St.
Andrews
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Having
St Andrew as your patron saint was no bad thing in
the Christian world: he was actually in the Bible
and one of the first followers of Jesus. Only St Peter
in Rome and St James at Santiago de Compostella had
equivalent kudos. To the dark age and medieval mind,
he was as close to Jesus as you could get.
The town of St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland,
now a centre of pilgrimmage for golfers, was a magnet
for religious pilgrims during the medieval period,
and has been pivitol in the swings and roundabouts
of political and religious history in Scotland since
it was a Pictish settlement.
St. Andrews Factsheet
-
Early St Andrews (or Kinrymont) - A
Pictish Monastery
St Andrews has been a Christian burial ground
since perhaps the 5th century, making it one of
the oldest Christian sites in Scotland. It was
a Pictish royal centre until the reign of the
warrior King Unust and the arrival of St Andrew's
relics.
Sometime after the reputed arrival of the saint's
relics, the Pictish King Unust (729-761), the
man who founded the town, built a church dedicated
to St Andrew - perhaps within an existing Pictish
monastic enclosure. Nearby lay the Pictish royal
residence - located, probably, at the end of North
Street and spreading into what later became the
Cathedral precincts.
 King
Unust is believed by many to lie in the famous
St Andrews Sacrophagus, which can still be seen
in the Cathedral's museum. A treasure of Dark
Age Pictish art, the Sarcophagus may have lain
before the high altar of the original 8th or 9th
century church dedicated to the saint. Covered
in old testament iconography, it depicts the biblical
King David - the icon of medieval kingship.
Others believe it was designed to hold a later
Pictish King, Constant铆n (789-820), who re-founded
the Church at St Andrews and may have been regarded
as a saint.
Despite St Andrew's biblical fame, he didn鈥檛 gain immediate, widespread
recognition across Scotland, whose peoples already had many local
saints to worship. The cult remained essentially Pictish in its
early years.
- Constantine
II and St Andrews
In the chaos of the Viking onslaught, Kinrymont,
as St Andrews was then known, probably suffered
devastating raids, although there is no written
record of it. However, with the birth of the Kingdom
of Alba at the start of the 10th century, the
town and the cult flourished.
In 906 AD, King Constantine II reorganised the
Pictish Church along Gaelic lines, giving St Andrews
a new role as the Episcopal centre of the Kingdom
of Alba. When he retired from the kingship in
943, Constantine became a monk and later The Abbot
of St Andrews.
According to legend, Constantine's monastic habit didn鈥檛 prevent
him from raiding Northumbria one more time. But it seems more
likely Constantine was sincere in his monastic piety. When he
died in 952, he was buried at St Andrews - a sign of changing
times - for he was the first Gaelic king not to be buried at the
home of St Columba's cult on the island of Iona.
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