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The History Of Fife

When the road and rail bridges were built over the rivers Forth and Tay, people suddenly began to discover the long-forgotten wonderland that is the Kingdom of Fife. For many a century no other place in Scotland was quite as exciting to live in and it still has a heritage that is unique, though four hundred years have passed since the height of its fame.

Man came early to settle in Fife. About eight thousand years ago, when the entire population of Scotland numbered only a few hundreds, a strip of coastline in North Fife was one of the rare abodes of those Stone Age settlers, the Mesolithic folk. It is still a good place for people who like shellfish, as they did.

Later, in Neolithic times and through the long centuries of the Bronze Age, the population was steadily growing. And then, almost two thousand four hundred years ago, a great wave of invaders from the Continent - the Gaelic-speaking Celts - swept triumphantly into Scotland to start a new Iron Age of progress. Their first foothold was on the shores of the River Tay. And up the estuary, where the hills of North Fife and Perthshire meet, the invaders covered the summits with forts that are still clearly visible.

Centuries later the early Christian missionaries arrived and one of these was a monk called St. Rule, from Patras in Western Greece. He brought a human armbone, three fingers from a right hand, one tooth and a knee-cap, all genuine parts of the skeleton of St. Andrew. People liked a piece of a saint in those days.

Something else happened too that was even more remarkable. When the local King of the Picts went down to the shore to find why this stranger had come to his realm, suddenly a great white cross appeared, shimmering diagonally in the clear blue sky. The cross eventually became the national flag of Scotland and the martyr of Patras the patron saint of Scotland. People did not know much about this St. Andrew. He was a far-off mystery man. But his bones were potent and that was what mattered.

Far better known, among the saints of Fife, was St. Margaret, the Queen of Malcolm Canmore. Most of her life was spent in Southern Fife, at the city of Dunfermline, then the capital of Scotland. There a shrine was erected in her memory soon after her death, and later she was given a more magnificent memorial, the great Benedictine Abbey which her son David, erected. The ashes of all but her head are still there.

Through most of the middle ages the Earls of Fife were first among the nobility of Scotland. They had hereditary right to place the crown on the King's head at his coronation and to lead the vanguard of his army into battle. Fife too was the home of Scotland's leading churchman, the arch-bishop of St. Andrews. The cathedral at St. Andrews was by far the largest in the land, well over 100 hundred yards long.

It was here that higher education flourished for the first time in Scotland after St. Andrews University was founded in 1411. Among Royal Palaces, too, the first favorite of Scottish monarchs for almost two centuries was Falkland Palace in Fife, built with a Renaissance grandeur that has been described as without parallel in the British Isles.