order’s houses in Scotland include Selkirk and then Kelso, Arbroath in 1178, Kilwinning from 1140 onward, Lindores, and Lesmahagow. In France the order was joined to the Benedictine Congregation of St Maur in 1627.

The church is said to have been consecrated in 1197, with a dedication to the dead saint. The same completion year, 1197, is given for the dedication to Becket. Another account says the building was unfinished when the king was buried there in December 1214, that it was not consecrated until 1233, and that it may not have been finished even then. The dedication is also dated 8 May 1233.

A smaller first scheme is thought to have been given up about ten years after the foundation, in favour of the larger church finished around that dedication of 1233. The work used local red sandstone over some sixty years and reads as one mainly Early English design, while the round-arched processional doorway in the west front looks back to late Norman or transitional work. The open arcade, or triforium, above the door is called unique in Scottish medieval architecture. The towers carry blind arcading.

There was probably a spire on the central tower, visible for miles and useful as a sea mark. The walls were once plastered inside and rendered outside. Those coatings are gone, and much of the carved detail has eroded, though loose fragments found during later consolidation show a refined and rather austere finish.

The east gable drew its force from tiered triplets of lancets. The south transept has enormously elongated lancets, called the largest lancet windows in Scotland, and three tiers of blank arches, the highest fronting the passage from the night stairs. The nave was three storeys high, on octofoil clustered-shaft piers, with a gallery of paired pointed arches inside a round-headed arch, and a clearstorey that probably had pairs of windows behind a wall passage. The design is traced to northern England, through St Andrews Cathedral and Jedburgh Abbey, with the closest surviving parallel at Hexham, and with related work at York, Ripon, Fountains, Rievaulx, Brechin, and Lanercost.

The west front, with paired towers, a cavernous portal, an arcaded gallery, and a great rose window, is read as an awareness of recent northern French façades. Paired towers had already been used at Dunfermline. The only significant later addition to the church named in that architectural account is the mid-fifteenth-century block on the south side of the choir, a sacristy below and a treasury above. Another account gives that sacristy to Abbot Paniter in the fifteenth century, and the building sequence dates the two-storey sacristy and treasury to the abbacy of Walter Paniter, from 1410 to 1449.

Domestic buildings stood around a small cloister on the south side of the church and, unusually, a second cloister further south. Most survive as foundations or excavated footings, apart from the south-east corner of the thirteenth-century chapter house. The abbot’s house, grown around an abbot’s hall at the south-west corner of the cloister, is called the best preserved of its type in Scotland and one of the most complete abbot’s residences in Britain. Its fabric is given to the thirteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

By the early sixteenth century it had become one of the most important non-defensible magnate’s houses in Scotland. The principal rooms were on the first floor, reached by an external forestair into a corridor, with a spiral stair, a hall later split by an inserted floor, a bedchamber and closet, and a gallery lit by a tight row of windows, with latrines, fireplaces, and traces of painted decoration. A three-storey reading of the same house gives it a groined roof on the ground floor and calls it a museum. The gatehouse range running west from the south-west tower may be thirteenth-century in origin, remodelled later in the Middle Ages.

Its passage was four bays long, with a great traceried window and blind arcading. Perhaps around the early sixteenth century the window was reduced, and a machicolated wall-walk and crow-stepped gable were added. A portcullis once defended the pend. The north-western angle tower, a three-storey keep with vaulted floors, was remodelled around 1500 with a machicolated parapet and new fireplaces.

A range beside the church may have been a guest house. The range between gatehouse and tower is traditionally called the regality court, where the estates were administered and justice was done. The precinct wall is said to have been of great height, 150 feet or 46 metres on the east and west, 760 feet or 232 metres on the north, and 480 feet or 146 metres on the south, with towers at the angles and gates on the north and at the south-east. Where the wall has gone, the line is marked by excavated foundations or by kerb stones.

The round window high in the south transept gable, the Round O, was lit at night as a beacon for mariners. From that light, people from Arbroath are called Reid Lichties. Robert Stevenson, grandfather of the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, repaired that gable in 1809 while he was in the town for the Bell Rock lighthouse. Another account says he rebuilt it.

