Abdie Old Parish Church

Abdie Old Parish Church

There has been a parish church at Abdie since at least the 1190s. For most of the Middle Ages the rectorship of Abdie was held by Lindores Abbey. The abbey benefited from income from the parish, and in exchange appointed a vicar who was meant to take services and care for the local community. In the 1450s the vicar of Abdie was an unsatisfactory character named John Laing. It was alleged that Laing was ‘an open and notorious fornicator’ who was ‘ignorant of letters and unfit to hold divine office’. After this there may have been efforts to find Abdie a more educated priest, as in 1466 a university graduate named Alexander Meldrum became vicar. Until the late 1550s many of the parishioners of Abdie seem to have supported traditional Catholic piety. However, after the Reformation the structures of the new Protestant Church of Scotland were established relatively quickly. At the start of the 1660s the medieval church was extended by the addition of an aisle on the north side. The new aisle was funded by the then minister Alexander Balfour and his family, who lived at nearby Denmylne Castle. In 1689 the minister of Abdie, William Arnott, was removed from his post for refusing to accept William and Mary as monarchs. Perhaps chastened by this experience, many of the eighteenth-century ministers of Abdie appear to have avoided political controversy. Indeed, Thomas Millar (minister from 1788 to 1792) was described by contemporaries as being ‘distinguished for sedateness’. However, this was not the approach adopted by Robert Thomas, who became minister of Abdie in 1796. The new parish minister became involved in political writing, publishing an attack on the revolutionary theories of Thomas Paine. At over 430 pages it was one of the longest eighteenth-century responses to Paine’s work. Robert Thomas also became involved in a bitter dispute about his glebe (the area of land assigned to a parish minister). The disagreement about the glebe went all the way to the House of Lords, which was then the highest court of appeal in the United Kingdom. By the time of Robert Thomas, the medieval church at Abdie was deemed increasingly out of date. It was criticised as ‘an old narrow building, low in the walls, and poorly lighted’. In the 1820s the congregation moved to a new building a short distance away. The old church soon fell into disrepair and by 1836 was in ruins. Today the building is completely roofless, though most of the external walls still stand. Several notable medieval and early modern tombstones can be found in and around the old church.

sacredlandscapesoffife

1190

Bess Rhodes

Site

240

24/11/2022

09/26/2023 01:52:07 pm

Anon., ‘Parish of Abdie’ in the Old Statistical Account (1795), vol. 14, pp. 113-124. Laurence Miller, ‘Parish of Abdie’ in the New Statistical Account (1845), vol. 9, pp. 47-55. Hew Scott, Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae: The Succession of Ministers in Scotland from the Reformation (1925), pp. 124-125. Robert Thomas, The Cause of Truth, Containing a Refutation of Errors in the Political Works of Thomas Paine (Dundee, 1797). Historic Environment Scotland, Canmore entry for ‘Abdie Old Parish Kirk’: https://canmore.org.uk/site/30063/abdie-old-parish-kirk [Accessed 21 October 2021]. Corpus of Scottish Medieval Parish Churches, entry for Abdie / Lindores Parish Church: https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/corpusofscottishchurches/site.php?id=158367 [Accessed 21 October 2021].

cm x cm x cm

current,56.333690679592294,-3.1990773472122496;

Abdie Old Parish Church

TEXT

Building

507

1820

Church of Scotland

Abdie