The Border Abbeys: Melrose, Kelso, Jedburgh and Dryburgh

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

The twelfth-century history of the abbeys rests on their own cartularies (the Liber of Kelso, Melrose and Dryburgh), royal charters and the Chronicle of Melrose. That is a rich record, but it is the monks' record. The historian Richard Oram, in Domination and Lordship: Scotland 1070–1230 (2011), warns against accepting "the monks' self-perception as improving landlords": where the charters show new fields or granges, the monks were often taking over land that peasants had already begun to clear. His facts and dates are treated here as established; his reading of who did the improving is given as his argument. Some dates are given differently in different books, notably Jedburgh's foundation and its promotion to an abbey. Responsibility for particular episodes of destruction is sometimes misattributed: Cromwell is blamed for damage at many sites, but the decisive destruction at the Border abbeys came in the 1540s. Whether the Melrose casket contains Bruce's heart is uncertain.

Reform comes to the Tweed

established The Border abbeys are the most visible part of a Europe-wide movement to reform monastic life, which reached Scotland in stages. Queen Margaret had brought Benedictine monks from Canterbury to Dunfermline in the 1070s or 1080s, and Alexander I brought Augustinian canons from Nostell to Scone in 1115. But it was David I who made Scotland one of the most active fields of the new orders in Britain. Oram describes him as one of the greatest royal patrons of the twelfth century, and an unusually independent one: he did not simply copy the conservative patronage of his brother-in-law Henry I of England.

shared Oram stresses that reform in Scotland has been told mostly in the reformers' own words. The native monasteries they replaced left only a handful of records, so the picture of a decayed old church swept away by vigorous newcomers comes largely from the winners. Monastic reform, he argues, was arriving everywhere in western Europe, sometimes regardless of how healthy the existing houses were. The Border abbeys were founded in a landscape that already had churches, farms and boundaries, not in an empty wilderness.

Selkirk and Kelso: the Tironensians

established Soon after he took control of Teviotdale and Tweeddale in about 1113, David settled a colony of monks from Tiron, near Chartres, at Selkirk. The order had been founded by Bernard of Abbeville only a few years earlier. Selkirk was Tiron's first daughter-house and, Oram notes, the first monastery of any of the new reformed orders of monks to be founded anywhere in Britain. It was richly endowed from David's own estates, including a grant of property at Roxburgh in 1114.

shared Why the Tironensians? They were a small order with no important patrons outside northern France and little later impact in England. Oram suggests the lead came from David's chaplain John, later bishop of Glasgow, who was closely attached to the order, and that David admired their austere and intense spiritual life. He sees the choice as evidence that David ignored the fashions of the English court rather than followed them.

established Selkirk did not last. Kelso's own cartulary records that the site was not suitable (locus non erat conveniens), and in 1128 David moved the monks to Kelso, directly across the Tweed from his castle and burgh at Roxburgh. The abbey church was consecrated in 1127–8 with David closely involved. Oram compares the arrangement with London and Westminster: a seat of government, a royal religious centre and a trading town side by side, at what was then the chief royal seat of David's kingdom. David's son and heir, Earl Henry, was buried at Kelso in 1152, and in 1159 Malcolm IV gave the monks a great charter whose painted initial shows David and Malcolm together.

established Kelso supplied senior churchmen to the kingdom. Its abbot Herbert became bishop of Glasgow in 1147, consecrated by the pope at Auxerre without any profession of obedience to York, and its abbot Arnold became bishop of St Andrews in 1160. In Oram's account, these two appointments planted the reforming tradition firmly in the two chief sees of Scotland. Kelso later sent monks to colonise Arbroath for William the Lion in 1178.

Melrose: the Cistercians

established From the mid-1130s David's favour turned to the still more austere Cistercians, an order that grew from fourteen houses in 1119 to nearly five hundred by 1152. His route to them ran through Rievaulx in Yorkshire, a daughter of Clairvaux connected with his friend Walter Espec and with Ailred, a former clerk of David's household who became Rievaulx's abbot. Melrose was founded in 1136 with monks from Rievaulx, on a new site a few miles up the Tweed from the old Northumbrian monastery of Old Melrose. It was the first Cistercian house in Scotland.

established Melrose became the mother of a Scottish family of Cistercian houses: Newbattle (1140), Holm Cultram and Kinloss (1150), Coupar Angus (1164) and Balmerino (1222), with Kinloss in turn founding Culross (1217) and Deer (1219). Through them, Oram notes, the reformed monastic tradition was carried deep into Gaelic Scotland north of the Forth. Kinloss, in Moray, was founded in David's presence in May 1150 in the home territory of his former dynastic rivals.

established Melrose was also a nursery of bishops. Its abbot Jocelin became bishop of Glasgow in 1174 and, in Oram's account, was possibly the mastermind of the Scottish church's freedom from York. Former abbots John and Adam were made successive bishops of Caithness by William the Lion and Alexander II, a frontier diocese where the king needed loyal men; Adam was murdered by the men of Caithness in 1222. The abbey kept the Chronicle of Melrose, one of the main narrative sources for the period and staunchly loyal to the crown.