The endowments, confirmed in a charter near the end of the reign, included the tithes and patronage of 24 parish churches, a parcel of land in every royal burgh, further lands, fisheries, ferries, saltpans, and Arbroath itself with the right to found a burgh. The monks might hold a market and build a harbour. Humphrey de Berkeley, laird of Gartley, gave the monks and their tenants free access to his wood at Balfieth in the Mearns for building and fuel, with peat for fuel, and the abbey’s charcoal burners had seasonal access to woodland around Edzell. King John of England allowed the abbey to buy and sell anywhere in England except London, without toll.

The house is called the richest abbey in Scotland, and the wealthiest and most powerful abbey in later medieval Scotland. Among the first gifts was custody of the Brecbennach, from the Gaelic Breac Beannach, understood as a banner, relic, or battle standard, possibly of St Columba, and translated as the speckled, peaked one. In 1211 a further charter added the lands of Forglen, given for God, St Columba, and the Brecbennach, on condition that the holders do military service and bring the Brecbennach with them. That duty passed to the families who later held Forglen, and the link is still in charters into the seventeenth century.

From the mid-nineteenth century the object was identified with the Monymusk Reliquary, also written Moneymusk, and it was also thought to have been carried at Bannockburn by Abbot Bernard. Later historians have questioned whether it is that reliquary, whether it was at Bannockburn, and whether it was ever at Arbroath. The popular association remains.

The Treaty of Falaise lasted about fifteen years. Richard the Lionheart, needing money for the Third Crusade, ended it on 5 December 1189 for 10,000 silver marks, or £6,500. Another account gives the same sum of 10,000 marks and says Scotland regained full sovereignty. In 1194 William offered 15,000 marks, or £9,750, for Northumbria and was refused because he wanted the castles.

In 1200 he did homage for Northumbria, not for Scotland, to King John. In August 1209 John brought an army to Norham. William promised money, agreed that his elder daughters would marry English nobles, and in a renewal of 1212 the marriage of his heir Alexander to John’s daughter Joan was arranged. In the autumn of 1209, while William was in Perth, a flood forced the royal family out by boat.

Henry II had the right, under Falaise, to choose William’s wife. In 1184 a marriage to Matilda of Saxony was forbidden for consanguinity. Henry chose Ermengarde de Beaumont. They married at Woodstock Palace on 5 September 1186.

Edinburgh Castle was her dowry, and Henry paid for four days of festivities. Jocelin, bishop of Glasgow, escorted her north. Their children were Margaret, countess of Kent, born in 1193 and died in 1259; Isabella, countess of Norfolk, 1195 to 1263; Alexander II, 1198 to 1249; and Marjorie, 1200 to 1244. He also had illegitimate children, among them Margaret, who married Eustace de Vesci; Robert de London; and others whose descendants were competitors for the crown in 1291.

The humiliation of Falaise set off a revolt in Galloway that lasted until 1186 and prompted a castle at Dumfries. In 1179 William and his brother David led a force into Easter Ross and raised castles at Ederdour on the Black Isle and at Dunkeath near the Cromarty Firth. Donald Meic Uilleim took Ross in a rising of 1181 and died in 1187, after which Inverness was recovered. Further northern expeditions came in 1197 and 1202.

A quarrel over the bishopric of St Andrews, between the king’s chaplain Hugh and the canonically elected John Scotus, ran through the pontificates of Alexander III and Lucius III. Hugh received St Andrews and John received Dunkeld. In 1188 a papal bull made the Scottish church directly subject to Rome. About 1192 the bishopric of Argyll was established, in the same year as a papal confirmation of the Scottish church by Celestine III.

William died on 4 December 1214 and was succeeded by his son Alexander. One account says he died in his sleep at Stirling Castle, aged 71. He was buried before the high altar. That burial broke a custom of about a century: Scottish monarchs had been laid at Dunfermline since Queen Margaret’s burial in the royal mausoleum there in 1093.

His queen, also called his widow, chose her own foundation at Balmerino for her grave. The first recorded abbot was Reginald, in 1178 and 1179, then Henry from 1179 to 1207, Gilbert from 1208 into the 1220s, and Radulf de Lamley from 1225 to 1239, so the dedication year of 1233 falls in Radulf’s time. Later names in the sequence include Adam, Walter, Robert, Sabinus, John, William, Henry, Nicholas, and John de Anegus from 1303 to 1309.

