The twelfth century, which was, in terms of building and the introduction of new religious orders, the most dynamic century in the history of the pre- Reformation Church, also saw the introduction of many new biblical and continental saints. Nowhere was the change more obvious than in the king's newly founded burghs, where the new parish kirks were dedicated to such as St Mary (at Berwick, Dundee, Glasgow and Haddington), St Nicholas (Aberdeen, Lanark and Renfrew) or St Giles (Edinburgh and Elgin). Elsewhere dedications were more mixed, encouraged by the number of native saints' lives written or rewritten in the twelfth century. In rural parish kirks, Andrew, brother of Peter, had to compete with St Kentigem, St Ninian, St Machar and St Serf. Local cults of Celtic or other early saints were as much a part of the early medieval church as the veneration of Andrew as a national saint.

Although the fourteenth century seems to have seen a slackening of interest in such local or early saints, they experienced a marked revival from the second quarter of the fifteenth century onwards. This was the age of Walter Bower, whose Scotichronicon matched an anti-English patriotism with the revival of a cult of native saints. Bower, an Augustinian Abbot of Inchcolm, turned his island abbey into a devotional centre dedicated to Columba. James Haldenstone, another Augustinian prior (of St Andrews) of the same period, was an early campaigner for the canonisation of St Duthac of Tain as well as a restorer of the cathedral church dedicated to the Apostle. Bishop William Lauder of Glasgow at the same time, in 1420, was petitioning the Pope for permission to move the feretory of St Mungo to a more prominent place in his cathedral church.