Hospital chantry

In Scotland hospitals provided a number of functions: Travellers’ rest, care homes for elderly men and women; and sub-monastic prayer communities.

[d] In Scotland Bishop Dunbar, in the months before he died in 1532, founded a "chantry" or chapel in Elgin Cathedral in memory of his father and mother.

The mortification records his wishes and obligations as follows: …in honorem Sanctse Trinitatis et fanctorum Columbae et Thomae martyris, et pro falute animarum Regis ejufque predeceflbrum et fucceflbrum, Alexandri Dunbar de Weftfeld militis et dominse Elizabethie Suthirland ejus fponfse…"[6]Howard Colvin[7] provides a definitive account of the origins of chantries in England.

[8] Colvin summarizes the situation as follows: … in origin the chantry can therefore be seen as the answer to what was essentially a monastic problem: how to continue effectively to intercede for an army of the dead whose ranks were already growing uncontrollably even before the official recognition of Purgatory had drawn fresh attention to their predicament.

Its flexibility in terms both of endowment and of duration enabled it – unlike the monastic foundation – to be adapted to the means of all ranks of society, so that what had begun largely as a form of seigneurial piety came in time to be adopted by the new squirearchy of the later middle ages and by self-made men like wool-merchants, who could identify with a parish church in a way that they perhaps could not with an old-established monastery of royal or baronial foundation …In general functions provided in chantries where they were separate establishments – e.g. Noseley, St Anne's Chapel in Barnstaple, Devon and Lincoln Cathedral were the same as those provided in many of the medieval hospitals and bedehouses in Scotland.