St Andrew: Scotland's Patron Saint
The Man behind the Saltire, the Home of Golf and a University Name
Saint Andrew is Scotland's patron saint and gives his name to the home of world golf and to an ancient Scottish university. Who was he and how did all this come about?
Saint Andrew, the Patron Saint of Scotland
Saint Andrew is the patron saint of Scotland. His feast day is 30 November and his name is remembered in small Fife town which is the home of golf (St Andrews) and the place where the game was first recorded. This small town of St Andrews is also home to an ancient university where the heir to the British throne, Price William, studied.
St Andrew’s Day (30 November) is celebrated by Scots around the world, one of three days at which Scots mark their nationhood and identity with feasting and drinking their national spirit, malt whisky.
St Andrew’s cross is the national flag of Scotland and is known as the ‘Saltire’ (a white diagonal cross on a blue background). The Saltire finds its most public exhibition at football and rugby games involving Scotland when Glasgow’s Hampden Park (Football or Soccer) and Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium(Rugby) are awash with St Andrew’s crosses and visiting fans are drowned out by the sound of ‘Flower of Scotland’, Scotland’s recently adopted, but as yet informal, national anthem.
St Andrew: The Man
Despite St Andrew’s place in Scottish hearts (and also Greek, Romanian and Russian as he is the patron saint of both countries as well as of Scotland), relatively little is known of him.
The gospels tell us that St Andrew was a Galilean fisherman. (Jesus is recorded as telling him that he would make him a ‘fisher of men’.) He was also brother to St Peter, reputedly the first Pope, and it was he who introduced Peter to Jesus.
He is reputed to have spread Christianity through Asia Minor and Greece, hence his being the patron saint to Greece, Romania and Russia as well as Scotland. Legend has it that he was martyred in Greece at Patras and that he dies by crucifixion on a diagonal cross (hence the shape of ‘St Andrew’s Cross’.
St Andrew and Scotland
St Andrew never visited Scotland during his life. How, then, did he come to be Scotland’s patron saint? The story is that an angel told Greek monk St Rule through a dream that Saint Andrew’s bones should be moved from their resting place in Constantinople (now known as Istanbul) and moved to ‘the ends of the Earth’. At that time Scotland was about as far away as it was possible to get, and St Rule landed, or more accurately was shipwrecked, together with St Andrew’s relics, at a small settlement on the east coast of Scotland in what is now known as Fife. Thus, the town (or more accurately, the Royal Burgh) of St Andrew’s was born.
Another story is that the Bishop of Hexham, in Northumbria in Northern England, brought St Andrew’s relics to St Andrews in the mid-eighth century.
Whichever is true, St Andrews’ relics were placed in a chapel which was later incorporated into St Andrew’s Cathedral. St Andrews became an important city in Scotland, many churches in Scotland (and many abroad which were founded by exiled Scots) were dedicated to St Andrew, his flag was adopted as Scotland’s national symbol, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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