Melrose Abbey: The Long, Strange Trip of Robert the Bruce's Heart (and Dryburgh Next Door)

In the 1100s, the kings of Scotland did something that looks reckless on a map. Along the Tweed valley, within a day's ride of the English border, they founded four great abbeys: Melrose, Dryburgh, Kelso and Jedburgh. They were huge, rich and covered in carving, and they sat in the path of every English army that would ever come north.

Every one of them was burned more than once. Every one of them was rebuilt more beautifully than it had any right to be. And two of them, a few miles apart on the river, ended up holding some of the strangest burials in Scotland: the heart of a king carried home from a battlefield in Spain, and the grave of the novelist who made the whole region famous.

This is part one of a single day across the Scottish Borders. Part two follows the frontier south to Jedburgh and into the country of the reivers: the families who raided, feuded and blackmailed their way through three centuries, and the castles and churches they left behind.

Melrose Before Melrose

The abbey isn't the first holy site at Melrose. About two and a half miles east, on a loop of the Tweed, is Old Melrose, where monks from Lindisfarne founded a monastery in the 600s. Its most famous recruit was a shepherd boy named Cuthbert, who entered the community around 651 and became the most venerated saint in the north of England. Old Melrose was later destroyed, but the place kept its reputation, and that holy association is part of why the Cistercians were brought here centuries later.

They came in 1136, at the invitation of King David I: monks from Rievaulx in Yorkshire, founding the first Cistercian abbey in Scotland. David was the great founder-king of medieval Scotland. Between Melrose, Kelso, Jedburgh, Holyrood and a dozen others, he planted monasteries across his kingdom. They were acts of piety, but they were also political. Big, well-run abbeys stocked with literate men brought farming, trade and administration to a frontier the crown needed to hold onto.

Melrose's second abbot made it holier still. Waltheof was David's stepson, a royal who gave it all up for the cloister. When he died in 1159 he was venerated as a saint, and pilgrims came to his tomb for centuries. A fragment of his shrine survives in the abbey museum.

Austere in Theory

The Cistercians began in 1098 at Cîteaux in Burgundy as a protest movement. Their founders thought the great Benedictine houses had gone soft, and they wanted to get back to hard manual work, plain food, silence and plain churches. Early Cistercian buildings were famously bare: no towers to speak of, no stained-glass pictures, no sculpture.

Then they got rich, almost by accident. Cistercians chose remote land, worked it themselves with lay brothers, and turned out to be extremely good at sheep. Melrose built up a network of outlying farms called granges across the Borders and beyond, with huge flocks grazing the hills. Its wool went to the cloth towns of Flanders, where weavers in places like Bruges and Ghent bought every good fleece they could get. Melrose became one of the wealthiest religious houses in Scotland.

The monks were also writing. The Chronicle of Melrose, kept by the community over generations, is one of the most important surviving sources for Scottish history in the 1100s and 1200s. A lot of what we know about that period, we know because somebody at Melrose wrote it down.

The king Alexander II, who died in 1249, chose to be buried here, which says a lot about the abbey's standing by then.

Burned and Rebuilt

Being rich, holy and twenty miles from England is a bad combination.

Edward I's armies attacked Melrose in 1300 and 1307. Edward II's attacked it in 1322. Then in 1385, Richard II of England invaded Scotland with a huge army and burned the abbey so thoroughly that the church had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

That rebuild is what you see today. Almost everything standing at Melrose dates from after 1385. The work dragged on for more than a century, and the church still wasn't finished when James IV visited in 1504. Over that time different master masons came and went, some trained in England and some in France, and you can see their styles change across the building. The tracery in the big windows has the lacy, flowing look of French work in some places and the straighter lines of English work in others.

One of those masons signed his name. An inscription inside the church credits John Morow, who says he was born in Paris and lists the other Scottish churches he worked on, including St Andrews, Glasgow and Paisley. It ends with a line of advice, Be halde to ye hende, roughly "keep the end in mind." Melrose took it as the town motto.

