Pittenweem Priory and the conventuality question

Abstract

Pittenweem Priory began life as the caput manor of a daughter-house established on May Island by Cluniac monks from Reading (c. 1140). After its sale to St Andrews (c. 1280), the priory transferred ashore. While retaining its traditional name, the ‘Priory of May (alias Pittenweem)’ was subsumed within the Augustinian priory of St Andrews. Its prior was elected from among the canons of the new mother house, but it was many decades before a resident community of canons was set up in Pittenweem. The traditional view, based principally on the ‘non-conventual’ status of the priory reiterated in fifteenth-century documents, is that there was ‘no resident community’ before the priorship of Andrew Forman (1495–1515). Archaeological evidence in Pittenweem, however, indicates that James Kennedy had embarked on significant development of the priory fifty years earlier. This suggests that, when the term ‘non-conventual’ is used in documents emanating from Kennedy's successors (Graham and Scheves), we should interpret it more as an assertion of superiority and control than as a description of realities in the priory.