Richard Oram, a Scottish historian born in the twentieth century, is professor of medieval and environmental history at the University of Stirling and director of the Centre for Environmental History and Policy there. He took a master of arts in medieval history with archaeology at St Andrews in 1983 and wrote his doctorate on medieval Galloway. He joined Stirling in September 2002 after an honorary lectureship at Aberdeen. His books include a life of David I in 2004 and another in 2020, a life of Alexander II published in 2012 and covering 1214 to 1249, and Domination and Lordship, a history of Scotland from 1070 to 1230 published in 2011.

That span covers the foundation, the burial of 1214, and the start of Alexander II’s reign. In June 2014 he became president of the Scottish Castles Association, and in October 2023 he was made a trustee of National Museums Scotland for four years. He is not described as a digger of this abbey.

The wars that followed the deaths of Alexander III in 1286 and of the Maid of Norway in 1290 left the Scottish throne empty. Edward I of England deposed John Balliol in July 1296 and took the Stone of Scone from Scone to Westminster. In February 1306 Robert Bruce killed John Comyn before the altar at Greyfriars in Dumfries and was crowned at Scone. He was excommunicated for that killing.

One account says Bishop Wishart of Glasgow absolved him. Another says the excommunication was lifted in 1308, that the pope threatened it again in 1317 if a truce was ignored, and that in 1320 John XXII excommunicated him once more. A further account ties a renewed excommunication to the capture of Berwick in 1318 during a papal truce, after the victory at Bannockburn in 1314. By 1314 only Edinburgh, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Roxburgh, and Stirling remained in English hands.

Edward Bruce’s campaign in Ireland ended with his death in 1318. Pope John had recognised Edward I’s overlordship of Scotland in 1305.

Bernard of Kilwinning, who died about 1331, was a Tironensian abbot, chancellor, and later bishop of the Isles. His name, Bernard abbe de Kilwynin, is on the Ragman Rolls of 28 August 1296, and he appears in a Melrose document that Christmas. He is not recorded as abbot of Kilwinning after 1296. A man named Roger is abbot of Kilwinning in a document of 1296 to 1305, so Bernard had left that office by 1305 at the latest.

He may have been ejected by the English king and may have gone to Arbroath. Since 1726 he was identified with Bernard de Linton, parson of Mordington, a name that occurs only on the Ragman Rolls. In 1988 A. A.

M. Duncan argued that the chancellor was Bernard of Kilwinning, not Bernard de Linton, and other historians have accepted that. Another account still calls the abbot Bernard de Linton and says he took the office in 1309 after Bishop Henry Lamberton removed John of Angus. The abbot’s own life says that from 1308 he appears in Robert I’s charters as Dom Bernard the Chancellor, that 1308 was the year Robert gained Angus, and that John de Angus, also written John de Anegus and John of Angus, was an English appointee.

On 1 November 1309 the bishop of St Andrews released John from the office. John kept Haltwhistle, a parish in Tynedale that belonged to the abbey. English sources still called John abbot. He was a Scottish prisoner in 1312 and held Haltwhistle from the bishop of Durham by 1313.

Bernard was elected abbot sometime in 1310, probably by August. The list of heads gives Bernard the years 1310 to 1328.

After his blessing he went to Norway and returned in February 1312. On 29 October 1312 Norwegian ambassadors met Robert at Inverness and agreed the Treaty of Inverness, renewing the Treaty of Perth and settling seizures of Scottish goods in Norway and the Scottish kidnapping of the steward of Orkney. Nine of the sixteen surviving royal charters from 1312 and 1313 have the abbey as beneficiary. Walter Bower, in the fifteenth century, gave Bernard a Latin poem on Bannockburn and quoted many lines of it.

Bower also hints that another Arbroath monk may have written it. Bernard’s name is on the Declaration of Arbroath, and as chancellor he had a role. He has been widely said, since the eighteenth century, to have drafted it, and there is no direct evidence. Duncan thought the papal cursus in the text pointed to a professional rhetorician.

G. W. S. Barrow thought Alexander de Kininmund, also Kinninmonth, a likelier author.

Another account says Bernard was responsible for overseeing the drafting, that the terms were probably agreed at Newbattle, that the letter was drafted in the royal secretariat, and that it was issued from Arbroath. It is also generally believed to have been written in the abbey by Bernard of Kilwinning or of Linton.

