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A brief history of Dunfermline

A visitor cannot spend ten minutes in Dunfermline without gravitating to the history soaked walls of the old Abbey Church and becoming chastened and subdued by the contact. With its rich background teaching the lessons of history, its own thrust and energy creating a prosperity more marked than that of its neighbours, in surroundings of great natural beauty providing further evidence of an especially favoured community, Dunfermline, ancient seat of the kings of Scotland, might very easily have remained so.

Instead, the very reverse happened. To understand the present it is often necessary to survey the past it would appear that Dunfermline had its rise in the beginning or towards the middle of the 11th century, originating with Malcolm Canmore, who returned from 17 years of exile to win the throne of his father from the usurper Macbeth. Its genesis was as a small fort built on a peninsular mount in Pittencrief Glen and called, as its name would indicate, the fort of the crooked rivulet. Two stimulating events influenced Dunfermline's growth and development. One was the erection of a religious house near the village which had already sprung up around Malcolm's castle. The other, and perhaps the more significant, was the marriage in 1070 of Malcolm with Margaret, the sister of Edgar Atheling, the unfortunate Anglo-Saxon prince who was dethroned and had his kingdom seized by William the Conqueror.

This union linking the royal lines of Scotland, England and Hungary took place at a time when, far to the south, Westminster Abbey was raising itself in strength, beauty and elegance. Queen Margaret, accepting her shipwreck in the Firth of Forth as an act of Providence, set her hand and mind to the shaping of a nation which would emerge from a semi- savage state and have for its heart the Church. She bore to her grim and rough-hewn husband six sons and two daughters, and in a tiny room high on Edinburgh Rock she died only four days after her spouse and Edward, her eldest son, heir to the throne, were killed in a battle at Alnwick. The building of the Abbey Church, which was designed to be ' the largest and fairest in the land,' was commenced in l072.

The people of Dunfermline have no cause to be grateful to the memory of Edward I of England. ' The Hammer of the Scots ' was more than once in residence at the Palace which stood adjacent to the Abbey and which, according to one recorder, Matthew of Westminster, could have accommodated three kings and their retinues. He rested there on his way south with the Stone of Destiny from Scone, and the Last occasion of his unwelcome royal patronage was in 1303. Scotland could well have done without it. After wintering in the north the Court moved out the following spring, and the last of the invaders had not embarked on the Forth before flames were roaring to the heavens, engulfing the labour of centuries. Edward himself gave the order for this final, cruel vandalism of Dunfermline. Yet the task of reconstruction was not long delayed, and the Scottish royal household were installed within its walls again by 1323, in which year David, the son of Robert the Bruce, was born.

Dunfermline and Scotland's patriot warrior king will be forever bound together.