Jedburgh: the Augustinian canons

established Jedburgh was founded in 1138–9 for Augustinian canons, priests who lived under a rule but could go out into the world to preach and minister. Oram explains that David's personal preference was for cloistered monks, but that reforming bishops valued canons more, because they could set an example of reformed worship to parish priests. Jedburgh was founded at the request of Bishop John of Glasgow, just as Bishop Robert of St Andrews encouraged David to found Holyrood (1128) and Cambuskenneth (1140s). Jedburgh is usually said to have been raised from a priory to an abbey in about 1154.

Dryburgh: the Premonstratensians and the Morvilles

established Dryburgh was founded in 1150 by Hugh de Morville, David's constable and lord of Lauderdale, not by the king. Oram presents it as the leading Scottish example of a Norman custom: a family newly risen to the first rank marking its arrival by founding a religious house. Hugh chose the Premonstratensian canons, whose rule blended Cistercian and Augustinian elements. The order was less than thirty years old, its first English house dated only from 1143, and it never enjoyed Scottish royal patronage. A colony had been settled at Alnwick in Northumberland in 1148 by Eustace fitz John, and Hugh probably made his contacts through him.

established Dryburgh's early endowments were slender compared with the royal houses, but they were a large share of Hugh's wealth. Hugh himself entered religion before his death in 1162. His son Richard did not concentrate the family's patronage on Dryburgh: he founded the hospital of St Leonard near Lauder around 1170 and Kilwinning Abbey in Cunningham, and Oram judges that the split left both Morville houses struggling for money.

Building with the king's timber

established The first buildings at the abbeys in the early twelfth century were mainly timber. David I and his successors gave Kelso, Melrose and Dryburgh the right to take what wood they needed from the royal forests, from great beams to hazel, alder and willow for wattle. The second wave of building in stone in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which produced the churches whose ruins survive, was paid for by the growing wool trade and made fresh demands on the woods for the large roof timbers. Fuel was another matter: in Berwickshire there was already so little woodland that one of Kelso's early grants was the right to cut turf for fires on Ednam moor, a practice the charter's writer seems to have struggled to describe in Latin.

Estates, forest and wool

established The abbeys became great landowners. Melrose's records allow its estate to be traced in detail. Between the late 1130s and the early 1200s it built up 900 hectares of land in the valley bottom opposite the abbey, plus rights of pasture, timber and pannage over more than 7,100 hectares of upland between the Gala and the Leader. In Wedale it ran mainly pastoral granges (outlying farms worked by lay brothers) at Colmslie, Buckholm and Whitelee. In Kyle, in Ayrshire, it received after 1165 a large estate around Mauchline with grazing across the Stewarts' hunting forest, and on the Lammermuirs at Spott Earl Patrick of Dunbar allowed it three flocks of up to 500 sheep each. Dryburgh developed a grange at Kedslie and held land across Lauderdale and as far away as Eldbotle on the East Lothian coast.

established Much of this lay within royal or baronial hunting forest, and the charters show constant pressure against its limits. Shortly after 1162 Malcolm IV allowed Melrose a cowshed for 100 cows at Colmslie; around 1190 William allowed one for 60 cows at Buckholm and a shed for 100 cows or 120 sheep at Whitelee, but nothing more substantial than wicker shelters within the forest. Melrose quarrelled with Dryburgh, settled in 1164, and with the de Morvilles, hereditary foresters, over the forest between Gala and Leader; in 1181 the king's court found for the monks, while Richard de Morville kept a forester to watch them. Only in 1236 did Alexander II put all of Melrose's lands outside the forest. In 1195 King William had to order a new settlement after Melrose overstocked the common grazing at Hassendean, where the king's tenants complained that they could no longer pay their rents.

shared The shift towards sheep is visible from the 1180s, when the Whitelee grant allowed for sheep as well as cattle. By the early 1200s Melrose was exporting most of its goods through Berwick, and Oram links the drive to expand its grazing to the abbey's need for income to pay for rebuilding. The earliest surviving reference to a fulling mill in Scotland, for finishing woollen cloth, comes from Dryburgh in the 1170s.

shared Oram's caution matters here. The assarts (new fields cut from woodland and scrub) at Blainslie, Kedslie and Sorrowlessfield in Lauderdale appear in Melrose and Dryburgh charters, but he argues they were peasant enterprise encouraged by Hugh de Morville's estate managers, which the abbeys took over. The expansion of farming in the Borders began before the monks arrived, and royal planting of a new nobility and of burghs mattered as much as the monasteries. The abbeys were very efficient landlords, but not the lone pioneers of their own legend.

