The University of St Andrews: Scotland’s First University

The Antipope Problem

A bishop could incorporate a body of scholars. He could not make them a university in the technical medieval sense, because the power to confer degrees valid across Christendom belonged only to the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. Wardlaw therefore petitioned the pope Scotland recognised: Benedict XIII, Peter de Luna, the Avignon claimant. On 28 August 1413 he issued six bulls conferring full university status, one of which survives in the University’s collections. King James I, then a prisoner in England, added his support and confirmed the charter in 1432.

The “third-oldest in the English-speaking world” claim, after Oxford and Cambridge, is accurate with one qualification worth stating: it means third-oldest surviving. The University of Northampton, founded in 1261 and suppressed in 1265, is older and gone. Trinity College Dublin (1592) is younger. And the phrase “English-speaking world” is itself a boundary drawn to set aside Bologna, Paris and the other continental foundations that far predate all of them.

The Colleges: Salvator, Leonard, Mary

The University took its lasting shape through three collegiate foundations. St Salvator’s College was founded in 1450 by Bishop James Kennedy with royal support from James II and named for Christ the Saviour; its chapel, consecrated in 1460, and its tower still dominate North Street. St Leonard’s College followed in 1511 or 1512, founded by Archbishop Alexander Stewart and Prior John Hepburn on the site of a pilgrims’ hospital and deliberately monastic in temper; George Buchanan studied there, and John Knox is traditionally attached to it. St Mary’s College was refounded in 1537 or 1538 by Cardinal James Beaton from the earlier St John’s College and Pedagogy, and from 1579 was restricted to theology — which remains its function as the Faculty of Divinity.

Those wobbling dates are worth flagging rather than smoothing. The University’s own materials and Encyclopaedia Britannica variously give 1511 or 1512 for St Leonard’s and 1537 or 1538 for St Mary’s. The variation reflects the real gap between an initial endowment and a formal erection or refoundation, and the honest presentation is approximate rather than absolute.

By the mid-eighteenth century falling numbers and worse finances forced consolidation. In 1747 St Salvator’s and St Leonard’s merged into the United College of St Salvator and St Leonard on the St Salvator’s site; the St Leonard’s buildings were sold off by 1772, its chapel retained. St Leonard’s was revived in 1972 as a non-statutory postgraduate college. St Andrews is still collegiate on paper, but in practice students live in halls, not colleges.

The LLA and the First Woman Graduate

In 1877 St Andrews created a qualification called the LA, soon renamed the Lady Literate in Arts. Championed by William Angus Knight, Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1876 to 1903, it was an external, examined credential for women, sat at approved centres across Britain and eventually overseas at a time when no Scottish university admitted women at all. It was engineered to sit as close to the MA as its designers could manage: the same standard of papers, the same number of subjects.

It was nonetheless a diploma. The University’s own collections blog gives the numbers: across the scheme’s life from 1877 to 1931 there were 36,017 candidates, examinations passed in 27,682 subjects, and 5,117 women who completed the qualification and received the LLA. That is a substantial achievement in access to higher learning, and it deserves the credit — but it is not the same thing as a degree, and the distinction matters because the looser version of the claim is repeated constantly.

Gregory’s Meridian and the Enlightenment

James Gregory, the University’s first Regius Professor of Mathematics from 1668 to 1674, designed the Gregorian reflecting telescope and, in 1673–74, laid down a meridian line inside the University — among the earliest non-ecclesiastical astronomical meridians in Europe. Tourist copy sometimes inflates this into “the place where time began” or “two centuries before Greenwich.” The sober version is impressive enough on its own terms, and it comes with a deflating footnote: the observatory Gregory planned around it was never completed.

St Andrews was one of the four universities of the Scottish Enlightenment, though it was the smallest and for long periods the poorest. Its later scientific reputation owes much to figures such as the zoologist Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, author of On Growth and Form, who taught there for three decades, and to five Nobel laureates among its alumni and former staff.

Its alumni list also demands care. James Wilson, born in Fife in 1742, signed the United States Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Constitution and sat as one of the first justices of the US Supreme Court — and attended St Andrews without graduating. The Prince and Princess of Wales met as students and both graduated in 2005. And John Knox, the name most often attached to the University, belongs in the caveats rather than the credits.

