Book II. Church and Culture (part 2)

Adamnan, though, as Bede says, a man of peace and providentially removed before the coming Easter, when matters would have been brought to a crisis between him and his recalcitrant monks, seems notwithstanding to have left a legacy of discord behind him. For the first time since the foundation of the monastery of Iona, we find in the successor of Adamnan an abbot who was not a descendant of Conall Gulban. Conmael, son of Failbhe, was of the tribe of Airgialla in Ireland, who were descended from Colla Uais; but three years after Adamnan’s death we find Duncadh, who belonged to the tribe of the patron saint, obtaining the abbacy. Then three years after we have the death of Conmael as abbot of Iona. After his death appears Ceode, bishop of Iona, who dies in 712, and in 713 Dorbeni obtains the chair of Iona, but after five months’ possession of the primacy dies on Saturday the 28th of October in the same year. During the whole of this time, however, Duncadh is likewise abbot. The explanation seems to be that the community of Iona had become divided on the subject of the Easter question, and that a party had become favourable to Adamnan’s views. As he had not succeeded in bringing over any of the Columban monasteries, they were driven to obtain an abbot elsewhere, and procured the nomination of Conmael; while the opposing party having got the upper hand three years after, Duncadh, the legitimate successor of the line of Conall Gulban, obtained the abbacy, and there was thus a schism in the community—one section of them celebrating their Easter after the Roman system, who had at their head Conmael, Ceode the bishop, and Dorbeni; and the other and more powerful section maintaining, under the presidency of Duncadh, the old custom of their church. After narrating how ‘at that time,’ that is, in 710, ‘Naiton‘Naiton, king of the Picts who inhabit the northern parts of Britain, taught by frequent study of the ecclesiastical writings, renounced the error by which he and his nation had till then been held in relation to the observance of Easter, and submitted, together with his people, to celebrate the Catholic time of our Lord’s resurrection,’ Bede closes his notices of the monastery of Iona by telling us that ‘not long after, those monks also of the Scottish nation who lived in the isle of Hii, with the other monasteries that were subject to them, were, by the procurement of our Lord, brought to the canonical observance of Easter and the right mode of tonsure. For in the year after the incarnation of our Lord 716, the father and priest Ecgberct, beloved of God and worthy to be named with all honour, coming to them from Ireland, was very honourably and joyfully received by them. Being a most agreeable teacher and most devout in practising those things which he taught, he was willingly heard by all; and, by his pious and frequent exhortations he converted them from the inveterate tradition of their ancestors. He taught them to perform the principal solemnity after the Catholic and apostolic manner;’ and Bede adds, ‘The monks of Hii, by the instruction of Ecgberct, adopted the Catholic rites, under Abbot Dunchad, about eighty years after they had sent Bishop Aidan to preach to the nation of the Angles.’ It is rarely, however, that, when a change is proposed in matters of faith or practice, a Christian community is unanimous, and there is always an opposing minority who refuse their assent to it. So it must have been here, for in the same passage in which Tighernac notices the adoption of the Catholic Easter in 716 he adds that Faelchu mac Dorbeni takes the chair of Columba in the eighty-seventh year of his age, and on Saturday the 29th of August; while he records the death of Abbot Duncadh in the following year. We have here again a schism in the community; and no sooner does Abbot Duncadh with his adherents go over to the Roman party, than the opposing section adopt a new abbot.

The greater part, if not the whole, of the dependent monasteries among the Picts seem to have resisted the change, and to have refused obedience to the decree which Bede tells us King Naiton had issued, when ‘the cycles of nineteen years were forthwith by public command sent throughout all the provinces of the Picts to be transcribed, learned and observed;’ for we are told by Tighernac that in 717, when Abbot Duncadh had died and Faelchu remained alone in possession of the abbacy, the family of Iona were driven across Drumalban by King Naiton. In other words, the whole of the Columban monks were expelled from his kingdom; and there is reason to think that Faelchu had been at the head of one of these dependent monasteries in the territories of the northern Picts. It is possible that the monks of the monasteries recently established among the southern Picts by Adamnan may have conformed; but those of the older foundations, such as Abernethy and Cillrigmonadh, or St. Andrews, were probably driven out; and thus with the expulsion of the family of Iona terminated the primacy of its monastery over the monasteries and churches in the extensive districts of the east and north of Scotland which formed at that time the kingdom of the Picts.

Chapter V. The Churches of Cumbria and Lothian.

Ten years after the landing of St. Columba in Iona the great battle of Ardderyd, or Arthuret, was fought between the pagan and the Christian parties in Cumbria; and the same year which saw Aidan, who had taken part in it, inaugurated by St. Columba as independent king of Dalriada, likewise witnessed the establishment of another of the chiefs who fought in that battle, Rydderch Hael, or the Liberal, as Christian king of Strathclyde, and the restoration of a Christian Church to its Cumbrian population. As Columba was the founder of the Christian Church among the northern Picts, so Kentigern was the great agent in the revolution which again christianised Cumbria. We are not, however, so fortunate in the biographers of Kentigern as we are in those of Columba. While those of the latter lived when the memory of his words and acts was still fresh in the minds of his followers, Kentigern found no one to record the events of his life till upwards of five centuries had elapsed after his death. A fragment of the life which had been used by John of Fordun and a complete biography by Jocelyn of Furness are all we possess, but neither of them was compiled before the twelfth century.

The older life, of which a fragment only remains, states that ‘a certain king Leudonus, a man half pagan, from whom the province over which he ruled in northern Britannia obtained the name of Leudonia, had a daughter under a stepmother, and the daughter’s name was Thaney.’ This girl, having become Christian, ‘meditated upon the virginal honour and maternal blessedness of the most holy Virgin Mary,’ and desired, like her, to bring forth one who would be for the honour and salvation of her nation in these northern parts. She ‘had a suitor, Ewen, the son of Erwegende, sprung from a most noble stock of the Britons,’ but she refused to marry him; upon which the king her father gave her the alternative of either marrying him or being handed over to the care of a swineherd, and she chose the latter. The swineherd was secretly a Christian, having been converted by Servanus, a disciple of Palladius, and respected her wishes. Her suitor Ewen, however, succeeded by a stratagem in violating her in a wood, and she became with child, upon which her father ordered her to be stoned according to the laws of the country; but as none of the officers presumed to cast stones at one of the royal family, she was taken to the top of a hill called Kepduf and precipitated from it; having made the sign of the cross, however, she came down to the foot of the mountain unhurt. The king then ordered her to be given over to the sea, saying, ‘If she be worthy of life, her God will free her from the peril of death, if He so will.’ They brought her, therefore, to the firth, which is about three miles from Kepduf, to the mouth of a river called Aberlessic, where she was put into a curach, that is, a boat made of hides, and carried out into deep water beyond the Isle of May. She remained all night alone in the midst of the sea, and when morning dawned she was in safety cast on the sand at Culenros, which, according to sailors’ computation, is thirty miles distant from the Isle of May. Here she suffered the pains of labour; and, as she lay on the ground, suddenly a heap of ashes which the day before had been gathered together close to the shore by some shepherds, was struck by a gust of the north wind, which scattered around her the sparks which lay hid within it. When, therefore, she had found the fire, the pregnant young woman dragged herself at once, as best she could, to the place indicated by God, and in her extreme necessity, with anxious groans, she made a little heap with the wood which had been collected the day before by the foresaid shepherds to prepare the fire. Having lighted the fire, she brought forth a son, the chamber of whose maturity was as rude as that of his conception. Some herds found her there with the child, and while some gave her food, others went straight to the blessed Servanus, who at that time was teaching the Christian law to his clerics, with one accord saying, ‘Sir, thus and thus have we found;’ to whom the saint said, A Dia cur fir sin, which in Latin means ‘O utinam si sic esset,’esset,’ and the youths replied, ‘Yea, father, it is a true tale and no fable which we tell; therefore we pray you, sir, come and see, that thy desire may without delay be satisfied;’ and he also, when he had learnt the order of the events, rejoiced with great joy, and said, ‘Thanks be to God, for he shall be my dear one.’ For as the child was being born, when he was in his oratory after morning lauds, he had heard on high the Gloria in excelsis being solemnly sung.sung. And after an address to his clerics, in which he vindicates the manner in which the conception of the blessed Kentigern had taken place, and ‘praises Him who alone governeth the world, and hath, among others, blessed our country Britain with such a patron,’ this fragment unfortunately terminates.

Jocelyn, whose narrative, as the Bishop of Brechin well observes, is here directed at undoing the weird legend of the earlier life, which gives the unedifying account of the conception of Kentigern, does not name either father or daughter. He calls Kentigern’s mother simply ‘the daughter of a certain king, most pagan in his creed, who ruled in the northern parts of Britannia.’ Neither does he name the suitor who betrayed her, but declares that she had no consciousness by whom, when, or in what manner she conceived, and had possibly been drugged. He states that, according to the law of the country, any girl in her situation was to be cast down from the summit of a high mountain, and her betrayer beheaded; that she was taken to the top of a high hill called Dunpelder, and was cast down, but came to the bottom uninjured; that she was then taken out to sea by the king’s servants, and placed in a little boat of hides made after the fashion of the Scots, without any oar, and, ‘the little vessel in which the pregnant girl was detained ploughed the watery breakers and eddies of the waves towards the opposite shore more quickly than if propelled by a wind that filled the sail, or by the effort of many oarsmen;’ that the girl landed on the sands at a place called Culenros, in which place at that time Servanus dwelt, and taught sacred literature to many boys who went to be trained to the divine service. The birth then takes place as in the other narrative, and they are brought and presented to Servanus, who ‘in the language of his country exclaimed, Mochohe, Mochohe, which in Latin means “Care mi, Care mi,” adding, Blessed art thou that hast come in the name of the Lord. He therefore took them to himself, and nourished and educated them as if they were his own pledges. After certain days had passed, he dipped them in the laver of regeneration and restoration, and anointed them with the sacred chrism, calling the mother Taneu and the child Kyentyern, which by interpretation is Capitalis Dominus.’ He then educates him, and the gifts of grace manifested by the boy were so great that ‘he was accustomed to call him, in the language of his country, Munghu, which in Latin means Karrissimus Amicus.’ Kentigern is brought up by Servanus, and the usual boyish miracles are recorded as evidences of his sanctity, till, having excited the jealousy and hatred of his fellow-students, he resolves, under Divine guidance of course, to leave the place. He accordingly retreated secretly, and ‘journeying arrived at the Frisican shore, where the river, by name Mallena, overpassing its banks when the tide flows in, took away all hope of crossing;’ but the river is miraculously divided to enable him to pass, the tide flowing back so that the waters of the sea and of the river stood as walls on his right hand and on his left. He then crosses a little arm of the sea near a bridge, which by the inhabitants is called Servanus’s bridge; and on looking back, he saw that the waters had not only flowed back and filled the channel of the Mallena, but were overflowing the bridge and denying a passage to any one. Servanus, who had followed in pursuit of the fugitive, stood above on the bank and endeavoured to persuade him to return, but without success; and ‘having mutually blessed each other, they were divided one from the other, and never looked in each other’s face again in this world. And the place by which Kentigern crossed became after that entirely impassable; for that bridge, always after that covered by the waves of the sea, afforded to no one any longer means of transit. Even the Mallena altered the force of its current from the proper place, and from that day to this turned back its channel into the river Ledone; so that forthwith the rivers which till then had been separate from each other now became mingled and united.’ Kentigern passes the night at a town called Kernach, where he finds an old man, Fregus, on his death-bed, who dies in the night; and ‘next‘next morning Kentigern, having yoked two untamed bulls to a new wain, in which he placed the body whence the spirit had departed, and having prayed in the name of the Lord, enjoined upon the brute beasts to carry the burden placed upon them to the place which the Lord had provided for it. And in truth the bulls, in no way resisting or disobeying the voice of Kentigern, came by a straight road, along which there was no path, as far as Cathures, which is now called Glasgu’, and halted near a certain cemetery which had long before been consecrated by Saint Ninian. Here Kentigern lives for some time; and then ‘the king and clergy of the Cumbrian region, with other Christians, albeit they were few in number, came together and, after taking into consideration what was to be done to restore the good estate of the church, which was well-nigh destroyed, they with one consent approached Kentigern, and elected him, in spite of his many remonstrances and strong resistance, to be the shepherd and bishop of their souls;’ and ‘having called one bishop from Ireland, after the manner of the Britons and Scots of that period, they caused Kentigern to be consecrated bishop.’

Such is the substance of these narratives; and here we are met, at the very outset, by a great anachronism. Along with the lives of Kentigern there is found a life of Servanus, in which he is made the founder of the church of Culenros; but there is not one syllable about his having been the master of Kentigern, or in any way connected with him, but the whole events of his life, as there given, indisputably place him, as we shall afterwards see, nearly two centuries later. In spite, therefore, of the statements of his biographers and of the belief of popular tradition, the only conclusion we can come to is that Servanus and St. Kentigern were divided by a more impassable barrier than the river Mallena—the stream of time, and that they had never looked in each other’s face at all. The scenery, however, of the narrative can be easily identified. The hill called in the one narrative Kepduf, and in the other Dunpelder, is Traprain Law, formerly called Dumpender Law, in the county of Haddington. It is an isolated hill and, along with North Berwick Law, forms a conspicuous object in the landscape. It is about 700 feet above the level of the sea, and on the south side it is nearly perpendicular. It is distant about seven or eight miles from Aberlady Bay, the Aberlessic of the older narrative. Culenros is Culross, on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, here called the Frisican shore, as the Forth itself is called by Nennius the Frisican Sea. The names of the two rivers Mallena and Ledone are simply the Latin terms for the flood and ebb tide, but the course of the two rivers, the Teith and the Forth, seems to have suggested the legend. They run nearly parallel to each other till they approach within three miles of Stirling, when the southern of the two rivers, the Forth, takes a sudden bend to the north, as if it would flow backwards, and discharges its waters into the Teith, the two forming one river, but adopting the name of the former. Kernach is Carnock, in the parish of Saint Ninian’s in Stirlingshire.

If, however, that part of the legend which introduces Servanus must be rejected, the remainder derives some support from the old Welsh documents. In the Triads of Arthur and his Warriors, which are undoubtedly old, the first is termed ‘Three tribe thrones of the island of Prydain;’ and the third of the tribe thrones is ‘Arthur, the chief lord at Penrionyd in the north, and Cyndeyrn Garthwys, the chief bishop, and Garthmwl Guledic, the chief elder.’ The chronology of the life of Kentigern is not inconsistent with that which here connects him with the historic Arthur, and the epithet Guledic, which was applied to the chief among the Cymric kings of the north, gives us Garthmwl as the name of the king of the district in which Glasgow was situated. In the Bonedd y Seint ynys Prydain, or Pedigrees of the Saints of Britain, we find the following pedigree: ‘Kyndeyrn Garthwys, son of Ywein, son of Urien Reged, son of Cynfarch, son of Meirchiawngul, son of Grwst Ledlwm, son of Cenau, son of Coel; and Dwynwen, daughter of Ladden Lueddog of the city of Edwin (Ddinas Edwin, or Edinburgh), in the north, was his mother.’ We have seen that prior to this period Monenna had founded a church on the summit of Dunpelder, in which she established nuns; and it is possible that Dwynwen or Taneu may have been one of these nuns, who, by the violation of her religious vow, had incurred the sentence of being exposed in a curach in the adjacent firth. There is nothing impossible in a small boat being driven before an east wind as far as Culross; and certain it is that on the shore where she is said to have landed there was a small chapel dedicated to Kentigern. We learn from the narrative that there had been an earlier church at Glasgow founded by Ninian, which Kentigern may have restored, and he makes his appearance in the martyrologies in the ninth century as ‘Saint Kentigern, Bishop of Glasgow and Confessor.’

Jocelyn, after describing Kentigern’s mode of life and how he spread the faith of Christ in his diocese, tells us that, ‘a considerable time having elapsed, a certain tyrant, by name Morken, had ascended the throne of the Cumbrian kingdom,’ who ‘scorned and despised the life and doctrine of the man of God in much slandering, in public resisting him from time to time, putting down his miraculous power to magical illusion, and esteeming as nothing all that he did.’ But after a time Morken dies and is buried in the royal town, which from him was called Thorp Morken. ‘After this,’ says Jocelyn, ‘for many days he enjoyed great peace and quiet, living in his own city of Glasgow, and going through his diocese;’ but, ‘when some time had passed, certain sons of Belial, a generation of vipers of the kin of the aforenamed King Morken, excited by the sting of intense hatred and infected with the poison of the devil, took counsel together how they might lay hold of Kentigern by craft and put him to death.’ In consequence of this Kentigern resolved to leave the north and proceed to Menevia in South Wales, now Saint David’s, where St. David then ruled as bishop. The Morken here mentioned is probably one of the kings termed Morcant by Nennius; and it is quite in accordance with the history of the period that the increasing power of the pagan party in the northern districts of Cumbria should have driven Kentigern from Glasgow and forced him to take refuge in Wales. Jocelyn describes him as proceeding by Carlisle, and says that, ‘having heard that many among the mountains were given to idolatry or ignorant of the divine law, he turned aside, and, God helping him and confirming the word by signs following, converted to the Christian religion many from a strange belief, and others who were erroneous in the faith.’ ‘He remained some time in a certain thickly-planted place, to confirm and comfort in the faith the men that dwelt there, where he erected a cross as the sign of the faith, whence it took the name of, in English, Crossfeld, that is, Crucis Novale, in which very locality a basilica, recently erected, is dedicated to the name of the blessed Kentigern.’ Jocelyn then tells us that, ‘turning aside from thence, the saint directed his steps by the sea-shore, and through all his journey scattering the seed of the Divine Word, gathered in a plentiful and fertile harvest unto the Lord. At length safe and sound he reached Saint Dewi.’

St. David was, as we have already seen, one of the great founders of the monastic church; and Kentigern had not been long with him when he applied to the king for land to build a monastery, where he might unite together a people acceptable to God and devoted to good works; and the king, whom Jocelyn calls Cathwallain, allowed him to choose his own place. Kentigern, ‘with a great crowd of his disciples along with him, went round the land and walked throughout it exploring the situations of the localities, the quality of the air, the richness of the soil, the sufficiency of the meadows, pastures and woods, and the other things that look to the convenience of a monastery to be erected;’ and is finally conducted by a white boar ‘to the bank of a river called Elgu, from which to this day, as it is said, the town takes its name.’ Here he commenced to construct his monastery; ‘some‘some cleared and levelled the situation, others began to lay the foundation of the ground thus levelled; some cutting down trees, others carrying them and others fitting them together, commenced, as the father had measured and marked out for them to build a church and its offices of polished wood, after the fashion of the Britons, seeing that they could not yet build of stone, nor were so wont to do.’ Here we are treading on somewhat firmer ground. The monastery described is that of Llanelwy, afterwards called St. Asaph’s. It is in the vale of Clwyd, at the junction of the river Elwy with the Clwyd, a name possibly given to it by Kentigern from some fancied resemblance to the river and valley in the north where he had his original seat; and the Red Book of St. Asaph’s records several grants made to Kentigern by Maelgwyn Gwyned, the king of North Wales at this time.

The description given by Jocelyn of the construction of the monastery is probably not an inapt account of how these early Irish monasteries were erected; and indeed it may be considered a type of the larger monasteries, for Jocelyn tells us, ‘There flocked to the monastery old and young, rich and poor, to take upon themselves the easy yoke and light burden of the Lord. Nobles and men of the middle class brought to the saint their children to be trained unto the Lord. The tale of those who renounced the world increased day by day both in number and importance, so that the total number of those enlisted in God’s army amounted to 965, professing in act and habit the life of monastic rule, according to the institution of the holy man. He divided this troop, that had been collected together and devoted to the divine service, into a threefold division of religious observance. For he appointed three hundred, who were unlettered, to the duty of agriculture, the care of the cattle, and the other necessary duties outside the monastery. He assigned another three hundred to duties within the enclosure of the monastery, such as doing the ordinary work and preparing food and building workshops. The remaining three hundred and sixty-five, who were lettered, he appointed to the celebration of divine service in church by day and by night; and he seldom allowed any of these to go forth out of the sanctuary, but they were ever to abide within, as if in the holy place of the Lord. But those who were more advanced in wisdom and holiness and who were fitted to teach others, he was accustomed to take along with him when, at the urgent demand either of necessity or reason, he thought fit to go forth to perform his episcopal office.’ Allowing for some exaggeration in the numbers of those in the second and third divisions, this is probably a very correct picture of the monasteries in the early monastic church of Ireland and Scotland when the head of the monastery was also a bishop.

After some account of Kentigern’s life at his monastery in North Wales, Jocelyn returns to the north in order to ‘show what his adversaries suffered, how he returned to the Cumbrian region, and what he did there.’ He tells us, after an imaginative account of the fate of those who had driven out Kentigern, that, ‘when the time of having mercy had arrived, that the Lord might remove the rod of his fierce anger and that they should turn unto Him and He should heal them, He raised up over the Cumbrian kingdom a king, Rederech by name, who, having been baptized in Ireland in the most Christian manner by the disciples of Saint Patrick, sought the Lord with all his heart and strove to restore Christianity.’ ‘Wherefore,’ continues Jocelyn, ‘King Rederech, seeing that the Christian religion was almost entirely destroyed in his kingdom, set himself zealously to restore it; and, after long considering the matter in his own mind and taking advice with other Christians who were in his confidence, he discovered no more healthful plan by which he could bring it to a successful result than to send messengers to Saint Kentigern, to recall him to his first see.’ It was by the great battle of Ardderyd, fought at Arthuret on the river Esk a few miles north of Carlisle, in which the pagan and Christian parties met in conflict, and a decisive struggle for the supremacy took place between them, that the victory of the Christian chiefs placed Rydderch Hael, or the Liberal, on the throne; and as this battle took place in the year 573, it gives us a fixed date for the recall of Kentigern. He responded to the call, and, having appointed Asaph, one of the monks, his successor, he enthroned him in the cathedral see; and, ‘blessing and taking leave of them all he went forth by the north door of the church, because he was going forth to combat the northern enemy. After he had gone out, that door was closed, and all who witnessed and heard of his egress and departure bewailed his absence with great lamentations. Hence a custom grew up in that church that that door should never be opened save once a year, on the day of St. Asaph, that is, on the kalends of May, for two reasons—first in deference to the sanctity of him who had gone forth, and next that thereby was indicated the great grief of those who had bewailed his departure.’ Jocelyn tells us that six hundred and sixty-five of the monks accompanied him, and that three hundred only remained with St. Asaph.

King Rydderch and his people went forth to meet him, and they encountered each other at a place called Holdelm, now Hoddam, in Dumfriesshire, where Kentigern addressed the multitude who had assembled to meet him; and in the supposed address which Jocelyn puts in his mouth we have probably a correct enough representation of the paganism which still clung to the people and influenced their belief—a sort of cross between their old Celtic heathenism and that derived from their pagan neighbours the Angles, who now occupied the eastern districts of their country. According to Jocelyn, he showed them ‘that idols were dumb, the vain inventions of men, fitter for the fire than for worship. He showed that the elements, in which they believed as deities, were creatures and formations adapted by the disposition of their Maker to the use, help and assistance of men. But Woden, whom they, and especially the Angles, believed to be the chief deity, from whom they derived their origin, and to whom the fourth day of the week is dedicated, he asserted with probability to have been a mortal man, king of the Saxons, by faith a pagan, from whom they and many nations have their descent.’ The ground on which he sat there ‘grew into a little hill, and remaineth there unto this day;’ and ‘men and women, old men and young men, rich and poor, flock to the man of God to be instructed in the faith.’ And here he fixed his see for a time; for Jocelyn then tells us that ‘the holy bishop Kentigern, building churches in Holdelm, ordaining priests and clerics, placed his see there for a time for a certain reason; afterwards, warned by divine revelation, justice demanding it, he transferred it to his own city Glasgow.’

It was while his see was still at Hoddam, and before he returned to Glasgow, that we are told by Jocelyn that Kentigern, ‘after he had converted what was nearest to him, that is to say, his diocese, going forth to more distant places, cleansed from the foulness of idolatry and the contagion of heresy the home of the Picts, which is now called Galwiethia, with the adjacent parts.’ There are, however, in Galloway proper no dedications to Kentigern, which somewhat militates against the accuracy of this statement. We are also told that ‘he went to Albania, and there with great and almost unbearable toil, often exposed to death by the snares of the barbarians, but ever standing undeterred, strong in the faith, the Lord working with him and giving power to the voice of his preaching, he reclaimed that land from the worship of idols and from profane rites that were almost equal to idolatry, to the landmarks of faith, and the customs of the church, and the laws of the canons. For there he erected many churches, and dedicated them when erected, ordaining priests and clerics; and he consecrated many of his disciples bishops. He also founded many monasteries in these parts, and placed over them as fathers the disciples whom he had instructed.’ By Albania are meant the eastern districts of Scotland north of the Firth of Forth, and Jocelyn here entirely ignores the work of Columba; but that the missionary labours of Kentigern were to some extent carried into these northern districts appears from the dedications to him; and, strangely enough, the traces of his missionary work are mainly to be found north of the great range of the Mounth, where, in the upper valley of the Dee, on the north side of the river, we find a group of dedications which must have proceeded from a Welsh source. These are Glengairden dedicated to Mungo, or Kentigern, Migvie and Lumphanan to Finan, the latter name being a corruption of Llanffinan, and Midmar dedicated to Nidan; while in the island of Anglesea we likewise find two adjacent parishes called Llanffinan and Llannidan. In the Welsh Calendar Nidan appears on 30th September, and his pedigree in the Bonedd y Seint makes him a grandson of Pasgen, son of Urien, and therefore a cousin of Kentigern. Jocelyn’s statement that Kentigern likewise sent forth missionaries ‘towards the Orcades, Norwagia and Ysalanda,’ or Iceland, must be rejected as improbable in itself and inconsistent with the older and more trustworthy account given by Diciul, the Irish geographer, in the early part of the ninth century, that the earliest Christian missionaries to the northern islands were anchorites who had all proceeded from Ireland. ‘All this being duly done,’ says Jocelyn, ‘he returned to his own church of Glasgow, where as elsewhere, yea, where as everywhere, he was known to shine in many and great miracles;’ and among those which he relates is the incident of the queen’s ring found in the salmon, which appears in the arms of the city of Glasgow.

The only remaining incident which may be considered as historical is the meeting of Kentigern with Columba. Adamnan tells us that ‘King Roderc, son of Tothail, who reigned on the rock of Cluaith,’ that is, at Alcluith, or Dumbarton, ‘being on friendly terms with the holy man, sent to him on one occasion a secret message by Lugbe Mocumin, as he was anxious to know whether he would be killed by his enemies, or not,’ and received from the saint the assurance that he should never be delivered into the hands of his enemies, but would die at home on his own pillow; and, says Adamnan, ‘the prophecy of the saint regarding King Roderc was fully accomplished, for, according to his word, he died quietly in his own house.’ It is plain, therefore, on better authority than that of Jocelyn, that during King Rydderch’s life some friendly intercourse had taken place between him and his people and Columba, and that clerics proceeded from Iona to Strathclyde. This could hardly have taken place without a meeting between the two saints, though Adamnan does not mention the name of Kentigern. Kentigern could hardly have returned to Glasgow much before 582; and we have seen that, after 584, Columba extended his missionary work into the region about the river Tay. He would thus be brought very near to the frontiers of the Strathclyde kingdom, and so be led to visit Kentigern. Jocelyn’s description of the meeting is too graphic to be omittedomitted. ‘Saint Columba the abbot, whom the Angles call Columkillus, a man wonderful for doctrine and virtues, celebrated for his presage of future events, full of the spirit of prophecy, and living in that glorious monastery which he had erected in the island of Yi, desired earnestly, not once and away, but continually, to rejoice in the light of Saint Kentigern. For, hearing for a long time of the fame in which he was estimated, he desired to approach him, to visit him, to behold him, to come into his close intimacy, and to consult the sanctuary of his holy breath regarding the things which lay near his own heart. And, when the proper time came, the holy father Saint Columba went forth, and a great company of his disciples and others, who desired to behold and look upon the face of so great a man, went with him. When he approached the place called Mellindonor, where the saint abode at the time, he divided all his people into three bands, and sent forward a message to announce to the holy prelate his own arrival and that of those who accompanied him. The holy pontiff was glad when they said unto him these things concerning them, and, calling together his clergy and people similarly in three bands, he went forth with spiritual songs to meet them. In the front of the procession were placed the juniors in the order of time; in the second, those more advanced in years; in the third, with himself, walked the aged in length of days, white and hoary, venerable in countenance, gesture and bearing, yea, even in grey hairs. And all sang “In the ways of the Lord how great is the glory of the Lord;” and again they answered, “The way of the just is made straight, and the path of the saints prepared.” On Saint Columba’s side, they sang with tuneful voices, “The saints shall go from strength to strength, until with the God of gods appeareth every one in Sion,” with the “Alleluia.”’ When they met, ‘they mutually embraced and kissed each other, and,’ says Jocelyn, naïvely enough, ‘having first satiated themselves with the spiritual banquet of divine words, they after that refreshed themselves with bodily food.’ Jocelyn then narrates a miracle of the usual character, and concludes by telling us that ‘they interchanged their pastoral staves, in pledge and testimony of their mutual love in Christ. But the staff which Saint Columba gave to the holy bishop Kentigern was preserved for a long time in the church of Saint Wilfrid, bishop and confessor at Ripon, and held in great reverence, on account of the sanctity both of him who gave it and of him who received it.’ It mustIt must, however, have reached Ripon after St. Wilfrid’s time, as otherwise he could hardly have expressed ignorance of Columba, as he did at the council of Whitby. Jocelyn concludes by saying that, ‘during several days, these saints, passing the time together, mutually conversed on the things of God and what concerned the salvation of souls; then saying farewell, with mutual love, they returned to their homes, never to meet again.’