The new church was anything but austere. The outside is covered in sculpture: saints in niches, dragons, demons and hobgoblins, angels playing lutes, cooks holding ladles, and, on the roofline, a pig playing the bagpipes. Whatever the founders at Cîteaux would have made of that, the masons of 15th-century Melrose clearly enjoyed themselves.

Then the Rough Wooing arrived. In 1544 and 1545, Henry VIII's armies came north to force the Scots to marry the infant Mary, Queen of Scots to his son, and the English commander, the Earl of Hertford, burned his way through the Border abbeys. It was the same war, and the same commander, that burned Craigmillar Castle and Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. Melrose was badly damaged and never properly repaired. After the Reformation in 1560, the community simply died out, and the last monk, John Watson, died around 1590. Part of the ruined nave was patched up and used as the parish church until 1810.

The Wizard of the Borders

The strangest person associated with Melrose may never have set foot in it.

Michael Scot was born around 1175, somewhere in the Borders. He became one of the great scholars of medieval Europe. He went to Toledo in Spain, which was then the center of a huge translation movement, learned Arabic, and translated Aristotle into Latin along with the commentaries of Islamic philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna. A good deal of the Aristotle that medieval European universities read reached them through translators like Scot. Later he became scientific adviser and court astrologer to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, a ruler so unconventional that his contemporaries called him stupor mundi, the wonder of the world.

A man who read Arabic, cast horoscopes for an emperor the Pope excommunicated, and wrote about the stars was always going to get a reputation. Within a few decades of his death, Dante put him in the Inferno, in the eighth circle of Hell among the sorcerers, astrologers and false prophets. Their punishment is to walk forever with their heads twisted around backward, weeping down their own spines, because in life they tried to see too far ahead.

In Scotland the folklore went further. Michael Scot the wizard was supposed to have split the Eildon Hills above Melrose into their three peaks by setting a demon to the job, and then kept the demon busy by ordering it to weave ropes out of sea sand. He was also said to be buried in Melrose Abbey with his books of magic. When a stone coffin turned up during work at the abbey in 1812, people promptly decided it was his, on no evidence whatsoever.

Sir Walter Scott made the legend famous. In The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), a knight comes to Melrose in the dead of night to open the wizard's grave and take the book of spells buried with him. The poem also gave the abbey its most-quoted lines:

> If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,> Go visit it by the pale moonlight.

The Heart of Robert the Bruce

Robert the Bruce spent most of his reign at war. He seized the throne in 1306 by murdering a rival in front of a church altar, spent years as a hunted outlaw, won Scottish independence on the field at Bannockburn in 1314, and spent another fourteen years forcing England to admit it. The Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton finally did, in 1328.

He died a year later, in June 1329, probably in his mid-fifties and after a long, wasting illness that chroniclers called leprosy (modern historians aren't so sure). He'd been excommunicated for the altar killing, and he'd once vowed to go on crusade, a vow he never got to keep. On his deathbed he worked out a way to keep it anyway. His body would go to Dunfermline Abbey, the royal burial church, where it still lies. His heart would be cut out, embalmed, and carried to the Holy Land against the enemies of Christ. Once that was done, the heart was to be buried at Melrose.

He picked the man for the job carefully.

The Black Douglas

Sir James Douglas had been with Bruce since the desperate early years. The Scots called him the Good Sir James. The English called him the Black Douglas, and it was said that English mothers in the north quieted their children by telling them the Black Douglas would get them.

He'd earned it. In 1307, Douglas took back his family's castle from its English garrison by attacking on Palm Sunday while they were at church. Then, so the castle couldn't be used against him again, he piled the dead soldiers into the cellar with the castle's stores of food and wine, poured the wine over the lot, and burned it. The Scots called it the Douglas Larder.

Douglas had Bruce's heart sealed in a small silver casket, traditionally said to have hung around his neck, and in 1330 he set out with a company of knights. They never reached the Holy Land. In Spain, King Alfonso XI of Castile was fighting the Moorish kingdom of Granada, and for crusaders on their way east, a war against Muslims in Spain counted. Douglas joined it.

In August 1330, at the Battle of Teba, near Málaga, Douglas was cut off from the main army and killed, along with the few knights still with him.