Red Gowns, Cold Water and Kate Kennedy

No Scottish university has a denser body of student custom, and none has a greater ratio of genuine practice to invented explanation. The scarlet undergraduate gown is real and still worn — St Andrews is now the only Scottish university where that is routinely true — and popular accounts date it to 1672, describing it as a uniform that made students identifiable, not least to publicans. The earliest documented dress regulation, though, is in the 1544 Statutes of St Leonard’s College, and it specifies no colour at all. The way the gown slips progressively off the shoulders by year of study, and the rule that its clasps are never fastened, are authentic student practice; the tidy symbolic stories attached to them are folklore.

The Gaudie, a torchlit pier procession on the evening of 30 April, commemorates something that certainly happened. In January 1800 the student John Honey swam out repeatedly to the wreck of the Janet of Macduff off East Sands and brought five crew members ashore, sustaining injuries when the mast struck him; he became a minister and died young in 1814, and the magistrates’ commendation survives.

The May Dip — running into the North Sea at dawn on 1 May to wash off academic sin and secure exam luck — is a real and well-loved custom, but its pedigree is short. Press evidence points to a May Dew face-washing tradition by the middle of the twentieth century and sea-dipping only from the 1950s and 1960s. Presenting it as an ancient rite, or as a direct memorial to John Honey, is the kind of tidy story this site declines to tell; the Honey connection attaches securely to the Gaudie and the Pier Walk instead. The dip moved to East Sands in 2011 on safety grounds.

Two further customs are documented and uncomplicated. Raisin Weekend, in which third- and fourth-year “academic parents” adopt first-years, takes its name from the pound of raisins once given in thanks and now ends in a shaving-foam fight in St Salvator’s Quad. And the PH cobbles outside St Salvator’s mark where the Protestant martyr Patrick Hamilton was burned in 1528; students avoid treading on them, on pain of a curse the May Dip is said to lift.

Rectors, Regents and the Dundee Divorce

Founded under the medieval Catholic church and tied after the Reformation to the Church of Scotland, St Andrews carried its ecclesiastical inheritance late into the modern period: until the nineteenth century the Rector had to be a Church of Scotland minister, and an 1825 attempt to elect Sir Walter Scott was ruled invalid on precisely that ground. Teaching, meanwhile, ran on the medieval regenting system, in which one regent carried a class through the whole arts curriculum. That ended at the 1747 union, when United College moved to specialised professorships — what the University’s historian R. G. Cant called the end, at long last, of the ancient system of regenting.

The Rectorship, redefined by the Universities (Scotland) Act 1858, is now an elected student office: matriculated students choose a Rector every three years, and the Rector chairs the University Court. The roll is remarkable — John Stuart Mill, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Jan Smuts, Guglielmo Marconi, Andrew Carnegie, John Cleese in 1970 as the first celebrity rector, and more recently the activist Srdja Popovic. The Chancellorship is the titular headship: Sir Menzies Campbell held it from 2006 until his death in September 2025, and in February 2026 Dame Anne Pringle was elected the University’s first woman Chancellor.

One institutional relationship deserves its own paragraph, because it produced another Scottish university. University College Dundee, founded in 1881, was incorporated into St Andrews from 1897, became Queen’s College in 1954, and separated as the independent University of Dundee by royal charter on 1 August 1967. The marriage was frequently strained; Dundee still elects a Rector as a legacy of it.

St Andrews Today

In the 2026 domestic guides St Andrews ranks first in Scotland and second in the UK in both the Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide and the Guardian University Guide. As the University itself noted of the Times table, it was the first time in that guide’s thirty-two-year history that both Oxford and Cambridge fell out of the top three, with LSE first and Durham third.

Global rankings tell a flatter story, and the gap is instructive rather than embarrassing. International tables weight research volume, income and institutional scale, and St Andrews — with roughly 10,200 to 11,600 students depending on how they are counted — is small by design. Its strengths are concentrated: International Relations, Physics and Astronomy, Chemistry, History and Art History. A university can be second in Britain on student experience and teaching measures and well outside the global elite on research volume at the same time, and both facts can be true. That is the best argument this collection can offer against quoting any single ranking as though it settled the question.

