The Religious Life of Dunkeld Cathedral

A medieval cathedral was a complex organisation. Most Scottish cathedrals served their local community as its parish church, and would attract many of the faithful of the diocese on great festivals. Yet it was even more important for contemporaries that, as the leading church in its diocese, a cathedral was the setting for an unbroken offering of worship in which only the clergy expected to take part.

The basic form of this worship was the same as in the monastic churches, with seven services together known as the Opus Dei (work of God), consisting of psalms, prayers, readings and anthems. In addition two masses were celebrated by the body of clergy each morning, whilst there would be privately recited masses as part of the individual devotions of the clergy or as offerings on behalf of dead benefactors.

In the time of Bishop Geoffrey Liberatione (1236—49) it was decided that the particular form which these services took at Dunkeld, like the rules by which the chapter was conducted, should be based on those at Salisbury Cathedral. This bishop was clearly very much concerned with the details of the services because he granted a charter to Scone Abbey on condition that the abbey would provide the cathedral with a pound of incense for censing the bread used at the mass when it was elevated at the consecration.

In the later middle ages it is likely that the form of the worship would have acquired a more specifically Scottish character. We know a little of the services from a sixteenth­century choir book, known as an Antiphonary, which is thought to have come from Dunkeld and is now in Edinburgh University Library. This contains musical settings for the mass and a number of anthems.