Of Kentigern’s death Jocelyn gives the following strange account, which probably reports the tradition of the church:—‘When the octave of the Lord’s Epiphany, on which the gentle bishop himself had been wont every year to wash a multitude of people in sacred baptism, was dawning—a day very acceptable to Saint Kentigern and to the spirits of the sons of his adoption—the holy man, borne by their hands, entered a vessel filled with hot water, which he had first blessed with the sign of salvation; and a circle of the brethren standing round him awaited the issue of the event. And when the saint had been some little time in it, after lifting his hands and his eyes to heaven, and bowing his head as if sinking into a calm sleep, he yielded up his spirit.’ ‘The disciples, seeing what was taking place, lifted the body out of the bath, and eagerly strove with each other to enter the water; and so, one by one, before the water cooled, they slept in the Lord in great peace; and, having tasted death along with their holy bishop, they entered with him into the mansions of heaven.’ ‘The brethren,’ continues Jocelyn, ‘stripped the saint of his ordinary clothes, which they partly reserved and partly distributed as precious relics, and clothed him in the consecrated garments which became so great a bishop. Then he was carried by the brethren into the choir with chants and psalms, and the life-giving victim was offered to God for him by many. Diligently and most devoutly, as the custom of the church in those days demanded, celebrated they his funeral; and on the right side of the altar laid they beneath a stone, with as much becoming reverence as they could, that abode of virtues, etc. The sacred remains of all these brethren were devoutly and disposedly consigned to the cemetery for sepulture, in the order in which they had followed the holy bishop out of this life.’ He is thus said to have died on the 13th of January, which is the octave of the Epiphany. If we are to understand that he died on a Sunday, then the year of his death may most probably be fixed as 603, in which year the 13th of January fell upon a Sunday. The Annales Cambriæ, however, record his death in the year 612, which may otherwise be accepted as the true date. Jocelyn tells us that he died full of years, when he was one hundred and eighty-five years old, but we cannot give him so many years. Such long periods of life are not an unusual feature in the traditionary acts of these early saints, and are usually inserted to reconcile some anachronism in the events of their life. The great anachronism in Kentigern’s life is the tale that he was a disciple of Servanus, and the latter of Palladius, and as Palladius died in the year 432, one hundred and eighty years before the death of Kentigern according to the Cambrian Annals, this long life was given him in order to fill up the interval; but, if we drop the century which has been added to it, we shall find that a life of eighty-five years is more consistent with the narrative, and furnishes us with an unexceptionable chronology. This would place his birth either at 518 or 527, according to the date we assume for his death; and, as Jocelyn states that he was twenty-five when he was consecrated a bishop, this gives us 543 or 552 as the date of it. We have thus an interval of about twenty or twenty-five years for his life at Glasgow, his expulsion to Wales, and his foundation of the monastery of Llanelwy, as his return under the auspices of King Rydderch must have taken place soon after the year 573.

Of the immediate successors of Kentigern we have no record whatever; but a quarter of a century had not elapsed from his death when the nation of the Angles were by the conversion of their king Aeduin, brought over to the Christian faith. Bede tells us that Aeduin was baptized at York by Paulinus on the holy day of Easter in the year 627, and that, ‘at a certain time, coming with the king and queen to the royal seat which is called Adgefrin, now Yevering, one of the Cheviots near Wooler, Paulinus stayed there with them thirty-six days, fully occupied in catechising and baptizing; during all which days from morning till night he did nothing else but instruct the people resorting thither from all villages and places in Christ’s saving word, and, when instructed, he washed them with the water of remission in the river Glen, which is close by.’ ‘These things,’ says Bede, ‘happened in the province of the Bernicians,’ which at this time extended to the Firth of Forth. By the continuator of Nennius, however, a different tradition has been handed down to us. He states that ‘Eadguin received baptism on Easter day, and that twelve thousand men were baptized along with him;’ and adds, ‘If any one would know who baptized them, Rum, son of Urbgen, baptized them, and for forty days did not cease to baptize the whole nation of the Ambrones; and by his preaching many believed in Christ.’ The Urbgen of Nennius is the Urien of the Welsh pedigree of Kentigern, which would place Rum in the position of being his uncle, which is hardly possible. But the tradition seems to indicate that the Cumbrian Church did play a part in the conversion of their Anglic neighbours; and the Angles occupying the district between the Tweed and Forth, being more immediately within their reach and coming directly in contact with them, may have owed their conversion to one who was of the same race as Kentigern, and, as belonging to the tribe of the patron saint, had succeeded him as head of the Cumbrian Church. Be this as it may, the short-lived church of Paulinus could not have had much permanent effect in leavening these Anglic tribes with Christianity; and the whole of the Cumbrian and Anglic districts were speedily thrown into confusion by the revolution which restored paganism for a time under the pagan Anglic king Penda and the apostate Welsh king Ceadwalla. When Christianity was again revived in Northumbria, it was in a different form, and one more assimilated to the church of Kentigern; but the Cumbrian kingdom fell, not long after, under the dominion of the Angles; and during the period of their rule there was probably no independent church there. It is to the Columban Church, established in Northumbria by King Osuald in 635, that we must look for the permanent conversion of the Angles who occupied the eastern districts between the Tweed and the Forth, and for the foundation of churches, or rather Columban monasteries, among them. The two principal of these were founded, the one by Aidan, the first of the Columban bishops; the second, in the time of Finan, his successor. Bede tells us that on the arrival of Aidan, ‘the king appointed him his episcopal see in the island of Lindisfarne, as he himself desired,’ and that ‘churches were built in several places; the people joyfully flocked together to hear the Word; possessions and lands were given of the king’s bounty to build monasteries; the younger Angles were by their Scottish masters instructed.’ And in another place he says that, when Aidan was first made bishop, ‘he received twelve boys of the Anglic nation to be instructed in Christ.’

‘Among the monasteries so founded by him was that of Mailros, situated on the banks of the Tweed not far from the later foundation at the place, and called Old Melrose, a peninsula nearly surrounded by the Tweed, which is overhung on the farther side by its lofty precipitous banks, and is strongly guarded by natural defences on every quarter except the south, where a wall was drawn across the narrow isthmus.’ And the first abbot we hear of in connection with this monastery was Eata, one of the twelve boys whom Aidan had instructed. The other monastery was that termed by Bede Urbs Coludi, the Saxon equivalent of which is Coldingaham, now Coldingham, built on a rock overhanging the sea, a short way south of the promontory termed Saint Abb’s Head. The neck of land on which it was built stretches into the sea, having for its three sides perpendicular rocks of great elevation. The fourth side was cut off from the mainland, and rendered impregnable, by a high wall and deep trench. This monastery was founded by Aebba, daughter of King Aedilfrid, and half-sister of the kings Osuald and Osuiu, who became its first abbess. It was a double monastery, and contained two distinct communities of men and of women, who lived under her single government. It is from her that the promontory of Saint Abb’s Head takes its name.

But, if the great name in the Cumbrian Church was that of Kentigern, that which left its greatest impress in Lothian, and one with which the monastery of Mailros was peculiarly connected, was that of Cudberct, popularly called Saint Cuthbert. Several Lives of him have come down to us; but undoubtedly the one which, from its antiquity, is most deserving of credit, is that by the venerable Bede. In this respect Cudberct was more fortunate even than Columba, for this Life was written within forty years of his death. Bede, too, was born in the lifetime of the saint whose life he records, and must have been about thirteen years old when he died; and he tells us himself that he had frequently shown his manuscript to ‘Herefrid the priest, as well as to several other persons who, from having long dwelt with the man of God, were thoroughly acquainted with his life, that they might read it and deliberately correct or expunge what they judged advisable.’ ‘Some of these amendments,’ he adds, ‘I carefully adopted at their suggestion, as seemed good to me; and thus, all scruples having been entirely removed, I have ventured to commit the result of this careful research, conveyed in simple language, to these few sheets of parchment.’ Bede tells us nothing of the birth and parentage of Cudberct; and, though he relates an incident which occurred when the saint was in his eighth year, and which he says Bishop Trumuini of blessed memory affirmed that Cudberct had himself told him, he does not indicate where or in what country he had passed his boyhood. When he first connects Cudberct with any locality, he says that ‘he was keeping watch over the flocks committed to his charge on some remote mountains.’ These mountains, however, were the southern slope of the Lammermoors, which surround the upper part of the vale of the Leader, in Berwickshire; for the anonymous history of St. Cuthbert, which, next to his Life by Bede, has the greatest value, says that ‘he was watching over the flocks of his master in the mountains near the river Leder.’ There ‘on a certain night, when he was extending his long vigils in prayers, as was his wont,’ which shows the bent of his mind towards a religious life, he had a vision in which he saw the soul of Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne being carried to heaven by choirs of the heavenly host; and resolved in consequence to enter a monastery and put himself under monastic discipline. ‘And,’ says Bede, ‘although he knew that the church of Lindisfarne possessed many holy men by whose learning and examples he might well be instructed, yet, allured by the fame of the exalted virtues of Boisil, a monk and priest, he chose rather to go to Mailros. And it happened, when he arrived there, as he leaped from his horse and was about to enter the church to pray, that he gave his horse to an attendant, as well as the spear which he held in his hand (for he had not as yet laid aside his secular dress), Boisil himself, who was standing at the gate of the monastery, first saw him.’ Boisil ‘kindly received Cudberct as he arrived; and, on his explaining the object of his visit, viz., that he preferred a monastery to the world, he kindly kept him near himself, for he was the provost of that same monastery. And after a few days, on the arrival of Eata of blessed memory, then a priest and the abbot of that monastery of Mailros, and afterwards abbot of Lindisfarne, and likewise bishop of the church of Lindisfarne, Boisil spoke to him of Cudberct, and, telling him how well disposed he was, obtained permission to give him the tonsure, and to unite him in fellowship with the rest of the brethren;’brethren;’ and thus Cudberct became a monk of the monastery of Melrose. As Bishop Aidan died in the year 651, this gives us the first certain date in his life.

The only Life which professes to give his earlier history is ‘The Book of the Nativity of Saint Cuthbert, taken and translated from the Irish.’ According to this Life, Cuthbert was born in Ireland, of royal extraction. His mother Sabina, daughter of the king who reigned in the city called Lainestri, was taken captive by the king of Connathe, who slew her father and all her family. He afterwards violated her, and then sent her to his own mother, who adopted her, and, together with her, entered a monastery of virgins which was then under the care of a bishop. There Sabina gave birth to the boy Cuthbert, and the bishop baptized him, giving him the Irish name of Mullucc. He is said to have been born in ‘Kenanus,’ or Kells, a monastery said to have been founded by Columba on the death of the bishop who had educated him. His mother goes with him to Britain by the usual mode of transit in these legends, that is, by a stone which miraculously performs the functions of a curach, and they land in ‘Galweia, in that region called Rennii, in the harbour of Rintsnoc,’ no doubt Portpatrick in the Rinns of Galloway. Then, leaving their stone curach, they take another vessel and go to ‘a harbour called Letherpen in Erregaithle, a land of the Scots. This harbour is situated between Erregaithle and Incegal, near a lake called Loicafan.’ A harbour between Argyll and the Isles must be on its west side, and the inlet called Lochmelfort may be meant, near the head of which is the lake called Loch Avich; or, if Loch Awe is meant, it may have been at Crinan, near which was Dunadd, the capital of Dalriada. Here they landed, the mother and son and three men, and wishing to warm themselves, they collect for the purpose dry branches, and heap them up to light a fire. The place, however, was much exposed to robbers, and the glitter of the golden armlets of the mother attracted the notice of some, who rushed upon her with lances, and would have slain her, but were discomfited by the prayers of the holy boy. From that day to this, when that spot is covered with branches or pieces of wood, they ignite of themselves, which the inhabitants attribute to the merits of the boy. Then they go to the borders of Scotia, where Columba, the first bishop of Dunkeld, receives the boy and educates him with a girl, a native of Ireland, named Brigida, who tells him that the Lord destines him for the Angles in the east of this province, but reserves her for the western population of the land of the Irish. Here he excites the envy of three southern clerics from the region of the Angles. They then go to the island which is called Hy, or Iona, where they remain some time with the religious men of that place. Then they visit two brothers-german of the mother, Meldanus and Eatanus, who were bishops in the province of the Scots, in which each had an episcopal seat; and these take the boy and place him under the care of a certain religious man in Lothian, while the mother goes on a pilgrimage to Rome. In this place in Lothian a church was afterwards erected in his honour, which is to this day called Childeschirche, and here the book of the nativity of St. Cuthbert, taken from the Irish histories, terminates. Childeschirche is the old name of the parish now called Channelkirk, in the upper part of the vale of the Leader; and the Irish Life thus lands him where Bede takes him up.

It is certainly remarkable that Bede gives no indication of Cudberct’s nationality. He must surely have known whether he was of Irish descent or not. He is himself far too candid and honest a historian not to have stated the fact if it was so, and it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this part of his narrative was one of those portions which he had expunged at the instance of the critics to whom he had submitted his manuscript. Unfortunately Bede nowhere gives us Cudberct’s age. He elsewhere calls him at this time a young man, and he says that his life had reached to old age. Cudberct resigned his bishopric in 686, and died in 687. He could hardly have been under sixty at that time, and it was probably on his attaining that age that he withdrew from active life. This would place his birth in the year 626, and make him twenty-five when he joined the monastery at Mailros. The Irish Life appears to have been recognised by the monks of Durham as early as the fourteenth century, and it is perfectly possible that these events may have taken place before Bede takes up his history, though they are characterised by the usual anachronisms. Dunkeld was not founded till more than a century after his death, and, as it was dedicated to St. Columba of Iona, he no doubt appears here as its bishop half-a-century after his death. The Brigida there mentioned is also obviously intended for St. Bridget of Kildare, who belongs to a much earlier period; and the Bishop Eatanus, his mother’s brother, is surely no other than Eata, abbot of Melrose, and afterwards bishop of Lindisfarne. The truth may possibly be that he was the son of an Irish kinglet by an Anglic mother; and this would account for her coming to Britain with the boy, and his being placed under a master in the vale of the Leader.

Bede gives us no particulars of Cudberct’s life in the monastery of Melrose from 651, when he joined it, to the year 661, when he accompanies Abbot Eata to Ripon, where King Alchfrid had given the latter a certain domain to found a monastery, which he did, and having instituted in it the same monastic discipline which he had previously established at Mailros, Cudberct was appointed provost of the guest-chamber. During this period of ten years we may place the events recorded in the chapter annexed to the Irish Life. According to this chapter, ‘after the blessed youth Cuthbert had arrived in Scottish land, he began to dwell in different parts of the country, and coming to a town called Dul forsook the world, and became a solitary.’solitary.’ Not more than a mile from it there is in the woods a high and steep mountain called by the inhabitants Doilweme, and on its summit he began to lead a solitary life. Here he brings from the hard rock a fountain of water which still exists. Here too he erects a large stone cross, builds an oratory of wood, and out of a single stone, not far from the cross, constructs a bath, in which he used to immerse himself and spend the night in prayer, which bath still exists on the summit of the mountain. Cuthbert remains some time in the territory of the Picts leading a solitary life, till the daughter of the king of that province accuses him of having violated her; but, at the prayer of the saint, the earth opened and swallowed her up at a place still called Corruen, and it was on this account that he never permitted a female to enter his church—‘a custom,’ says the writer, ‘which is still rigidly observed in the country of the Picts; and churches were everywhere dedicated in his honour.’ The saint, however, would no longer remain in these parts, but exchanged them for another part of the country. The localities here mentioned can be easily recognised. Dul is the village of Dull in Strathtay in Atholl, where Adamnan, not long after Cudberct’s death, founded a monastery; and about a mile east of Dull is the church of Weem, situated under a high cliff called the Rock of Weem, about six hundred feet high, and in some places so steep as to be almost perpendicular. In the year 657 Osuiu, king of Northumbria, had extended his sway not only over the Britons and Scots, but also over the territories of the southern Picts. The district in which these places are situated was now under the dominion of the Angles, which may have led to Cudberct having proceeded thither. Cudberct did not remain long at Ripon, for Bede tells us that, ‘since the whole condition of this world is fragile and unsteady as the sea when a sudden tempest arises, the above-named abbot Eata, with Cudberct and the rest of the brethren whom he had brought along with him, was driven home, and the site of the monastery he had founded was given for a habitation to the monks.’ This sudden tempest, as we learn from Bede’s history, was the return of St. Wilfrid to England, when King Alchfrid, ‘who had always followed and loved the Catholic rules of the church,’ gave him ‘the monastery of thirty families at a place called In Wrypum (Ripon), which place he had lately given to those that followed the doctrine of the Scots to build a monastery upon. But forasmuch as they afterwards, being left to their choice, would rather quit the place than adopt the Catholic Easter and other canonical rites according to the custom of the Roman and Apostolic Church, he gave the same to him.’

Boisil having soon after died, Cudberct was appointed prior of Mailros in his room, ‘and performed its functions for several years with so much spiritual zeal, as became a saint, that he gave to the whole community not only the counsels, but also the example, of a monastic life.’ He was also zealous in converting the surrounding populace, ‘and frequently went out from the monastery, sometimes on horseback, but more generally on foot, and preached the way of truth to those who were in error, as Boisil had been also wont to do in his time in the neighbouring villages. He was also wont to seek out and preach in those remote villages which were situated far from the world in wild mountain places and fearful to behold, and which, as well by their poverty as by their distance up the country, prevented intercourse between them and such as could instruct their inhabitants. Abandoning himself willingly to this pious work, Cudberct cultivated these remote districts and people with so much zeal and learning that he often did not return to his monastery for an entire week, sometimes for two or three, yea occasionally even for an entire month, remaining all the time in the mountains, and calling back to heavenly concerns these rustic people by the word of his preaching as well as by his example of virtue.’ It was during this time that we find him visiting Aebbe at Coludi or Coldingham, and spending the greater part of the night in prayer and prolonged vigils, ‘entering the sea till the water reached to his arms and neck;’ and that on one occasion he went to the land of the ‘Niduari Picts,’ or Picts of Galloway, who were then under the dominion of the Angles. He is described as quitting his monastery on some affairs that required his presence, and embarking on board a vessel for the land of the Picts who are called Niduari, accompanied by two of the brethren, one of whom reported the incident. They arrived there the day after Christmas, expecting a speedy return, for the sea was smooth and the wind favourable; but they had no sooner reached the land than a tempest arose, by which they were detained for several days exposed to hunger and cold; but they were, by the prayers of the saint, supplied with food under a cliff where he was wont to pray during the watches of the night; and on the fourth day the tempest ceased, and they were brought by a prosperous breeze to their own country. The traces of this visit have been left in the name of Kirkcudbright, or Church of Cuthbert.

In the year 664 the Columban Church in Northumbria was brought to an end by the adverse decision of the Council of Whitby, and Bishop Colman left the country with those of his Scottish clerics who would not conform to Rome. Eata, the abbot, however, and his provost, Cudberct, gave in their adhesion to the Roman party, and, at Bishop Colman’s suggestion, the monastery of Lindisfarne was placed under Eata’s charge, who thus became abbot both of Mailros and of Lindisfarne. To the latter monastery Eata transferred Cudberct, ‘there to teach the rules of monastic perfection with the authority of a superior, and to illustrate it by becoming an example of virtue.’ He appears to have become zealous in endeavouring to assimilate the Scottish system to the customs of the Roman Church, for Bede tells us that there still remained ‘in the monastery certain monks who chose rather to follow their ancient custom than to obey the new rule. These, nevertheless, he overcame by the modest power of his patience, and by daily practice he brought them by little and little to a better disposition.’ In the meantime Tuda, who had been initiated and ordained bishop among the southern Scots of Ireland, having also the coronal tonsure according to the custom of that province, and observing the Catholic time of Easter, and had come from thence while Colman was yet bishop, was appointed bishop of the Northumbrians in his place. ‘He was a good and religious man,’ says Bede, ‘but governed his church a very short time,’ being cut off by the great pestilence of that year. King Alchfrid had sent Wilfrid to Gaul to be consecrated bishop over him and his people, and being still absent, King Osuiu sent Ceadda, abbot of the monastery of Laestingaeu, who had been one of Bishop Aidan’s disciples, to Kent to be ordained bishop of the church of York, where, as the archbishop had just died, he was consecrated bishop by Bishop Vini of Wessex, to whom were joined two bishops of the British nation who adhered to the Roman party.

Wilfrid now returned from Gaul a consecrated bishop. ‘Whence it followed,’ says Bede, ‘that the Catholic institution gained strength, and all the Scots that dwelt among the Angles either submitted to these persons or returned to their own country.’ Ceadda soon gave way to Wilfrid, and was translated to the province of the Mercians; while from the year 669 to 678, when he was expelled, Wilfrid administered the bishopric of York and of all the Northumbrians, and likewise of the Picts as far as the dominions of King Osuiu extended. During the period of his episcopate, Wilfrid, as we are informed by Eddi, founded the monastery of Hagustald, or Hexham, in the valley of the Tyne, the district having been given him by the queen Etheldreda, whose property it appears to have been; and he dedicated it to St. Andrew, in commemoration of an early incident in his life recorded by Eddi, who tells us that, when he first conceived the purpose of endeavouring to turn the Northumbrians from the Columban institutions to Rome, he went in Rome to a church dedicated to St. Andrew, and there knelt before the altar and prayed to God, through the merits of his holy martyr Andrew, that He would grant him the power of reading the Gospels aright, and of preaching the eloquence of the Evangelists to the people. His prayer was answered by the gift of persuasive eloquence; and feeling himself peculiarly under the guidance of that apostle, he dedicated his monastery of Hexham to him. And thus were the dedications to St. Andrew first introduced into the northern parts of Britain.

Returning to Cudberct, after he had been twelve years in charge of the monastery of Lindisfarne, he resolved, according to the custom of the time, to withdraw from the monastery and lead a solitary life in some remote island. Bede tells us that he had already ‘begun to learn the rudiments of a solitary life, and that he used to withdraw into a certain place which is yet discernible on the outside of his cell, than which it is more secluded.’ This place can still be identified. It is a low detached portion of the basaltic line of rock which runs in front of the ruins of the priory at the south-west corner of the island of Lindisfarne, which becomes an islet at high-water, while at low-water it is accessible by a ridge of stone covered with sea-weed. It still bears his name; and here subsequently existed a small chapel dedicated to him, which was called ‘the Chapel of St. Cuthbert on the Sea.’ Bede tells us that ‘when he had for a while learned as a recluse to contend thus with the invisible enemy by prayer and fasting, then in course of time he ventured still higher, and sought a place of conflict farther off and more remote from the abode of men.’ For this purpose he retired to the solitary island of Farne, at a greater distance from the mainland than Lindisfarne, and then uninhabited. It is about two miles and a half from the mainland, and presents to the land a perpendicular front of about 40 feet in height, from which there extends a grassy plain. Here he constructed an anchorite’s cell; and the description which Bede gives of it affords us a good idea of what such establishments usually were. ‘How this dwelling-place,’ says Bede, ‘was nearly circular, in measure from wall to wall about four or five perches. The wall itself externally was higher than the stature of a man, but inwardly, by cutting the living rock, the pious inhabitant thereof made it much higher, in order by this means to curb the petulance of his eyes as well as of his thoughts, and to raise up the whole bent of his mind to heavenly desires, since he could behold nothing from his mansion except heaven. He constructed this wall not of hewn stone, nor of brick and mortar, but of unwrought stones and turf, which he dug out of the centre of the place. Of these stones, some were of such a size that it seemed scarcely possible for four men to lift them; nevertheless it was discovered that he had brought them from another place and put them on the wall, assisted by heavenly aid. His dwelling-place was divided into two parts—an oratory, namely, and another dwelling suitable for common uses. He constructed the walls of both by digging round, or by cutting out much of the natural earth, inside and outwardly, but the roof was formed of rough beams and thatched with straw. Moreover, at the landing-place of the island there was a large house, in which the monks, when they came to see him, might be received and rest; and not far from this there was a fountain of water adapted for the supply of their wants.’ The remains of this establishment can still be traced on the island, and here, ‘having constructed the above abode and outhouses with the aid of the brethren, Cudberct, the man of God, began now to dwell alone.’ He had hardly done so two years when a discussion broke out between Wilfrid and King Ecgfrid. Wilfred was expelled from his see, ‘and two bishops were substituted in his stead to preside over the nation of the Northumbrians—viz., Bosa, to preside over the province of the Deiri, and Eata, over that of the Bernicians—the former having his episcopal chair in the city of York, the latter, in the church of Hagustald, or Hexham, or else in that of Lindisfarne, both of them being promoted to the episcopal dignity from a college of monks.’monks.’ Three years afterwards the great diocese of York was still further divided, and two other bishops were added to their number—‘Tunberct, in the church of Hagustald, while Eata remained in that of Lindisfarne, and Trumuini in the province of the Picts, which at that time was subject to the Angles.’

Cudberct had remained eight years in his solitude when Tunberct was for some cause deposed from his bishopric, and, at a great synod assembled at Twyford on the Alne, in the year 684, in presence of King Ecgfrid, and presided over by Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, Cudberct by the unanimous consent of all was elected to the bishopric of Hagustald in his place, and was consecrated bishop at the Easter of the following year in the city of York, and in presence of King Ecgfrid, ‘seven bishops meeting at the consecration, among whom Theodore was primate;’ but, as he preferred being placed over the church of Lindisfarne, in which he had lived, it was thought fit that Eata should return to the see of the church of Hagustald, over which he had been first ordained, and Cudberct should take upon him the government of the church of Lindisfarne. This was done, says the anonymous history, ‘with the general assent of King Ecgfrid and of the archbishop and these seven bishops and of all the magnates.’ Two months after his consecration as bishop King Ecgfrid was slain in the battle of Dunnechtain by the Picts, Trumuini fled from his diocese, and the dominion of the Angles over the Picts, Scots and Strathclyde Britons came to an end.

Cudberct, who had accepted the bishopric with great reluctance, after he had filled the office for two years from his election, becoming aware that his end was drawing near, resolved to lay down his pastoral office and return to his solitary life; and after making a complete visitation not only of his diocese but also of all the other dwellings of the faithful, in order to confirm all with the needful word of exhortation, he, soon after Christmas in the year 686, returned to the hermit’s life he loved so well, in his cell in the island of Farne. And as a crowd of the brethren stood around him as he was going abroad, one of them asked him, ‘Tell us, lord bishop, when we may hope for your return.’ And Cudberct, who knew the truth, answered his simple question as simply, saying, ‘When you shall bring my body hither.’ ‘After he had passed nearly two months,’ says Bede, ‘greatly exulting in the repose which he had regained, he was seized with a sudden illness, and by the fire of temporal pain he began to be prepared for the joys of everlasting happiness.’ The account which Bede gives us of his death was, he says, narrated to him by Herefrid, a devout and religious priest, who at that time presided over the monastery of Lindisfarne as abbot, and was with Cudberct when he died. It is too long for insertion, but one or two incidents recorded by him throw light upon some points relevant to our inquiry.