The letter is dated 6 April 1320 at Arbroath and is addressed to Pope John XXII. It is called a response to excommunication for disobeying a demand of 1317 for a truce, and also a defence after the renewed excommunication that followed Berwick. It argues that Scotland was an ancient independent kingdom. It is the sole survivor of three letters made at the time.

The others were from Robert I and from four Scottish bishops. The lead count of seals is fifty-one magnates and nobles. The document itself begins with 39 names, eight earls and thirty-one barons. At least eleven further barons and freeholders were associated on the folded foot.

A shorter account says the letter was sent by 39 Scottish nobles, barons, and freemen. On the surviving copy only 19 seals remain, and only 12 of those people are named in the text. It was carried to Avignon by Sir Adam Gordon, Sir Odard de Maubuisson, and Kininmund, who was not yet a bishop. Two wordings of the famous sentences are preserved.

One says that as long as a hundred of them remained alive they would never on any conditions be subjected to the lordship of the English, and that they fought not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. The other says they were fighting not for glory, nor riches, nor honours, but for freedom, for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself. The text claims a migration of the Scoti from Scythia by way of Spain, 113 kings of their own blood, and a comparison of Robert with Judah Maccabee and Joshua. It has been read as an early claim that a people may choose or reject a king, and also as propaganda for Bruce against the still-living John Balliol.

A further reading derives much of it from the Irish Remonstrance of 1317. The papacy is said to have lifted the excommunication and then to have used Robert’s royal title. Robert’s life places papal recognition of him as king of an independent Scotland in 1324, and the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton, by which Edward III gave up sovereignty over Scotland, in 1328. The letter was little known until the late seventeenth century.

The Latin text was first printed in the 1680s and translated into English after the Glorious Revolution. In 1998 a resolution of the United States Senate, following a resolution of 10 November 1997, fixed a National Tartan Day on 6 April and said the American Declaration of Independence was modelled on this letter. Historians generally do not support that claim. In 2016 the letter was placed on the United Kingdom Memory of the World Register.

The seven-hundredth year, 2020, was to have a festival in Arbroath, postponed because of the pandemic, and the National Museum of Scotland planned to show the document in public for the first time in fifteen years.

In the winter of 1327 to 1328 Bernard was advanced to the bishopric of the Isles, a see Robert had reserved for his own patronage in 1324. The election likely fell between 9 November 1327 and 14 January 1328. He resigned the chancellorship, and its salary of 200 marks, probably on 3 April 1328. Robert assigned him £100 toward the expenses of the election and the grain tithes of the church lands of Abernethy for seven years.

He was consecrated between 26 June and 12 November 1328, perhaps in Norway, where the archbishop of Trondheim was metropolitan. Some canons of Snizort had elected Cormac Cormacii instead. Cormac’s representatives were in Bergen in July 1331 and failed to overturn Bernard. Bernard had died by 10 June 1331.

The Chronicles of Mann say he was bishop during four different years and that he was buried at Kilwinning, his first monastery, not at Arbroath. The next abbot in the list is Geoffrey, from 1329 to 1347.

A fire caused by a great storm is dated 1272. The English attacked the abbey in 1350 and again in 1378 or 1379. Lightning struck the church in 1380. On 16 February 1384 a contract with a plumber for re-roofing the choir suggests that repairs were nearly done.

On 29 January 1446 a fight in front of the great gate, between the Ogilvys and the Lindays, left the gentlefolk buried in the abbey and the humbler people in the cemetery. John Gedy, abbot from 1384 to 1410, was granted the mitre on 26 June 1396. The poem The Inchcape Rock gives him a bell on the Inchcape Rock to warn ships. A maintenance contract with the wright Stephen Liel is dated 1474.

In 1517 Arthur Boece, a clerk of the diocese of Brechin, described the interior and the furnishings to an Italian cardinal. Other sources for that year still count twenty-seven monks, which has been taken to mean the house was in a healthy state.

David Beaton, also Beton or Bethune, was born about 1494 and died on 29 May 1546. He was the fifth son of fourteen children of John Beaton of Balfour, who died in 1514, and Christian Rosyth. He studied at St Andrews and Glasgow, was sent to Paris in his sixteenth year, and in 1519 studied civil and canon law at Orléans. In 1520 his uncle James Beaton, then archbishop of Glasgow, made him rector and prebendary of Cambuslang.