The famous version has him tearing the casket from his neck, hurling it into the enemy ranks and charging after it, shouting at the heart to lead the way and he would follow. It's told and retold, and it may even be true, but it comes from accounts written well after the fact. What's solid is that the survivors recovered both Douglas's body and the casket. His flesh was boiled off so his bones could make the long journey home, and they were buried at St Bride's Kirk in Douglas, Lanarkshire. The heart went to Melrose, as Bruce had asked.

It was a fitting place for it. When Edward II's army wrecked Melrose in 1322, Bruce had paid for the repairs, including a grant of £2,000 in 1326, which was an enormous sum. The Douglas family put a red heart on their coat of arms after Teba, and it's still there.

Lost, Found, Lost and Found Again

Over the following centuries, through the burnings and the Reformation and the slow collapse of the abbey, everyone lost track of exactly where the heart was.

In March 1921, workmen from the government's Office of Works were digging below the floor of the chapter house when they found a conical lead casket. They didn't open it. They made a small copper plaque recording that it had been found beneath the chapter house floor in March 1921, put it in with the casket, and buried it again.

In 1996, Historic Scotland's archaeologists excavated the chapter house floor and found the casket a second time, with the 1921 plaque still in place: a note from one generation of excavators to the next. This time it went to a lab in Edinburgh. A fibre-optic camera showed a second, smaller lead container inside the first, about ten inches tall and tapering toward the top, and that's where the heart is. The inner casket was never opened, and no DNA test was done.

On 22 June 1998, the casket was reburied privately at Melrose. Two days later, on the anniversary of Bannockburn, Scotland's Secretary of State, Donald Dewar, unveiled the round memorial stone that marks the spot. Its inscription is adapted from The Brus, the long poem about the king written in the 1370s by John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen:

> A noble hart may haiff nane ese,> gif fredome failyhe.

A noble heart can have no ease if freedom fails.

Can it be proven that it's Bruce's heart? No. The archaeologist who led the investigation said the honest answer is that it's reasonable to assume it is. A king's heart was brought home from Spain to Melrose, and a medieval heart in a lead casket turned up exactly where you'd expect it. That's about as close as history usually gets.

The Most Dangerous Family in Scotland

The Black Douglas's family went on to become something bigger than he was.

Through the 1300s and 1400s, the Douglases were the most dangerous family in Scotland. They held huge territories across the south, they could raise private armies, and they were the crown's main defense against England. That made them indispensable to the kings of Scots, and a threat to them. Kings married into the family, rewarded it, and periodically tried to destroy it.

The senior line, the Black Douglases, descended from Sir James's nephew, the first Earl of Douglas. Their power ended in murder twice over.

In 1440, the sixteen-year-old 6th Earl of Douglas and his younger brother were invited to Edinburgh Castle to dine with the ten-year-old king, James II. At the end of the meal, according to later tradition, a black bull's head was set on the table, a sign of death. The two boys were dragged outside, given a mock trial, and beheaded. It's remembered as the Black Dinner.

Twelve years later, in 1452, James II, now grown, invited the 8th Earl of Douglas to Stirling Castle under a promise of safe conduct, argued with him over dinner, and stabbed him to death with his own hands. His courtiers finished the job, and the body was thrown out of a window. Over the next three years the crown hunted the rest of the family down, and by 1455 the Black Douglases were finished. James II didn't long outlive them. His own death, a few miles down the Tweed in 1460, belongs to part two of this day.

The junior line, the Red Douglases, Earls of Angus, came out on top mostly by siding with the king and outlasting their cousins. They went on to be just as troublesome for the next century of Scottish kings.

Even Melrose ended up in Douglas hands in the end. After the Reformation, the abbey's income went to a commendator, a layman given the right to collect a religious house's revenues without any part in its religious life. Commendators were usually royal favorites or younger sons of powerful families. The last commendator of Melrose was a James Douglas, and in 1590 a building next to the cloister was converted into a fine house for him. It's now the Commendator's House Museum. It's full of carved stone that's come down off the church over the centuries, along with medieval floor tiles, cooking pots and portable urinals pulled out of the abbey's great drain, which is probably the most honest picture of monastic daily life in the whole place.