‘After three weeks of continued wasting infirmity, Cudberct came to his end thus. He began to be taken ill on the fourth day of the week, and in like manner on the fourth day of the week, his sickness having been accomplished, he departed to the Lord.’ Herefrid visited him on the morning after he was taken ill, and when he took leave of him, and said, ‘Give us your blessing, for it is time for us to go on board and return home,’—‘Do as you say,’ he said; ‘go on board and return home safe; and when God shall have taken my soul bury me in this cell, at the south side of my oratory, opposite the east side of the holy cross which I have erected there. Now there is at the north of the same oratory a stone coffin, hidden by sods, which formerly the venerable abbot Cudda presented to me. Place my body in that, and wrap it in the fine linen which you will find there.’ Herefrid was prevented from returning by a storm which lasted five days, but, when calm weather returned, he went back to the island and found that Cudberct had left his monastery and was sitting in the house built outside the enclosure for the reception of visitors, in order that any of the brethren who came to minister to him should find him there, and have no need to enter his cell. When Herefrid returned to Lindisfarne, he told the brethren that their venerable father had given orders that he should be buried in his own island; they resolved therefore to ask him to permit his body to be translated hither, and to be deposited in the church with suitable honour. On his coming to the bishop and laying this request before him he replies, ‘It was my wish to rest in the body here, where I have fought my little wrestling, such as it has been, for the Lord, and where I desire to finish my course, and whence I hope to be raised up by the merciful Judge to a crown of righteousness. Moreover, I think it would be more advantageous to you that I should rest here, on account of the trouble you would have from fugitives and evil-doers, who will probably fly to my tomb for refuge; for whatsoever I am in myself, I know that the report will go abroad of me that I am a servant of Christ; and you would necessarily have very often to intercede with the powerful of the world, and so to undergo much labour and trouble from the possession of my body.’ But, on their pressing their request, he says, ‘If you would really overcome what I had disposed, and should bear my body from this place, it seems to me that it would be better, in that case, to bury me inside your church, so that you may visit my tomb whenever you please, and have it in your power to admit or not to admit those that come thither.’ The monks thanked him for his permission, knelt down, and then returned home, from that time forth visiting him frequently. ‘And when, his sickness continuing, he saw that the time of his dissolution was at hand, he commanded that he should be carried back to his little cell and oratory.’ Now it was at the third hour of the day. ‘There we accordingly carried him,’ says Herefrid, ‘for through his exceeding weakness, he was unable to walk. But, when we came to the door, we begged him to allow some one of us to enter along with him and minister to him; for no one but himself, had for many years, ever entered therein.’ He accordingly allowed one of the brethren to remain. When Herefrid returned about the ninth hour of the day, he found him reclining in a corner of his oratory opposite the altar; and when he pressed him ‘to leave some words which might be considered as a bequest and as a last farewell to the brethren, he began to speak a few words—but they were powerful—concerning peace and humility, and cautioning us against those persons that chose rather to wrestle against such things than take delight therein. “Keep peace,” he said, “one“Keep peace,” he said, “one with another, and heavenly charity; and, when necessity demands of you to hold counsel as to your state, take great care that you be of one mind in your conclusions; and, moreover, maintain mutual concord with other servants of Christ, and despise not the household of the faith who come to you seeking hospitality, but be careful to receive such persons, to entertain them, and to send them away with friendly kindness; and do not think you are better than other followers of the same faith and conversation.”conversation.” But, with the spirit characteristic of one who had just emerged from an ecclesiastical controversy, he adds,—“But“But with those that err from the unity of Catholic peace, either by not celebrating Easter at the proper time, or by living perversely, have no communion.”’communion.”’ ‘Thus he spent a quiet day till evening, and tranquilly continued the wakeful night also in prayer. Now when the wonted time of nocturn prayers was come, having received the salutary sacraments at my hands, he fortified his departure, which he knew had now come, by the communion of the body and blood of our Lord; and, having lifted up his eyes to heaven and extended his hands on high, his soul, intent on heavenly praises, departed to the joys of the kingdom of heaven.’

The similarity of his death to that of Columba, both in the time and manner of its occurrence and in the touching simplicity of the narrative, is very striking, and not less so the mode in which it was made known and received by the monks of Lindisfarne. Herefrid says that he immediately went out and ‘announced the death to the brethren, who had in like manner been passing the night in watching and prayer; and it happened that, in the order of nocturnal lauds, they were at that moment chanting the fifty-ninth,’ or, as it is in our English prayer-books, the sixtieth psalm; ‘and forthwith one of them ran and lighted two candles, and, holding one in each hand, he went up to a higher place, to show to the brethren who remained in the monastery of Lindisfarne that the holy soul of Cudberct had now departed to the Lord; for such was the signal agreed upon among them to notify his most holy death. And when the monk who was intently watching afar off, on the opposite watch-tower of the island of Lindisfarne, saw this, for which he had been waiting, he ran quickly to the church, where the whole congregation of the monks were assembled to celebrate the solemnities of nocturnal psalmody; and it happened that they also, when he entered, were singing the before-mentioned psalm,’ The body of Cudberct was then brought in a boat to the island of Lindisfarne, where ‘it was received by a great multitude of people, who, together with choirs of choristers, met it, and it was deposited in a stone coffin in the church of the blessed apostle Peter, on the right side of the altar.’

Eleven years after his death, the remains of Cudberct were enshrined, and, as the custom of enshrining the relics of their saints was now beginning in the Irish Church, the circumstances here detailed are very instructive. The Divine power, Bede tells us, ‘put it into the hearts of the brethren to raise his bones, which they expected to have found dry, as is usual with the dead when the rest of the body has been consumed and reduced to dust, in order that they might enclose his remains in a light chest; and they intended, for the sake of decent veneration, to deposit them in the same place, but above instead of below the pavement. When they expressed this their desire to Eadberct, their bishop, he assented to their proposal, and commanded that they should remember to do this on the day of his deposition, which occurred on the thirteenth of the kalends of April, or the 20th of March. This they accordingly did; but, on opening the sepulchre, they found his whole body as entire as when he was yet living, and more like one in a sound sleep, for the joints of the limbs were flexible, than one who was dead.’ They hastened to inform the bishop, who was at the time dwelling as a solitary in the island of Farne, of what appeared to them a miraculous preservation of the remains, and he desired them ‘to gird the body with fresh wrappings instead of those which they had removed, and so place him in the chest they had prepared.’ The monks did as they were commanded; ‘and the body having been wrapped in new raiment and laid in a light chest, they deposited it upon the pavement of the sanctuary.’ This is a very early example of enshrining, and shows that the shrine they had prepared was large enough to receive the entire body, and that the custom then was to inter a saint in a stone coffin under the pavement, at the right side of the altar; but to place a shrine, enclosing his remains, above the pavement.

Adamnan’s first visit to Northumbria was made in the year 686; but we know nothing of it beyond the fact that the object of it was to redeem from Aldfrid the captives who had been carried off from Ireland by his predecessor, King Ecgfrid. Cudberct was at this time bishop of Lindisfarne, and it is extremely probable that they met. Adamnan’s second visit, however, was in 688, after Cudberct’s death, but while the whole kingdom was still full of his memory and the report of his sayings and doings; and these may have probably had their effect in bringing Adamnan over to the adoption of the Roman system, of which Cudberct had latterly been such a strenuous supporter. Bede tells us that, through his efforts, a great part of the Scots in Ireland, and some also of the Britons in Britain, conformed to the proper and ecclesiastical time of keeping Easter. By the latter expression, the Britons of Strathclyde, who had recently regained their freedom from the yoke of the Angles, are meant, as the Britons of North Wales did not conform till the year 768, nor those of South Wales till the year 777. With the Britons of Strathclyde, too, we may connect at this time Sedulius as their bishop, who was present at a council held at Rome in the year 721, under Pope Gregory II., and subscribes its canons as Sedulius, a bishop of Britain of the nation of the Scots. The Strathclyde Britons therefore, on regaining their independence, appear to have obtained a bishop from Ireland, probably from the southern Scots; and his presence at this council proves that he was of the Roman party.

On Cudberct’s death, Wilfrid, who had been restored to his bishopric of York by King Aldfrid in the previous year, held the episcopal see of Lindisfarne one year, till such time as a bishop was chosen to be ordained in his room, and seems to have not a little troubled the monks during his short rule, as no doubt Bede alludes to his temporary government of the monastery when he says, ‘For in truth, after the man of God was buried, so violent a storm of temptation shook that church, that several of the brethren chose rather to depart from the place than to encounter such dangers. Nevertheless Eadberct was ordained to the bishopric the year after; and, as he was a man noted for his great virtues and deep learning in the Scriptures, and above all given to works of almsdeeds, he put to flight the tempest of disturbance which had arisen.’ Wilfrid was not more fortunate in the management of his restored diocese of York, for he was again expelled after having held it five years. Wilfrid, as usual, appealed to Rome, and the Pope, as usual, decided in his favour; and we learn both from Bede and Eddi that on his return journey he was suddenly seized with illness in the city of Meaux in Gaul, where he lay four days and nights as if he had been dead; but on the dawn of the fifth day he sat up in bed, as it were awakening out of a deep sleep, and saw numbers of the brethren singing and weeping about him. He asked for Acca the priest, and, when he came, told him that he had a dreadful vision. ‘There stood by him,’ he said, ‘a certain person remarkable for his white garments, who told him that he was Michael the Archangel, and was sent to recall him from death; for the Lord had granted him life through the prayers and tears of his disciples and the intercession of the blessed Virgin Mary; and that he would recover from his illness. “But be ready,” he added, “for I will return and visit thee at the end of four years. Go home and rear a church in her honour who has won for thee thy life. You have already built churches in honour of St. Peter and St. Andrew, but hast done nothing for St. Mary who interceded for thee. Amend this, and dedicate a church to her.”’ The bishop accordingly recovered, and setting forward on his journey arrived in Britain. Notwithstanding the decision of the Pope, King Aldfrid refused to admit him, but, on the king’s death in 705, a synod was held near the river Nidd in the first year of the reign of his successor Osred, and after some contention he was, by the consent of all, admitted to preside over his church, and his two principal monasteries—Ripon and Hexham—were restored to him; and thus he lived in peace four years, that is, till the day of his death. His troubled life came to an end in 709; and he was carried to his first monastery of Ripon, and buried in the church of the blessed Peter the apostle close by the south end of the altar. During this period of four years Wilfrid had, as we have seen, regained possession of the monastery of Hexham, which he had founded and dedicated to St. Andrew; and now, according to the injunction of the archangel, as Eddi tells us, the church of St. Mary at Hexham had its beginning; and, as a thank-offering to St. Michael himself, another temple in the same place, or near it, was erected soon afterwards.

Wilfrid was succeeded, as Bede tells us, in the bishopric of the church of Hagustald by Acca his priest, who, ‘being himself a most active person and great in the sight of God and man, much adorned and added by his wonderful works to the structure of his church, which is dedicated to the blessed apostle Andrew. For he made it his business, and does so still (for Acca was still bishop of Hexham when Bede wrote), to procure relics of the blessed apostles and martyrs of Christ from all parts, to erect altars in honour of them, dividing the same by porches in the walls of the church. Besides which he very diligently gathered the histories of their sufferings together with other ecclesiastical writings, and erected there a most numerous and noble library.’ Bede adds that ‘Acca was bred up from his youth and instructed among the clergy of the most holy and beloved of God, Boza, bishop of York. Afterwards coming to Bishop Wilfrid in the hope of improving himself, he spent the rest of his life under him till that bishop’s death, and, going with him to Rome, learnt there many profitable things concerning the government of the holy church which he could not have learnt in his own country.’ Among the relics of the blessed apostles thus collected and brought to Hexham by Acca were most certainly the relics of St. Andrew, and among the histories gathered together by him would no doubt be the legend of that apostle. When Bede finishes his history in the year 731, he tells us that at that time four bishops presided in the province of the Northumbrians. Wilfrid (second of the name) in the church of York, Ediluald in that of Lindisfarne, Acca in that of Hagustald, or Hexham, and Pecthelm in that which is called Candida Casa, or the White House, ‘which, from the increased number of believers, has lately become an additional see, and has him for its first prelate.’

From the time when the great diocese of York was broken up in the year 681, its history has had no bearing upon that of the churches of Cumbria or Lothian. The diocese of Lindisfarne, however, extended to the Firth of Forth; and about this time the monastery of Tyninghame, at the mouth of the river Tyne in East Lothian, must have been founded within it by Balthere the anchorite. Simeon of Durham, in his History of the Kings, records in the year 756 the death of Balthere the anchorite, and, in his History of the Church of Durham, he adds ‘in Tiningaham.’ He is popularly known in the district as St. Baldred of the Bass. By Bower St. Baldred is connected with Kentigern, and said to have been his suffragan bishop; and he reports a tradition that, a contest having arisen between the parishioners of the three churches of Haldhame, Tyninghame, and Lyntoun, in Lothian, for the possession of his body, and arms having been resorted to, they were at night overcome with sleep, and on awaking found three bodies exactly alike, one of which was buried in each church. This sufficiently connects St. Baldred with Tyninghame; and Alcuin, who wrote in the eighth century, as clearly connects Balthere with the Bass. He was thus removed from Kentigern’s time by more than a century, was in reality an anchorite, and connected, not with the British diocese of Cumbria, but with the Anglic see of Lindisfarne. This diocese contained the territory extending from the Tyne to the Tweed, including the district of Teviotdale; and we learn from the anonymous history of Cudberct that its possessions beyond the Tweed consisted of the districts on the north bank from the sea to the river Leader, and the whole land which belonged to the monastery of St. Balthere, which is called Tyningham, from the Lammermoors to the mouth of the river Esk. Beyond this western boundary the church of Lindisfarne possessed the monastery of Mailros with its territory; Tighbrethingham, which cannot be identified with any certainty; Eoriercorn or Abercorn, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, and the monastery in which Trumuini had his seat when he ruled over the province of the Picts during their subjection to the Angles, and from which he fled after the disastrous battle of Dunnichen; and Edwinesburch, or Edinburgh, where the church dedicated to St. Cuthbert still bears his name. The history of the church of Hagustald, or Hexham, will be found to have an important bearing upon that of one of the more northern churches.

Between the diocese of Lindisfarne and the Western Sea lay that of Glasgow, or Strathclyde, now freed from the yoke of the Angles and under an independent bishop; but the district of Galloway was still under the rule of the Angles of Northumbria, and here the church of Ninian appears to have been revived under an Anglic bishop some few years before Bede terminates his History. By the increased number of believers Bede no doubt means those of the Anglic nation who had settled there. The line of the Anglic bishops was kept up here for upwards of sixty years, during which five bishops filled the see; and, when King Eadberct added the plain of Kyle and other regions to his kingdom, they would become more firmly seated. It was probably at this time that the veneration of Cudberct and Osuald was extended into Ayrshire, where there are numerous dedications; but soon afterwards the power of the Angles began to wane, and the Anglic diocese of Candida Casa, or Whithern—owing, according to William of Malmesbury, to the ravages of the Scots or Picts—came to an end in the person of Beadulf, its last bishop, who lived to about 803. In other words, the disorganisation of the Northumbrian kingdom at this time and the decrease of its power enabled the native population to eject the strangers and assert their independence.

Chapter VI. The Secular Clergy and the Culdees.

It is not till after the expulsion of the Columban monks from the kingdom of the Picts, in the beginning of the eighth century, that the name of Culdee appears. To Adamnan, to Eddi and to Bede it was totally unknown. They knew of no body of clergy who bore this name, and in the whole range of ecclesiastical history there is nothing more entirely destitute of authority than the application of this name to the Columban monks of the sixth and seventh centuries, or more utterly baseless than the fabric which has been raised upon that assumption. Like many of our popular notions, it originated with Hector Boece, and, at a time when the influence of his fabulous history was still paramount in Scotland, it became associated with an ecclesiastical controversy which powerfully engaged the sympathies of the Scottish people; and this gave it a force and vitality which renders it difficult for the popular mind to regard the history of the early Scottish Church through any other medium. At this most critical period of its history we unfortunately lose the invaluable light afforded by the trustworthy narratives of Adamnan and Bede, but their very silence shows that it was a name not identified with the Monastic Church, which then not only prevailed in Ireland, but embraced likewise the churches of the Scots and the Picts, of the Cumbrians and the Northumbrians, but rather associated with those influences which affected the monastic system in both countries.

The Monastic Church was broken in upon by two opposite influences, which, though very different in their characters, yet possessed one feature in common, and were eventually to unite. One of these influences was external to the Monastic Church. The other developed itself within it.

The first arose when the Irish Church came in contact with that of Rome, and is associated with the controversy regarding Easter, and other Roman usages which arose out of it. Although the monastic system was an important and recognised institution in the Roman Church at the time, it was subordinated to a hierarchy of secular clergy; and a church which not only possessed monasticism as a feature, but was so entirely monastic in its character that its whole clergy were embraced within its rule, not only was alien to the Roman system, but necessarily produced peculiarities of jurisdiction and clerical life which were repugnant to it. Hence, where the Roman Church exercised a direct influence upon this Monastic Church, its tendency necessarily was to produce a return to the older system of a hierarchy of secular clergy, with monachism as a separate institution existing within the church, but not pervading the whole. It was this influence, which had been brought to bear upon the church of the Picts, originating with Wilfrid of York and affecting them through their connection with the Angles of Northumbria, that eventually severed their connection with the Columban church, and brought to an end the primacy of Iona over the churches of Pictland. We have hitherto regarded this church as identified with that founded by Columba in Iona, and, as such, intimately connected with the Church of Ireland. We have also found the interpretation of the peculiarities of the former in the institutions of the latter, and the leading facts of its history in the Irish Annals. We must now, however, treat the history of the church in the eastern districts, which formed the territory of the Picts, separately from that of Iona; and as, with this connection with the Irish Church, we likewise lose the invaluable guidance of Bede, we must find our main source of information in an analysis of those ecclesiastical traditions applicable to this period, which have come down to us. We have already seen, from the narrative of Bede, how Naiton, as he calls him, or Nectan, king of the Picts who inhabit the northern parts of Britain, taught by frequent study of the ecclesiastical writings, renounced the error by which he and his nation had till then been held in relation to the observance of Easter, and submitted, together with his people, to celebrate the Catholic time of our Lord’s resurrection; how he sought assistance from the nation of the Angles, and sent messengers to Ceolfrid, abbot of the monastery of Jarrow, desiring him to write him a letter containing arguments by the help of which he might the more powerfully confute those that persevered in keeping Easter out of the due time, and also concerning the form and manner of the tonsure for distinguishing the clergy; how he prayed to have architects sent him to build a church in his nation after the Roman manner, which he promised to dedicate to St. Peter; how, when he received the letter he requested, he had it read in his presence and that of the most learned men, and interpreted into his own language, and issued a decree that, together with his nation, he would observe this time of Easter, and that the coronal tonsure should be received by all the clergy in his nation; how this decree, by public command, was sent throughout all the provinces of the Picts to be transcribed, learned and observed; and how all the ministers of the altar and monks adopted the coronal tonsure, and the nation was placed under the patronage and protection of St. Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. We have also learned from the Irish Annals that this powerful confutation, like many other efforts to enforce uniformity, resulted in the resistance of the Columban monks and their expulsion from his territories.

The legend which mainly deals with this revolution is that of Bonifacius, preserved in the Aberdeen Breviary; and his leading statements harmonise so well with Bede’s narrative, and are so much supported by the dedications of the churches mentioned in connection with it, that we may safely import them into the history of this period. It is thus told:—Bonifacius was an Israelite by birth, descended from the sister of St. Peter and St. Andrew, and born in Bethsaida. In his thirty-sixth year he was ordained priest by John, Bishop and Patriarch of Jerusalem. When he attained his forty-sixth year he went to Rome, where he was made a bishop and cardinal, and then, by the election of all the cardinals, he was elevated to the papacy. He then called some of his brethren into the oratory, and informed them that he proposed to set forth on a mission to the ends of the earth, for the love of God and those people who dwelt in the northern regions beyond the bounds of Europe. They said, ‘Send religious men, as your predecessors Celestinus and Gregorius sent Palladius, Patricius and Augustinus.’ But Bonifacius replied that it had been revealed to him by St. Peter, in an angelic vision, that he should undertake this mission himself. Accordingly, after due preparation, he shortly afterwards set out from Rome. The mission consisted of Bonifacius, and of Benedictus, Servandus, Pensandus, Benevolus, Madianus, and Principuus, bishops and most devout men, who devotedly followed him, and two distinguished virgins, abbesses, Crescentia and Triduana; seven presbyters, seven deacons, seven sub-deacons, seven acolytes, seven exorcists, seven lectors, seven doorkeepers, and a great multitude of God-fearing men and women. They had a prosperous journey and voyage, and arrived in Pictavia, sailed up the Scottish Sea or Firth of Forth, and proceeded as far as Restinoth. Here they were met by Nectan, king of the Picts, at the head of his army, who, seeing such a multitude of strangers, was struck with astonishment, but finally, with all his nobles and officers, received the sacrament of baptism at the hands of Bonifacius and his bishops. The king then dedicated the place of his baptism to the Holy Trinity, and gave it to Bonifacius, who then performed the usual miracles, ‘wrote one hundred and fifty books, and founded as many churches, with an equal number of bishops and a thousand presbyters, and converted and baptized thirty-six thousand men and women; and finally, in the eighty-fourth year of his age, on the 17th day before the kalends of April, or 16th March, departed to Christ.’ Another form of the legend states that his name was Albanus Kiritinus, surnamed Bonifacius; that he founded a church at the mouth of the river Gobriat, or Gowry, in Pictavia, after baptizing Nectanus the king; that he preached sixty years to the Picts and Scots, and, at the age of eighty, died at Rosmarkyn, and was buried in the church of St. Peter.

These legends are borne out by the dedications, as we find that the churches of Restennot, near Forfar, and Invergowry, at the mouth of the water of Gowry, are dedicated to St. Peter; and Rosemarky, on the north shore of the Moray Firth, an old Columban monastery founded by Lugadius, or Moluog, of Lismore, was dedicated to St. Peter and Bonifacius; while the church of Scone, the chief seat of the kingdom, was dedicated to the Holy Trinity. The legends are obviously connected with the revolution by which King Nectan and the entire nation of the Picts conformed to Rome. The earlier part of the narrative is of course fictitious, and Bonifacius is here erroneously identified with one of the Bonifaces who occupied the papal throne in the seventh century. The object of this was no doubt to make more prominent and direct his character as a missionary in the interest of the Roman party. He was in reality a bishop from that party in the Irish Church which had conformed to Rome. When Adamnan went to Ireland and held the synod in which his law was promulgated in the year 697, its canons were signed, among others, by Cuiritan epscop, or Bishop Cuiritan, and also by Bruide mac Derili Ri Cruithintuath, or king of Pictavia, the brother and immediate predecessor of Nectan; and in the old Irish Calendars he appears on the 16th March as Curitan epscoip ocus abb Ruis mic bairend, that is, Curitan, bishop and abbot of Rosmarkyn. This is also the day in which Bonifacius appears in the Scotch Calendars, and their identity seems beyond doubt. It is equally clear that the legend also shows the introduction of a body of secular clergy into the kingdom of the Picts, and, as we found that at the council on the banks of the Nidd, at which it was resolved to appoint Cuthbert bishop, and to place him at Lindisfarne, while Eata was transferred to Hexham, a body of seven bishops were present and confirmed the arrangement, so here the mission is composed of seven bishops, with an equal number of presbyters, deacons, sub-deacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors and doorkeepers—that is, the entire hierarchy of the secular clergy of Rome with its minor orders. Wynton, in his notice of Boniface, well expresses this—

‘Sevyn hundyr wynter and sextene,
Quhen lychtare wes the Virgyne clene,
Pape off Rome than Gregore
The Secund, quham off yhe herd before,
And Anastas than Empryowre,
The fyrst yhere off hys honowre,
Nectan Derly wes than regnand
Owre the Peychtis in Scotland.
In Ros he fowndyd Rosmarkyne,
That dowyd wes wytht kyngys syne,
And made was a place Cathedrale
Be-north Murrave severalle;
Quhare chanownys ar seculare
Wndyr Saynt Bonyface lyvand thare.’

Another legend which appears to belong to this period, and which is likewise confirmed by the dedications, is that of Fergus, or Fergusianus. His story is this: He was for many years a bishop in Ireland, and then came to the western parts of Scotland, to the confines of Strogeth, where he founded three churches. Thence he went to Cathania, or Caithness, where for some time he occupied himself in converting the barbarous people. After that he visited Buchan, resting in a place called Lungley, where he built a basilica, which still exists, dedicated to himself. Then he came to Glammis, where he consecrated a tabernacle to the God of Jacob, and where he died full of years. His bones were afterwards enshrined in a shrine of marble, and his head taken with all due honour to the monastery of Scone, where many miracles were performed. Now, we find that among the bishops who were present at the council held at Rome in the year 721, and signed the canons, is ‘Fergus the Pict, a bishop of Ireland,’ who is no doubt our Fergus before he passed over to Pictland in Britain, which appears to have been his native country; and his appearance at the council of Rome shows that he belonged to the party who had conformed to the Roman Church. At Strageath, in the district of Stratherne, and in the immediate neighbourhood, are three churches dedicated to St. Patrick—those of Strageath, Blackford and Dolpatrick—which shows that their founder had come from Ireland. In Caithness, the churches of Wick and Halkirk are dedicated to St. Fergus. In Buchan the village called in the legend Lungley is now named St. Fergus, and the neighbouring parish of Inverugie, now called Peterhead, is dedicated to St. Peter. At Glammis we have St. Fergus’ cave and St. Fergus’ well, and the statement that his head was preserved at Scone is confirmed by an entry in the accounts of the Lord High Treasurer, of a payment by James IV. for a silver case for it.

The distribution of the churches among the Picts which were dedicated to St. Peter will show the extent to which the country at this time adopted him as their patron. Among the southern Picts we have Invergowry, Tealing, Restennot, and Meigle. Among the northern Picts we have in Aberdeen and Banff, Cultyr, Fivy and Inverugie; and in Moray and Ross, Drumdelgy, Ruthven, Glenbucket, Belty, Inverawen, Duffus and Rosemarky. King Nectan himself is said by the Irish annalist Tighernac to have become a cleric in the year 724, and probably retired to the church which he had built after the Roman manner by the architects sent him from Northumbria, and which, as he had promised to dedicate that church to St. Peter, must have been one of these we have named, either Restennot or Rosemarky.

These legends having thus so far indicated the external influence which led to the introduction of the secular clergy into the church among the Picts, we must now advert to another and more powerful influence of an opposite kind, which arose within the Monastic Church itself, and equally tended to break in upon the monastic character of that church. This influence was that increasing asceticism which led the monks to forsake the cœnobitical life for the solitary cell of the anchorite, and induced those who wished to pass from a secular to a religious life to prefer this more ascetic form of it. This form of the religious life had long existed in the Christian Church, and, from a very early period, there prevailed a feeling that the solitary life in the desert, or in the anchorite’s cell, was a higher form of the religious life than that afforded by the cœnobitical life of the monastery. Thus St. Jerome, writing in the fourth century, tells us that ‘there were in Egypt three kinds of monks. First, the Cœnobites, whom they call in the Gentile tongue Sausses but whom we may term those living in common. Secondly, the Anchorites, who live alone in desert places, and are so called as living apart from men; and, thirdly, that kind which are called Remoboth, the worst and most neglected;’ and John Cassian, a native of Scythia, who founded two monasteries at Marseilles, one for men and the other for virgins, and died about the year 440, writing what he terms ‘Conferences with the Monks,’ speaks, in his eighteenth, of the different sorts of monks in his day. He likewise distinguishes them into three sorts. First the Cœnobites, who live in common, under an abbot, imitating the life of the apostles. Second, Anchorites, who, after they have been instructed and educated in monasteries, withdraw into the deserts. The authors of this order were St. Paul the hermit and St. Anthony. And third, the Sarabaites, who pretended to retire from the world, and joined themselves together by two or three in a company, to live after their own humour, not being subject to any man. He looks upon these but as a corruption of the monastic state rather than a distinct order. He adds to these a fourth sort of monks, made of those who, not being able to endure the monastic life in a convent, retreated alone into certain cells to live more at liberty, but praises the second as the most perfect. In his nineteenth conference, an abbot called John, who had been an anchorite and had entered a monastery, is asked which of the two orders was to be preferred, and replies that he thought the life of the cœnobites best for those who were not absolutely perfect, and shows that none but those who have attained to a degree of eminent perfection are capable of living the life of a hermit. Another of these ancient fathers, Nilus, who had betaken himself to a solitary life in the desert of Sinai, and died about the year 451, writes a treatise upon the question whether the life of the Anchorites, or Hermits, whom he also calls Hesycasts, or Quietists, who dwell in solitude, is to be preferred before the life of those religious who dwell in cities, and states that this is a question about which the judgment of spiritual men is much divided. Those who prefer the religious who live in communities in cities before the anchorites, say that they have more worth because they meet with more opposition; whereas those who live in solitude being quiet and not subject to temptations, have not so much virtue; to which Nilus replies that there are as many temptations in solitude as in cities, and that the reason why some persons argue so is because they regard outward sins only, not considering that there are infinite temptations and spiritual sins which encounter us as well in privacy as in cities; and he therefore supports the opinion that the solitary life is the higher form of the religious life. Isidore of Seville, too, in the seventh century, distinguishes between the different kinds of monks, and says that the Cœnobites are they that live in common, like those in the days of the apostles, who sold their goods and had all things in common; the Hermits, they that withdraw into desert places and vast solitudes in imitation of Elias and John the Baptist, delighting, with a wonderful contempt of the world, in total solitude; and the Anchorites, they who, having perfected themselves in cœnobitical life, shut themselves up in cells apart from the aspect of men, inaccessible to all, and living in the sole contemplation of God. But Bede, who was a Benedictine monk, seems also to regard the life of an anchorite as a higher form of religious life, when in his History he says of Cudberct on his retiring to the island of Farne, that, ‘advancing in the merits of his devout intention, he proceeded even to the adoption of a hermit life of solitary contemplation and secret silence;’ and, in his Life, that ‘he was now permitted to ascend to the leisure of divine speculation, and rejoiced that he had now reached the lot of those of whom we sing in the Psalm, The saints shall go from virtue to virtue; the God of Gods shall be seen in Sion.’

The preference for this mode of life, as the highest form of a religious life that could be attained, seems to have arisen from an overstrained interpretation of some passages of Scripture. Thus Bede, in the beginning of his Life of Cudberct, tells us that he ‘would hallow its commencement by quoting the words of the prophet Jeremiah, who, in lauding the state of the perfection of the anchorite, says, “It is good for a man who hath borne the yoke from his youth; he shall sit alone and keep silent, because he shall raise himself above himself.”’ But the preference of the solitary life as the highest form of asceticism seems to have been mainly founded upon two passages in the New Testament. One is that passage in the Epistle of St. James in which he winds up his exhortation by saying, ‘Pure religion and undefiled, before God and the Father, is to visit the widows and fatherless in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world;’world;’ or, as a literal rendering of the old Latin version would be, ‘Pure and immaculate religious service towards God and the Father is this, to visit the infants and widows in their tribulation, and to keep oneself immaculate from this world.’ By an overstrained interpretation of this passage it was assumed that a person could only keep himself immaculate from the world by withdrawing himself from it altogether, and from all association with his fellow-creatures, except in works of benevolence to those in distress; and that this was a form of religion peculiarly acceptable to God and the Father. The other passage is that in the First Epistle of St. Peter, where it is said, ‘But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvellous light; which in times past were not a people, but are now the people of God; which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy. Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.’ And this was interpreted to mean that those who passed their lives in mortifying the body and praising God by singing the psalter, in living in this world as strangers from all society and as pilgrims to a better world, were a peculiar people and entitled to call themselves the people of God.