The abbey account says that in 1522 David succeeded that uncle as archbishop of St Andrews and was the last abbot. His own life says the uncle became archbishop of St Andrews in 1522 and resigned the commendatorship of Arbroath in the nephew’s favour, that David returned to Scotland with the Duke of Albany in 1521, went to England as a diplomat in 1522, and in 1525 sat in parliament as lord abbot or commendator. The list of heads gives James Beaton the abbey from 1517 to 1523 or 1524, and David Beaton from 1524 to 1545, and it continues with later commendators, so the phrase last abbot does not close the list. James V stayed at the abbey for four days in July 1529, during those years.

Between 1533 and 1542 David was often James V’s ambassador to France, for the marriages to Madeleine of France and then to Mary of Guise, and he sent the king hawks and wild boar. In 1537 he was coadjutor at St Andrews with right of succession. In December 1537 he was made bishop of Mirepoix and consecrated the next summer. In 1538 Pope Paul III made him a cardinal, with the title of St Stephen on the Caelian Hill.

In February 1539 he succeeded his uncle as archbishop of St Andrews. In 1544 he was papal legate in Scotland. He was the last Scottish cardinal before the Reformation.

Margaret Sanderson, born in Paisley, took a master of arts and a doctorate at Edinburgh in 1971, worked at the Scottish Record Office from 1969, and became head of publications and education there. In 1986 she published her biography of the cardinal, Cardinal of Scotland. She wrote that his relationship with Marion Ogilvy, born in 1500, the youngest daughter of James Ogilvy, first Lord Ogilvy of Airlie, looked little different from a marriage, and that the couple lived at Ethie Castle and had eight children. She took that open breach of clerical celibacy, beside his prosecution of Protestants who argued that clergy might marry, to have damaged the Catholic Church in Scotland.

His oldest surviving son, David Beaton of Melgund, later became a Protestant and master of the household to James VI and to Anne of Denmark. His daughter Margaret married David Lindsay, tenth earl of Crawford. James V died at Falkland Palace on 14 December 1542. Beaton produced a will that would have made him a regent for Mary, Queen of Scots.

It was generally regarded as forged. The Earl of Arran became regent. Beaton was arrested on 27 January 1543, held at Dalkeith, Seton, Blackness, and then St Andrews Castle. On 29 May 1546 Norman Leslie, William Kirkcaldy of Grange, and Peter Carmichael of Balmadie stabbed him in St Andrews Castle, mutilated the body, and hung it from a window.

That killing was not at Arbroath. At his death he was lord chancellor, archbishop, and cardinal legate. The next names at the abbey include James Beaton II from 1545 to 1551, George Douglas, and John, Lord Hamilton, from 1551 to 1568 and again from 1573 to 1579. The Hamiltons held the commendatorship, and the estates were made a temporal lordship in 1606 and in 1608.

The list ends, for the sixteenth century, with Esmé Stuart from 1579 to 1583.

A first attack by Reformers is dated 1543, though religious life may have continued until the Reformation parliament of 1560. Parts of the abbey were dismantled in 1580 to build a new burgh church. Another account says that from 1590 the stones were taken for buildings in the town, and that this went on until 1815. By the time of John Slezer’s views in the Theatrum Scotiae of 1693, the ruins were much as they are now.

The sacristy, the abbot’s house, and parts of the gatehouse were kept up because they had new uses. The rest was treated as a quarry, and the unroofed church became an extension of the graveyard, with burial plots for leading local families. The abbot’s house later served as a school and as a factory, and part of the gatehouse range was used by the burgh for civic business. In the later eighteenth century the town began to take pride in the ruins.

In 1799 the magistrates asked the Barons of the Exchequer, responsible under the Act of Annexation of 1587, for a repair grant, and were refused. In 1814 a petition of the future Lord Panmure to be keeper of the fabric led the Barons to sue in the Court of Session. Judgment gave the remains to the crown. In 1816 they began a major clearance and stabilisation, more invasive than later practice would allow.

In the 1830s Robert Reid urged that neighbouring properties be bought and demolished so the abbey could be seen. Further work in 1834 and 1835, on Reid’s report, aimed to keep the ruins as they were rather than to rebuild a supposed original. In 1842 the ground beside the south transept was bought. The gatehouse range was acquired in 1905, the abbot’s house in 1924, and the claustral ranges in 1929.