Timeline

1. 1410

   A society of masters begins teaching at St Andrews

   Scholars displaced from Paris by the Great Schism and from England by the Anglo-Scottish wars

2. 28 Feb 1411/12

   Bishop Henry Wardlaw grants a charter of incorporation and privilege

   The Old Style Scottish year began on 25 March, which is why sources split between 1411 and 1412

3. 28 Aug 1413

   Antipope Benedict XIII issues six papal bulls

   Only a pope or emperor could grant degree-awarding status; Scotland followed the Avignon obedience

4. 1432

   King James I confirms the charter

   Royal authority added to ecclesiastical; the lion rampant on the shield records it

5. 1450

   St Salvator's College founded by Bishop James Kennedy

   Its chapel, consecrated 1460, remains the visual heart of the town

6. 1511/12

   St Leonard's College founded

   Archbishop Alexander Stewart and Prior John Hepburn, on the site of a pilgrims' hospital

7. 1528

   Patrick Hamilton burned outside St Salvator's

   The PH cobbles and the student superstition around them date from this

8. 1537/38

   St Mary's College refounded by Cardinal James Beaton

   Restricted to theology from 1579; still the Faculty of Divinity

9. 1544

   Statutes of St Leonard's College regulate student dress

   The earliest documented dress rule — with no colour specified

10. 1672

    The scarlet undergraduate gown dated to this year in popular accounts

    St Andrews is now the only Scottish university where red gowns are still routinely worn

11. 1747

    St Salvator's and St Leonard's merge as United College

    Financial decline forces the union; the medieval regenting system ends with it

12. 1800

    Student John Honey rescues five crew from the wrecked Janet of Macduff

    Commemorated by the Gaudie and the Pier Walk

13. 1877

    The Lady Literate in Arts (LLA) scheme launches

    A distance-examined diploma for women, pitched at MA standard — but not a degree

14. 1892

    Women admitted as undergraduates on the same terms as men

    Following the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889

15. 1895

    Agnes Forbes Blackadder graduates MA on 29 March

    The University's first woman graduate; a hall was renamed for her in 2012

16. 1926

    The Kate Kennedy Procession is revived

    By students James Doak and Donald Kennedy; its centenary falls in April 2026

17. 1931

    The LLA scheme closes

    5,117 women had completed the diploma across its 54-year run

18. 1967

    Queen's College Dundee becomes the independent University of Dundee

    By royal charter on 1 August, ending a relationship begun in 1897

19. 2005

    Prince William and Catherine Middleton graduate

    They met as students; the University's own matchmaking statistic dates from 2011 publicity

20. 2026

    Dame Anne Pringle elected the University's first woman Chancellor

    Succeeding Sir Menzies Campbell, who served from 2006 until his death in 2025

Did You Know?

• The crescent moon on the University shield is a pun on Peter de Luna — the antipope whose bulls founded the place.
• One of the original six bulls of 28 August 1413 survives in the University's own collections.
• James Wilson, a signatory of the US Declaration of Independence and an early Supreme Court justice, studied at St Andrews but never graduated.
• An attempt to elect Sir Walter Scott as Rector in 1825 was ruled invalid because the office then required a Church of Scotland minister.
• The University of Dundee began as University College Dundee inside St Andrews, and only became independent on 1 August 1967.
• In February 2026 Dame Anne Pringle became the first woman Chancellor in the University's 613-year history.

Honest Caveats

The LLA was not a degree. It was an examined diploma, deliberately built to MA standard, and it opened higher study to thousands of women who had no other route. Calling it the first degree awarded to women in Britain — as popular accounts sometimes do — is wrong. Agnes Blackadder’s MA of 29 March 1895 is the degree milestone.

John Knox’s studentship is inference. No matriculation or graduation record places him at St Andrews. The attribution rests on Theodore Beza’s testimony and John Major’s known move to St Andrews; the original DNB observed that Knox appears in the Glasgow register in 1522 and in neither university’s graduation lists. Jane Dawson’s 2015 biography favours St Andrews with careful hedging, and so should any honest summary.

Several traditions are younger than they look. The May Dip appears in the record only from around the mid-twentieth century; the red gown’s 1672 date comes from popular and institutional accounts rather than a surviving statute, the first documented dress rule being the colourless one of 1544; and Kate Kennedy, the subject of a pageant revived in 1926, has no evidence of having existed.

Two adjacent claims belong to other bodies. The R&A, however famous, does not own the Old Course, which is public land under the St Andrews Links Trust. And the “one in ten students marries another” statistic originates in University publicity from 2011, not in independent research.

Ranking claims need their basis attached. First in Scotland and second in the UK is a 2026 domestic-guide position. Global research-volume tables place St Andrews far lower, and quoting one without the other misrepresents a small, highly selective institution in either direction.