They thus came to the conclusion that a solitary life passed in devotion and self-mortification, accompanied by acts of benevolence to the sick and bereaved, was a ‘cultus’ or ‘religio’ peculiarly acceptable to God and the Father; and hence they were called, if they did not call themselves so, Deicolæ, or God-worshippers, in contrast to Christicolæ, the name applied in a general sense to all Christians, and, in a narrower application, to monks leading a cœnobitical life. Thus in the Life of St. Anthony, written by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, who introduced monachism into the Western Church, and translated into Latin by Evagrius, a priest of Antioch, in the year 358, we find it stated that ‘the neighbours and the monks whom he often visited, seeing St. Anthony, called him a Deicola, and, indulging in the expression of natural affection, they loved him, some as a son, others as a brother.’ Again, Martinus, a bishop, who terms himself Scotus, or a native of Ireland, writing to Miro, king of Gallicia, in the sixth century, probably about the year 560, regarding ‘the rules of an honest life,’ says that he will not urge him to follow ‘those more arduous and perfect rules which are practised by a few very excellent Deicolæ.’ Columbanus, too, in his second instruction or sermon to his monks, says, ‘Whosoever, therefore, willeth to be made a habitation for God, let him strive to become lowly and quiet, that not by glibness of words, nor by suppleness of body, but by the reality of his humility he may be recognised as a Deicola; for goodness of heart requireth not the feigned religion of words;’ and a disciple of Columbanus, who followed out this life after his master had been driven out of Luxeuil with his monks, retired to a solitary spot called Luthra in the midst of a forest, now Lure in the district of Besançon, ‘But his virtues having attracted religious men to him from all quarters, he formed a community of monks and erected two oratories; and, after governing his monastery for several years, he appointed one of his disciples abbot in his stead, and again withdrew to a solitary cell, where he devoted himself to divine contemplation till his death about 625. This man bears no other name in the calendars than Deicola, and his memory is still held in high estimation by the people of that country, who call him Saint Die.’

We find, too, these solitaries also called the people of God. In the ancient Life of St. Patrick written by Probus, he tells us that, after Patrick had passed four years with St. Martin of Tours, where he was trained in monastic life, an angel appeared to him and said, ‘Go to the people of God, that is, to the hermits and solitaries, with naked feet, and live with them, that you may be tried for some time; and he went into a solitude, and remained with the hermits eight years.’

The conception of this ‘cultus’ of God is well expressed in a passage of Simeon of Durham, who, in his History of the Kings, under the year 781, says, some 250 years after, of a certain Dregmo, in the territory of the church at Hexham, that ‘he greatly feared God and diligently devoted himself, as far as his means allowed, to the exercise of works of charity, leading a life in all respects apart from the customs of his countrymen—a man of remarkable simplicity and innocence, and of profound devotion and reverence towards the saints of God; on which account his neighbours held him in great honour, and called him a true God-worshipper.’

In the seventh century attempts were made by several councils to bring the solitaries more under the monastic rule. By the fifth canon of the Council of Toledo, held in 646, it was provided that ‘well-instructed monks alone should be allowed to live separate from a cloister as recluses, and become the trainers of others in the higher forms of ascetic life. Those recluses and wanderers who are unworthy must be brought within a cloister, and in future no one must be devoted to this highest form of the ascetic life, as a recluse, who had not first been trained in a monastery to the knowledge and practice of the monastic life.’ By the Council of Trullo, held in 692, it was provided, by canon 41, that those who would live separate in their own cells must have first passed three years in a monastery, and that any one who has once withdrawn himself to a solitary cell must not again leave it; and by canon 42 that, as there are hermits who come to the towns in black clothing and long hair, and associate with secular persons, it is ordered that such persons shall be tonsured and enter a monastery, wearing the monastic dress. If they will not do this, they must be expelled from the town.

Such attempts, however, seem to have had little effect, and the next century was to see the Anchorites and Recluses, who lived apart from the monastic rule, and practised what they considered the highest form of asceticism, and the secular clergy, who had never come under the monastic rule, but were subject only to the general canon-law of the church, brought more together, a tendency to which indeed had probably already manifested itself in the end of the previous century, which the forty-second canon of the Council of Trullo was designed to check. For though nothing could be more opposed in spirit, than the secular life of the ordinary clergy on the one hand and the ascetic life of the anchorites on the other, forming, as it were, the opposite poles of the ecclesiastical system, yet they had one feature in common—that both lived separately, in opposition to the cœnobitical life of the monks. The new institution which thus brought them together was that of the secular canons, founded by Chrodegang, bishop of Metz, in the year 747. His rule was at first intended for his clergy of Metz alone, with a view of leading them to adopt a more regular life in the ecclesiastical sense of the term. This rule consists of thirty-four chapters. By the third he directs that the canon clerics shall live together in a cloister, and shall all sleep in one dormitory, with the exception of those to whom the bishop shall give permission to sleep separately in their own dwellings within the cloister; that no woman or layman is to enter the cloister without an order from the bishop, the archdeacon, or the ‘primicerius’; that they shall eat in the same refectory, that laics shall only be allowed to remain in the cloister as long as they have work, and that those living separately within the cloister must live alone and have no other cleric with them. By the ninth chapter he enjoins them to perform the bodily labours in common as well as in private. By the thirty-first he enjoins his clerics to give to the church what real property they have, retaining the income only, but gives them leave to reserve to themselves their moveable property, for almsgiving, and to dispose of it as they please by their wills.

The object of this rule was certainly to bring the secular clergy of this town to live a cœnobitical life, but with such relaxations as would both allow it to be considerably modified towards certain of the body, and to permit the recluses, though not expressly named, to be included within it; but the new canonical life became so popular, that the rule was revised and enlarged, so as to adapt it to the state of the clergy generally, and enable it to be extended over the whole church. This revised rule consists of eighty-six chapters. By the thirteenth it is provided that within the cloisters there shall be dormitories, refectories, cellars and other habitations; that all shall sleep in one dormitory, living as brethren in one society, except those to whom the bishop shall give leave to sleep separately on separate couches in their own dwellings in the cloister, with seniors among them to watch over them; and that no female or laic shall enter the cloister. Chapter thirty-nine bears that, as there is an evil zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to destruction, so there is a good zeal which separates from vice and leads to God and eternal life: therefore they ought to exercise zeal with the most fervent love, as servants of God (Servi Dei). The eighty-first chapter, however, deals directly with the Deicolæ, with the view of bringing them under the canonical rule. It consists of ‘the epistle of a certain Deicola, sent in the name of Christ to the priests and clerics for their instruction and exhortation;’ and it is addressed ‘to the beloved priests in the churches of Christ, the bishops and all the clergy therein everywhere, and their servants, and to all the Deicolæ living in the whole world.’ He begs of them that, ‘living justly, piously and holily, they should show a good example to others, and live with soul, heart and body under the canonical rule.’ He exhorts ‘all clerics under them to give humble obedience, and endeavour to fulfil the canonical rule without murmuring, serving the Lord willingly; seeing that every man ought to be subject to the higher powers and those put over them, how much more should they, as servants of God (Servi Dei), humbly obey their provosts?’ He finally exhorts them to be mindful ‘of the canonical rules, and to have their precepts always before their eyes.’ By the General Council held at Aix-la-Chapelle in 816 and 817, this canonical rule was adopted, and a number of canons were passed to give effect to it, with some modifications. They begin with the 114th canon. The 117th canon provides that each bishop must see that the cloister in which his clerics live is enclosed with a strong wall; the 120th, that those clerics who possess property of their own and an income from the church shall receive from the community their daily food only, with a share of the oblations. Those who have no private means are entirely supported and clothed. By the 135th, the boys and youths who are educated in the canonry shall be well cared for and instructed, be placed under a senior canon and dwell together in the upper floor of a house. By the 141st, each bishop must provide a hospital for the poor and strangers, and each cleric shall give the tenth of what he received for its support. By the 142d, canons are allowed to have separate dwellings, and proper places shall be provided for the aged and the sick within the canonry; and by the 144th, women must not enter the dwellings and the cloister, with the exception of the church.

In the early English Church we find the name Deicola in a Saxon form applied to a community of solitaries. We find it stated in the Peterborough MS. of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the year 655, that ‘Peada, king of the Mercians, and Oswiu, the brother of King Osuald, came together and said that they would rear a monastery to the glory of Christ and the honour of St. Peter; and they did so, and gave it the name of Medeshamstede,’ now Peterborough. In 657 the monastery was finished, and consecrated by Deusdedit, archbishop of Canterbury, in the presence of King Wulfhere, the brother and successor of King Peada, and his earls and thanes. There were also present four bishops, and Wilfrid, who was then only a priest; and the king endowed it. Then ‘the abbot desired that he would grant him that which he would desire of him, and the king granted it to him. “I have here,” he said, “God-fearing monks, who would pass their lives in an anchoretage, if they knew where. But here is an island, which is called Ancarig,” now Thorney Isle, “and I will crave this—that we may there build a monastery to the glory of St. Mary, that they may there dwell who may desire to lead their lives in peace and in rest.”’ The king accordingly grants the request, and endows this monastery also. The expression Gode-frihte, or God-fearing, here applied to these anchorite monks, is obviously the Saxon equivalent of Deicola. In the following century the canonical rule was introduced into England, as we find in a legatine synod held in Northumberland, in the year 787, that by the fourth canon bishops are required to take care that all canons live canonically, and all monks or nuns regularly—that is, according to monastic rule; and that the title of God-worshippers passed down to the canon clerics, at least to those who lived separately, appears from this, that, when King Athelstan was on his march against the Scots in 936, he halted at York, and there besought of the ministers of St. Peter’s church, who were then called Colidei, to offer up their prayers on behalf of himself and his expedition. They are said to be ‘men of holy life and honest conversation, then styled Colidei, who maintained a number of poor people, and withal had but little whereon to live.’ ‘It would appear,’ says Dr. Reeves, ‘that these Colidei were the officiating clergy of the cathedral church of St. Peter’s at York in 946, and that they discharged the double function of divine service and eleemosynary entertainment;’ in other words, they were canon clerics, and the name Colidei is merely an inversion of that of Deicolæ. Those of Canterbury we find called in a charter by King Ethelred, in 1006, cultores clerici, or cleric God-worshippers, the word Dei being evidently implied.

In the early Monastic Church of Ireland, this tendency to prefer a solitary life, as a higher form of the religious life, developed itself at a very early period. It seems to have assumed two different aspects. One when the abbot or one of the brethren of the monastery retired for a time to a separate cell, for solitary prayer, or for penitential exercises, during which time he held no intercourse with the other inmates of the monasteries. The cells adopted for this purpose were usually those primitive dwellings called by the Irish Clochans, built of unmortared stone, with walls of great thickness, circular in shape, with a dome-shaped roof, somewhat of a beehive form, and hence often called beehive cells. When used for such retirement they were called Carcair, or prison cells. Thus, in an old poem attributed to Cuimin of Coindeire, he says of Enda, who founded the monastery on the principal of the Arann Isles:—

Enda of the high piety loved
In Ara, victory with sweetness,
A carcair of hard narrow stone,
To bring all unto heaven.

Of Ultan of Arbreccan he says—

Ultan loves his children;
A carcair for his lean side,
And a bath in cold water
In the sharp wind he loved.

Of Molaissi of Devenish he says—

Molaissi of the lake loves
To be in a carcair of hard stone.

Adamnan, too, tells us of Feargna, or Virgnous, who, ‘after having lived for many years without reproach in obedience among the brethren, led an anchoretic life for other twelve years, as a victorious soldier of Christ, in the abode of the anchorites in Muirbulcmar.’ This was, he also tells us, in the island of Hinba, which can be identified with Eilean na Naomh, one of the Garveloch isles, and here, in this solitary isle where there is little to disturb them, we find the remains of this abode of the anchorites in connection with other remains which are evidently the foundations of an early monastic establishment. It consists of two circular dome-shaped buildings joined together, built of uncemented stone. The larger one is internally fourteen feet in diameter; the other, a part of the beehive roof of which still remains, is about a foot less. The two buildings communicate with each other by means of a square-shaped doorway through the points of contact, and the larger one with the outside by another doorway of a similar kind facing south-west.

The other form of this solitary life was one in which the inmate of a monastery withdrew from it altogether, and sought out some remote and desert spot or island in which he might pass the rest of his life in total solitude. Such retreats were called emphatically ‘Deserts.’ Of this desire, which with many became almost a passion, Adamnan gives us an instance in Cormac ua Leathan. Adamnan calls him ‘a truly pious man, who no less than three times went in search of a desert in the ocean, but did not find it;’ and he says Columba thus prophesied of him: ‘In his desire to find a desert, Cormac is this day, for a second time, now embarking from that district which lies on the other side of the river Moda, and is called Eirris Domno; nor even this time shall he find what he seeks, and that for no other fault than that he has irregularly allowed to accompany him on the voyage a monk who is going away from his own proper abbot without obtaining his consent.’ Again he tells us that Cormac made another attempt to discover a desert in the ocean, and Columba, who was then at the court of King Brude, says to the king in the presence of the ruler of the Orkneys, ‘Some of our brethren have lately set sail, and are anxious to discover a desert in the pathless sea. Should they happen, after many wanderings, to come to the Orkney islands, do thou instruct their chief, whose hostages are in thy hand, that no evil befall them within his dominions;’ and Adamnan tells us he did arrive in the Orkneys. On his third voyage, Cormac sailed for fourteen days and nights due north, before a south wind, without seeing land; and, when the wind changed to the north, he returned again to Iona, without having in any of his three voyages succeeded in discovering such a ‘desert’ as he sought for.

Those who devoted themselves to such a solitary life were said to give themselves up to God, and the name of Deoraidh, literally strangers, was applied to them as ‘strangers and pilgrims’ in the religious sense of the term, and ‘Deoraidh De,’ or pilgrims of God. But their connection with the monastery from which they emerged was not entirely severed; for, as we have seen, when the abbacy became vacant, the Deoraidh De, or pilgrim, was entitled to succeed in the fifth place; and the Brehon Laws provide that if a bishop commit certain offences, ‘the Ferleginn, or lector, shall be installed in the bishopric, and the bishop shall go into the hermitage or pilgrimage of God’ (Aibilteoiracht no in Deoruighecht De).

Towards the end of the sixth century this passion for a solitary life had increased so much that it tended greatly to break up the monastic system, and became embodied in what was termed the third order of saints; and, while the second order expresses a purely monastic church, this third order which succeeded it, was Eremitical. ‘It was,’ says the Catalogue, ‘of this sort. They were holy presbyters and a few bishops; one hundred in number; who dwelt in desert places, and lived on herbs and water and the alms of the faithful. They shunned private property; they despised all earthly things, and wholly avoided all whispering and backbiting; and they had different rules and masses, and different tonsures—for some had the coronal and others the hair; and a different paschal festival—for some celebrated the Resurrection on the fourteenth moon, or sixteenth, with hard intentions. These lived during four reigns, and continued to that great mortality,’ that is, from about 600 to 666. In 634, as we have seen, the church of the southern half of Ireland had conformed to Rome, while the northern Irish were not brought over to the Roman system till the end of the century. What, therefore, is alluded to, when they are said to have different masses and different tonsures, is that this order consisted of two parties—one belonging to the southern Irish which had adopted the coronal tonsure and the Roman method of calculating Easter; while the other in these respects adhered to the customs of their fathers. They appear at this time not only to have lived a hermit life in the desert, but to have founded eremitical establishments, where a number of hermits lived in separate cells within the same enclosures. To both the name of Desert or Diseart was usually given; and Colgan mentions no fewer than ten establishments, and the Annals of the Four Masters fourteen, the names of which commence with the word Diseart.

Among those who belonged to the party who adhered to the customs of their fathers was that ‘Beccan Solitarius,’ or the Solitary, to whom, along with Segine of Iona, Cumine in 634 addressed his letter regarding the proper time for keeping Easter; and it shows the importance now attached to this mode of life, that he is placed on the same platform with the abbot of Iona. Tighernac records, in the year 677, the death of ‘Beccan Ruimean in an island of Britain;’ and he appears in the Martyrologies as ‘Becan Ruim.’ His hermitage was therefore in one of the Western Isles; and what island that was we learn from his epithet of Ruimean or Ruim, that is, of the island of Rum. The names of seven bishops and eight presbyters who belonged to this order are given in the Catalogue, but they were mainly connected with the party which had conformed to Rome. The first of the presbyters named is Fechin of Fore; he is the Vigeanus of the Scottish Calendar, to whom the church of Arbroath was dedicated, and probably that of Ecclefechan, or Fechan’s church, in Dumfriesshire. In an island on the west coast of Ireland called Ardoilean, or High Island, an uninhabited and almost inaccessible island off the coast of Connemara, is one of the most interesting and best preserved specimens of these Anchoretical or Eremitical establishments, which is attributed to this Fechin. It consists of a Cashel, or uncemented stone wall, nearly circular, enclosing an area of one hundred and eight feet in diameter. Within this enclosure there is an oratory, one of the widest of these ancient structures, measuring internally twelve feet by ten, and ten feet in height. The doorway is two feet wide and four feet six inches high, having inscribed on its horizontal a cross similar to one on the lintel of the doorway of St. Fechin’s church at Fore. On the east side of the oratory is an ancient stone sepulchre like a Pagan kistvaen. There are also within the enclosure two clochans, or dome-roofed cells—one externally round, but internally a square of nine feet, and seven feet six inches high. The other is circular, and internally seven feet by six, and eight feet high. The doorways are two feet four in width, and only three feet six in height. On the other side are a number of smaller cells, about six feet long by three wide and four feet high, and are mostly covered with rubbish. There are no buildings adapted for a cœnobitical life; and it is probably a good specimen of the eremitical establishments of this third order of the saints.

The ancient document termed the Catalogue of the Saints, which affords us such a valuable clue to the main characteristics of the Irish Church during these different periods, leaves us at the period of the great pestilence in the year 666; but we find that after that date the nomenclature of the Continental anchorites begins to appear, in an Irish form, attached to the eremitical class in the Irish Church. In lieu of the term Deicolæ, which as we have seen, was from the earliest period the designation of those who adopted what they considered the higher form of religious life, peculiarly the ‘cultus’ of God and the Father, we find these Irish anchorites having the term of Ceile De applied to them. These terms, though not etymologically equivalent, may be considered as correlative, and intended to represent the same class; and as Christicola becomes in Irish Celechrist, so Deicola assumes in Irish the form of Ceile De. There is a poem in the Leabhar Breac attributed to St. Mochuda of Rathen, who died in 636, which gives us a picture of the constituent elements of the Irish Church at this period. It bears this title: ‘Here begins the rule of Mochuta of Rathen, inculcating ten commandments upon every person;’ and consists of nine sections. Of these, the title of the second is, ‘Of the occupations of a bishop here;’ of the third, ‘Of the abbot of a church;’ of the fourth, ‘Of the occupations of a priest;’ of the fifth, ‘Shouldst thou be a person’s anmchara, or soul’s friend?’ of the sixth, ‘Of the occupations of a monk;’ and of the seventh, ‘Of the Cele De, or of the clerical recluse,’ thus distinguishing the Cele De from the monk.

These Ceile De, however, show precisely the same characteristics which belonged to the Deicolæ of the Continent. Like the Deicolæ, they were Anchorites, for we find that, when the name of Cele De appears as a personal title, it is borne by one who had lived as a solitary in a desert, or who is termed an Anchorite. Thus Angus the Hagiologist, who founded a desert called after his name Disert Aengus, now Disert Enos, is well known as Aengus Cele De; Comgan, whose death is recorded in the Ulster Annals in 869 as ‘Comgan Fota, Anchorite of Tamhlacht,’ appears in the Calendar of Tamhlacht as ‘Comgan Cele De;’ and in the earliest notice of the Cele De at Clonmacnois, in 1031, we find that Conn nambocht, or ‘of the poor,’ is termed Head of the Cele De and anchorite of Clonmacnois. Again, like the Deicolæ, they are the ‘people of God.’ Thus the Ulster Annals tell us that in 921 ‘Armagh was pillaged on the Saturday before St. Martin’s Day, which was the 10th of November, by Gofrith, grandson of Ivar, and his army, who saved the houses of prayer with their people of God, that is, Cele De, and their sick, and the whole church town, except some houses which were burned through neglect.’ Like the Deicolæ, they too claimed to be strangers and pilgrims in the religious sense of the term; hence Cele De is occasionally used in the sense of stranger. Dr. Reeves gives us a curious instance of this. In one of the Irish MSS. in the Bodleian Library is an Irish translation of a Latin tract ‘de Bragmannis,’ containing a supposed correspondence between Alexander the Great and Dindimus, king of the Brahmins. In this tract occurs the sentence, ‘We are not, says Dindimus, inhabitants of this world, but strangers. Nor did we come into this world that we might remain, but that we might pass through. We hasten to the lares of our fathers,’ etc., which is thus translated: ‘Not of the inhabitants of the present world are we, I tell thee, O Alexander, said Dinnim; but Cele De is our title. We do not accept land unnecessarily in the world; for our patrimony is before us, namely heaven, with its abodes and rewards.’ Thus fully expressing the sentiment of the Brahmins being strangers and pilgrims in the same sense as were the Cele De. In a lake in the county of Tipperary, formerly called Lochcre, but afterwards Monaincha, there were two islands: on one a monastery was founded in the sixth century; and on the other, termed Innisnambeo, or the island of the living, a church was founded in the eighth century by St. Elair, whose death is recorded on 7th September 807 as ‘anchorite and scribe of Loch Crea.’ This island was visited by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, and his description will show us the two churches—the ancient monastic church and the anchorite church of the Cele De—side by side. He says, ‘In South Munster is a lake containing two isles; in the greater is a church of the ancient religion; and in the lesser a chapel wherein a few celibates, called Cœlicolæ or Colidei, devoutly serve. Into the greater no woman or any animal of the feminine gender ever enters but it immediately dies. This has been proved by many experiments. In the lesser isle no one can die; hence it is called “insula viventium,”“insula viventium,” or the island of the living.’living.’

Like the Deicolæ, they evidently came under the canonical rule. The Irish Annals record the following singular entry:—‘In this year (811) the Cele De came over the sea with dry feet without a vessel; and a written roll was given him from heaven, out of which he preached to the Irish; and it was carried up again when the sermon was finished. This ecclesiastic (literally son of the church) used to go every day southwards across the sea, after finishing his sermon.’ Eliminating the miraculous element, we have here an ecclesiastic, whose title is given in the Irish form of Cele De, coming from the Continent with a written precept, which he urged upon the Irish. This was sixty-eight years after Saint Chrodegang framed his rule for the canonical life, and also after the revised rule was framed containing the urgent appeal of the Deicola to all the Deicolæ over the world, and only five years before the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle. We may therefore reasonably conclude that what the ecclesiastic called the Cele De introduced into Ireland was the canonical rule. There is also preserved in the Leabhar Breac a prose rule attributed to Maelruain of Tamhlacht, who died in 792, and the title is ‘Here beginneth the rule of the Cele De, from what Maelruain composed.’ This rule, however, was evidently not intended for a monastic body, and shows more resemblance to the canonical rule. The Cele De are only mentioned in a few places in Ireland. Nine only are enumerated by Dr. Reeves. These are Tamhlacht, if Maelruain’s establishment belongs to this order, Armagh, Clonmacnois, Clondalkin, Monaincha, Devenish, Clones, Pubble and Scattery. These could hardly then be the representatives of the great monastic church, but must have been a new order which had not spread very widely among the churches; and Dr. Reeves admits that ‘possibly the institution of Maelruain may have borrowed from or possessed some features in common with the order of canons; for certain it is that in after ages both the Keledei of Scotland and the Colidei of Ireland exhibited in their discipline the main characteristics of secular canons.’ Thus we find he again says, ‘the Cele De of Armagh occupying very much the same position as the Colidei of York, as canons of the cathedral, and latterly having the name Latinised into the same form.’

In Scotland the name takes the form of Keledei; and they make their first appearance in the territory of the southern Picts after the expulsion of the Columban monks. This we learn from the history of Servanus or St. Serf. His life is found in apparent connection with that of Kentigern, but the tale that it tells is very different from that which we find in the lives of the latter saint. Its story is as follows: There was a king in the land of Canaan called Obeth, son of Eliud, and his wife was Alpia, daughter of a king of Arabia. As usual in such legends, the worthy couple had no children for twenty years, and then, after they had often prayed to God and offered alms, and the whole people had fasted three days and nights, comes the usual vision, and they have two sons. The name of the one was Generatius, that of the other Malachias, or Servanus. He was called Servanus because he served God day and night; and this name was given him by Magonius, bishop of Alexandria, who baptized him. His father dies when he was seven years old. He then studies in Alexandria for thirteen years, when he receives from the bishop the monastic habit. After thirty years he receives priest’s orders from the same bishop, and then returns to Canaan, where all the Canaanites elect him bishop. Here he remains twenty years erecting monasteries and churches. An angel then appears and gives him the usual mandate to leave his country and kindred. He takes leave of all the clerics and laics of his bishopric, and he goes with sixty soldiers (that is, of Christ) to the banks of the Nile, crosses it and goes to the Red Sea, which he crosses, as usual, dryshod, and thence to Jerusalem, where he remains seven years as its patriarch, in room of bishop Jacob, patriarch of Jerusalem. Here an angel takes him up Mount Sion, and shows him the wood of the true cross, from which he cuts three pastoral staves. Then he goes to Constantinople, where he remains three years. Thence to Rome, where he finds the papal throne vacant, and he is elected pope and fills the vacant chair of St. Peter seven years. The angel again tells him he must go forth to distant lands. He goes forth followed by a great number of clerics and people, men and women, and he tells them to divide themselves into two parts, one of which must remain in Rome, and the other accompany him on his mission. He crosses the Alps, and after several adventures, arrives at the Ictian Sea or Straits of Dover, with seven thousand soldiers (of Christ), and crosses it dryshod. They then go from place to place till they arrive at the river Forth. Adamnan, at this time an abbot in Scotland, meets him on Inchkeith, and receives him with much honour. Servanus asks him how he is to dispose of his family and companions. Adamnan tells him they may occupy Fife, and from the Mount of the Britons to the Mount which is called Okhel, that is, the Ochil Hills. Servanus then goes with a hundred followers to Kinel, and throws across the sea his rod, which becomes an apple-tree, called Morglas by the moderns. He then goes to the place called Culenros, purposing to live there, and removes the thorns and brushwood which abounded there. The king who then ruled over the Picts, Brude, son of Dargart, is wroth because he resided there without his leave, and sends to have him killed. There is then the usual deadly sickness of the king, and the cure through the prayers of the saint; and the king gives him the place where he inhabits as an offering for ever. Servanus then founds and dedicates the church and cemetery at Culenros, or Culross. Then he goes to Lochleven to see Adamnan, who receives him there, and shows him an island in that lake well adapted for his religious community which is granted him. Servanus founds a monastery in that island in which he remains seven years, and from thence he goes about the whole region of Fife, founding churches everywhere. The other places mentioned in this life in connection with him are the cave at Dysart on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, where he had his celebrated discussion with the devil, and where the memory of St. Serf is still held in honour; Tuligbotuan, or Tullybothy, Tuligcultrin, or Tillicoultry, Alveth and Atheren, now Aithrey, all in the district on the north side of the Forth, extending from Stirling to Alloa. The only other place mentioned is his ‘Cella Dunenense,’ or cell at Dunning in Stratherne, where he slew a dragon with his pastoral staff, in a valley still called the Dragon’s Den. Finally, ‘after many miracles, after divine virtues, after founding many churches, the saint, having given his peace to the brethren, yielded up his spirit in his cell at Dunning, on the first day of the kalends of July;’ and his disciples and the people of the province take his body to Culenros, and there, with psalms and hymns and canticles, he was honourably buried; and so ends the life. Here we have the same strange eastern origin, the same journey to the west, the same occupation of the papal throne, as we found in the legend of Boniface. This feature seems to characterise the legends of those missionaries who promoted the great change by which a new order of clergy, under the influence of the Roman Church, superseded the Columban monks in the eastern and northern districts of Scotland; and probably the invention had no greater motive than to separate them, in a very marked manner, from the clergy of the older church, and to give weight and authority to their promotion of the influence of the Roman party.