A summary of state care gives ownership in 1905 and guardianship in 1929. The old maps call the place the Abbey of Aberbrothock, and the church St Thomas’s or the Abbey Church.

State digging inside the church began as early as 1816, with more in 1834 and 1835. Work south of the south transept came in the 1840s. The other monastic buildings were not explored until after 1929. Those digs generally stopped when historic occupation levels were reached, so they mostly disturbed post-medieval soil, and only the areas then thought urgent were opened.

In 1938 an excavation in the chapter house found ten interments in stone coffins, taken to be abbots or other senior members. One coffin held the remains of a wool habit. The graves had been rifled at some later time. Much of the archaeological potential is thought to have survived, including outside the core, despite later burials and post-medieval buildings.

On Christmas Day, 25 December 1950, Ian Hamilton, Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson, and Alan Stuart, students at the University of Glasgow and members of the Scottish Covenant Association, took the Stone of Scone from Westminster Abbey. The stone had been fitted into King Edward’s Chair. It broke in two as it came out. The border was closed for the first time in four hundred years.

A stonemason, Baillie Robert Gray, mended it with a brass rod that held a piece of paper. What was written on the paper is not known. The stone was found at Arbroath on the site of the high altar in April 1951, and also on 11 April 1951, and also beside the high altar in March 1951, three months after the removal. One account calls the abbey, at that moment, a property of the Church of Scotland.

The care record already gives the buildings to the state in 1905 and 1929. The stone is said to have been returned to Westminster four months after the removal, and also in February 1952, after about a year’s absence. The four were interviewed. All but Hamilton later confessed.

They were not prosecuted. Hartley Shawcross told Parliament that the removal was vandalism and an offence to the sanctity of Westminster, and that the public interest did not require criminal proceedings. A display about the stone was added in the visitor centre in 2014. The panels in the abbey itself had been renewed in 2010.

A display linking the declaration to the American Declaration of Independence, in the undercroft, was refreshed in 2014.

A visitors’ centre beside the west front is said to have opened in the summer of 2001, and also in 2003. It is clad in red sandstone, with a wave-shaped roof planted with sedum. It holds displays, surviving stonework, a scale model, a computer fly-through of the complete church, and a viewing gallery. It won the Angus Design Award in 2002.

There were 11,641 visitors in 2013 to 2014. Costumed guided tours were available when the significance of the place was last reviewed in 2015. Before the centre was built, the ground on its site was dug. Trial trenches in June 1999 found nothing surviving in Hamilton Green itself and a dump of medieval waste on the raised ground by the graveyard wall, read as redeposited.

The main excavation ran from 27 March to 20 April 2000, after a watching brief of 7 to 24 March on the underpinning of a burial-enclosure wall. Further watching of landscaping ran from 29 May 2000 to 5 June 2001. The north door was dug from 4 to 11 July 2001. A water main in Abbey Street was watched from 26 February to 25 March 2001, and the lowering of the pend from 17 January to 4 April 2002.

The 2000 site lay north of the north-west tower and west of the burial ground, a raised grassed area about 33 metres north to south. Fourteen possible stakeholes, about a tenth of a metre deep and wide, were cut into the natural subsoil and may have held a crude shelter or a fence before the abbey. A ditch about 13 metres long on a north–south line, in its northern part 0.7 metres deep and 2.2 metres across, was filled while construction was still going on, because architectural fragments lie in the fill. A sandstone wall about 12 metres long is read as the original burial-ground wall, with an ashlar jamb of an entrance whose full width could not be measured.

Four articulated burials lay east of that wall, without wooden coffins, heads to the west, in a row, about a metre below the modern surface, the skulls between 16.61 and 16.89 metres above ordnance datum. They are also called monastic burials, and an early report of the dig believed them to be medieval monks. A rough metalled path through the entrance produced pottery of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Unused architectural stones with masons’ marks were built into later dwarf walls in the dumped material west of the wall, and small hearths left slag.

The area is also called the masons’ yard, and the entrance is also called a gateway and a secondary gatehouse in the precinct wall. At the north door, the original threshold of squared blocks survived inside the moulded jambs, with a row of seven further stones on the outer line of the jambs. A gravel and mortar surface is taken to be the original public approach. In 2001 three test pits on the boundary found, in one, a small pit and a medieval potsherd, in another, demolition debris, and in the third, nothing of note.

