Shortly after 1300, on the Nordnes peninsula just outside the medieval town of Bergen in Norway, a woman claiming to be the heir presumptive to the throne of Scotland, Margaret, maid of Norway, was burnt at the stake. Within twenty years, the chapel of St Margrethe stood, dedicated to her, on the site of her death, and was attracting pilgrims in such numbers that Audfinn, bishop of Bergen, was moved to try to suppress it. Yet the chapel endured until the Reformation around 1537, probably gaining the acquiescence of Audfinn's successors, and incubating a cult that spread as far as the remote, windswept islands of Iceland and the Faroes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Maintained by the donations of the devout and serving as a place of prayer to a single, specific saint, the Margrethe chapel at Nordnes is a key example of just one type of cult chapel. The questions we can pose about it are those that we will return to throughout this book when considering all the varieties of chapels that existed in medieval Norway, Scotland and England: who built and visited it? How was it funded? What was its relationship with the other churches in its environs? What were its functions? And how did the Church hierarchy deal with it?

The ecclesiastical landscapes of high and late medieval northern Europe were not exclusively populated by cathedrals, monasteries and parish churches. There were other religious buildings, commonly called chapels, which were to be found in any number of locations, from villages to hilltops and harbours to manor houses. These buildings, with their almost bewildering multiplicity of functions and users, enlivened the religious topography for ordinary Christians, providing alternative locations beside the parish church for devotional practices.

To examine how chapels were defined and used, three major themes will be considered in this book: the universality of the high and late medieval Church, the extent of Scandinavian influence in the British Isles, and the impact of population decline on religious landscapes.