Balmerino Abbey

Balmerino Abbey, or St Edward's Abbey, in Balmerino, Fife, Scotland, was a Cistercian monastery which has been ruinous since the 16th century.

The Abbey was founded from 1227 to 1229 by monks from Melrose Abbey with the patronage of Ermengarde de Beaumont and King Alexander II of Scotland. At the time the settlement here was known as Balmerinach, or St Merinac's Place: named after one of the monks who accompanied St Regulus (or St Rule) when he is said to have brought the bones of St Andrew to Scotland in 347. On this basis, Balmerino Abbey may have been founded on a site first chosen for a chapel nearly nine centuries earlier by St Merinac. By 1233 the church was sufficiently complete for Ermengarde to be buried in it. It remained a daughter house of Melrose. It had approximately 20 monks at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but declined in that century. The Abbey became the biggest monastic controller of salmon fisheries on the Firth of Tay, with salmon exports becoming its principal source of income in the later Middle Ages. During the war of the Rough Wooing, the Abbey was burned by an English force in December 1547. The English commander Thomas Wyndham wrote of nuns and gentlemen's daughters who were at school with them. Balmerino Abbey was allegedly damaged again in 1559 by Scottish Protestants as part of the Reformation's destruction of perceived idolatrous structures. The community appears to have died out shortly afterwards, with the estate being made into a temporal lordship in 1603 (other sources give 1605 or 1606-7) for Sir James Elphistone, who became 1st Lord Balmerino. In 1561 John Hay became the lay commendator and converted some of the abbey buildings for use as a house, with superfluous buildings like the church being dismantled for stone. Eventually the house itself fell into ruin. Due to growing interest in the middle ages, in 1896 the ruins were archaeologically excavated, uncovering the plan of the church. In 1910 the landowner employed Francis William Deas to survey the building and execute a program of repairs and consolidation.

Archaeological site data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).