Copper alloy, iron, glass, bone, and antler objects from the medieval dumps have been read as possible traces of a workshop or of trade. Seals, a gaming board, and a ring brooch have also been found in the grounds, as separate finds.

In May 2011 two trenches for new information signs showed mostly later levelling. Possible structural remains in the southern trench, at NO 6430 4124, were left undisturbed. Another trench of that work is placed at NO 6429 4129. In January 2013 four small trenches tested the roots of newly planted apple trees south and south-west of the Little Cloister.

To the west the ground had been raised in the recent past. Further east, closer to the ruins, probable medieval deposits lay at a shallow depth. It had previously been thought that a road and houses of the late 1800s had cleared that ground. In March 2018 a geophysical survey of the abbey grounds and of Abbey Green to the east found anomalies that may be structural remains and numerous possible drains.

The reading is cautious because of later occupation. In February 2020 twelve trenches tested those anomalies and asked how far nineteenth- and twentieth-century clearance had gone, and what medieval material survived. The work is also described as preparation for a new scriptorium. Stone walls were recorded in trenches 1 and 7.

A linear clay feature with a groove was recorded in trench 3. Negative cuts lay at the base of trenches 3 and 5. Two concreted, flat-topped sandstone structures in trench 6 were almost certainly contemporary and worked together, though their purpose is unknown. Possibly undisturbed medieval deposits were recorded in trench 8.

The top of a possible vaulted flue was recorded in trench 9. A metalled surface was recorded in trench 12. Trenches 2, 4, and 10 had no archaeological features. Live tree roots stopped a full look at trench 11.

In June 2021 a watching brief for a new interpretation panel east of the outer cloister found no features, deposits, or artefacts. In March 2022 a watching brief for a temporary scriptorium south-east of the abbot’s house found nothing of archaeological significance.

The abbey and its associated buildings, including the abbot’s house, were added to the schedule of monuments on 31 December 1921, amended on 21 February 2018, with supplementary information updated on 31 January 2019. The same place is also recorded as scheduled on 11 October 1971, when the abbey and the associated buildings were listed, the listing being of category A. A campaign for wider international recognition of the abbey and the declaration was launched in 2005. Alex Johnstone wrote that the declaration was a literary work of outstanding universal significance.

In 2008 Councillor Jim Millar opened a public petition and said the campaign was asking the United Nations for that recognition. No later account among these pages records that the abbey received it. White stonecrop, a plant more often found in southern England, grows on the stonework. A herbal of 1649 says it resists pestilential fevers and is good for tertian agues, that bruised and applied outwardly it helps the King’s evil, and that it should be used carefully inside the body because the juice causes vomiting.

A possible bat roost has been noted. The sandstone weathers badly, and many different repairs can be seen in the masonry. In January 2026 the interior was described as closed since 2021, after inspections found unstable high-level masonry, while the visitor centre and the grounds stayed open, and faster decay of the red sandstone was blamed on the changing climate. The visit information current on 9 November 2026 gives opening hours and ticket prices and does not repeat that closure.

Hugh Chisholm, born in London on 22 February 1866 and died on 29 September 1924, edited the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was a son of Henry Williams Chisholm and Anna Louisa Bell, and the mathematician Grace Chisholm was his sister. He was educated at Felsted, matriculated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1884, took a first in literae humaniores in 1888, and was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1892. He edited the eleventh edition as editor-in-chief from 1903.

It was completed under his direction in 1910 and published as a whole, in 29 volumes, in 1911. That eleventh edition is one of the reference works attached to the published account of this abbey. The Catholic Encyclopedia, an English-language work on the Catholic Church published in New York, is another. Its first volume appeared in March 1907.

The last three volumes are placed in 1912, and the run is also said to have ended with volume 15 in 1913, with a master index in 1914. The company was incorporated in February 1905. The editors included Charles G. Herbermann, Edward A.

Pace, Condé B. Pallen, Thomas J. Shahan, Thomas F. Woodlock, and John J.

Wynne. Remy Lafort gave a nihil obstat on 1 November 1908, and Archbishop John M. Farley of New York gave the imprimatur. The abbey’s published account links that encyclopedia.

Neither reference work is a substitute for the fabric, the charters, or the later digs.