Article summary: The Adamites of Glencorse:

Could a remnant of the controversial medieval Adamite movement have found its way from Bohemia to Scotland and established itself in the secluded valley of Glencorse?

This investigation examines the possibility through the surviving history of Glencorse and its submerged medieval chapel of St Catherine-in-the-Hopes. Drawing upon historical place-names, antiquarian accounts, the chapel's documented medieval origins and the wider history of the Hussite and Adamite movements, it explores whether fragments of an otherwise lost religious community might have survived beyond the violent suppression of the Adamites in fifteenth-century Bohemia.

The evidence is circumstantial rather than conclusive. Indeed, the article considers whether the absence of evidence might itself be explained by the nature of the community and its subsequent disappearance. At its heart is a deliberately provocative historical question: could the strange history of the Adamites have continued, unnoticed, in the Pentland Hills?

The article ultimately leaves the question open — inviting the reader to decide where historical evidence ends and historical possibility begins.

Abstract

The possibility of a connection between the fifteenth-century Bohemian Adamites and the medieval chapel of St Catherine-in-the-Hopes at Glencorse has not, so far as I am aware, been considered in Scottish ecclesiastical or Hussite studies. The proposal may at first appear improbable. The accepted history of the Adamites places their principal activity in Bohemia and their suppression there in 1421, while the Scottish evidence for St Catherine's chapel begins more than two centuries earlier and contains no explicit reference to Bohemian religious refugees.

Nevertheless, a closer examination of the evidence raises several questions which are not easily dismissed. These concern the peculiar dedication of the Glencorse chapel, the topography and relative isolation of the valley, the persistence of traditions associated with water and ritual bathing, the uncertain history of the chapel between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and, perhaps most intriguingly, a small cluster of later references to persons and practices which sit uneasily within the conventional ecclesiastical history of the district.

The argument advanced here is necessarily tentative. No single document establishes an Adamite presence at Glencorse. What may be proposed, however, is the possibility that a small group of Hussite refugees, escaping the suppression of the Adamites in Bohemia in 1421, eventually reached Scotland and established themselves in the vicinity of the chapel of St Catherine-in-the-Hopes.

If so, the community may have survived for several generations, leaving behind little more than fragments of folklore, place-name evidence and ecclesiastical unease.

The story becomes particularly intriguing because the site of their supposed settlement now lies beneath Glencorse Reservoir.

I. The Problem:

The history of medieval religious dissent in Scotland is surprisingly well populated with gaps.

This is not, in itself, remarkable. Scotland was peripheral to many of the religious movements which transformed continental Europe during the later Middle Ages, and surviving records tend to preserve the activities of institutions rather than those of itinerant, heterodox or deliberately clandestine communities.

The difficulty is particularly acute in the case of groups whose survival depended upon their not being recorded.

The Adamites provide an extreme example.

The name is applied to a number of movements in European religious history, but the group of immediate interest here is the radical Bohemian sect associated with the Taborites during the Hussite wars. Their emergence is conventionally dated to 1421. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts portray them as rejecting established ecclesiastical authority and, in some cases, attempting to recover the state of innocence represented by Adam before the Fall. The more sensational descriptions of their sexual and communal practices require caution, since such accusations were routinely made against medieval heretical groups.

Their suppression is not in doubt.

Jan Žižka acted against them in 1421, and the community associated with the island settlement on the Nežárka was effectively destroyed.

The conventional conclusion is therefore straightforward: the Adamites disappeared.

But this is not quite what the evidence says.

It says that the known Adamite community was suppressed.

That distinction may appear pedantic. In historical reconstruction, however, it can be decisive.

II. The Adamite Problem:

The numbers involved are uncertain.

One traditional account speaks of approximately three hundred radicals leaving Tábor, while other accounts suggest a smaller group subsequently concentrated around the Nežárka settlement. Later sources describe the destruction of the community and the killing of its principal leaders.

Yet medieval suppression was rarely as complete as the language of ecclesiastical or military sources implies.

People flee.

Families separate.

Individuals adopt new names.

Communities disappear from one jurisdiction only to reappear elsewhere.

This is especially likely among religious dissidents, whose survival depended upon mobility.

There is therefore nothing intrinsically improbable in the proposition that one or more Adamites survived the events of 1421.

The more difficult question is: where could they have gone?

The answer usually assumed is nowhere.

The answer proposed here is Scotland.

III. Why Scotland?:

At first sight, Scotland appears an unlikely destination.

Bohemia and Scotland were separated by considerable geographical distance, linguistic barriers and political frontiers.