Dryburgh: The White Canons

A few miles downriver, in a bend of the Tweed, Dryburgh Abbey belongs to a different kind of religious life entirely.

Dryburgh's community were Premonstratensians, named after Prémontré in northern France, where St Norbert of Xanten founded the order around 1120. They're also known as the White Canons, after their white habits. They weren't monks. They were canons regular, ordained priests living in community under the Rule of St Augustine. A Cistercian was meant to stay in his cloister. A Premonstratensian could go out and serve as the priest of a parish, so the order combined the cloister with work in the world.

The first canons came north from Alnwick in Northumberland around 1150. They were invited by Hugh de Morville, an Anglo-Norman knight who had come to Scotland in the service of David I and risen to become Constable of Scotland and Lord of Lauderdale, one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Dryburgh became the leading Premonstratensian house in Scotland. Near the end of his life, Hugh retired into his own foundation as one of the canons, and he died there in 1162.

The Son

Hugh's eldest son, also named Hugh, went south and made his career in England, at the court of Henry II.

On 29 December 1170, after Henry, in a rage at Archbishop Thomas Becket, reportedly asked whether no one would rid him of this turbulent priest, four of his knights rode to Canterbury. Hugh de Morville was one of them. They cornered Becket in his own cathedral at the hour of vespers and cut him down at the altar steps. Most accounts say Morville didn't strike a blow himself. His job was to hold back the crowd while the other three did it. It didn't matter. Becket was made a saint within three years, his shrine became the greatest pilgrimage site in England, and the four knights became some of the most infamous men in Christendom.

The father died a canon at Dryburgh, praying in the abbey he built. Eight years later the son helped kill an archbishop in his own church.

Burned for Ringing the Bells

Dryburgh was never as rich as Melrose, Kelso or Jedburgh, but it was just as exposed. English armies burned it in 1322, sacked it in 1385, and burned it in 1544 and again in 1545.

The 1322 attack is the one with the story. Edward II had invaded Scotland that summer, but Bruce simply pulled everyone back and stripped the country of food in front of him. The English army got as far as Edinburgh, found nothing to eat, and starved its way back south. As it retreated past Dryburgh, the canons, thinking the danger had passed, rang the abbey bells to celebrate. The soldiers heard them, turned around, and set the place on fire.

Bruce poured money into Melrose afterward. Dryburgh got very little from him beyond confirmation of a small existing rent, and historians still aren't sure why.

The burnings of the 1540s, in the Rough Wooing, were the end. When the Reformation came in 1560, life at Dryburgh effectively stopped. The remaining canons lived on in a dwindling community until, by 1584, only two of them were left alive.

The Cloister

The church at Dryburgh is mostly gone: the transepts survive, along with a scattering of arches framing open lawn. But the buildings along the east side of the cloister are some of the best-preserved monastic rooms in Scotland, and they show how the canons actually lived.

The 13th-century chapter house is still roofed. It was the community's meeting room. Every morning the canons sat on the stone benches around its walls, heard a chapter of their rule read aloud, confessed their faults in front of each other, and dealt with the business of the house. Traces of the original painted decoration are still on the plaster, and the room's acoustics are remarkable.

Above it ran the dormitory, where the canons slept in their habits so they'd be ready to go. In the middle of the night, a bell woke them for the night office, and they went straight down a night stair into the church. Along the same range was the warming house, one of the only rooms in the abbey with a fire, where they could thaw out after services in a Borders winter.

On the south side of the cloister was the refectory. Meals were eaten in silence while one canon read aloud from scripture or the lives of the saints. The roof is gone, but the great rose window in its western gable still stands.

The Earl Who Turned a Ruin Into a Garden

After the Reformation, Dryburgh's lands passed through a run of commendators from the Erskine family and were eventually absorbed into the earldom of Mar. Then the estate changed hands, belonging for a time to the Haliburtons, until in 1786 it was bought back by an Erskine descendant: David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan.

Buchan was a genuine eccentric and a genuine scholar. In 1780 he founded the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, which still exists and is still the country's leading body for the study of its past. At Dryburgh, he turned the ruins into a romantic landscape garden. He planted trees among the walls and put up monuments around the estate, including a temple to the Muses and, in 1814, a colossal red sandstone statue of William Wallace looking out over the Tweed. It still stands on the hillside above the river.