In this case, however, an older Irish document gives him a closer connection with the west. In the tract on the mothers of the saints, which is ascribed to Aengus the Culdee, in the ninth century, we are told that ‘Alma, the daughter of the king of the Cruithnech,’ or Picts, ‘was the mother of Serb, or Serf, son of Proc, king of Canaan, of Egypt; and he is the venerable old man who possesses Cuilenros, in Stratherne, in the Comgells between the Ochill Hills and the sea of Giudan.’ Here Alpia, a name which has a very Pictish look, the daughter of the king of Arabia, becomes Alma, the daughter of the king of the Picts, and the husband of a Pictish princess must have belonged to a race nearer home than the people of Canaan, here placed on the west bank of the Nile and connected with Egypt. The Scotch part of the legend, like that of Bonifacius, is supported by the dedications, all the churches in the places mentioned in connection with him being dedicated to St. Serf. The chronology of this part of the Life, too, is quite consistent; we find no anachronisms in it, and there is not a syllable about his being a disciple of Palladius or the teacher of Kentigern. The Brude, son of Dargart, of the Life, may be identified with Brude, son of Derile, who reigned from 697 to 706, and preceded that Nectan, son of Derile, who expelled the Columban monks from his kingdom. Brude appears in one of the chronicles, which seems to have been connected with Lochleven, as Brude, son of DargartDargart; and the chronicle adds, ‘in which time came Saint Servanus to Fife.’ Then Adamnan, who is brought into such close connection with Servanus, died in 704, only two years before the death of Brude; and there were, as we know, the most friendly relations between them. Now there is in the Chartulary of St. Andrews a memorandum of some early charters in the Celtic period, and one of them is a grant by which ‘Brude, son of Dergard, who is said by old tradition to have been the last of the kings of the Picts’—which however he was not—‘gives the isle of Lochlevine to the omnipotent God, and to Saint Servanus, and to the Keledei hermits dwelling there, who are serving, and shall serve, God in that island.’ In another, ‘Macbeth, son of Finlach, and Gruoch, daughter of Bodhe, king and queen of the Scots, give to God omnipotent, and the Keledei of the said island of Lochlevine, Kyrkenes.’ And in a third, ‘Macbeth gives to God and Saint Servanus of Lochlevyne, and the hermits there serving God, Bolgyne.’ We thus see that the establishment founded by Servanus about the beginning of the eighth century was one of hermits, and that they bear the name of Keledei. There is nothing inconsistent with probability that they may have been introduced by Adamnan, after he had himself conformed to Rome and was endeavouring to bring over his brethren, and that that part of the Life which brings him to the south shore of the Firth of Forth—in other words, from Northumbria—when he is met in Inchkeith by Adamnan, may be perfectly true.

Jocelyn of Furness, in his Life of Kentigern, tells us that he ‘joined to himself a great many disciples whom he trained in the sacred literature of the Divine law, and educated to sanctity of life by his word and example. They all with a godly jealousy imitated his life and doctrines, accustomed to fastings and sacred vigils at certain seasons, intent on psalms and prayers and meditation on the Divine Word, content with sparing diet and dress, occupied every day and hour in manual labour. For, after the fashion of the primitive church under the Apostles and their successors, possessing nothing of their own, and living soberly, righteously, godly and continently, they dwelt, as did Kentigern himself, in single cottages, from the time when they had become mature in age and doctrine. Therefore these solitary clerics were called in common speech Calledei.’ In assigning the Calledei, or Keledei of Glasgow to the time of Kentigern, Jocelyn is no doubt guilty of as great an anachronism as when he assigned to him Servanus as a teacher; and the statement belongs to the same period in Kentigern’s supposed history, when he first became bishop of Glasgow; but this part of his life is very problematical, ‘and the historical part of his legend probably begins only when he returned from Wales after the battle of Ardderyd. Here, however, he appears connected with the Monastic Church of Wales, he is followed by six hundred and sixty-six of his monks of Llanelwy, and Jocelyn tells us that these monks all rest, as the inhabitants and countrymen assert, in the cemetery of the church of the city of Glasgow.’ Jocelyn, however, wrote while there existed bodies of Keledei in Scotland, and he is no doubt reporting a genuine tradition as to the original characteristics of the Culdean clergy before they became canons. What he here describes is simply a community of anchorites, or hermits. Servanus was contemporary with that Scottish Sedulius, bishop of the Britons, who had conformed to Rome, and whom we find bishop of the Strathclyde Britons after they had acquired their independence and became freed from the yoke of the Angles. It is to this period that these Calledei of Glasgow properly belong; and this connection with the real Servanus may have led to the history of this period having been drawn back, and both Calledei and Servanus associated with the great apostle of Glasgow in popular tradition.

We have seen that in the year 710, Nectan king of the Picts placed his kingdom under the patronage of St. Peter, and we have now reached the period when that apostle was superseded by St. Andrew as the patron saint of the kingdom. Two separate editions of the legend of the foundation of St. Andrews have come down to us. The older of these is a document of the twelfthtwelfth century, and appears in connection with the earliest of the chronicles in which the century which intervened between the last of the Scottish kings of Dalriada and the first of the Scottish dynasty which ascended the throne of the Picts is suppressed, and the line of the Scottish kings of Dalriada made immediately to precede Kenneth mac Alpin, the founder of the latter dynasty. The second form of the legend is longer and more elaborate, and emerges, at a somewhat later period, from St. Andrews itself. The older legend bears this title: ‘How it happens that the memory of St. Andrew the apostle should exist more widely in the region of the Picts, now called Scocia, than in other regions; and how it comes that so many abbacies were anciently established there, which now in many cases are by hereditary right possessed by laymen.’ The legend itself obviously consists of five parts, very inartistically put together. In the first, we are told that St. Andrew, the brother-german of St. Peter, preached to the northern Scythian nations, and sought the Pictones, then the Achæans, and finally the town of Patras, where he was crucified on the second day before the kalends of December, and where his bones were kept down to the time of Constantine the Great, and his sons Constantine and Constans, that is, for a space of two hundred and seventy years. In their reign they were taken up and transferred to Constantinople and there enshrined, and remained there till the time of the Christian emperor Theodosius, a period of about one hundred and ten years. In the second part we are told that a king of the Picts, called Ungus, son of Urguist, rising with a great army against the British nations inhabiting the southern part of the island, and cruelly ravaging and slaying, came at last to the plain of Merc, or the Merse. Here he wintered. Then came nearly the whole of the natives of the island and surrounded him, wishing to destroy him with his army; but, next day, when the king was walking with his seven most intimate companions, a divine light surrounded them, and, falling on their faces, they heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Ungus, Ungus, hearken unto me, the apostle of Christ called Andrew, who am sent to defend and protect you. Behold the sign of the cross in the air; let it advance against your enemies. You must, however, offer up the tenth part of your inheritance as an oblation to God omnipotent, and in honour of St. Andrew.’ On the third day he divides his army into twelve troops, each preceded by the sign of the cross, and they were victorious. The king then returned home resolved to immolate the tenth part of his inheritance to God and St. Andrew the apostle. The third part of the legend tells us that one of the custodians of the body of St. Andrew the apostle at Constantinople, when he had taken counsel and fasted for two, three, nay four days, and prayed for the mercy of God, was admonished by a vision that he must leave his country and kindred and home and go to a land which would be shown him. Accordingly he went, conducted by the angel, and arrived safely at the summit of the King’s Mount, that is, Rigmund. The fourth part tells us that, in the same hour in which he sat wearily with his seven companions, a divine light overwhelmed the king of the Picts, who with his army was coming to a particular place called Kartenan; and not bearing the light, they fell on their faces, and deaf and blind were healed to the number of seven; and one, who had been blind from his birth and received sight, cried with a loud voice that he saw the place full of the visitation of angels; and the king with his army came to the place which the Lord had shown to the blind man. The fifth part begins, ‘Regulus, therefore, a monk, a pilgrim from the city of Constantinople, with the relics of St. Andrew, which he had brought with him, met the king at the gate which is called Matha, that is, Mordurus. They saluted each other, and fixed their tents where now is the Royal Hall.’ King Ungus then gave that place and city to God and St. Andrew the apostle, that it should be the head and mother of all the churches which are in the kingdom of the Picts. ‘Regulus, therefore, abbot and monk, with his dear companions, occupied that place, leading a monastic life, and serving God day and night, in holiness and justice all the days of his life, and their bodies rest there. Regulus held in his hand and power the third part of the whole of Scocia, and ordained and distributed it in abbacies. This country commended itself, by the situation and amenity of its localities, to Picts, Scots, Danes, Norwegians, and others, who arrived to ravage the island; and, if they needed refuge, it offered them always a safe receptacle, and received them within her as in their own camp.’ The first part of this legend may be put aside as connected with the history of the relics of St. Andrew prior to the fifth century, and is true enough; but it is obvious that the other parts are inconsistent with each other, and appear to be derived from different sources and to have been inartistically brought together. Thus, in the third part, an unnamed custodier of the relics brings them from Constantinople and lands at Rigmund; but in the fifth part Regulus, a monk, brings them from Constantinople and arrives at the gate called Matha; and this last part seems unconnected and as if it belonged to a different narrative from those that precede.

The second legend, which emanated from St. Andrews itself, is much more elaborate. The first part of this form of the legend states that in the year 345 Constantine collected a great army to invade Patras, in order to avenge the martyrdom of St. Andrew and remove his relics; that an angel appeared and ordered Regulus, the bishop, with his clergy, to proceed to the sarcophagus in which the bones of St. Andrew were enshrined, and to take a part of them, consisting of three fingers of the right hand, a part of one of the arms, the pan of one of the knees, and one of the teeth, and conceal them; that the following day Constantine entered the city and carried off to Rome the shrine containing the rest of the bones; that he then laid waste the Insula Tyberis and Colossia, and took from thence the bones of St. Luke and St. Timothy, and carried them to Constantinople along with the relics of St. Andrew. The second part of this legend is an elaboration of the second part of the other. The Pictish king is called Hungus, son of Ferlon. His enemy is Adhelstan, king of the Saxons; and he is encamped at the mouth of the river Tyne. The night before the battle St. Andrew appears to Hungus in a dream and promises him the victory, and tells him that his relics will be brought to his kingdom, and the place where they are brought will become honoured and celebrated. The people of the Picts swear to venerate St. Andrew ever after if they prove victorious. Adhelstan is defeated, and his head is taken off and carried to a place called Ardchinnechun, or Queen’s Harbour. According to the third part of this form of the legend, some days after this victory the angel of God appears a second time to the blessed bishop Regulus, and warns him to sail towards the north with the relics of St. Andrew which he had reserved, and, wherever his vessel should be wrecked, there to erect a church in honour of St. Andrew. Bishop Regulus, accordingly, accompanied by holy men, sails towards the north, voyages among the islands of the Grecian Sea for a year and a half, and wherever he lands erects an oratory in honour of St. Andrew. At length they direct their sails towards the north, and on the eve of St. Michael arrive at the land of the Picts, at a place once called Muckros, but now Kylrimont; and, his vessel being wrecked, he erects a cross he had brought from Patras, and remains there seven days and nights. Having intrusted the care of this place to the seniors St. Damian and his brother Merinach, Regulus and the rest go with the relics to Forteviot, and find there the three sons of King Hungus—viz. Owen, Nectan, and Finguine—who, being anxious as to the life of their father, then on an expedition in the region of Argathelia, give a tenth part of Forteviot to God and St. Andrew. They then go to a place called Moneclatu, but now Monichi, and there Finchem, the queen of King Hungus, is delivered of a daughter called Mouren, who was afterwards buried at Kylrimont; and the queen gives the place to God and St. Andrew. They then cross the mountain called the Mounth, and reach a place called Doldencha, but now Chondrohedalvan, where they meet King Hungus returning from his expedition. The king prostrates himself before the relics, and this place also is given to God and St. Andrew. They then return across the Mounth to Monichi, where a church was built in honour of God and the apostle; thence to Forteviot, where also a similar church is built. King Hungus then went with the holy men to Chilrymont, and, making a circuit round a great part of that place, immolated it to God and St. Andrew for the erection of churches and oratories. King Hungus and Bishop Regulus and the rest proceeded round it seven times, Bishop Regulus carrying on his head the relics of St. Andrew, his followers chanting hymns, and King Hungus following on foot, and after him the magnates of the kingdom. Thus they commended that place to God, and protected it with the king’s peace; and, in commemoration, the holy men surrounded it with twelve stone crosses. King Hungus afterwards gave to the basilica of the holy apostle, as a parochia, the land between the sea called Ishundenema and the sea called Sletheuma, and in the district adjacent to it the land within a line drawn from Largo through Ceres to Naughton. King Hungus gave this place, viz. Chilrymont, to God and St. Andrew his apostle, with waters, meadows, fields, pastures, moors and woods, as a gift for ever, and granted the place with such liberty that its inhabitants should be free and for ever relieved from the burden of hosting, and building castles and bridges, and all secular exactions. Bishop Regulus then chanted the Alleluia, that God might protect that place in honour of the apostle; and, in token of this freedom, King Hungus took a turf in presence of the Pictish nobles, and laid it on the altar of St. Andrew, and offered that same turf upon it. This part of the legend concludes with the names of thirteen Pictish witnesses of royal race, whose names have been apparently taken at random from the earliest part of the list of the Pictish kings.

Now these two forms of the legend are in very striking contrast to each other, especially in the part which Regulus plays in each. In the former and older legend, he makes his first appearance when he meets the king at the gate called Matha with the relics. In the latter he is introduced into the history of the removal of the relics from Patras, and reserves a portion to be conveyed to a distant land; and thus, along with him, the whole history is removed back to the fourth century. His character too, and that of his foundation, is quite different in the two legends. In the older he is presented to us as a monk and abbot. He and all his people follow a monastic life at St. Andrews, and he founds abbacies or monasteries. He possesses the third part of all Scotia, and devotes it to the foundation of abbacies or monasteries throughout the whole of it. In the later legend he appears as a bishop. He has two presbyters and two Deacons among his followers, and he founds churches and oratories which are dedicated to St. Andrew. In the one we have a purely monastic foundation; in the other a church with secular clergy. The older legend, therefore, takes us back for Regulus to the Monastic Church which had been founded among the southern Picts by Columba towards the end of the sixth century, and to it we must look for the Regulus of this form of the legend. Now, we find it stated in the Acts of Farannan that, after the great synod of Drumceitt in the year 573, which was attended both by Columba and by Aidan, king of Dalriada, the former, before he returned to Britain, founded a church in the Region of Cairbre. This was the church of Drumcliffe, situated a little to the north of Sligo, in the barony of Cairbury and diocese of Elphin, the foundation of which is attributed to Columba in the old Irish Life. We are then told that on this occasion he was met by the leading ecclesiastics of the neighbourhood, with the men and women most noted for sanctity, who accompanied him in some of his wanderings. Now, among these ecclesiastics we find recorded the name of Regulus, or Riagail, of Muicinis, an island in the lake formed by the river Shannon called Loch Derg; and this Regulus appears in the old Irish Martyrologies on the 16th day of October. In the Felire of Angus the Culdee there is commemorated, on that day, ‘Riagail, gifted was his career;’ and the gloss is, ‘that is, Riagail of Muicinish, in Loch Derg.’ Regulus of St. Andrews, however, is commemorated in the Scottish Calendar on the 17th of the same month; and we find that there is usually a confusion in the celebrations on these two days, when the 16th day of the month is also the 17th day before the kalends of the next month. We also find that, while the name of the Irish Regulus’ foundation is Muicinis, or the isle of swine, the name of St. Andrews, before it received that of Chilrymont, is said in the second legend to have been Muicross, or the promontory of swine. It seems, therefore, to be a reasonable conclusion that the Regulus of Muicinis, commemorated on the 16th October, and the Regulus of Muicross, on the 17th of that month, were the same person, and that the historic Regulus belongs to a Columban church founded among those which Columba established among the southern Picts during the last years of his life, and at the same time when Cainnech of Achaboe had his hermitage there; and to those older foundations must be appropriated the churches dedicated to Regulus, or St. Rule.

The title of the older legend states that the abbacies or monasteries then founded ‘in the territory of the Picts, which is now called Scotia,’ that is, in the districts between the Firth of Forth and the river Spey, had to a great extent passed into the possession of laymen; and the legend seems to attribute this to the depredations of the occupiers of the land—the Picts, Scots, Danes, Norwegians and others who took possession of them as a safe refuge. The order in which these occupiers are enumerated is historically correct; and, though the expressions are somewhat obscure, they seem to indicate that the expulsion of the Columban monks, which terminated the Monastic Church in these districts, had been followed by the same process as we learn from Bede took place in Northumbria after the Scottish monks had withdrawn from thence. The assimilation of the church there to that of Rome, and the reaction towards a secular clergy, appear to have led there to a secularisation of the monasteries to a great extent. Bede gives us an account of this in a letter written in the last year of his life, that is, in 735, to Bishop Ecgberct; and the picture he draws shows a complete disorganisation of the monastic institution in the land, and its usurpation by the secular world. ‘As you yourself very well know,’ he says, ‘those who are utterly regardless of a monastic life have got into their power so many places under the name of monasteries, that there is no place at all which the sons of the nobility or of veteran soldiers may occupy.’ Again, ‘But there are others guilty of a still more grievous offence. For, though they are themselves laics, and neither habituated to nor actuated by the love of a regular life, yet, by pecuniary payments to the kings, and under pretext of founding monasteries, they purchase for themselves territories in which they may have freer scope for their lust; and, moreover, they cause these to be assigned to them by royal edicts for an hereditary possession;’ ‘and, though they themselves are laymen, yet they have monks under their rule,—or, rather, they are not monks when they assemble there, but such as, having been expelled from the true monasteries for the crime of disobedience, are found wandering up and down; or those whom they themselves have succeeded in alluring from these monasteries; or, at any rate, those among their own servants whom they have been able to induce to take the tonsure and make a promise of monastic obedience to them. With these motley bands they fill the cells which they have constructed.’ ‘Thus,’ says Bede further, ‘for about thirty years, that is, from the time when King Aldfrid was removed from the world, our province has been so demented by this mad error, that from that period scarcely has there been a single prefect who has not, during the course of his prefectship, founded for himself a monastery of this description. And, since this most wretched custom has become prevalent, the ministers also and servants of the king were content to do the same. And thus, contrary to the established order, numberless persons are found who style themselves indiscriminately abbots and prefects, or ministers or servants of the king; and, though laymen might have been instructed in something of the monastic life, not indeed by experience but by hearsay, yet these persons have nothing in common with the character or profession whose duty it is to give the instruction. And indeed such persons, at their own caprice, suddenly receive the tonsure, as you are aware; and by their own decision are made from laymen, not monks, but abbots.’ This piteous wail of the true-hearted Bede seems to find an echo in the title of the older legend of St. Andrew. King Aldfrid died in 705, and the thirty years Bede refers to extend to the year in which he wrote this account, and which was indeed the last of his life. It was but twelve years after King Aldfrid’s death that King Nectan expelled the Columban monks from his dominions. The monasteries would naturally fall into the possession of the tribe of the land; and, if we substitute monasteries founded by the Columban church, from which their monks were expelled, for monasteries and cells directly founded by laymen, it is probable enough that the withdrawal of the Columban monks in the one country and their expulsion in the other, with the introduction of a secular clergy in both, was followed by similar results; and that the kingdom of the Picts may have exhibited the greater part of these monasteries in the hands of laymen, the semblance and the nomenclature of the monastic institution being thus kept up without the reality. Bede indicates that the motive for doing so was to preserve the privileges of such foundations, such as exemption from service and right of sanctuary, without the corresponding obligations; and such grounds of action would be equally powerful in the one country as in the other. Tighernac records in 747 the death of Tuathal, abbot of Cinnrighmonadh, or Kylrimont. He may have been one of those titular abbots; but as this is the only instance in which an abbot of Kilrymont is noticed in the Irish Annals, it is more probable that he was the expelled abbot of the old monastery, who had died in Ireland.

But if the historic Regulus belongs to the older Columban foundation at Muicross, and if the expulsion of the Columban monks was followed by such results, it is equally certain that King Hungus and the reception of the relics of St. Andrew, which is inseparably connected with him in the legend, must be brought down to a later period, to which also the fictitious Regulus belongs. The lists of the Pictish kings show no Angus or Hungus, son of Fergus, till we come to the powerful king of that name who reigned from 731 to 761; and the events ascribed to him in the legend correspond with those of his reign. He was engaged in war in the Merse, and he had penetrated into those parts of Argathelia which formed the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada, on an expedition which had for its object the entire conquest of that kingdom, and might well lead his sons to fear for his safety. The narrative which Bede gives us of the circumstances which led King Nectan to place his kingdom under the patronage of St. Peter in 710 entirely excludes the possibility of the national veneration of St. Andrew having been introduced before that date; and, while it is obvious, from an analysis of the legends, that a fictitious and artificial antiquity has been given to it, yet the knowledge of its true date seems not to have been entirely extinguished by the fabulous one: for we find a record of it in one chronicle, though not a very early one, when it is said, ‘The zeire of God sevynn hundir lxi ye relikis of Sanct Androw ye Apostle com in Scotland;’ and this year synchronises with the last year of the reign of Angus mac Fergus, who was one of the most powerful kings of the Picts. If, then, the relics of St. Andrew were brought into Scotland in the reign of this Angus, king of the Picts, the question at once arises, Where did they come from?—and here the mind naturally reverts to the church of Hexham. It too was dedicated to St. Andrew. It too possessed relics of St. Andrew. But in both it preceded in date the foundation of St. Andrews in Scotland; for Hexham was founded in 674 by Wilfrid, who dedicated it to the apostle, and the relics were brought there by his successor, Bishop Acca, whose episcopate lasted from 709 to 732. In one remarkable respect, too, one church was a reflection of the other; for Wilfrid dedicated his church to St. Andrew in consequence of his belief that he had received the gift of persuasive eloquence through the intercession of the apostle, in answer to his prayers offered up in the church of St. Andrew in Rome; and he afterwards erected two chapels at Hexham, dedicated to St. Mary and St. Michael, owing to his belief that he had recovered from a mortal sickness through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, announced to him in a vision by Michael the Archangel. This peculiar combination, therefore, at Hexham, of a principal dedication to St. Andrew with chapels to St. Mary and St. Michael, arose out of incidents in Wilfrid’s life. And yet we find the same combination at St. Andrews in Scotland, for the second legend tells us, after narrating the foundation of St. Andrews, ‘Afterwards in Chilrymont the holy men erected seven churches—one in honour of St. Regulus, the second in honour of St. Aneglas the Deacon, the third in honour of St. Michael the Archangel, the fourth in honour of St. Mary the Virgin, the fifth in honour of St. Damian, the sixth in honour of St. Brigida the virgin, and the seventh in honour of a certain virgin Muren.’ The first of these churches belongs, of course, to the older foundation; but here we find that the third and fourth are chapels dedicated to St. Michael and St. Mary. There seems, too, to have been a tradition that about this time the foundation of an episcopal see among the Picts proceeded from Hexham. When Bede wrote his history in 731, Acca was still living at Hexham, and exercising his episcopal functions there apparently without disturbance; but Simeon of Durham tells us that in 732—that is, in the following year—Acca was expelled from his see; and Prior Richard of Hexham adds to this statement, ‘By what urgent necessity he was driven forth, or whither he directed his steps, I do not find recorded. But there are some who say that at that time he commenced and prepared the episcopal see at Candida.’ or Whithern. He certainly founded no see at Whithern, for we have the contemporary authority of Bede for the fact that it had been founded some years before, and that Pecthelm was its first bishop; but, at the time Prior Richard wrote, the memory of the great Pictish kingdom had passed away, the Picts of Galloway alone retained the name, and writers of that period transferred to Galloway events that truly belonged to the northern portion of the race. Thus Florence of Worcester placed Trumuini as bishop of Candida, though it is clearly stated by Bede that the Picts he presided over were those north of the Firth of Forth; and Prior Richard, in quoting the passage from Bede, where he says that Wilfrid’s bishopric extended over the Picts as far as Osuiu’s dominion extended, over whom Trumuini was afterwards placed, adds the expression, ‘because Whithern had not yet its own bishop,’ thus transferring what was intended by Bede to apply to the Picts north of the Forth to those of Galloway. The Hexham tradition was probably no more than that it was believed Acca had gone to the nation of the Picts and founded a bishopric among them. It is certainly a remarkable coincidence that Acca, the venerator of St. Andrew, and the importer of his relics into Hexham, should have fled in 732, and that a report should have sprung up that he had founded a bishop’s see among the Picts; and that St. Andrews should have been actually founded by a Pictish king between the years 736 and 761, and part of the relics of St. Andrew brought to it at that time. Indeed, the correspondence between the church history of the Northumbrian and Pictish kingdoms in this respect is at this time very striking:—the Northumbrians expelling the Columban clergy, introducing secular clergy with dedications to St. Peter, and then dedicating Hexham to St. Andrew, and receiving the relics of the apostle brought there by one of its bishops; and, sixty years later, the Picts expelling the Columban monks, introducing the secular clergy, placing the kingdom under the patronage of St. Peter, and then receiving from some unknown quarter the relics of St. Andrew, and founding a church in honour of that apostle, who becomes the national patron saint. The second legend concludes with this statement:—‘These are the names of those holy men who brought the sacred relics of St. Andrew the apostle into Scotia—St. Regulus himself; Gelasius the deacon; Maltheus the hermit; St. Damian, presbyter, and his brother Merinach; Nervius and Crisenius from the island Nola; Mirenus, and Thuluculus the deacon; Nathabeus and Silvius his brother; Seven hermits from the island of the Tiber—Felix, Juranus, Mauritius, Madianus, Philippus, Eugenius, Lunus; and three virgins from Collossia, viz., Triduana, Potentia, Cineria. These virgins are buried at the church of St. Aneglas. Thana, son of Dudabrach, wrote this document for King Pherath son of Bergeth, in the town of Migdele.’ The king here meant is probably the last king but one of the Picts, called in the Pictish Chronicle Wrad son of Bargoit, who reigned from 840 to 843; and Migdele is Meigle in Perthshire.

The church of St. Andrews, then, is represented in this legend as consisting of three groups—First, one of secular clergy, viz., Bishop Regulus himself, with two priests and two deacons, and three others, whose quality is not given; secondly, a group of hermits, viz., Maltheus, with two from the island of Nola, and seven from the island of Tiber—in all, a community of ten; and, thirdly, three virgins. The second group is that of the hermits, representing a community of Keledei similar to those established by Servanus in Lochleven. The legend of Triduana, which is preserved in the Aberdeen Breviary, tells us that she led a heremitical life, with her virgins Potentia and Emeria, in a desert place at Roscoby (Rescobie in Forfarshire). The tyrant Nectanevus, prince of the neighbourhood, pursued her, whereupon she fled to Dunfallad (Dunfallandy) in Athol. There his ministers coming to her and telling her that the beauty of her eyes had attracted the prince, she plucked them out and gave them to them. Triduana then devoting herself to prayer and fasting in Lestalryk, now Restalrig, in Laudonia, passed into heaven. Here, as usual, the legend is supported by the dedications. At Rescobie is St. Triduan’s fair. Restalrig is also dedicated to her; and here too a connection with Northumbria, to which it then belonged, seems to peep out.

The canonical rule appears to have been adopted in Scotland not long after it had been introduced into Ireland; for, as we learn from the Chronicles, two hundred and twenty-five years and eleven months after the church of Abernethy had been founded by Gartnach, son of Domelch, who reigned from 584 to 599, the church of Dunkeld was founded by Constantin, son of Fergus king of the Picts, who reigned from 790 to 820. This places the foundation of Dunkeld some time between the years 810 and 820, and the tradition of Dunkeld, as reported by Alexander Mylne, a canon of that church in 1575, is that he placed there ‘religious men who are popularly called Keledei, otherwise Colidei, that is God-worshippers, who, according to the rite of the Oriental Church, had wives, from whom, however, they withdrew while ministering, as was afterwards the custom in the church of St. Regulus, now St. Andrew;’ while Wyntoun, the prior of Lochleven, tells us that

Awcht hundyr wyntyr and fyftene
Fra God tuk fleysch off Mary schene,
Leo and Charlys bath ware dede,
And Lowys than in Charlys stede.
The kyng off Peychtis Constantyne
Be Tay than foundyd Dwnkeldyne,
A place solempne cathedrale,
Dowyd welle in temporalle.
The byschape and chanownys thare
Serẅys God and Saynct Colme, seculare,
Off oure byschoprykis, off renowne
The thryd, and reputatyowne.

The date assigned by Wyntoun to the foundation of Dunkeld is probably correct, and those religious men who Mylne says were popularly called Keledei, Wyntoun here calls ‘chanownys seculare.’

The result, then, that we have arrived at is that the Culdees originally sprang from that ascetic order who adopted a solitary service of God in an isolated cell as the highest form of religious life, and who were termed Deicolæ; that they then became associated in communities of anchorites, or hermits; that they were clerics, and might be called monks, but only in the sense in which anchorites were monks; that they made their appearance in the eastern districts of Scotland at the same time as the secular clergy were introduced, and succeeded the Columban monks who had been driven across the great mountain range of Drumalban, the western frontier of the Pictish kingdom; and that they were finally brought under the canonical rule along with the secular clergy, retaining, however, to some extent the nomenclature of the monastery, until at length the name of Keledeus, or Culdee, became almost synonymous with that of secular canon.

Chapter VII. The Coärbs of Columcille.

