Perth Charterhouse Project

What is the Charterhouse?

Few people are nowadays aware of where Perth’s Charterhouse once stood, let alone what it was. It has nothing to do with charters or record-keeping, the name being an anglicised version of the name of the mother-house of the Carthusian order, which is located in the foothills of the Alps in eastern France at La Grande Chartreuse. Although the Carthusian order was founded in 1084, it was only in the 1420s that King James I introduced Carthusian monks to his kingdom and the priory in Perth was the only Carthusian monastery built in Scotland. That James chose Perth as the location for his new foundation underscores how important the burgh was to him and his ambitions. The Charterhouse is a lost icon of Perth’s central place in the story of medieval Scotland. 

James founded the Charterhouse during a whirlwind of royal activity following his return to Scotland in 1424, aged thirty, after eighteen years of captivity in England.  For those not familiar with story of James I’s early life, he was captured by English pirates – aged twelve – on a ship that was taking him to France and brought to the Lancastrian king of England, Henry IV. James I’s ailing father – Robert III – died shortly after, aged sixty-eight, meaning James was now king in name although he would not receive his crown until 1424. In the interim, Scotland was ruled by his uncle, Robert Stewart, duke of Albany and earl of Fife, until his own death in 1420 when his son, Murdac, succeeded him as governor of the realm. James I’s return to Scotland witnessed strenuous – and often violent - efforts by the king to restore his royal authority and enhance his kingly status, including a flurry of royal building projects.   

The Charterhouse was built as a royal mausoleum for James I and his English wife, Joan Beaufort, and was one of his two main building projects, alongside the palace at Linlithgow. The Carthusians order was characterised by a desire for solitary existence and prayer, so they lived as collective hermits with individual houses and gardens within the complex. After the first flurry of enthusiasm for the new order in the decades following its foundation, the Carthusians had waned in popularity through the thirteenth and into the early fourteenth century. A resurgence in popularity occurred in the post-plague era from c.1350, when several houses were founded in France, including the important mausoleum of the Dukes of Burgundy at Chapmol beside Dijon, and in England (including the London Charterhouse, founded in late fourteenth century, and Sheen Priory and Mount Grace Priory, founded in fifteenth century).  Selecting one of the most austere religious orders for his monastic foundation was a statement of James’s personal piety, the divine nature of his kingship and the power/ wealth of the monarchy. Despite some notable urban monasteries, including the London Charterhouse, Carthusian foundations were usually located in isolated rurality (typified by the remote locations of La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble and Mount Grace on the edge of the north-eastern moors of Yorkshire) so this also made this foundation more exceptional. To find out more about the Carthusian Order and Mount Grace in Yorkshire, you can visit this informative website produced by English Heritage. 

The choice of Perth over other burghs in Scotland for this royal religious foundation reflected concentrated efforts (from the mid-fourteenth century onwards) to focus government, court, and ceremony on a royal centre at Perth and Scone (where inauguration/ coronation took place). Yet, the place of Perth in the history of medieval Scotland, and the place of the Charterhouse in Perth’s history, are things about which there is still much to learn and communicate, particularly into a wider public historical narrative. In part, this is due to the poor survival of built heritage from the medieval period in modern Perth. Following the ravages of the Reformation (which saw the destruction of the priory and the three friaries that ringed the burgh), the thirteenth-century abandonment of its castle for focus on royal lodgings in the burgh (also now gone), and the progressive rebuilding of much of the burgh since the eighteenth century, most of Perth’s medieval built heritage is ‘lost’. There is a handful of exceptions: St John’s Kirk (the parish church in the centre); the late fifteenth-century Fair Maid’s House; the street plan and some waterways (including the king’s lade). 

Main Collaborators

The main project collaborators are Prof Richard Oram (University of Stirling), Dr Lucy Dean (Centre for History, University of the Highlands & Islands) and local partners, including Culture Perth and Kinross (CPK) and Gavin Lindsay, local consultant in Archaeological Education, Interpretation and Research. The project seeks to re-establish understanding of Perth’s central role in later medieval Scotland for and with a wider (particularly local) public and facilitate a means of reconnecting modern audiences with a sense of place in the present through exploring the Perth’s medieval past.

The city’s material and archival collections for this period – managed, curated and cared for by CPK (through the archives, libraries and museums under its care) – sit at the heart of the project. Our activities centre around raising the profile of these collections, particularly the late medieval and early modern archival collections, which are underused and inconsistently catalogued; and supporting CPK’s objectives around building better collections knowledge and engaging new and wider audiences for their collections in the future.

In conjunction with this, we are also seeking to address Perth and Kinross Archaeological Research Framework (PKARF)’s observation that this is a site of significant interest that has not received much focus in terms of archaeology, to expand the project in collaboratively interdisciplinary directions that also offer exciting opportunities for engagement through community archaeology.