His romanticism had a practical side. At a time when old ruins all over Scotland were being quarried for building stone, owning Dryburgh as a showpiece protected it. Buchan died in 1829 and is buried at the abbey, in what was the canons' sacristy.

Among the trees at Dryburgh is an old yew that tradition says was planted by the monks in 1136. That's awkward, since the abbey wasn't founded until about 1150, but the claim has been in print since at least 1838. In 1897, a book on British yew trees dismissed it entirely and said the tree was no more than about three hundred years old. Other estimates still put it somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand. Nobody has offered to cut it down and count.

Two Graves

Two burials made Dryburgh what it is today.

On 26 September 1832, Sir Walter Scott was buried in the abbey's north transept, a part of the ruin he called St Mary's Aisle. He'd died five days earlier at Abbotsford, the house he built on the Tweed a few miles west of Melrose. He had the right to be buried at Dryburgh through his Haliburton ancestors, who had once owned the abbey lands. His wife lies with him in a plain red granite tomb, and his son-in-law and biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, is buried close by.

It's hard to overstate what Scott did to Scotland's image of itself. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–03) collected the old ballads of the reiver families. Then came the long poems and, from 1814, the Waverley novels, which were enormously popular across Europe and America. In 1822 he staged George IV's visit to Edinburgh, the first by a reigning monarch in nearly two centuries, as a tartan pageant, and he put the king himself in a kilt. Clans, tartan, Highland honor, noble ruins by moonlight: a great deal of what the world thinks of as "Scotland" passed through Scott's hands first.

That includes the reivers, the raiding families of the frontier, who get their full story in part two. Scott's own ancestors were among them. One of them, Auld Wat Scott of Harden, was a notorious reiver. In Scott's hands, men who had lived by theft, blackmail and murder became daring folk heroes. And the tourism his books created, with readers arriving to see the places in the poems, was a big part of why the abbeys those same raiders and armies burned came to be valued and protected instead of quarried away.

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, was buried beside him in 1928. Haig was a Borders man, from a family whose ties to the land went back centuries; their seat at Bemersyde stands just up the river. He commanded the British armies on the Western Front from the end of 1915 until the Armistice, through the Somme, Passchendaele and the final offensives of 1918.

His grave is marked by a plain headstone of the standard design used by the Imperial War Graves Commission, the same pattern that marks hundreds of thousands of graves of the men who served under him. His wife lies beside him under a matching stone.

Haig is still one of the most argued-about figures in British history. To his defenders, he was the commander who adapted, held the army together and won the war in 1918. To his critics, he was the man who sent a generation into the machine guns for a few miles of mud. After the war he threw himself into the cause of veterans. He helped found the British Legion, and the Earl Haig Fund sold the red remembrance poppies that are still worn every November. In Scotland, the poppies are still made by hand at the Lady Haig Poppy Factory in Edinburgh, founded by his wife in 1926.

Two Borders men, buried a few feet apart in an abbey ruin. One spent his life turning the bloody history of this frontier into romance. The other led the deadliest war Britain has ever fought.

Visiting Melrose and Dryburgh

Both abbeys are cared for by Historic Environment Scotland and both are ticketed. If you're planning to see several HES sites on one trip, look at the Explorer Pass before you go.

Melrose Abbey is right in town. The ticket includes the Commendator's House Museum, which is worth the time. Walk the outside of the church slowly and look up; most of the best carvings are high on the walls and roofline. Inside, a very narrow spiral stair climbs high into the ruin. It's tight going, but the view over the town and the Tweed valley is worth it.

Dryburgh Abbey is a short drive away, near St Boswells, at the end of a wooded lane. It's much quieter than Melrose, and the cloister buildings are the part not to miss. Scott's house at Abbotsford and Buchan's Wallace statue are both close enough to add to the same day.

The Borders really need a car. The Borders Railway gets you as far as Tweedbank, next to Melrose, but the abbeys, towers and castles are spread out across the farmland.