‘It appears to have been a wonderful dispensation of the Divine goodness, that the same nation which had wittingly and without envy communicated to the people of the Angles the knowledge of the true Deity, should afterwards, by means of the nation of the Angles, be brought, in those points on which they were defective, to the rule of life;’ such is the reflection of the Venerable Bede when contemplating the change which had taken place in the Columban Church in the beginning of the eighth century, which he thus expresses: ‘The monks of Hii, or Iona, by the instruction of Ecgberct, adopted the Catholic rites under Abbot Dunchad, about eighty years after they had sent Bishop Aidan to preach to the nation of the Angles.’ He had previously stated that, not long after the year 710, ‘those monks also of the Scottish nation who lived in the island of Hii, with the other monasteries that were subject to them, were, by the procurement of our Lord, brought to the canonical observance of Easter and the right mode of tonsure; and this had been effected by the most reverend and holy father and priest Ecgberct, of the nation of the Angles, who had long lived in banishment in Ireland for the sake of Christ, and was most learned in the Scriptures and distinguished for the perfection of a long life, and who came among them, corrected their error, and changed them to the true and canonical day of Easter.’ Bede implies that this took place in the year 716; but the change was not so general or so instantaneous as might be inferred from this statement. The monks of Iona, or a part of them at least, had certainly in that year adopted the Catholic Easter; but it is not till two years after that date, and a year after the death of Abbot Dunchad, that they adopted the coronal tonsure. The expression of the Irish annalist who records the event rather implies that it had been forced upon an unwilling community; and, so far from the other monasteries that were subject to them having generally submitted to the change in 716, the resistance of those within the territories of the Pictish king to the royal edict commanding the adoption of the Catholic Easter and the coronal tonsure throughout all the provinces of the Picts led to the expulsion of ‘the family of Iona’—by which expression the Columban monks are meant—from the Pictish kingdom in 717. This conflict then appears to have led to two results. In the first place, it separated the churches of the eastern districts from Iona, broke up the unity of the Columban Church, and terminated the supremacy of the parent monastery of Iona over the churches in the Pictish kingdom, which had been subject to them; and, in the second place, it seems undoubtedly to have caused a schism in the community on the island, as such innovations usually do when the attempt to force upon an entire body the views of a majority is sure to be met by a resisting minority.

There were thus at this time two parties among the brethren in Iona. One party, who had reluctantly given way on some points, but in the main adhered to the customs of their fathers, and clung with tenacity to the monastic system hallowed by their veneration for the founder Columba; the other, and probably the larger and more influential, conforming in everything to the Roman party, and leaning towards a modification of their monastic institution by the introduction of a secular clergy—each party putting up a rival abbot as soon as they found themselves sufficiently powerful to do so. By the death of Dunchad, in 717, Faelchu was left for the time sole abbot of Iona. He was of the race of Conall Gulban, and the legitimate successor of the old abbots according to the law which regulated the succession to the abbacy in the Monastic Church; and his party would be strengthened by those of the refugee monks from the monasteries in King Nectan’s dominions who took shelter in Iona. Of the monks who had been driven out of the Pictish kingdom, some would merely pass over the Drumalban range into the territory of the Scottish kings of Dalriada, or seek a farther home among the Columban monasteries in Ireland; but many would no doubt be drawn to the parent monastery in Iona, which was beyond King Nectan’s power, and add numbers and force to what might be termed the Conservative party in the island. On the other hand, Ecgberct was still alive and resident in Iona, and would naturally be at the head of what may be called the Reforming party, and use all his influence in promoting and extending their authority in the island. The account Bede gives of his life there shows that his efforts were not so immediately and entirely successful as one would infer from his other statements, and that his progress was slow. He says, ‘This man of God, Ecgberct, remained thirteen years in the aforesaid island which he had thus consecrated again to Christ, by kindling in it a new ray of divine grace, and restoring it to ecclesiastical unity and peace. In the year of our Lord’s incarnation 729, in which the Easter of our Lord was celebrated on the eighth day before the kalends of May—that is, on the 24th April—when he had performed the solemnity of the mass in memory of the same resurrection of our Lord, on that same day he departed to the Lord; and thus finished, or rather never ceases to celebrate, with our Lord, the apostles and the other citizens of heaven, the joy of that greatest festival, which he had begun with the brethren whom he had converted to the grace of unity. But it was a wonderful provision of the divine dispensation that the venerable man not only passed out of this world to the Father at Easter, but also when Easter was celebrated on that day on which it had never been wont to be kept in these parts. The brethren, therefore, rejoiced in the certain and Catholic knowledge of the time of Easter, and rejoiced in the protection of their father, departed to our Lord, by whom they had been corrected. He also rejoiced that he had been continued in the flesh till he saw his followers admit and celebrate with him as Easter that day which they had ever before avoided. Thus the most reverend father, being assured of their correction, rejoiced to see the day of our Lord; and he saw it, and was glad.’ These expressions are hardly consistent with the statement that he had brought the entire community over to the adoption of the Catholic customs thirteen years before, in 716; and we find that during his life, after Faelchu had been left in sole possession of the abbacy, it was not till he had possessed it for five years that a rival abbot, Feidhlimidh, is put forward in the year 722, who is recorded as holding the abbacy in that year, though Faelchu was still in life. His pedigree is not recorded, and he could have had no claim as belonging to the tribe of the saint, to whom the succession belonged. Again, when Faelchu dies in 724, we find that a certain Cillene Fada, or the Long, succeeds Faelchu in the abbacy, and on his death, in 726, another, Cilline, surnamed Droichteach, appears as abbot, though during the whole of this time Feidhlimidh also is abbot of Iona. Ecgberct did not, therefore, see entire conformity during his life, and the schism was in full vigour up to the day of his death.

We must place probably at this time and in connection with these events two missionaries, who likewise appear to have proceeded from the south towards the western districts and the Isles. These are Modan and Ronan. Modan appears in the Scotch Calendars as an abbot on the 4th February, and as a bishop on the 14th November; but the dedications to him are so much mixed up together that it is probable that the same Modan is meant in both. Ronan appears as bishop on the 7th of February. The dedications to them are usually found so close together as to show that they both belonged to the same mission. We first find Modan at Dryburgh, on the south bank of the Tweed, and then at the church called by the Celtic people Eaglaisbreac, and by the Anglic population Fahkirk, now called Falkirk, both meaning ‘the speckled church.’ We then find him at Rosneath, in the district of Lennox, and near it is the church of Kilmaronok dedicated to St. Ronan. They appear to have proceeded to Lorn, where Balimhaodan, or ‘St. Modan’s town,’ is the old name of Ardchattan, and where on the opposite side of Loch Etive, is again Kilmaronog. Ronan appears then to have carried his mission to the Isles. He has left his trace in Iona, where one of the harbours is Port Ronan. The church, afterwards the parish church, was dedicated to him, and is called Teampull Ronaig, and its burying-ground Cladh Ronan. Then we find him at Rona, in the Sound of Skye, and another Rona off the coast of Lewis; and finally his death is recorded in 737 as Ronan, abbot of Cinngaradh, or Kingarth, in Bute. The church, too, in the island of Eigg again appears about this time, when we hear in 725 of the death of Oan, superior of Ego.

A new element seems now to have been introduced into the controversies at Iona, and probably still further complicated the state of parties there. This was the appearance, after the death of Cillene the Long, but while Feidlimidh, the rival abbot, was still alive, of an anchorite as abbot of Iona. Tighernac tells us that in 727, the year after Cillene’s death, the relics of St. Adamnan were carried to Ireland and his law renewed, that is, what was called the law of the innocents, which exempted women from the burden of hosting. An ancient document, however, in one of the Brussels MSS. explains this to mean not that the bones of Adamnan had been enshrined and carried to Ireland, but other relics which had been collected by him. The passage is this: ‘Illustrious was this Adamnan. It was by him was gathered the great collection of the relics (martra) of the saints into one shrine; and that was the shrine which Cilline Droichteach, son of Dicolla, brought to Erin, to make peace and friendship between the Cinel Conaill and the Cinel Eoghain.’ Cilline Droichteach, however, appears in the Martyrology of Tallaght as ‘Abb Iae,’ or abbot of Iona; and the Martyrology of Marian expressly says, ‘Abbot of la Cholumcille was this Cilline Droichteach;’Droichteach;’ while his death is recorded by Tighernac in 752 as ‘anchorite of Iona.’ Here then we have an anchorite who was abbot from 727 to 752 during the tenure of the same office by Feidhlimidh. Cilline was not of the race of Conall Gulban, and therefore not of the line of legitimate successors to the abbacy, but belonged to the southern Hy Neill. The collecting of the relics of the saints by Adamnan is clearly characteristic of that period in his history when he had conformed to Rome; and Cilline’s bearing the shrine as a symbol of his authority in renewing Adamnan’s law connects him also with the same party. The results then of the controversy at Iona correspond with those which we have already found among the Picts after the expulsion of the Columban monks—that, besides the secular clergy who made their appearance in connection with the Roman party, there likewise came clergy belonging to the more ascetic order of the anchorites; and they now appear as forming one of the parties in Iona. The epithet of Droichteach means literally bridger, or bridgemaker, a name apparently little appropriate in an island where there are no streams large enough to render bridges necessary; but behind the vallum of the monastery, and extending from the mill-stream to the hill called Dunii, was a shallow lake, occupying several acres, which fed the stream, and which was probably partly natural and partly artificial. Through the centre of this lake, which is now drained, there runs a raised way pointing to the hills. It is a broad and elevated causeway constructed of earth and stones, and is now called Iomaire an tachair, or ‘the ridge of the way.’ It is 220 yards long and about 22 feet wide. In a hollow among the hillocks to which it points, and at some little distance, is the foundation of a small oval house measuring about 18 feet long by 14 broad, outside measure, now called Cabhan Cuildeach; and from the door of the house proceeds a small avenue of stones, which grows wider as it ascends to a hillock; and there are traces of walls which appear to have enclosed it. It is difficult to avoid the conjecture that it was the construction of this causeway which gave to Cillene, the anchorite abbot, his epithet of Bridgemaker, more especially as it points towards what appears to have been an anchorite’s cell, to which it was probably designed to give ready access across the lake; and, if he constructed it, we have only to look to an old anchorite establishment in Ireland to find what afforded him his pattern. In the island of Ardoilen, on the west coast of Ireland, already referred to as affording an example of an early anchorite establishment, we find that ‘on the south side of the enclosure there is a small lake, apparently artificial, from which an artificial outlet is formed, which turned a small mill; and along the west side of this lake there is an artificial stone path or causeway, 220 yards in length, which leads to another stone cell or house, of an oval form, at the south side of the valley in which the monastery is situated. This house is eighteen feet long and nine wide, and there is a small walled enclosure joined to it, which was probably a garden. There is also, adjoining to it, a stone altar surmounted by a cross, and a small lake which, like that already noticed, seems to have been formed by art.’ There is no appearance of a stone altar near the cell in Iona. In other respects the resemblance seems too striking to be accidental.

It is during this period, while Feidhlimidh and Cilline the anchorite appear as rival abbots, that a catastrophe is recorded by Tighernac in 737, in which Failbe, son of Guaire, the heir of Maelruba of Apuorcrosan, was drowned in the deep sea with twenty-two of his sailors. The monastery founded by Maelruba at Apuorcrosan, now Applecross, had therefore remained intact. The word ‘hæres,’ or heir, is here the equivalent of the Irish word Comharba, pronounced coärb, signifying co-heir or inheritor, which occasionally appears as applied to the heads of religious houses in Ireland during the preceding century, in connection with the name of its founder, and which now makes its first appearance in Scotland. In the Monastic Church in Ireland, when land was given by the chief or head of a family, it was held to be a personal grant to the saint or missionary himself and to his heirs, according to the ecclesiastical law of succession. Heirs of his body such a founder of a monastery, who was himself under the monastic rule, of course could not have; but, as we have seen, when the tribe of the land and the tribe of the patron saint were the same, the former supplied the abbacy with a person qualified to occupy the position; and, when they were different, the abbot was taken from the tribe to which the patron saint belonged. These were his ecclesiastical successors and co-heirs. As such they inherited the land or territory which had been granted to the original founder of the church or monastery, and as such they inherited, as coärbs, or co-heirs, his ecclesiastical as well as his temporal rights. When the integrity of the monastic institutions in Ireland began to be impaired in the seventh century under the influence of the party who had conformed to Rome, the heads of the religious houses found it necessary to fall back more upon the rights and privileges inherited from the founders; and hence in this century the term of Coärb, in connection with the name of some eminent saint, came to designate the bishops or abbots who were the successors of his spiritual and temporal privileges, and eventually the possessor of the land, bearing the name of abbot, whether he were a layman or a cleric. Thus, at A.D. 590, the annals record the appointment of Gregory the Great to be coärb of Peter the Apostle, that is, bishop of Rome. At 606 we have the death of Sillan, son of Caimin, abbot of Bangor and ‘coärb of Comgall,’ who was its founder. In 654 we find the superior of the church of Aranmore called ‘coärb of Enda’ its founder; and in 680 the superior of the monastery at Cork is termed coärb of St. Barry, who founded it. Here in 737 the abbot of the monastery at Apuorcrosan is termed the heir, that is coärb, of Maelruba, who founded it; and, as we shall see, the abbots of Iona became known under the designation of coärbs of Columcille. Twelve years afterwards a similar catastrophe befell the family of Iona, who were drowned in a great storm in the year 749, a not unnatural occurrence if they were caught in their curach between Iona and Colonsay in a southwesterly gale; but which party suffered by this loss we do not know—probably that which supported Cilline the anchorite, as, on his death in 752, we find the abbacy assumed by Slebhine, son of Congal, who was of the race of Conall Gulban, and therefore belonged to what may be termed the Columban party. In the same year Tighernac records the death of Slebhine’s brother Cilline in Iona, and of Cuimine, grandson or descendant of Becc the religious of Ego, or the island of Eigg. Slebhine, the Columban abbot, appears to have endeavoured to get his authority as the legitimate successor of Columba recognised by the Columban monasteries in Ireland; for we find him going to Ireland in 754, and enforcing the law of Columcille three years after, when he seems to have returned to Iona, but again went to Ireland in the following year. Feidhlimidh, the rival abbot, dies in the year 759, having completed the eighty-seventh year of his age. But this did not terminate the schism: for we find a Suibhne, abbot of Iona, who goes to Ireland in the year 765, apparently for the purpose of endeavouring to win the Columban monasteries there; but the death of Slebhine two years after leaves him sole abbot for five years, when, on his own death in the year 772, he is succeeded by Breasal, son of Seghine, whose pedigree is unknown; and in him the schism seems to have come to an end. Slebhine appears to have been the last of the abbots who at this time were of the race of Conall Gulban and had thus a hereditary claim to the abbacy; and more than a hundred years elapsed before another of the race obtained the abbacy. The fall of the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada about this time may have contributed to this suspension of the rights of the tribe of the patron saint. But all opposition to the entire conformity of the whole family of Iona to the Roman Church appears now to have ceased, and there is no indication of any further division among them.

Breasal appears to have held the abbacy without challenge for nearly thirty years; and, five years after his accession, he seems to have been fully recognised by the Columban monasteries in Ireland, as we find that the law of Columcille was enforced in 778 by Donnchadh, king of Ireland, and head of the Northern Hy Neill, and by him as abbot of Iona. In 782 we have the first notice of a new functionary in Iona, in the death in that year of Muredach son of Huairgaile, steward of Iona. His functions were probably connected with the law of Columcille, which involved the collection of tribute. We find, too, during this period, some incidental notices of two of the other foundations in the Isles. In 775 dies Conall of Maigh Lunge, the monastery founded by Columba in Tyree. In 776 the death of Maelemanach, abbot of Kingarth in Bute, and in 790 that of Noe, abbot of the same monastery, are recorded. We learn, too, that while Breasal was abbot two Irish monarchs retired to Iona and died there. Niall Frosach, formerly king of all Ireland, died there in 778. Airtgaile, son of Cathail, king of Connaught, assumed the pilgrim’s staff in 782, and in the following year retired to Iona, and died there after eight years spent in seclusion. The last connection of the Scots, too, with Dalriada was severed for the time by the removal of the relics of the three sons of Erc, the founders of the colony, who had been buried in Iona, to the great cemetery of Tailten in Ireland.

Breasal’s tenure of the abbacy, however, was to be characterised by a greater event, which was to exercise a fatal influence on the fortunes of the Scottish monasteries for many a long and dreary year. This was the appearance in the Isles, in 794, of a host of sea pirates from the northern kingdom of Denmark, who were to render the name of Dane equivalent in the ears of the Columban monks to the spoliation of their monasteries and the slaughter of their inmates. In 794 there appears in the Irish Annals the ominous entry of the devastation of all the islands of Britain by the Gentiles, as they were at first called, followed, in 795, by the spoliation of Iae Columcille, or Iona, by them. Again, three years after, the spoliation of the islands of the sea between Erin and Alban by the Gentiles. The Danes soon discovered that the richest spoil was to be found in the monasteries, and directed their destructive attacks against them. Breasal, however, though doomed to witness these acts of spoliation, was spared the sight of the total destruction of his monastery; for in 801 he died, in the thirty-first year of his tenure of the abbacy.

In the following year the monastery of Iona was burnt down by the Danes, and the Annals of the Four Masters place in the same year the death of Connachtach, a select scribe and abbot of Iona; and four years afterwards the community of Iona, then consisting of only sixty-eight members, were slain by the Danes, |A.D. 802-814.
Cellach, son of Congal, abbot of Iona.| Cellach, son of Conghaile, the abbot who succeeded Connachtach, having apparently taken refuge in Ireland. The monastic buildings thus destroyed belonged, no doubt, to the original monastery, which, as we have seen, had been originally constructed of wood, and repaired by Adamnan. Hitherto there had been no feeling of insecurity in connection with such wooden buildings, but since the ravages of the Danes began there is abundant evidence of the frequent destruction of such buildings by fire; and in the present instance there seems to have been not only the entire destruction of the monastery, but also the slaughter of those of the community who remained behind. So complete was the ruin, and so exposed had the island become to the ravages of the Danes, that the abbot Cellach appears to have resolved to remove the chief seat of the Columban order from Iona to Kells in Meath, of which he had obtained a grant two years previously. The Irish Annals record, in the year following the slaughter of the community, the building of a new Columban house at Kells; and we are told that in 814 Cellach, abbot of Iona, having finished the building of the church at Kells, resigns the abbacy, and Diarmicius, disciple of Daigri, is ordained in his place. This monastery at Kells, which thus took seven years to build, was constructed of stone, which now began universally to supersede wood in the construction of ecclesiastical buildings, as less likely to suffer total destruction from the firebrand of the Danes.

At this time, too, the remains of St. Columba seem to have been raised from the stone coffin which enclosed them, and carried to Ireland, where they were enshrined. We know from Adamnan that the body of the saint had been placed in a grave prepared for it, and apparently enclosed in a stone coffin, and that the place in which it lay was perfectly well known in his day. We also know that, at the time Bede wrote his History in 735, his remains were still undisturbed; but, at the time the Book of Armagh was compiled, that is, in 807, they were enshrined and preserved at the church of Saul Patrick on the shore of Strangford Lough in the county of Down in Ireland. It is therefore between these dates, 735 and 807, that they must have been removed.

Among the customs which sprang up in the Irish Church after she had been brought into contact and more frequent correspondence with the Roman Church, and had, to some extent, adopted her customs, was that of disinterring the remains of their saints and enclosing them in shrines which could be moved from place to place, and which were frequently used as a warrant for enforcing the privileges of the monasteries of which the saint was the founder. Notices of such enshrining of their relics first appear in the Irish Annals towards the middle of the eighth century. Thus we read, in 733, of the enshrining of the relics of St. Peter, St. Paul and St. Patrick for enforcing his law; in 743, of the enshrining of the relics of St. Treno of Celle Delgon, and in 776, of those of St. Erc of Slane and St. Finnian of Clonard; in 784, of the relics of St. Ultan; in 789, of those of St. Coemgin and St. Mochua. Then, in 799, we have the placing of the relics of Conlaid, who was the first bishop of Kildare, and, in 800, of those of Ronan, son of Berich, in shrines of gold and silver.

We have already seen that the remains of St. Cuthbert were enshrined eleven years after his death; and the circumstances are given in so much detail by Bede, who is a contemporary authority, that the proceedings of the Lindisfarne monks will throw light upon those of the monks of Iona. St. Cuthbert had wished to be buried in a stone coffin which had been given him by the abbot Cudda, and was placed under ground on the north side of his oratory in the island of Farne, but which he wished to be placed in his cell on the south side of his oratory opposite the east side of the holy cross which he had erected there. However, he accedes to the request of the Lindisfarne monks that they should bury him in their church at Lindisfarne. Accordingly, after his death his body was taken to Lindisfarne and deposited in a stone coffin in the church on the right side, that is, the south side, of the altar. Eleven years later the Lindisfarne monks resolved to enclose his remains in a light shrine, and, for the sake of decent veneration, to deposit them in the same place, but above, instead of below, the pavement. On opening his sepulchre they find the body entire, and they laid it in a light chest and deposited it upon the pavement of the sanctuary. Bishop Eadberct, St. Cuthbert’s successor, then died, and they deposited his body in the tomb of St. Cuthbert, and placed above it the shrine which contained the relics of the latter saint.

We see then that at this time, and in a church which derived its origin from Iona and preserved many of its Scottish customs, the place where the patron saint was buried was on the right, or south, side of the altar, and that when his remains were enshrined the shrine was placed in the same situation, but above the pavement of the church, instead of being sunk beneath it, that they might more readily be made the object of veneration. As the saint’s body was said to have been found entire, the light chest or shrine must have been large enough to contain it. We know from Simeon of Durham’s History of the Church of Durham that, when, owing to the cruel ravagings of the Danes, the monks resolved to abandon Lindisfarne, they took this shrine with them, and that it was finally deposited at Durham. He then tells us that in the year 1104 ‘the body of St. Cuthbert was disinterred, on account of the incredulity of certain persons, and was exhibited, in the episcopate of Bishop Ralph, in the presence of Earl Alexander, who afterwards became King of Scots, and many others. Ralph, abbot of Seez, afterwards bishop of Rochester, and ultimately archbishop of Canterbury, and the brethren of the church of Durham, having examined it closely, discovered that it was uncorrupted, and so flexible in its joints that it seemed more like a man asleep than one dead; and this occurred four hundred and eighteen years, five months and twelve days after his burial.’ The description here given of the state of the body of St. Cuthbert is a verbatim repetition of that given by Bede when his tomb was opened eleven years after his death, and must be taken as having no other foundation; but we have from Reginald of Durham what is more material, an exact description of the shrine which enclosed it. He says—‘We have hitherto treated of the manner in which St. Cuthberct, the glorious bishop of Christ, was placed in his sepulchre; we will now give a description of the inner shrine (theca) itself. In this inner shrine he was first placed in the island of Lindisfarne, when he was raised from his grave; and in this his incorruptible body has been hitherto always preserved. It is quadrangular, like a chest (archa), and its lid is not elevated in the middle, but flat, so that its summit, whether of lid or sides, is all along level and even. The lid is like the lid of a box, broad and flat. The lid itself is a tablet of wood, serving for an opening, and the whole of it is made to be lifted up by means of two circles, or rings, which are fixed mid-way in its breadth, the one towards his feet and the other towards his head. By these rings the lid is elevated and let down, and there is no lock or fastening whatever to attach it to the shrine. The shrine is made entirely of black oak, and it may be doubted whether it has contracted that colour of blackness from old age, from some device, or from nature. The whole of it is externally carved with very admirable engraving, of such minute and most delicate work that the beholder, instead of admiring the skill or prowess of the carver, is lost in amazement. The compartments are very circumscribed and small, and they are occupied by divers beasts, flowers, and images, which seem to be inserted, engraved, or furrowed out in the wood. This shrine is enclosed in another outer one, which is entirely covered by hides, and is surrounded and firmly bound by iron rails and bandages. The third, however, which is decorated with gold and precious stones, is placed above these, and, by means of indented flutings projecting from the second, for which, in due order, similar projections are fabricated in this, is closely attached and fastened to it by long iron nails. This cannot possibly be separated from the rest, because these nails can by no device be drawn out without fracture.’

The Irish shrine was probably not so elaborate, but it too, as we have seen, was decorated with silver and gold; and in the Life of St. Bridget, written probably in the first half of the ninth century, and attributed to Cogitosus, an account is given us of the shrines in the church of Kildare. We have seen that the remains of Conlaid, the first bishop of Kildare, were disinterred and enshrined in the year 799; and Cogitosus, in his description of the church of St. Bridget, says, ‘in which the glorious bodies both of Bishop Conleath and of this virgin St. Bridget repose on the right and left sides of the altar, placed in ornamented shrines decorated with various devices of gold and silver and gems and precious stones, with crowns of gold and silver hanging above them.’ If we are to look, then, to the period between the years 735 and 807 for the circumstances which led to the remains of St. Columba being disinterred, taken over to Ireland, and enshrined at the church of Saul Patrick, one of the nearest churches to Iona on the Irish coast, the most natural inference certainly is that they were connected with the piratical incursions of the Danes and the destruction of the original monastery by fire in 802.

In the year 818, Diarmaid, abbot of Iona, returned to the island, bringing with him the shrine of St. Columba. This implies that there had been by this time a reconstruction of the monastery at Iona. The same causes which led to the new foundation at Kells being constructed of stone applied with equal force at Iona; and, looking to the time which was spent in erecting the buildings at Kells, which required seven years to complete them, and that four years had elapsed before Diarmaid could bring the shrine to Iona, there can be little doubt that the new monastery there was now likewise constructed of stone. The site, however, was changed. The position of the original wooden monastery was, we have seen, in the centre of the open level ground which extends between the mill-stream on the south and the rocky hillocks which project from the east side of Dunii on the north, and about a quarter of a mile to the north of the present ruins; but of this no vestiges now remain, save the western vallum, or embankment, which can still be traced, and the burying-ground near the shore, marked by two pillar-stones about five feet high and three feet apart, across the top of which a third stone lay, forming a rude entrance or gateway. This monastery had never before been exposed to any hostile attack; but, now that it had become the object of the plundering and ravaging incursions of the Danes, it was discovered to be in a very exposed situation. In front was the sea, and behind it, on the west, from which it was separated by the vallum, was the lake extending from the mill-stream to the base of Dunii. The ground south of the mill-burn presented a much more secure site, for here it was bounded on the west by a series of rocky heights which could be fortified; and here, where the present ruins of a late Benedictine monastery are situated, can be discovered the traces of older stone buildings, which must have belonged to an earlier monastery. These no doubt may not be part of a stone monastery erected so long ago as the beginning of the ninth century, but the monastery then erected would merely be repaired, and such parts as entirely gave way rebuilt from time to time; and it may be assumed that, when the monastic buildings were once constructed of stone, the monastery would always be preserved in the same place. Here, then, the new stone monastery was probably constructed, consisting of an oratory or church, a refectory, the cells of the brethren and an abbot’s house. Behind the latter is a small rocky hillock called Torrabb, or the abbot’s mount, in which is still to be found the pedestal of a stone cross; and on a higher rocky eminence on the west, which overhangs the monastery, are still to be seen the remains of entrenchments and outworks by which it appears to have been strongly fortified.

Here the brethren were reassembled, and hither was brought the shrine containing the relics of St. Columba, which, according to what we have seen was the usage of the time, would be placed on the right, or south, side of the altar in the church, so as to be exposed for the veneration of the inmates of the monastery. It might be supposed that the monks of Iona would have felt a reluctance to leave a site hallowed by the memories of their venerated patron saint, even though the new site may have promised greater security; but it must be recollected that it is the presence of the saint’s body that hallows the site of the monastery he has founded, and confers upon it the privileges of an Annoid, or mother church. Any spot to which his relics might be taken would be equally sacred in the eyes of the community, and the new monastery equally endowed with the privileges connected with them. It was so with the monks of Lindisfarne, whose veneration accompanied the body of St. Cuthbert when forced to retreat from their monastery under very similar circumstances; and it hallowed every spot in which it was deposited, till it finally invested the church at Durham, which held his shrine, with the same feeling of devotion and reverence which had attached to their first seat in the island of Lindisfarne.

Whether the new stone monastery in Iona was to afford them better security against their pagan plunderers the Danes was now to be tested, as seven years had not elapsed before they renewed their attack; and we now get a glimpse into the state of the monastery at this time from a contemporary, in the metrical life of St. Blathmac, written by Walafrid Strabo, who himself died only in the year 849. He tells us that Blathmac was of royal descent, heir of a throne in that rich Ireland which had given birth to him as her future king; that, renouncing all secular prospects, he resolved to lead a religious life and do honour to his name, which signifies in Latin ‘pulcher natus;’ that he surreptitiously joined a certain monastery, which his biographer does not name, but which was in his father’s principality, and finally, as abbot, ruled a venerable body of monks; that he finally, in order to attain the height of perfection, coveted the crown of martyrdom, and, in order to attain his desire, thought he could not do better than go to ‘a certain island on the shores of the Picts placed in the wave-tossed brine, called Eo,’ or Iona, ‘where Columba, the saint of the Lord, rests in the flesh. This island he sought under his vow to suffer the marks of Christ, for here the frequent hordes of pagan Danes were wont to come armed with malignant furies.’ He seems to have had the care of the monastery intrusted to him, and had not long to wait, ‘for the time soon came when the great mercy of God decreed to associate his servant with his glorious hosts above the stars, and confer a sure crown,’ viz. that of martyrdom, ‘upon the pious victor.’ He became aware that an attack on the island was about to be made by the Danes, and he thus addressed the brethren:—‘“Ye, O companions, seek within your own minds whether it be your determination to endure with me the coming fate, for the name of Christ. Whoever of you can face it, I pray you arm yourselves with courage; but those who are weak at heart and panic-struck should hasten their flight, that they may avoid the obvious danger, arming their hands for better vows. Before us stands the imminent trial of certain death. May a firm faith keep us prepared for future events; may the careful guardian of the flying protect those less strong.” The community, touched by these words, determined to act according to their strength. Some, with a brave heart resolved to face the sacrilegious bands, and rejoiced to have to submit their heads to the raging sword; but others, whom the confidence of mind had not yet persuaded to this, hasten their flight to known places of refuge.’

