Publication Account

Date 1978

Event ID 1017883

Category Descriptive Accounts

Type Publication Account

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1017883

The first mention of the Parish Church of Haddington occurs in 1139 when David I granted to the church of St. Andrews the church of .St. Mary's at Haddington (ESC, 1905, 93) . The church itself is located 150 yards (137.16m) up from the Nungate Bridge on the left bank of the River Tyne. The David I church is surmised to have been a small Norman building occupying the site of the choir of the present church. This structure was begun some time after the destruction of the previous church by Edward III in 1356 (Gray, 1944, 24). Built of red and grey sandstone, it is cruciform in shape and composed of a choir, nave, wide side-aisles and transepts without aisles at the crossing. It was ordered to be taken down during the 1547/48 English occupation but those orders fortunately were not carried out and the church suffered only minor damage. After the Reformation the nave was transformed for Protestant worship and the choir and transepts were allowed to decay. The church underwent extensive reconstruction in 18ll. In order to combine the square pew system with sufficient accommodation galleries had to be made over the aisles. The capitals of the pillars suffered damage and all of the arches were cut away so as to make the opening larger for the congregation in the galleries (Anon, 1922, 5). In recent years the choir and transepts have been restored. Constructed 'in the great building period of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries' (Anon, n. d.,) St. Mary's Parish Church is one of Scotland's finest medieval parish churches.

Information from ‘Historic Haddington: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1978).