On the invasion route

established Their position on the main routes between England and Scotland made the abbeys targets in every war. Edward II's army damaged Melrose in 1322, and Robert the Bruce paid for its rebuilding. Richard II's army burned Melrose and sacked Dryburgh in 1385; Melrose was rebuilt in the elaborate Gothic style whose ruins survive today.

established The decisive blows came in the Rough Wooing, Henry VIII's attempts in the 1540s to force a marriage between his son Edward and the infant Mary, Queen of Scots. English armies under the Earl of Hertford devastated the Borders in 1544 and 1545, burning all four abbeys. They were never fully repaired. After the Reformation of 1560 monastic life ended, the last monks and canons died out, and parts of Melrose and Jedburgh were used as parish churches.

shared Cromwell's soldiers are often blamed for damage at Melrose. There may have been later damage in the 1650s, but the main destruction dates from the 1540s.

Melrose: the heart of a king

established Melrose holds several royal and noble burials, including Alexander II (died 1249), and in the twelfth century lords such as William de Valognes, the king's chamberlain, and Roger Avenel, lord of Eskdale, paid to be buried there. Robert the Bruce asked that his heart be carried on crusade after his death in 1329; Sir James Douglas took it to Spain, where he was killed in 1330, and the heart was brought back and buried at Melrose.

shared In 1921 a lead casket was found beneath the chapter house floor. Archaeologists recovered it in 1996, and it was reburied on 22 June 1998 under a memorial stone. It is believed to contain Bruce's heart, but no scientific test has confirmed this.

established Melrose is also famous for its carvings, including saints, dragons, gargoyles and a much-photographed carving of a pig playing the bagpipes. Sir Walter Scott, as Sheriff-Depute of Roxburghshire, supervised early repairs to the ruins, funded by the Duke of Buccleuch.

The abbeys today

established Kelso, once among the richest abbeys in Scotland, is now the most fragmentary: only parts of the west end of the great church remain. James III was crowned there in 1460 after his father, James II, was killed by an exploding cannon at the siege of nearby Roxburgh Castle.

established Jedburgh's great abbey church survives almost complete to roof level, one of the finest examples of Romanesque and early Gothic architecture in Scotland, though its cloister is reduced to foundations.

established Dryburgh, in a loop of the Tweed among trees, is the burial place of Sir Walter Scott, who died in 1832.

established The four abbeys are linked by the Borders Abbeys Way, a 68-mile circular walking route through the Tweed and Teviot valleys. All are cared for by Historic Environment Scotland.

• Selkirk, the forerunner of Kelso, was the first monastery of any of the new reformed orders of monks in Britain.
• Kelso's cartulary says the monks left Selkirk because the place was "not suitable".
• Melrose was the first Cistercian abbey in Scotland and the mother of Newbattle, Kinloss, Coupar Angus and Balmerino.
• Dryburgh was founded by David I's constable, not the king, for an order the Scottish crown never patronised.
• In 1195 the king had to step in after Melrose's flocks overgrazed a village common at Hassendean.
• The earliest surviving reference to a fulling mill in Scotland comes from Dryburgh in the 1170s.
• James III was crowned at Kelso Abbey.
• A carving at Melrose shows a pig playing the bagpipes.

• Myth: David I founded all four abbeys. Dryburgh was founded by his constable Hugh de Morville, for an order that never had Scottish royal patronage.
• Myth: the monks turned an empty wilderness into farmland. The abbeys were planted in a landscape already divided by old ditches and boundaries, and many of the clearances in their charters were peasant work they took over.
• Disputed: the dates of Jedburgh. Its foundation is given as 1138, 1138–9 or later, and its promotion from priory to abbey is usually put around 1154.
• Myth: Cromwell destroyed the abbeys. The decisive destruction came in the English invasions of 1544–45.
• Disputed: Bruce's heart. The Melrose casket is believed to contain it, but this has never been tested.