Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys

The following is from Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys by Rev. D. Butler, M.A.:

Chapter IV - Collegiate Churches

The creation of collegiate churches was a practical endeavour toward ecclesiastical reform in the fifteenth century, when the foundation of monastic establishments ceased. They had no parishes attached to them, and were regulated very much as the cathedrals. They arose with the purpose of counteracting the evils incidental to the monastic system, and were formed by grouping the clergy of neighbouring parishes into a college, or by consolidating independent chaplainries. They were called præposituræ, were presided over by a dean or provost, and the prebendaries were generally the clergy holding adjacent cures. In Scotland, during more recent times, the term "collegiate" was applied to a church where two ministers (as at St. Cuthbert's, Edinburgh) served the cure as colleagues, but in the fifteenth century the term had a different and wider significance. Collegiate churches were then an expression of the zeal and munificence that were displayed in the enlargement and decoration of buildings, when all classes vied with each other in the endowment of chaplainries for the maintenance of daily stated service, always including prayers and singing of masses for the souls of their founders, their relations, and benefactors. The collegiate churches were also an evidence from within the Church itself of the need for reform in the great Benedictine and Augustinian abbeys that were then in the ascendant throughout the country.

Scotland possessed forty-one collegiate churches, but space will only permit us here to deal with nine of them: Biggar, Bothwell, St. Nicholas (Aberdeen), King's College (Old Aberdeen), Roslin, Chapel Royal (Stirling), St. Giles' (Edinburgh), St. Mary's and St. Salvator's (St. Andrews).