But the fifteenth century was a period of considerable European mobility. Clerics, merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, students and exiles moved across political boundaries with surprising frequency.

Scotland was also considerably less isolated than its modern geographical position might suggest.

Scottish merchants were active in continental trade; Scottish soldiers served abroad; ecclesiastical connections extended throughout Europe; and pilgrimage provided a continuous movement of people between distant regions.

A fugitive religious community would not necessarily have travelled directly from Bohemia to Scotland.

A more plausible hypothesis would involve several stages.

Bohemia to the German lands.

The German lands to the Low Countries.

The Low Countries to the North Sea.

And finally, Scotland.

If the refugees deliberately sought a place where they could remain inconspicuous, they would have had little reason to settle in Edinburgh itself.

They would have sought precisely the sort of environment which Glencorse provided.

A valley.

Water.

Agricultural land.

Heather and woodland.



And, most importantly, an existing religious landscape which could provide a degree of protection and anonymity.

IV. St Catherine-in-the-Hopes:

Here the Scottish evidence becomes unexpectedly interesting.

The site now occupied by Glencorse Reservoir contained a medieval chapel dedicated to St Catherine.

Canmore dates the chapel to approximately the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, while the surviving foundations recorded in 1915 suggested a structure approximately 44 feet 9 inches by 20 feet internally. The remains are now submerged beneath the reservoir.

The chapel was known as St Katherine of the Hopes.

Records give forms including:

• St. Katherine of the Hopes (1593)
• S. Katherine in lie Hoippis (1607)
• Sanct-Katherenis in lie Houpis (1618)
• Sanct-Catharines de lie Houp (1634)

The Scottish Place-Name Survey interprets the name as referring to the chapel of St Catherine of the Hopes, with hope understood in its Scots topographical sense.

Nothing about this is evidence of Adamites.

That point should be stressed.

But it presents an intriguing coincidence.

The Adamite movement derived its theological identity from the condition of Adam before the Fall.

The Glencorse chapel was known as the chapel of St Catherine of the Hopes.

The word hope therefore becomes capable of supporting two quite different interpretations: the literal topographical meaning, and the metaphorical interpretation of a place in which restoration or redemption might be sought.

It would be irresponsible to claim that medieval Adamites chose Glencorse because of the name.

It would, however, be equally irresponsible to pretend that the symbolic vocabulary would have meant nothing to medieval religious refugees.

V. The Chapel and the Deer:

There is a second peculiarity.

The foundation tradition of St Catherine's chapel became associated with the legend of Sir William St Clair, a white deer and the hounds Help and Hold.

The tradition was recorded in antiquarian literature and subsequently entered literary culture through Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Andrew Kerr's nineteenth-century account also discusses the tradition while carefully acknowledging the absence of documentary evidence establishing the precise circumstances of the chapel's foundation.

The story is familiar enough to require little repetition.

What matters here is its symbolic structure.

A man enters the wilderness.

He encounters a remarkable animal.

He fears for his life.

He calls upon a saint.

He is delivered.

A sacred site is established at the place of deliverance.

It is a story of wilderness, water, death and renewal.

Those themes would have been immediately comprehensible to medieval religious communities.

They are also precisely the themes through which the Adamites understood the restoration of primordial innocence.

Again, this proves nothing.

But historical hypotheses are rarely built from proof alone.

They are built from convergences.

VI. The Water Question:

There is another consideration which deserves greater attention than it has received.

The Adamites were, in theological terms, obsessed with the restoration of the human condition before the Fall.

The symbolic importance of water in medieval Christianity needs no explanation.

Baptism represented death and rebirth.

The washing of the body represented purification.

The wilderness represented withdrawal from corrupted society.

And the Adamite interpretation of these ideas was unusually literal.

Their enemies accused them of discarding clothing and returning physically to the condition of Adam.

Whether all such accusations were true is uncertain. Modern scholarship has rightly treated the more lurid allegations with caution.

But the association between Adamism and the rejection of conventional bodily and social boundaries is well established.

A secluded Scottish community possessing access to a stream, a pool or a burn would therefore have required no elaborate infrastructure to practise its distinctive interpretation of Christian renewal.

Glencorse offered water in abundance.

It also offered something equally valuable: privacy.

VII. The Silence of the Scottish Records:

Perhaps the strongest objection to the Glencorse hypothesis is also the most interesting.

There is no medieval Scottish document which says:

“There are Adamites living at Glencorse.”

No chronicler describes them.

No bishop condemns them.

No trial record survives.

No papal correspondence mentions them.

No monastery reports their presence.

At first sight this destroys the hypothesis.