Blathmac was aware that in attacking the monasteries the great object of desire to the Danes was the shrines enriched with precious metals; and therefore the monks ‘took the shrine from its place,’ which was, no doubt, on the right side of the altar, and ‘deposited it in the earth in a hollowed tumulus, or grave, and covered it with sods.’ The fatal day is then ushered in rather poetically, showing how thoroughly the narrator realised the scene. ‘The golden aurora,’ he says, ‘dispelling the dewy darkness, dawned, and the glittering sun shone again with glorious orb, when this pious cleric stood before the holy altar, celebrating the holy offices of the mass, himself a victim acceptable to God to be offered up to the threatening sword. The rest of the brethren lay commending their souls with prayers and tears, when, behold, the cursed bands rushed raging through the unprotected houses, threatening death to those blessed men, and, furious with rage, the rest of the brethren being slain, came to the holy father, urging him to give up the precious metals which enclosed the sacred bones of Saint Columba,’—a description which shows that there was a church or oratory, with an altar—that the services of the church were again observed, and that there were houses or cells for the monks. ‘This booty,’ he proceeds, ‘the Danes coveted; but the holy man stood firm with unarmed hand, by a stern determination of the mind taught to resist battle and to challenge encounter, unaccustomed to yield. He then poured out in the barbarous tongue—that is, in Danish—the following words: “I know not truly what gold ye seek, where it may be placed in the ground, and in what recesses it may be hid; but, if it were permitted me to know, Christ permitting, never would these lips tell this to your ears. Savagely bring your swords, seize their hilts and kill. O God, I commend my humble self to Thy protection.” Hereupon the pious victim is cut in pieces with severed limbs, and what the fierce soldier could not compensate with a price he began to search for by wounds in the stiffened entrails. Nor is it a wonder, for there always were and always will arise those whom evil rage will excite against the servants of the Lord.’ And so Blathmac attained his desire, and was made ‘a martyr for the name of Christ.’ This event, so graphically described by the abbot of Augiadives, or Reichenau, took place in the year 825.

Four years after the martyrdom of Blathmac, we find Diarmaid, the abbot of Iona of whose presence in Iona while the Danes attacked the monastery in 825 we saw no trace, coming to Scotland with the Mionna of Coluimcille. The word Mionna, as Dr. Reeves has pointed out, ‘signifies articles of veneration, such as the crozier, books, or vestments of a saint, upon which oaths used in after-times to be administered,’ in contradistinction to the word Martra, denoting the bones or remains of the body of the saint. Thus we find Adamnan mentioning the brethren endeavouring to avert the effects of a drought by walking round a field, with the white tunic of St. Columba and some book written in his own hand. By this time, then, the brethren who had escaped were reassembled at Iona under their abbot; and to this period we may assign the construction, over the spot where the shrine had been concealed, of a small oratory for its reception. At the west end of the present ruins of the abbey church, and attached to the west wall of the cloister, are the foundations of a small quadrangular cell which goes by the name of St. Columba’s tomb. The walls are about three and a half feet high, but it has been partly excavated, as the interior floor is somewhat below the surface of the surrounding ground. It has at the west end a regularly formed entrance, and within it—at the east end—are two stone cists placed along the north and south walls, with the space of a few feet between them. That this so-called cell is, in fact, the remains of a small oratory, is at once evident when we compare these remains of the building with oratories of this description in Ireland; and of one of these, which is more entire, it seems to be almost a reproduction. In the parish of Templemolaga and county of Cork there are the remains of some ecclesiastical buildings. They consist of a central or enclosing wall, within which are the remains of a church about twenty-five feet long by twelve feet broad inside measure, and on the north side of this, at a little distance, is a small oratory, which goes by the name of Leaba Molaga, or St. Molaga’s bed. It measures internally ten feet by seven feet two inches clear of walls, which are two feet nine inches thick. The cell at Iona measures internally ten feet five inches by seven feet, and the walls are about two feet thick. The west gable of St. Molaga’s bed is partly preserved, and shows in the centre a doorway formed of two upright stones for jambs, which support a massive horizontal lintel. It is five feet six inches in height and two feet four inches in width. The entrance to the cell at Iona is in the same place and of the same width. This kind of oratory in Ireland has one peculiarity, and that is a prolongation of the side walls beyond either gable to the extent of from eighteen inches to two feet, which is carried up the gables on a line with the stone roof, forming a species of pilaster. These exist in Leaba Molaga, being about two feet three inches wide and one foot four inches deep; and the same peculiar feature is seen in the cell at Iona. At the east end of Leaba Molaga there were a small window and an altar of stone on which were preserved two stones believed to have been candlesticks; and on the south side of the altar, and along the south wall of the oratory, was a stone cist, or tomb, which measures five feet six inches in height, one foot eight inches in width, and one foot in depth. Within the cell at Iona there are two stone cists, one lying along the south wall of the oratory, and the other along the north wall, with the space of a few feet between them. The cist on the south wall is eight feet ten inches in length, and that on the north wall six feet nine inches, and both cists are also one foot eight inches broad. The east end of the cell now forms the wall of the cloister, and, if a window existed, it has been built up, but the resemblance between the two buildings is so striking, that we can hardly doubt that it was an oratory of the same kind, and that the space between the two cists was once filled, at the east end, by a stone altar. The stone cist on the right, or south, side of the altar would, according to custom, contain the shrine of St. Columba, the patron saint; that on the north side probably the remains of St. Blathmac, who died a martyr in protecting it from the Danes and who, we are told by his biographer, ‘reposes in the same place, where, for his holy merits, many miracles are displayed.’

Abbot Diarmaid did not remain long in Iona, for we find him in the year 831 returning to Ireland with the Mionna, and we hear no more of him. In 849 Innrechtach, abbot of Iona, is said to have gone to Ireland with the Mionna of Columcille, from which we may infer that they had been restored to Iona, and that some time between the year 831 and 849 Innrechtach had become abbot. We know nothing of his race except that his surname was Ua Finachta, and nothing of his history except that he was slain by the Saxons when on a journey to Rome in the year 854, and that he is then called heir, or coärb, of Columcille. In the meantime that great revolution had been effected which placed a Scottish dynasty on the throne of the Picts. This is the most obscure portion of the history of Scotland, and it is now hardly possible to trace the circumstances which combined to elevate a Scot, in the person of Kenneth mac Alpin, to a position of so much power, or to ascertain to what extent the ecclesiastical element entered into this revolution; but we can gather that it led to the reintroduction of the Scottish clergy into the eastern districts thus added to Kenneth’s kingdom, and to an attempt to reclaim for them these monasteries from which they had been expelled in the preceding century. And this appears to have extended even to the Scottish foundations in Lothian; for Kenneth, we are told, invaded Saxonia, as the country south of the Firth of Forth was still termed, six times, and burnt Dunbarre and Mailros, which had been usurped. In whatever sense Dunbarre was held to be usurped, or whether this epithet was intended to apply to it as well as to Mailros, the latter was unquestionably founded by the Scottish missionaries from Iona, who were, as we know, expelled from the monasteries they had founded, if they would not conform to Rome; and it is possible that Dunbar may also have been a Scotch foundation. It was undoubtedly in the possession of the Angles of Northumbria; but Melrose appears to have been transferred to the Britons of Strathclyde, as we find it afterwards in the diocese of Glasgow; and it was probably in retaliation that the Britons burnt Dunblane. Be this as it may, Kenneth certainly resolved to re-establish the Columban Church within the territories of the southern Picts, which now formed the heart of his kingdom, on a different basis; and, for this purpose, selected Dunkeld, where Constantine, king of the Picts, had founded a church, probably as being the nearest of the Pictish churches to the former Scottish kingdom of Dalriada, and the most central for the whole kingdom.

Here, we are told, he built a church, and removed to it the relics of St. Columba—that is, probably, only a part of them—in the seventh year of his reign, which corresponds with the year 850, the year after Innrechtach had departed to Ireland with the Mionna. Iona, as we have seen, had already lost her primacy over the Columban monasteries in Ireland, which, in consequence of the destruction of her monastery by the Danes, was transferred to Kells; and, in taking the relics to Dunkeld, Kenneth constituted it too as an Annoid, or mother church, over the Columbans in Scotland, and seems to have resolved to place the abbot of his new monastery of Dunkeld as bishop over the church in the territories of the southern Picts which had now come under his rule, with a view to the more ready reorganisation of Scottish monasteries within them, so that it should form one diocese, as it were, under one bishop. Accordingly, five years after Kenneth’s death, we find recorded the death of Tuathal mac Artguso, abbot of Dunkeld and first bishop of Fortrenn, as the kingdom of the southern Picts was then called. As abbot of Dunkeld, a church dedicated to St. Columba and possessing part of his relics, he thus occupied towards the Columban monasteries in Scotland the same position as had belonged to Iona, and would be regarded by them as coärb of Columcille. As bishop of Fortrenn he was the recognised head of the Pictish church.

The same year in which the death of the first bishop of Fortrenn is recorded contains also the record of the death in the territory of the Picts of Cellach son of Aillel, abbot of Kildare, and abbot of Iona. Nothing can better show how completely Iona had lost her position for the time, and how difficult it now was to find a person to occupy the post of danger, than the abbacy falling to an abbot of Kildare; but, though he is said to have been also abbot of Iona, he did not die either there or in his own monastery of Kildare, but in the country of the Picts. He had probably been driven from his own monastery in the province of Leinster by its exposure to the attacks of the Danes, by whom it was plundered and its church burnt in the year 836; and in 845 its vice-abbot was slain, a title which seems to indicate the absence of the abbot. Kildare was, as we know, dedicated to the great virgin saint of Ireland, St. Bridget, or St. Bride, and was the mother church of all her foundations; but there was within the country of the Picts one church in especial which was also dedicated to St. Bride, and was held to be in a manner affiliated to that of Kildare, and that was the church of Abernethy; and when we find an abbot of Kildare seeking refuge in the Pictish kingdom and dying peacefully within its bounds, it could hardly be elsewhere than in this church of Abernethy that he took refuge; and he appears, when Innrechtach had left his monastery of Iona and been slain on his way to Rome in 854, to have been appointed abbot of Iona. Abernethy thus comes again into view for the first time since it was refounded by St. Columba at the end of the sixth century. The Columban monks were, no doubt, expelled from it in the beginning of the eighth century, but now, in the reign of Kenneth mac Alpin, it was once again occupied by Irish clergy. It is at this time probably that we may place the erection of the round tower there, which could only have been the work of Irish clergy; and this is the more probable as it is undoubtedly of an older type than the round tower at Brechin, the date of the building of which can be placed with some degree of certainty late in the succeeding century, and as a round tower had been erected at Kildare, which Dr. Petrie places at the close of the preceding century.

The year 865, which saw the deaths both of the first bishop of Fortrenn and of the abbot of Kildare, corresponds with the second year of the reign of Constantine, the son of Kenneth; and he seems to have transferred the bishopric from Dunkeld to Abernethy, for we find the next abbot of Dunkeld, who died during this reign, called simply superior of Dunkeld, while the title of bishop of Fortrenn is dropped; and Bower, the abbot of Inchcolm, tells us of Abernethy that ‘in that church there had been three elections of bishops when there was but one sole bishop in Scotland; and at that time it was the principal royal and episcopal seat, for some time, of the whole kingdom of the Picts.’Picts.’ He is surely here reporting a genuine tradition, and the statement as to the three elections during the time when there was one sole bishop is so specifically made that it must have been derived from some authentic record. But the time when there was one sole bishop cannot have been before the nomination of the abbot of Dunkeld as first bishop of Fortrenn. It must, however, have been before the bishops of St. Andrews appear as sole bishops in the succeeding century. We are driven, therefore, to place it in this interval between the death of Tuathal, first bishop of the Picts, in the year 865, and the first appearance of that position being occupied by a bishop of St. Andrews, which, as we shall see, was in the year 908. We have no record of the three bishops elected at Abernethy during this interval; but we may possibly find the name of one of them in the dedication of a neighbouring parish. The church of Lathrisk, now Kettle, was dedicated to St. Ethernascus, whose day in the Scotch Calendar is the 22d December; and we find on the same day in the Irish Calendar Saints Ultan, Tua and Iotharnaisc, at Claonadh, now Clane, in the county of Kildare, which too connects him with the mother church of St. Bridget of Kildare.

There is a legend which seems intimately connected with the events of this very obscure portion of Scottish history. It is the legend of St. Adrian, and, like all such legends, possesses some features which may be considered historical. It is thus told in the Aberdeen Breviary at 4th March, the day of St. Adrian:—Adrian, a distinguished soldier of Christ, derived his origin from the province of Pannonia, a part of the region of Hungary. He was, as usual, of royal descent, and, from his transcendent merits, was early raised to the episcopate; and a large number of clerics and laymen can testify to his labours among them. Desirous of extending them to other countries, and inflamed with zeal for the Christian religion, he took with him a venerable company and set out for the central parts of Scotia, which were then occupied by the Picts, and landed there, having with him confessors, clerics, and common people to the number of six thousand and six, among whom the most notable were Glodianus, who was crowned with martyrdom, Gayus and Monanus, white-robed confessors, Stobrandus and other chief priests adorned with the mitre. These men with their bishop Adrian, the Pictish kingdom being destroyed, did many signs and wonders among the people, but afterwards desired to have a habitation of their own on the Isle of May, at the entrance of the Firth of Forth. But the Danes, who then devastated the whole of Britain, came to the isle and there slew them. In this island of May there was anciently a monastery founded, built of fair-coursed masonry in honour of God and of his martyred saints, which was afterwards destroyed by the nation of the Angles; but there still remains a church often frequented by the faithful people on account of their merits. There is also a celebrated cemetery where the bodies of the martyrs repose. At 1st March, on which day St. Monanus was celebrated, the Breviary legend further tells us that ‘Monanus, born in Pannonia, a province of the region of Hungary, belonged to that company who, with the blessed Adrian, came from the pagan inhabitants of Noricum to the Isle of May, where they were crowned with martyrdom. But, before that the aforesaid company was destroyed by the fury of the Danes, blessed Monanus preached the Gospel to the people on the mainland and in a place called Inverry in Fyf. There his relics rest. Many miracles of healing were performed there.’ The only other version we have of this legend is that given by Wyntoun, who was prior of Lochleven and there composed his Chronicle, and possessed no doubt sources of information as to church legends now lost to us. He thus in his quaint verse tells the tale in connection with Constantin, son of Kenneth, who reigned from 863 to 876:—

This Constantyne than regnand
Oure the Scottis in Scotland,
Saynt Adriane wyth hys cumpany
Come off the land off Hyrkany,
And arryẅed into Fyffe,
Quhare that thai chesyd to led thar lyff.
At the king than askyd thai
Leve to preche the Crystyn fay.
That he grantyd wyth gud will,
And thaire lykyng to fullfille,
And to duell in to his land,
Quhare thai couth ches it mayst plesand.
Than Adriane wyth hys cumpany
Togydder come tyl Caplawchy.
Thare sum in to the Ile off May
Chesyd to byde to thare enday.
And sum of thame chesyd be northe
In steddis sere the Wattyr off Forth.
In Invery Saynct Monane,
That off that cumpany wes ane,
Chesyd hym sa nere the sé
Till lede hys lyff: thare endyt he.
Hwb, Haldane, and Hyngare
Off Denmark this tym cummyn ware
In Scotland wyth gret multitude,
And wyth thare powere it oure-yhude.
In hethynness all lyvyd thai;
And in dispyte off Crystyn fay
In to the land thai slwe mony,
And put to dede by martyry.
And upon Haly Thurysday
Saynt Adriane thai slwe in May
Wyth mony off hys cumpany:
In to that haly Ile thai ly.

The chronology of this tale is quite clear. They came just at the time when the so-called destruction of the Picts by Kenneth mac Alpin took place; and they themselves perished by the Danes in the reign of his son Constantin. Of so remarkable an event, however, as the invasion of Fife by a body of six thousand and six Hungarians history knows nothing, and it is obvious that we have here to deal with a myth somewhat similar to that which brought St. Bonifacius and St. Servanus from Palestine. It appears, however, that there were two traditions as to the origin of these people, and Boece, who reports the fact, may probably here be trusted. He says—‘There are not wanting those who write that these holy martyrs of Christ were Hungarians, who, flying from the pagan fierceness which was then rampant in Germany, passed into Scotland to preserve their religion. Others say they were a company gathered together from Scots and Angles.’ The first refers to the legend in the Breviary; the second contains probably an admission of the truth; and an examination of the legend will confirm this. The names of most of the company are disguised under Latin forms, but one seems to preserve its original shape. Monanus is simply the Irish Moinenn, with a Latin termination. His relics are preserved at Inverry, now St. Monans, and he is venerated on the 1st of March; but this is the day of St. Moinenn in the Irish Calendar, who was first bishop of Clonfert Brenain on the Shannon, and whose death is recorded by Irish annalists in 571. This leads us at once to Ireland as the country from whence they came; and, so far from being accompanied by a living St. Monan, who lived at Inverry, they had probably brought with them the relics of the dead St. Moinenn, bishop of Clonfert, of the sixth century, in whose honour the church, afterwards called St. Monans, was founded. But, when we turn to the history of Ireland at this period, we find Turgesius the Dane had placed himself at the head of all the foreigners in Ireland, and had brought the whole of the south of Ireland under subjection to him. In the year 832 he attacked Armagh and sacked it three times in one month. During the next nine years he appears to have remained content with his secular possession of the country, and did not attempt to overthrow the power of the ecclesiastical authorities; but in 841 he banished the bishop and clergy and usurped the abbacy of Armagh, that is to say, the full authority and jurisdiction in Armagh and the north of Ireland; and he seems not only to have aimed at the establishment of a permanent rule of the Northmen over Ireland, but to have attempted the establishment of his national heathenism in place of the Christianity which he found in the country. This continued for four years, till his death in 845. Now, at this very time Kenneth mac Alpin was establishing his Scottish kingdom in Pictland, and reclaiming for the Scottish clerics their old ecclesiastical foundations. This must naturally have led to an extensive immigration of Scots, both lay and cleric, into his new territories, and we find that, after Turgesius had usurped possession of Armagh, he went to Loch Ree, with a fleet of his countrymen, and from thence ‘plundered Meath and Connaught; and Cluainmicnois was plundered by him, and Cluain Ferta Brenain and Lothra, and Tirdaglas, and Inisceltra, and all the churches of Loch Derg-dheirc, or Loch Derg on the Shannon, in like manner.’ This took place between 841 and 845; and under the latter year the Irish Annals report the destruction as still more complete, for they tell us that at Loch Ree ‘a fortress was erected by Turgesius for the foreigners, so that they spoiled Connaught and Meath, and burned Cluain mic Nois with its oratories, and Cluainferta Brennain, and Tirdaglas, and Lothra, and numerous cities.’ Clonfert then was one of a group of monasteries which were plundered and burnt by the Danes at the very time when a body of clerics and laymen are said to have arrived in Fife and erected a church at Inverry, which was dedicated to St. Monenn, the first bishop of Clonfert, and where his relics were deposited. It seems, therefore, a reasonable conclusion that the two events were connected, and that it was probably owing to the state into which the church in Ireland had been brought by the Danes, and to the coincident establishment of a Scottish dynasty on the throne of the Picts, that we find an abbot of Kildare appearing as also abbot of Iona, and dying in the country of the Picts which had come under Scottish rule, and that the arrival of so large a body of Scots in Fife is intimately connected with the revolution which placed these Pictish districts under the rule of a Scottish king.

The Caplawchy of Wyntoun is now called Caiplie, on the shore of Fife opposite the Isle of May, and Inverry is now called St. Monans. Both are within the eastern district of Fife, which was said to have been given to St. Regulus as a ‘parochia.’ Wyntoun tells us that some of the company who landed there chose to remain on the Isle of May, and others in places beyond the north shore of the Forth; and we may infer that, while the great body of them spread over Fife and the neighbouring districts, some resorted to an eremetical life and were slain by the Danes.

In the meantime the security of Iona was threatened by new enemies. These were the Norwegian Vikings who occupied the Western Isles about the middle of this century, and continued to do so from time to time, till their permanent settlement in the Orkney Islands, towards the end of the century, led to a more continued possession of the Isles; and in the year 878 it appears to have been necessary to remove the relics of St. Columba from Iona to Ireland for safety. These consisted not only of the Mionna, or reliquaries, which had been so frequently taken to Ireland, but also of the shrine which contained the remains of his body; for we are told that in this year ‘the shrine of Colum Cille and all his reliquaries were taken to Ireland to escape the foreigners,’ and two years later Feradach, son of Cormac, abbot of Iona, dies. He was, no doubt, the successor of Cellach, the abbot of Kildare, but his pedigree is unknown, and there is nothing to show whether he was connected with any other religious house. The line of Conall Gulban, however, the ancestor of the tribe of the patron saint, now comes in again, but merely to give to the abbacy of Iona its last independent abbot for many a long year. Flann, the son of Maelduin, whose death as abbot of Iona is recorded in the year 891, was a descendant of Conall Gulban; but one of the same tribe, Maelbrigde, son of Tornan, having been in 888 elected abbot of Armagh, the abbacy of Iona seems to have fallen under his rule also, and thus he is described as ‘coärb of Patrick and of Columcille’ in the Martyrology of Donegal, which adds that he was ‘a man full of the grace of God, and a vessel of the wisdom and knowledge of his time.’ His death is recorded in 927.

In his time, however, the shrine of St. Columba must have been restored to Iona, as we learn from the Life of St. Cadroë, a work of the eleventh century. Cadroë was a native of Scotia, or Scotland, and was born about the year 900. His father was Faiteach, a man of royal blood; his mother, Bania, of similar wealth and nobility. She had been previously married and had sons by her first husband; but after her marriage with Faiteach she continued childless, till, with her husband, she applied to the merits of St. Columba, and, going to his sepulchre and passing the night in prayer and fasting, had hardly slept, when they saw themselves in a vision holding two different candles, which suddenly united into one light, and a man of shining apparel appeared and told her that her tears had stained her stole and assisted her prayers in the sight of God, and that she should bear a son called Kaddroë, a future light of the church, who should have courage like his name; a warrior in the camp of the Lord, he shall go up unconquered against the opposing wall, prepared to stand in battle for the house of Israel. They awake full of joy, and after a time the woman has a son whom, according to the divine command, they called Kaddroë. When the child is old enough, his father’s brother Beanus, an aged priest, wishes to put him to school, but the father objects, and insists that the child must be dedicated to him who gave it. The mother then has another child called Mattadanus. They then go a second time to the tomb of St. Columba, and offer to him the second boy, and deliver the eldest to Beanus to be educated. The expressions used of the sepulchre and the tomb of St. Columba imply that they went to Iona; and the small cell at the west end of the abbey church, now called the tomb of St. Columba, is, as we have seen, in all probability the remains of the oratory in which the shrine of St. Columba was kept, and to which it must have been restored when the parents of St. Cadroë passed the night in prayer and fasting before it. And this connection with Iona is further indicated; for, when the boy reaches an age to require more advanced instruction, he is sent to Armagh, the metropolitan town of Ireland, to be further trained, at a time when, as we have seen, the abbacy of Iona was under the rule of the abbot of Armagh.

Chapter VIII. The Scottish Church.

‘This is he who first gave liberty to the Scottish Church which had been until now under servitude, according to the law and custom of the Picts.’ Such is the almost unanimous testimony of the chronicles as to King Giric, who reigned from 878 to 889; and this is the first appearance of the church under the name of ‘the Scottish Church.’ At this time the kingdom ruled by the new dynasty of kings of Scottish race was still the kingdom of the Picts, and the kings were still called kings of the Picts. Giric therefore must be regarded as such; and he seems also to have broken in upon the Tanistic law of succession, and reintroduced the Pictish law, by which the throne descended to the sister’s children in preference to the son’s; while by ‘the Scottish Church’ could only be meant that church which his predecessor Kenneth had constituted and placed under the rule of one bishop. The first, as we have seen, was the abbot of Dunkeld; but the election of this bishop was now in the hands of the church of Abernethy. Giric’s object therefore probably was to secure the support of the Scottish clergy by conferring a boon upon their church. Whatever that boon may have been, the expression ‘that he first gave it’ seems to imply that it was something which the Pictish kings had not previously given, but in which he was followed by his successors. What then was implied by the church being under servitude, and having liberty given to it? These are terms which, in connection with the church lands, have a very definite meaning. About thirty years before this date Ethelwulf, king of Wessex, as we are told in the Saxon Chronicle, in the year 855, ‘chartered the tenth part of his land, over all his kingdom, for the glory of God and his own eternal salvation;’ and in the deeds rehearsing this grant we find the same expressions used. Thus, in one grant he says that he has not only given the tenth part of his lands to the holy churches, but also ‘that our appointed ministers therein should have them in perpetual liberty, so that such donation shall remain permanently freed from all royal service, and relieved from all secular servitude;’ and in another there is a still more detailed explanation of it. He grants the tenth part of his lands ‘to God and St. Mary, and to all the saints, to be safe, protected and free from all secular services, not only the greater and lesser loyal tributes or taxations, which we call Witeredden, but also free from every thing, for the remission of souls and my sins, to the sole service of God, without hosting or construction of bridges or fortification of citadels, that they may pray for us without ceasing, in as far as we have freed them from their servitude.’ In the early Irish Monastic Church, the land granted for the endowment of a church or monastery to its first founder or patron saint, was usually called its Termon land, and was considered by right to have the privilege of sanctuary and to be free from any rents, tributes, or other exactions by temporal chiefs; but the close connection between the church and the tribe, and the rights of the latter in connection with the succession to the abbacy, led to a constant attempt on the part of the secular chiefs to bring these lands under the same obligations towards themselves as affected the tribe lands; and, when they succeeded in this, they were held to have brought the church under servitude. This appears even as late as the Synod of Cashel, in 1172, the fourth act of which is as follows:—‘That all church lands, and possessions belonging to them, be wholly free from exaction on the part of all secular persons, and especially that neither petty kings, nor chieftains, nor any other powerful men in Ireland, nor their sons with their families, are to exact, as has been customary, victuals and hospitality in lands belonging to the church, or presume any longer to extort them by force;’ and there is an instructive passage in the Annals of the Four Masters, about the same time, where we find it stated, in the year 1161, ‘It was on this occasion that the churches of Columcille in Meath and Leinster were freed by the Coärb of Columcille, Flaithbheartach Ua Brolchain; and their tributes and jurisdiction were given to him, for they had been previously enslaved.’

When the Columban monks were expelled from the Pictish territories in the beginning of the preceding century, and a different system introduced, the church lands would no doubt be brought under the same burdens and exactions as applied to other lands. This appears to have taken place about the same time in England; for St. Boniface, archbishop of Mentz, who was himself an Englishman, writes to Cudberht, archbishop of Canterbury about 745, regarding ‘the enforced servitude of the monks in royal works and buildings, which is not heard of in the whole Christian world save only among the nation of the Angles—which cannot be acquiesced in or consented to by the priests of God—which is an evil unknown to past ages.’ So it seems also to have been among the Picts; and it had become their custom and usage that the church lands and their occupants should not be exempted from secular services. It is therefore probably by a prolepsis that the first grant of St. Andrews by King Hungus is accompanied by exemptions really due to King Giric, when we are told that the donation is ‘with such freedom that its occupiers should always be free and quit from all hosting and construction of castles and bridges, and the vexation of all secular exactions.’ The ordinary burdens of the land among the Picts were exigible by their kings, mormaers and toiseachs; and the proportion received by each was termed their share, as appears from the grants in the Book of Deer. What King Giric did, therefore, was probably to issue a decree, similar in terms to that of the Synod of Cashel at a later period, ‘that all church lands and possessions belonging to them be wholly free from exaction on the part of all secular persons, and that neither kings nor mormaers nor toiseachs are to exact, as has been customary among the Picts, victuals and hospitality in lands belonging the church, or presume any longer to extort them by force.’

Though the church benefited by this act of King Giric, it does not appear to have availed much, so far as his personal object was concerned; for he was, along with his pupil the British son of Kenneth’s daughter, driven out, and the throne was once more occupied by his male descendants. They now were called no longer kings of the Picts, but kings of Alban; and the districts between the Forth and the Spey are no longer Fortrenn, or Pictland, but Alban. The reign of the second of these kings of Alban was an important one for the Church, for in his sixth year—that is, about 908—a great meeting was held on the Moothill of Scone, at which King Constantin and Bishop Cellach ‘solemnly vow to protect the laws and discipline of the faith, and the rights of the churches and of the Gospel, equally with the Scots.’ Two facts may fairly be deduced from the short notice of this meeting given in the Pictish Chronicle; first, that it secured the rights and liberties of the church as now amalgamated into one body; and secondly, that the leading part taken in it by Bishop Cellach obviously places him at the head of the church, and the primacy must now have been transferred from Abernethy to St. Andrews. There are two lists of the bishops of St. Andrews given to us; one by Bower, who was abbot of Inchcolm, and the other by Wyntoun, who was primate of Lochleven. These lists agree, and in both Cellach appears as first bishop of St. Andrews. This meeting may be held to have in fact finally constituted the Scottish Church under its then organisation, in which it was placed under the government of one bishop, who was designated Epscop Alban, or bishop of Alban.

