Melrose Abbey

People

• D

  King David I of Scotland

  Founder; requested the abbey's foundation in 1136

• W

  Waltheof of Melrose (St Waltheof)

  Stepson of King David and abbot 1148–1159; gave Melrose a reputation for sanctity and learning, and his tomb in the chapter house became a focus of pilgrimage

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  Robert the Bruce (Robert I)

  Ordered the abbey's rebuilding after 1322; his embalmed heart is believed to be buried at the abbey

• J

  Sir James Douglas

  Principal auditor of finance for the post-1322 rebuilding

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  Alexander II of Scotland

  Buried at the abbey, along with other Scottish kings and nobles

• J

  John Morow

  Master mason whose inscription 'Be halde to ye hende' on a stairway became the motto of the town of Melrose

• W

  Sir Walter Scott

  As Sheriff-Depute of Roxburghshire, supervised the 19th-century preservation work and described the abbey in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel'

Cultural influences

• Cistercian monasticism — Melrose was the first Cistercian house in Scotland, colonised from Rievaulx (itself a daughter house of Cîteaux), and became the order's mother church in the country.

• Gothic architecture — the abbey was built in the Gothic manner in the form of a St John's Cross, and is famed for its carved decorative detail: saints, dragons, gargoyles and plant forms.

Connections

• R

  Rievaulx Abbey

  Mother house in North Yorkshire from which Melrose's first community came

• O

  Old Melrose

  Earlier monastery ~2 miles east, founded by/dedicated to St Aidan of Lindisfarne; where St Cuthbert trained

• D

  Dunfermline Abbey

  Burial place of the rest of Robert the Bruce's body (his heart being at Melrose)

• J

  Jedburgh, Dryburgh and Kelso abbeys

  Fellow Borders abbeys; Melrose forms part of the Borders Abbeys Way walk

Discovery & excavation

In culture

• Sir Walter Scott described Melrose Abbey in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' (Canto Second).

• Kirk in the Hills, a Gothic church in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan completed in 1958, was patterned after Melrose Abbey.

• The abbey was recreated in the video game Minecraft by 4J Studios in 2015, featured in an official tutorial world.

What to look for

• The more intact eastern section of the church, laid out on the traditional east–west axis; the western section survives only as foundations.

• Carved decorative detail across the ruins — likenesses of saints, dragons, gargoyles and plant forms, among the richest medieval carving in Scotland.

• John Morow's mason's inscription, 'Be halde to ye hende' ('Keep in mind, the end, your salvation'), on one of the stairways.

• The memorial stone over the reburied heart casket near the Chapter House site, associated with Robert the Bruce.

• Original medieval floor tiles — Melrose is the only Scottish abbey to retain some of its original tiling.

• The 1590 structure now maintained as a museum, and the surviving graveyard (mostly 19th-century stones) to the south and southeast.

Standing there

• Standing in the roofless eastern church today, your eye is drawn upward over some of the richest carved stone in Scotland — saints, dragons, gargoyles and curling plant-forms worked into the pink-red sandstone, the same warm stone that glows when the Borders sun catches the ruined gables.
• Underfoot in places lie the original medieval floor tiles — Melrose is the only Scottish abbey to keep some of its own tiling — so you walk on the very surface trodden by the Cistercian community; nearby a memorial stone marks where the lead casket of a human heart, taken to be Robert the Bruce's, was reburied in 1998.
• Today the ruin sits quiet within its graveyard of mostly 19th-century stones beside the little Borders town, open sky where the vaulting fell to Cromwell's bombardment, whose cannon-marks the walls still bear; the wind moves freely through arcades that once enclosed a sung, candlelit interior.
• In its working medieval centuries this was a place of ordered Cistercian silence broken by the eight daily offices of plainchant, the church heavy with incense and the smell of beeswax candles and tallow lamps; up to a hundred monks moved between choir, chapter house and cloister to a strict horarium.
• Beyond the church walls the abbey ran a vast working estate, so a 12th-century visitor would have met the smells and sounds of a wool economy — fleeces, sheep, woodsmoke and cart traffic — the monastery prosperous enough on Melrose wool to feed four thousand starving people for three months during one famine.