Yet it should be remembered that the surviving record is not a complete record of medieval Scotland.

The chapel itself provides a useful illustration.

Although its existence is secure, much of its early history remains uncertain. Its precise foundation date is disputed, and the later historical record becomes clearer than the medieval evidence. Canmore notes that it was annexed to Penicuik Church in 1635, while its burial ground remained in use until the eighteenth century.



A small dissident community would have had every reason to avoid leaving documentary traces.

Indeed, the absence of records may be precisely what we should expect.

VIII. The Sixteenth-Century Disappearance:

There is a potentially significant chronological feature.

The chapel's identity remains visible in records from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the revealing declaration made in 1593 by the Laird of Rosslyn, who described himself as a parishioner of “St Katherine of the Hopes” rather than Lasswade.



By this period the Reformation had transformed Scottish religious life.

If a small heterodox community had existed in the valley during the preceding century, the Reformation would have presented both danger and opportunity.

Danger, because religious conformity was once again being renegotiated.

Opportunity, because the old distinctions between Catholic orthodoxy and heresy were being replaced by a new Protestant order.

The Adamites could simply have disappeared into the general population.

Their descendants might have become Presbyterians.

Their theology might have survived only as custom.

Their identity might have vanished completely.

This would explain an otherwise curious feature of the hypothesis.

There is no obvious moment at which the Adamites of Glencorse were destroyed.

They simply cease to be distinguishable.

IX. The Problem of the Name:

There is one further clue, although it must be handled with extreme caution.

The place-name Glencorse is not itself mysterious.

The Scottish Place-Name Survey derives it from Gaelic gleann combined with crasg/croisg, giving essentially “glen of the crossing(s)”. The name is recorded in numerous medieval and early modern forms.

Yet the idea of crossing possesses an almost irresistible resonance when the Adamite hypothesis is considered.

The proposed refugees would have crossed Europe.

They would have crossed linguistic and political boundaries.

They would have crossed the North Sea.

And finally they would have crossed into a valley whose name itself recalled crossing.

This is not etymological evidence.

It is coincidence.

But coincidence becomes interesting when it occurs repeatedly.

X. What Happened to Them?:

The most plausible reconstruction is not that a large Adamite colony settled at Glencorse.

That would almost certainly have left more evidence.

A much smaller group is more credible.

Perhaps twenty people.

Perhaps fewer.

Perhaps only two or three families.

They would not have needed to announce themselves as Adamites.

Indeed, doing so would have defeated the purpose of their escape.

They could have adopted ordinary occupations.

Farmers.

Labourers.

Craftsmen.

Perhaps one or two served the chapel.

Their children would have grown up speaking Scots.

The Bohemian language would have disappeared within a generation or two.

Their distinctive religious practices would gradually have become family customs.

A belief in communal equality might become hospitality.

A rejection of excessive materialism might become frugality.

A suspicion of ecclesiastical authority might become stubborn independence.

And ritual immersion might become no more than an eccentric local practice.

Within three generations, nobody would necessarily remember why.

XI. The Reservoir:

The final irony is that the physical evidence which might have settled the question has disappeared beneath the water.

Glencorse Reservoir was constructed between 1819 and 1824. The project transformed the valley and submerged the remains of St Catherine's Chapel. The chapel foundations were still visible when examined in 1915, but are now normally covered by the reservoir.

This makes the hypothesis frustratingly difficult to test.

If an Adamite settlement existed nearby, its archaeological remains may now be inaccessible.

If burials associated with the community survived, they too may lie beneath the reservoir.

If objects were concealed beneath the chapel floor, they may remain there.

The reservoir has therefore done something unusual to the historical problem.

It has not merely preserved the landscape.

It has removed it from investigation.

The very water which may have been central to the community's religious practice now conceals whatever physical evidence they left behind.

XII. A Scottish Adamism?:

There remains, however, a larger question.

Would a transplanted Adamite community still have been Adamite after a century in Scotland?

Probably not in any strict sense.

Religious movements change when they cross cultures.

A Bohemian sect transported to Scotland would inevitably absorb Scottish vocabulary, custom and religious practice.

The result would no longer have resembled the community suppressed by Žižka.

It might instead have become something much stranger:

a Scottish folk tradition retaining fragments of an obscure continental theology.

This possibility provides a more convincing explanation for the complete absence of an identifiable “Adamite church” at Glencorse.

There may never have been one.

There may instead have been a tradition.

And traditions are notoriously difficult for historians to recover.

XIII. The Modern Discovery:

The modern history of Glencorse provides an unexpectedly appropriate conclusion.