It is followed in some dozen years after by another event, which, though the notice of it from another source is short enough, yet had evidently a very important influence upon the church. We have already seen that a fraternity of Cele De are mentioned in connection with the Church of Armagh as early as the year 921, when we are told by the Irish Annalists that in that year Armagh was pillaged, on the Saturday before St. Martin’s day, which was the 10th of November, by Gofirth, grandson of Ivar, and his army, who spared the houses of prayer with their people of God, the Cele De, and their sick, and the whole church town, except some houses which were burnt through neglect; but two of the annalists add in the same year that ‘Maenach Cele De, or the Culdee, came across the sea from the west, that is, from Ireland, to establish the ordinances of Erinn.’ We have thus the decrees of 908, followed by a Cele De, or Culdee, coming over from Ireland and establishing laws, which can only mean those rules which regulated the community of the Cele De at the time in Ireland, who had now been for a century under the canonical rule; and at this period we must date the establishment in Scotland of the form of canonical life which we find the Culdees in Scotland afterwards exhibiting.

We get a glimpse into the state of the church in this reign too in the Life of St. Cadroë. Having been fully instructed at Armagh, he returned to Beanus, his uncle, and ‘scatters the seeds of wisdom throughout the whole of Scotland; for, though the Scots have had many teachers, they have not had many fathers. He here trained them in the knowledge of the arts, whence, because he instructed many with his lips, he had no associates; for, from the time of his arrival, none of the wise men had crossed the sea, but still remained in Ireland. The old man rejoiced to possess the youth, and had not his equal in anything which he tried.’ In the meanwhile time passed on, and, as usual, he received a divine warning that he was to leave his native country and go on a foreign mission. There flowed near his residence a large river, close to which, as it happened, was the trunk of a certain tree. Thither he went at night, and removing his garments entered the stream in the extreme rigour of cold, and, holding by the tree, that he might not be carried off by the current, he recited Psalms, from the 118th to the 123d Psalm. He then entered upon his pilgrimage, and as grief filled the whole region, and the population assembled, the king of the country, called Constantin, endeavoured to retain him. In his journey Cadroë, desiring to pray, entered the monastery of St. Bridget, when the people coming from different parts completely fill the noble and rustic church. All begged him not to quit the country, and after some discussion a certain abbot, called Maelodarius, came with the king and persuaded them to let him go, and he departed to the land of the Cumbrians. We need not follow him any farther. As Cadroë was born about the year 900, his return from Armagh was either coincident with or soon after the arrival of the Culdee in 920, as is implied in his statement that he was the last of the instructors who had come from Ireland. The large river was no doubt the river Earn; and we may thus identify Beanus with the St. Bean to whom the church of Kinkell in Strathearne, on the north bank of the Earn, was dedicated. He commenced his foreign mission about the year 940. The monastery where he entered the Church of St. Bridget can have been no other than that of Abernethy, and Maelodarius, or Maelodhar, was no doubt its abbot. The first notice of the Cele De at Armagh, as we have seen, occurs in the same year in which Maenach the Cele De came to Scotland, and during the tenure of the abbacy by Maelbrigde, the instructor of Cadroë; and he too probably was connected with the mission which brought the Cele De to Scotland, and with the establishment of its rule. Constantin, who so strenuously urged his not leaving the country, makes a fitting termination to his own reign when, according to the Pictish Chronicle, worn out with age, he assumed the pilgrim’s staff, and served the Lord, and resigned the throne to Malcolm, son of Donald. This is echoed by St. Berchan when he says—

Afterwards God did call him
To the monastery on the brink of the waves,
In the house of the apostle he came to death;
Undefiled was the pilgrim.

By the house of the apostle St. Andrews is meant, and here, according to the testimony of the same chroniclers who reported the grant in favour of the church by King Giric, he becomes abbot of the Keledei, or Culdees.

Whether Cellach the bishop was alive at this time we do not know, but his successor was certainly Fothad, son of Bran. He appears in the Chartulary of St. Andrews as having made an arrangement with the Keledei of Lochleven, by which they gave the island of Lochlevyne to the bishop of St. Andrews, who, in return, undertook to provide them with food and clothing. This grant is said to have been made by ‘Ronan, monk and abbot, a man of admirable sanctity, who first conveyed the place, by a precaria, to the bishop Fothath, son of Bren, who then and since was celebrated throughout all Scotland, and was of a commendable life. The bishop gave his benediction to all who should observe that convention and the friendship established between the bishop and the Keledei; and, on the other hand, gave his malediction to all bishops who should infringe or revoke that convention.’ Fothad remained bishop during the whole of the reign of Malcolm, who succeeded Constantin; but we are told that he was expelled by his successor, Indulph, who reigned from 954 to 962, and that he lived eight years afterwards. As his death is recorded in the year 963, this places his expulsion in the year 955. During the whole of this period the island of Iona was in the main cut off from any connection with Scotland, by the occupation of the Western Islands by the Norwegians, and its monastery had to fall back upon Ireland for such nominal connection with the Columban monasteries as could be kept up. One of the abbots of these monasteries was usually elected coärb of Columcille, and the abbacy of Iona became a dependent monastery under his rule. As we have seen, in the beginning of the century a descendant of Conall Gulban, Maelbrigde, son of Tornan, had been elected abbot of Armagh, and, as belonging to the tribe of the patron saint, became coärb of Columcille; but on his death in 927, Dubthach, son of Duban, who was also of the race of Conall Gulban, became coärb of Columcille. He was abbot of Raphoe, in Ireland, and as such was likewise coärb of Adamnan, and accordingly his death is recorded by the Ulster Annals in 938 as coärb of Columcille and Adamnan; but he is styled by the Four Masters ‘coärb of Columcille and Adamnan both in Erin and Alban.’ During his time, however, the actual government of the abbacy as a dependent monastery seems to have fallen to the Anchorite, or Deorad as he is termed in the Brehon Laws; for we find that an anchorite had been elected abbot, though he died before his right was confirmed, as in 937 the death is recorded of Angus, son of Murcertach, a learned man, anchorite and abbot-elect of Iona. Dubtach’s successor was Robartach, who was likewise abbot of Raphoe, for his death is recorded in 954 as coärb of Columcille and of Adamnan; and during his time also we find an abbot of the dependent monastery in 947, when Caen-comhrac, abbot of Iona, dies.

An attempt seems now to have been made to connect the monastery of Iona with the Scottish Church, for the next two coärbs of Columcille, Dubhduin and Dubhscuile, whose joint tenure of the coärbship extends from the year 954 to 964, do not appear to have had any connection whatever with Iona; while Bower betrays the cause of the expulsion of Fothad, when he tells us that his successor Malisius was a disciple of the blessed St. Duthacus in Ireland, who had foretold of him that he would be the future bishop of the Scots. He quotes as his authority a Life of St. Duthacus which does not now exist. This Duthacus can be no other than that Dubhthach who was coärb of Columcille both in Erinn and Alban from 927 to 938; and Indulph’s attempt was to bring Iona into connection with the Scottish Church by placing a disciple of his in St. Andrews as its bishop. The abbacy of Dunkeld, too, to which a Columban monastery would naturally look as its head in Scotland, seems now to have passed into the hands of laymen, and to have been held by a lay abbot; for we find Dunchad, abbot of Dunkeld, taking part in the war of succession between the kings Dubh and Cuilean, and being slain in the battle of Duncrub. Malisius is said to have been eight years bishop, which is the exact time Fothad is said to have lived after his expulsion; and St. Andrews seems at this time to have drawn pilgrims from Ireland; for in 963 we find, in the Irish Annals, the death of Aedh, son of Maelmithidh, in pilgrimage at Cinnrimonadh or St. Andrews. But when Indulph was succeeded by Dubh, in 962, he appears to have been restored in the last year of his life, as the first event mentioned by the Pictish Chronicle in the reign of Dubh is the death of Fothad the bishop, and in the year 963 the Annals of the Four Masters record his death as that of Fothadh, son of Bran, scribe and bishop of Inis Alban.

The succeeding bishop was Maelbrigde, and during his time we find that Dubhscuile, who is simply styled coärb of Columcille and died in 964, was succeeded by Mughron, whose death is recorded in the Annals of Ulster in 980 as ‘coärb of Columcille in Erinn and in Alban,’ showing that Iona had once more fallen back upon the coärb of Columcille in Ireland. During the first two years of Mughron’s possession of the coärbship, the government of Iona as a dependent monastery seems to have again fallen to the Anchorite, who joined with it the title of bishop, but after his death, a new official makes his appearance—an Aircinnech of Iona, whose death is recorded in 978. The name of Aircinnech first appears in the Irish Annals in the ninth century, when it is occasionally mentioned, but more frequently in the succeeding centuries. It was essentially a lay office, though we find it combined with the titles of bishop, of abbot and of priest. The duties of the office were to superintend the lands and farms of the church or monastery and their tenants, to collect the rents or other tributes paid by them, and perhaps also to distribute amongst the poor the alms or hospitality of the coärb and his ‘familia.’ When the functions of abbot were discharged by an anchorite, such an office became necessary for the management of the secular concerns of the monastery.

The short and unsatisfactory notices of the church given in the Pictish Chronicle show, in the reign of Cuilean, from 967 to 976, indications of some disturbance in the church of St. Andrews, the nature of which we can only guess at. We learn that a Marcan, son of Breodolaig, was slain in the church of St. Michael, which was one of the seven churches of St. Andrews; that Leot and Sluagadach go to Rome; that Bishop Maelbrigde died, and that Cellach, son of Ferdalaig, ruled in his stead; and when Bower adds that he was the first who went to Rome for confirmation, and lived twenty-five years after his confirmation, we can see that all these events were connected; but whether it was a violent attempt to seize the bishopric, which ended in the pretender being slain in the church, and whether Leot and Sluagadach went to Rome to obtain absolution for the slaughter, or whether it was a contested election on the death of Maelbrigde, and they went to obtain for Cellach the additional authority of the pope’s confirmation, we cannot tell. The reign of Kenneth, who succeeded Cuilean, was an important one both for the Scottish Church and for Iona. The important event for the former was the foundation of the church of Brechin, which appears to have taken place early in his reign, and to have been dedicated to the Holy Trinity. The short statement which the Pictish Chronicle gives us of this donation to the church conveys no further information regarding it than that Brechin was even then considered an important place. We can only infer, from its subsequent history, that it was a monastery after the Irish model, in which form the Scottish foundations after the accession of Kenneth mac Alpin appear to have been made, with which was now combined a college of Cele De, and that it has left us, as a mark of its early connection with Ireland, the only other specimen of the round towers to be found in Scotland, besides that which had been erected at Abernethy. The churches, too, which afterwards formed the diocese of Brechin, were probably, even at this early period, possessions of the new foundation at Brechin. In the districts of Angus and Mearns the churches were shared between the dioceses of Brechin and St. Andrews, in a manner so irregular and unsystematic as to point to a mixed population in which some of the villages were still Pictish and others had now a Scottish colony. It seems to have been through the medium of the recovery of the old foundations, and the creation of new, that a Scottish population was spread over the country; and the object of King Kenneth in this foundation may have been to bring a Pictish population more under the direct influence of the Scots. The church of Brechin was founded during the time that Mughron was coärb of Columcille both in Erinn and Alban, when probably there was freer intercourse between the Scotch and Irish Churches; but his death, after he had held the coärbship for sixteen years, was followed by events fatal for Iona.

At this time the Western Isles, including the Isle of Man, were the subject of a constant struggle between the Danes and the Norwegians, for their acquisition by the former and their retention by the latter. The Danes of Limerick had, during the latter part of this century, acquired possession of the Isle of Man, and, as early as the year 973, we find Maccus, son of Aralt, who was at their head, called king of many islands; but how far his sway over the Western Isles extended we do not know. Of the two pagan races who infested Ireland and the West of Scotland, the Danes were by far the more cruel and destructive in their attacks upon the monasteries, and appear to have been most dreaded. The last year of Mughron’s life had witnessed the arrival at Iona of one of the most powerful kings of the Danes of Dublin, Anlaf Cuaran, who in that year ‘went on a pilgrimage to Hi Coluimcille,’ where he died, ‘after penance and a good life;’ he was, however, closely connected with the Scottish royal family, having been son-in-law of King Constantin, and in close alliance with him, and had been baptized when king of the Northumbrians; but Mughron’s successor, Maelciarain ua Maigne, coärb of Columcille, ‘suffered red martyrdom from the Danes at Athcliath,’—that is, was slain by the Danes at Dublin in 986; and in the same year Iona is plundered by the Danes, on the eve of the nativity, and the abbot and fifteen of the clergy of the church were slain. These were the Danes of Limerick, who were now under the rule of Gofraigh mac Aralt, the brother of Maccus, and who is termed by the Irish Annalists king of Innsigall, or the Western Isles. But he was encountered by Sigurd, earl of Orkney, and we find that in the following year a great slaughter was made of the Danes who had plundered Iona, and three hundred and sixty of them were slain; while two years later their king, Gofraigh, was himself killed in Dalriada, and the Isles once more passed into the undisturbed possession of the Norwegians, and were governed by the earls of Orkney. The monastery which had been plundered was of course that stone monastery which had been built after the destruction of the wooden monastery by fire, and the small number of monks slain indicates that the greater part had taken refuge in the fort; but, like Blathmac, the abbot, whose name is not recorded, remained at his post, and tradition still points out a bay in the north end of the island, remarkable for its pure white sand, and called Traith ban na manach, or the White Bay of the Monks, as the scene where an abbot and fifteen monks were slain by the Danes. As this was the last time that Iona was plundered by the Danes, who not many years after were converted to Christianity, it is probably to this occasion that the tradition regarding the shrine of Saint Columba, given by Colgan on the authority of St. Berchan, may be referred. The story is this: ‘Manderus, son of the king of Denmark and leader of a fleet of Northmen, wasting the northern parts of Britain with fire and sword, came to Iona, where these satellites of Satan, mixing sacred things with profane, and pillaging everything which they met, excavated the ground in search of hidden treasure. Among others they found the sarcophagus, or shrine, in which was a true treasure, viz. the body of Saint Columba. They took the shrine on board, and on their way to Ireland opened it; but, finding nothing but the bones and ashes of a man, shut it again and threw it into the sea. It was cast by the waves upon the shore at Downpatrick, and the abbot, having found it, and being instructed by a divine revelation that it contained the relics of Saint Columba, placed it along with those of Saint Patrick and Saint Bridget.’ Certain it is that in the following century the shrine was believed to be at Downpatrick. In the old tract called the Amra Coluimcille we find the following statement:—‘In Dun’—that is Downpatrick—‘again, some say, the resurrection of Coluimcille will be, as the poet has said—

Hy (Iona), with the multitude of its martra (relics),
Of which was Colum, beauteous disciple;
He went out yet at last,
So that Dun is his blessed church.’church.’

St. Berchan, writing in the end of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century, repeats as a saying of Saint Columba—

My grace on Hi (Iona) without crime,
And my soul in Derry,
And my body under the stone,
Under which are Bridget and Patrick.

And we find that in the year 1127 ‘the shrine of Coluimcille was carried off into captivity by the Galls of Atacliath’—or Danes of Dublin—‘and restored again to its house at the end of a month,’ which certainly implies that it was then in Ireland.

During the three years that followed this plundering of the monastery, we find Dunnchadh Ua Robhacain coärb of Columcille and Adamnan, which implies that he was abbot of Raphoe; but, on his death in 989, we find that Dubdahthe, the abbot of Armagh, takes the coärbship of Columcille by the advice of the men of Erinn and Alban. The monastery of Iona, however, appears soon after in an efficient state, as we find it governed by a local abbot whose death is recorded in 1005. In the same year Malcolm the Second commenced his thirty years’ reign over Alban, now for the first time called Scotia. He is said, in a chronicle of the twelfth century, after the great battle of Carham in 1018, ‘to have on that day distributed many oblations to the churches as well as to the clergy.’ In Iona he appears for the time to have restored to the abbot the title of coärb of Columcille, for we find that in 1007 ‘Muredach mac Crican resigns the coärbship of Columcille for God’—that is, becomes a recluse; and Ferdomnach is elected to the coärbship by the advice of the men of Erinn at the fair of Taillten, which implies that his coärbship was limited to Ireland; and we find that he was in fact abbot of Kells, as was his successor; while, on the other hand, the death of Flannobra, coärb of Iona, is recorded in 1025. In the following year Maelruanaidh Ua Maeldoraigh, lord of Cinel Conall, that is, of the tribe of Conall Gulban, went over the sea on his pilgrimage. The expression ‘over the sea’ implies that he went to Iona.

Cellach, the bishop of Alban, is said to have filled that office for twenty-five years, which brings his death towards the end of the tenth century. The first bishop to whom we can assign a fixed date after that is Alwynus, who is said to have been bishop three years, and whose death must have taken place in 1028, which places his election as bishop in the year 1025. Between Cellach and Alwyn we have two names given us by Bower and Wyntoun, those of Malmore and Malisius; but we know nothing beyond their names. During the tenure of one or other of them, the district of Lothian was ceded to Malcolm the Second by Eadulf Cudel after the battle of Carham in 1018, and the churches of Lothian naturally fell under the superintendence of the bishop of St. Andrews as sole bishop in Scotland. But not the least important event connected with Malcolm the Second was that he gave his eldest daughter in marriage to Crinan, lay abbot of Dunkeld, and by this marriage the hereditary lay abbots of Dunkeld gave to the Scottish throne a dynasty of kings who were destined to extinguish that ancient church, with its peculiar institutions, from which their ancestors had emerged.

We can readily trace this descent of Dunkeld from a high ecclesiastical position to a lay possession. We see it first as a Culdee church, founded shortly before the accession of the Scottish kings to the Pictish throne; then as a Scottish monastery, its abbot filling the high office of bishop of Fortrenn, the new kingdom acquired by the Scots. Then the bishopric passes to Abernethy, and the successor to the abbot who was first bishop, appears as ‘princeps,’ or superior, of Dunkeld, a term which leaves it doubtful whether he was a cleric or a layman. Then we find Duncan, abbot of Dunkeld, slain in battle while fighting for one of the kings in a war of succession—evidently a layman. Then we have Crinan, abbot of Dunkeld, marrying one of the daughters of the king, while the other is given to Sigurd, earl of Orkney. The possessions of Dunkeld were large and situated in the very heart of the kingdom, but Crinan appears to have held, along with them, those of the monastery of Dull, also secularised, which extended from Strathtay to the boundary between Atholl and Argyll. Between the two, a large tract of country was in his hands, and his following of men must have been very great. We find him under the name of ‘Hundi jarl’ in the Orkneyinga Saga fighting with the Norwegians along with other jarls, and in 1045 he is slain in battle in a great contest between the people of Alban. The character of these abbots as great lay lords seems plain enough, and their hereditary descent equally so; for the name of Crinan’s son being Duncan gives a strong presumption that he was himself the son or grandson of the former abbot whose name was Duncan; and we find that the abbacy of Dunkeld remained with his descendants. The abbey, too, seems, during his time, to have come to an end, for we are told that in 1027 Dunkeld was entirely destroyed by fire.

This state of matters, however, was not peculiar to Scotland, or very different from what existed both in Ireland and in Wales at the time. In the early Monastic Church of Ireland celibacy was enforced, at least upon one class of the monks, for the saints of the second order ‘refused the services of women, separating them from the monasteries;’ but still there was a succession to the abbacy, the tribe or family in whom it was vested providing a fit person in orders to fill the office; but when the stringency of the monastic rule was broken in upon, under the influence of the secular clergy, marriage was gradually permitted or connived at, and at length became general, the rebound towards a secular state being great in proportion to the enforced strictness of the previous system. The natural consequence was that a direct descent from the ecclesiastical persons themselves came in place of the older system of succession, and the church offices became hereditary in their family. The next step in the downward process was that the abbots and superiors did not take orders, and became virtually laymen, providing a fit person to perform the ecclesiastical functions, but retaining the name and all the secular privileges and emoluments of the abbacy. The performance of the church services was either intrusted to a secular priest, who was called the ‘sacerdos,’ or sagart, or it fell to the Cele De, when there was such a body connected with the monastery, or to both combined.

The great ecclesiastical offices thus became hereditary in the persons of laymen in two ways; either by the usurpation of the benefice by the lay chieftains from whose tribe or family it had been supplied, or in the family of the abbot by whose direct descendants the office was filled, and who ceased after a time to take orders. It must be borne in mind that prior to 1139, though celibacy was enforced upon monks by their monastic rule, and upon the clergy generally as a matter of discipline, marriage, when it did take place, was not unlawful. It was not till the second great Council of Lateran, held in that year, declared all such marriages ipso facto null and void, that they became so; and the effect of this, where the benefice had become hereditary in a particular family, was, instead of restoring the former clerical character of its possessor, to stereotype their condition of laymen and to convert them into a purely lay family. The well-known passage in Giraldus Cambrensis’ Itinerary of Wales, in which, talking of the church of Llanpadarn Vawr, he says ‘that this church, like many others in Wales and Ireland, has a lay abbot; for a bad custom has prevailed amongst the clergy, of appointing the most powerful people of a parish stewards, or rather patrons, of their churches, who in process of time, from a desire of gain, have usurped the whole right, appropriating to their own use the possession of all the lands, leaving only to the clergy the altars with their tenths and oblations, and assigning even these to their sons and relations in the church. Such defenders, or rather destroyers, of the church have caused themselves to be called abbots, and presumed to attribute to themselves a title, as well as estates, to which they have no just claim,’ gives us an illustration of the first, and the equally well-known statement by St. Bernard, in his Life of St. Malachy, as to the state of Armagh when Celsus became coärb, or abbot, in 1105, affords an illustration of the second. He says, ‘A scandalous custom had been introduced by the diabolical ambition of certain of the nobles, that the holy see should be obtained by hereditary succession. For they allowed no one to be promoted to the bishopric unless such as were of their own tribe and family. Nor was it for any short period this execrable succession had continued, as nearly fifteen generations had already passed away in this villainy; and so firmly had this wicked and adulterous generation established their unholy right, or rather wrong, which deserved to be punished with any sort of death, that although, on some occasions, clergymen of their blood were not to be found among them, yet bishops they were never without. In fine, there had been already, before the time of Celsus, eight individuals who were married and without orders, yet literates.’ The church of Armagh was situated in the territories of a tribe descended from Colla-da-Chrioch, one of the founders of the Oirghialla, or Oriel race; and Dr. Reeves tells us that a descendant of Colla, named Sinach, founded a family, called from him the Clann Sinaich, and that to this family the enjoyment of the abbacy of Armagh, styled the coärbship of St. Patrick, became limited, so that for a space of about two centuries it never left it. He adds that ‘from the pedigrees of the Clann Sinaich, preserved in the Books of Lecan and of Mac Firbis, illustrated by the details and chronology of the Irish Annals, we are able to construct a genealogical table of the abbots of Armagh, which answers with wonderful exactness to the statements of St. Bernard.’ His account, too, of the state in which Malachy found the great monastery of Bangor when he resolved to restore it, shows that it also had fallen into the hands of a succession of lay abbots. After referring to its ancient glory, and to its destruction by the Danes, in which ninety of its inmates were slain in one day—which probably refers to the event recorded in the Ulster Annals in 823, when ‘Bennchair was plundered by the Gentiles, the oratory destroyed, and the relics of St. Comgall shaken from their shrine’—he adds, ‘Still, from the time when the monastery was destroyed, there were not wanting those who held it, with its possessions; for they were appointed by the usual mode of election, and called abbots, preserving in name, but not in reality, what once existed.’ It was then possessed by a rich layman who was St. Malachy’s uncle, and who retained the lands while Malachy refounded the church.

The Irish Annals afford us several illustrations of the hereditary succession, not only in abbacies, but in other offices at this time. Thus, in the monastery of Lusk, in the list of abbots between the years 731 and 927, we find that the second and third abbots were brothers, and sons of the first abbot named in it; that the fourth abbot and the prior were brothers; that the son of the second abbot was ‘economus,’ or house-steward; that the fifth abbot was son of the third; that the eighth abbot was son of the sixth; and that the tenth abbot and the bishop of Duleek and Lusk were brothers, and sons of the eighth abbot. Again, in the monastery of Gleann Uissean, near Carlow, we find between 874 and 1016 the names of eight abbots and one Aircinnech, or Erenagh. Of these, the second and third are brothers, and sons of the first; the fourth and fifth are brothers, and sons of the third; the sixth was foster-son to the second, while his son was Aircinnech, or Erenagh; the seventh abbot was son of the fourth, and the eighth, grandson of the second. Here the whole are direct descendants of the abbot who died in 874. Then we find also that the office of ‘economus’ or house-steward of Armagh was hereditary from 779, when the death of Cearnach, son of Suibhne, who was bishop of Armagh, is recorded, when he is called ‘economus’ of Armagh. He is succeeded by three sons, one after another. His grandson by the third son is bishop and anchorite of Lann Leire. Another grandson is abbot of Lann Leire. The son of the latter is abbot of Lann Leire and ‘economus’ of Armagh, whose son again is abbot of Lann Leire. But perhaps the most instructive example is connected with the celebrated monastery of Clonmacnois. Torbach, abbot or primate of Armagh in 812, was the son of one abbot of Louth, and the father of another abbot of the same place; and from him descended a family who filled many offices connected with Clonmacnois, and among them we shall find that even the Anchorites married and were succeeded by sons. This family were called the Cinel Torbaigh. Their connection with Clonmacnois began with his son Aedhagan, who died on his pilgrimage at Clonmacnois in 834; and his son was Eoghan, the anchorite, who died in 845. Eoghan’s son Luchairen, scribe and anchorite at Clonmacnois, died in 863; and in 893 his son Egertach, the Aircinnech or Erenagh of Eaglais-beg, or the little church at Clonmacnois, died. In 947 the son of the latter, Aenagan, Erenagh of the little church, and bishop and pure virgin—that is, unmarried—died; and in 953 his brother Dunadhach, bishop of Clonmacnois; whose son Dunchadh, Ferleighinn, or lector of Clonmacnois, and its anchorite, afterwards head of its rule and history, died in 1005. He was father of Joseph, who was anmchara, soul-friend or confessor of Clonmacnois. Joseph’s son was Conn na-mbocht, or of the poor, who appears in the Annals of the Four Masters in 1031 as ‘Head of the Cele De and Anchorite of Clonmacnois,’ the first that invited a party of the poor of Cluain at Iseal Chiarain, and who presented twenty cows of his own to it. Of this it was said—

O Conn of Cluain! thou wert heard from Erinn in Alban;
O head of dignity! it will not be easy to plunder thy church.

And Conn was father of Maolchiarain, coärb of Ciaran, or abbot of Clonmacnois. It is unnecessary to follow this further, but it is obvious how prevalent at this time in Ireland was the marriage of the clergy of all classes and the perpetuation of their ecclesiastical offices in the lines of their own descendants, and that it had even broken down the asceticism of the Anchorite and the canonical rule of the Cele De in this respect. In Scotland we find that the territory of the old monasteries was called Abdaine, or Abbacy, a word represented in Latin by ‘abbatia’ or ‘abthania,’ and had to a great extent passed into the hands of laymen who often retained for several generations the name of abbot. The territory termed the Abthania of Dull, which was of great extent and included the modern parishes of Dull and Fortingall, seems to have been in the hands of Crinan, the lay abbot of Dunkeld, and, along with the possessions of the latter abbacy must have placed him on a par as to power and position with the great Mormaers of Alban.

During the reigns of his son Duncan, and of the usurper Macbeth, we find that Maelduin, called by Bower son of Gillandris, was bishop. He appears as Maldunus, bishop of St. Andrews, granting the church of Markinch with all its land to God, St. Servanus and the Keledei of the island of Lochleven; and his death is thus recorded in 1055 by Tighernac, who was his contemporary: ‘Maelduin, son of Gillaodran, bishop of Alban, the giver of orders to the Gael of the clergy, died in Christ.’ Wyntoun tells us he was bishop twenty-seven years, which places the commencement of his episcopate in 1028.

His successor was Tuthald, who is said by Bower to have held the bishopric for four years only, and during his episcopate he grants the church of Scoonie to the same Culdees. This brings us to the year 1059 when Fothad became bishop, two years after Malcolm, surnamed Ceannmor or Great Head, had, by the defeat and death of Macbeth, recovered for his family the kingdom of Scotia; and Fothad’s tenure of the bishopric lasted throughout the whole of his reign. Probably the most important act he performed, and one that exercised a most powerful influence on his church, was the marriage of King Malcolm to the Saxon Princess Margaret, which took place in the spring of 1069. Wyntoun tells us—

Malcolme oure Kyng than till hys wyff
Weddyd Saynt Margret; wyth hyr hys lyff
In lele spowsale he thowcht to lede,
Departyd quhyll thai suld be wyth dede.
Off Saynt Andrewys the byschape than
The secund Fothawch, a cunnand man,
Devotly mad that sacrament,
That thai than tuk in gud intent.