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Publication Account
Date 1981
Event ID 1018052
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1018052
It has been suggested that the chapel of Edinburgh Castle which was conveyed to Holyrood Abbey (ESC, 1905, 75), served as the church for the early urban nucleus (Duncan, 1975, 466). St. Giles succeeded this Edinburgh Castle chapel as burgh church and its parish was carved from that of St. Cuthbert (Duncan, 1975, 466). David I, however, granted the church of St. Giles with its grange to the Lazarites, a possession which was later confirmed by Pope Innocent III (Cowan, 1967, 177). During the period of war and schism in the fourteenth century the lands of St. Giles and other patronage of the church fell to the Scottish crown which proceeded to disburse them once more. As early as 1419 the burgesses of Edinburgh were pressing the crown to raise St. Giles to collegiate status, but this was not granted until 1466 (Cowan, 1967, 177). By the year 1559, St. Giles boasted forty-four chantry altars and nearly one hundred officiating clergy (Meikle, 1948, 22).
It is possible that the earliest church structure was that of an unaisled nave with the same dimensions as the present one, and probably an apsidal sanctuary in the position of the existing crossing (RCAM, 1951, 26). It is unknown when the church became cruciform although the tower was in existence by 1387 (RCAM, 1951, 26). By the early fifteenth century, at the time when Edinburgh first pursued the idea of collegiate. status, virtually a new church was taking form. It consisted of a choir with four bays and side aisles; a nave of five bays, also with side aisles; and a central crossing with north and south transepts (MacGibbon, 1896, ii, 420). St. Giles survived the Reformation with little external structural damage, and internally it suffered only through the large number of times it was divided and subdivided to take in new congregations. When episcopacy was established in 1633 the body of the church was temporarily made whole again, although Charles II 1s plans to see the building remodelled on cathedral lines went unrealised (RCAM, 1951, 30). In 1871, when it was decided to restore it as much as possible to its pre-Reformation character, all galleries and partition walls were removed, opening the building into a single place of worship (Gray, 1940, 21).
Information from ‘Historic Edinburgh, Canongate and Leith: The Archaeological Implications of Development’ (1981).