In recent years the reservoir has acquired another community whose relationship with the water is markedly different from that of the surrounding population.

People come to swim.

They arrive individually but rarely remain individual for long.

They share the water.

They share the experience of cold.

They assist one another.

Social distinctions become temporarily irrelevant.

The activity is voluntary, unnecessary and, to an outside observer, faintly irrational.

Yet participants describe precisely the qualities which the medieval Adamites are traditionally associated with: simplicity, nature, equality, community and a temporary suspension of ordinary social conventions.

There is, of course, no historical continuity between the two communities.

There cannot be.

No documentary evidence connects modern open-water swimmers with medieval Bohemian heretics.

And yet the resemblance is sufficiently striking to invite speculation.

Perhaps the most enduring religious traditions are not those preserved in books.

Perhaps they are those preserved in behaviour.

XIV. A Tentative Conclusion:

The evidence assembled here does not justify the assertion that the Adamites settled at Glencorse.

It does, however, permit a more modest proposition.

A small number of Adamite or Adamite-adjacent refugees could have escaped the suppression of 1421.

Continental religious refugees did travel.

Scotland was accessible.

The Glencorse valley provided water, agricultural resources and relative seclusion.

A medieval chapel stood there under the suggestive dedication of St Catherine-in-the-Hopes.

The documentary record is incomplete.

And the physical site has subsequently been submerged.

None of these facts proves the hypothesis.

Taken individually, they amount to very little.

Taken together, they produce what might be called an archaeological possibility.

The absence of positive evidence remains the principal difficulty.

But perhaps this is precisely what we should expect from a community whose survival depended upon anonymity.

The Adamites, after all, had already learned the principal lesson of religious persecution:

survival sometimes requires disappearing.

If a handful of them reached Scotland, they would have had little reason to preserve the name by which their enemies knew them.

They may instead have become inhabitants of the valley.

Their theology may have dissolved into folklore.

Their descendants may have forgotten Bohemia.

Their chapel disappeared beneath the reservoir.

And eventually, even the memory of the people themselves disappeared.

Until people began swimming there again.

XV. The Adamites of Glencorse:

There is an old historical temptation to believe that the past exists somewhere beneath our feet, waiting to be uncovered.

At Glencorse, that proposition is unusually literal.

Beneath the surface of the reservoir lies the chapel of St Catherine-in-the-Hopes.

Beneath the chapel may lie the traces of a community.

Beneath the community lies a question.

And beneath the question lies an extraordinary possibility:

that six centuries ago a handful of religious refugees crossed Europe in search of a place where they could live according to their understanding of human innocence — and found it in a small Scottish valley.

They could hardly have known that their refuge would one day become a reservoir.

They certainly could not have imagined that, six hundred years later, people would voluntarily return to its waters at dawn, remove most of their clothing, swim through the cold, and emerge laughing.

Yet if the surviving fragments of the Adamite tradition tell us anything, it is that the boundary between the sacred and the ridiculous has always been remarkably thin.

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether the Adamites came to Glencorse.

Perhaps the better question is:

what if they never really left?

Postscript: the evidence beneath the water:

There is one final piece of evidence which deserves mention.

When the chapel was examined in 1915, its foundations were visible above the mud. The survey recorded a substantial, oriented structure and even noted an unusual arrangement of stones at its south-eastern corner. Today the foundations are submerged beneath Glencorse Reservoir.

Were a future lowering of the reservoir to expose the site once more, an archaeological investigation might conceivably recover material capable of answering some of these questions.

A fragment of pottery would be useful.

A coin would be better.

A continental devotional object would be extraordinary.

A Bohemian manuscript would be decisive.

And a medieval swimming cap would, naturally, settle the matter beyond reasonable doubt.

Selected sources and further reading

Kerr, Andrew. “Glencorse and its Old Buildings.” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 1879. Kerr discusses the history of Glencorse, St Catherine's chapel and the St Clair deer tradition, while explicitly distinguishing legend from documentary evidence.

Dixon, Norman. The Place-Names of Midlothian. The entry for Glencorse traces the name through medieval forms and discusses the chapel as St Katherine of the Hopes.

Canmore, National Record of the Historic Environment. Glencorse Reservoir, St Catherine's Chapel, Canmore ID 51860. Provides the archaeological description, dimensions, documentary references and the record of the 1915 investigation.

Havey, Francis. “Adamites.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1907. Useful as an example of the traditional account of the Adamites and their suppression, while also recording later Neo-Adamite movements.

Schaff, Philip. New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, entry “Adamites”. Particularly valuable for its caution concerning the reliability of accusations made against the sect.