ΧΙ PAGANISM OF THE SCANDINAVIANS 213 king of Northumbria, to his marriage with king Constantin's daughter. In 986 abbot Maelciarain "suffered red martyrdom from the Danes at Dublin," and on Christmas Eve of that year, as already mentioned, they made their last attack upon Iona, when the abbot and several of the clergy were slain. A place is still shown in Iona called "the White Bay of the Monks," as the scene of their suffering. There is one more record at this period of the transference of St. Columba's relics to Ireland. shrine is said to have found its final rest in Downpatrick along with the relics of St. Patrick and St. Bridget. His It may well afford matter for reflection that these. Scandinavians were suffered to remain heathen to the very close of the tenth century. Had there been in Scotland men of the type of St. Columba, Aidan, or Cuthbert, or in England missionaries like Wilfrid or Willibrord, these fierce but brave Norsemen would long before have been brought under the influence of the Christian religion. It would have been as easy for the missionary to have crossed the North Sea with the message of the Gospel to the Norsemen as it was for them to leave their bays and rove about, the scourge of the sea and the terror of the land. An Irish Columban with his twelve disciples would have converted them as surely as he converted their forefathers in race and creed that worshipped Odin and Thor by the Lake of Constance. Had the British Churches done so for the Scandinavians, they would have been spared those merciless raids that destroyed church and monastery, east and west, and gave the land no rest for two hundred years. That it was not done, and not even attempted, is a reflection upon the Christianity of our islands, and a sure evidence of the decay of the missionary spirit, following upon the decay of vital religion in the Church both of Britain and of Ireland. CHAPTER XII Scotia applied to North Britain-Causes of the Church's Degeneracy —Secularisation of Church Property-Supposititious Episcopal See at Mortlach-Tribal versus Diocesan Bishops-King Macbeth a Church Benefactor-Bishop Fothadh, the last of the bishops "of Alban." IN the long reign of Malcolm II. (1005-1034) the country receives for the first time the name of Scotia. The Scottish kings, since the union of Picts and Scots, had now been a century and a half in possession of the Pictish throne. For the first fifty years of that period they were still called kings of the Picts; for the rest of the period they were known as kings of Alban. The change from Alban to Scotia shows that the two races were being amalgamated, but under the influence of the dominant race of the Scots. Malcolm, the last king of the MacAlpin dynasty, was to bequeath the new name of Scotia to a new line of kings. He began his reign by the oft-repeated attempt to wrest Bernicia from the kings of England. The old kingdom of Northumbria, once so potent in the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, and associated with the Celtic Church and Lindisfarne, had now dwindled to an earldom. Malcolm's attack on Bernicia was resisted by Uchtred, the young son of the earl of Northumbria, and son-in-law of Aldun, bishop of Durham, who seems to have already possessed, as governor of the district, the germ of that civil authority which the prince-bishops of Durham exer CHAP. XII OLAF, FIRST CHRISTIAN KING OF NORWAY 215 cised in later ages. The result of the battle of Durham, which Malcolm had besieged, was the entire defeat of the Scots. Malcolm saved his life with difficulty; the next Scottish king of his name who made a similar venture in that quarter was not so fortunate. Malcolm was not more successful in his next effort to wrest the country north of the Spey from the grasp of Sigurd, the powerful earl of Orkney. The Norwegians had colonised the Orkneys for many years; they had crossed the Pentland Firth and taken possession of Caithness and Sutherland, and more recently had seized the fruitful province of Moray. Sigurd was supported by the influence of Olaf Tryggvesson, the first Christian king of Norway. That influence was gained by a peculiar incident which savours more of Mohammedan propagandism than of Christian conversion. from a Viking expedition to the Hebrides, and passing by the Orkneys, he came upon earl Sigurd, as he lay with a single ship under the isle of Hoy. He made Sigurd his prisoner, and the condition of his freedom was his acceptance of the Christian faith and baptism, and the proclamation of Christianity in the Orkneys. To ensure fulfilment of the pledge, he took Sigurd's son Hungus with him to Norway, where he lived with king Olaf till his death. Olaf had promised Sigurd that he should "hold in full liberty as his subject, and with the dignity of an earl, all the dominions which he had had before." Malcolm, when aware of the powerful backing of Sigurd, thought it more prudent to offer him his daughter in marriage than to offer him battle. Of this marriage was born Thorfin, who became, on his father's death, five years afterwards, earl of Caithness and Sutherland, and was invested as such by his grandfather king Malcolm. Olaf was returning in the year 997 Malcolm's daughter was married to Sigurd in 1008. An elder daughter had previously married Crinan, lay abbot of Dunkeld. From this Crinan descended a new line of kings that governed Scotland till the advent of the Stuart dynasty; and through them again the line was transmitted, on the female side, to the present sovereign of the United Kingdom. The degeneracy of the Church of this period has been attributed to the secularising of her great offices, and to the incessant invasions and harassing depredations of the Norsemen. It is doubtful how far the spiritual degeneracy was owing to the sacrilege of the Norsemen; and as to the marriage of the clergy, while such cases as the lay abbot of Dunkeld were gross perversions of the monastic ideal and ruinous to the Church, the secular clergy were not at this time forbidden to marry. In the next century, when the Scottish Church came for the first time under the Roman obedience, her secular clergy would be subject to the canons of the second Lateran Council (A.D. 1139), which forbade their marriage.2 It is more than probable that the secularising of spiritual offices was an effect of the actual declension of the Church as well as a further aggravation of the evil. The Irish Annals from the ninth to the eleventh century give numerous instances of hereditary succession to abbacies and other spiritual offices. They became nothing better than an appanage of powerful families, who were always ready with a son or relative to take up the Church's properties, come of the offices and duties what might. The great St. Bernard, in his life of St. Malachy of Armagh, writes in scathing terms of the corruptions and scandals within the Irish Church from this misappropriation. mentions "the scandalous custom introduced by the 1 Skene, C. S., i. 391. 2 We have just seen that the bishop of Durham gave his daughter He in marriage to the son of the earl of Northumbria. XII SECULARISATION OF SCOTTISH CHURCH 1 217 diabolical ambition of certain of the nobles, who allowed no one to be promoted to a bishopric except such as were of their own tribe and family." And this had gone on, he says, in the Irish Church for many generations. The same tale comes from Wales, as reported by Giraldus Cambrensis in his Itinerary of Wales, where lay abbots appropriated the church lands and left to the clergy nothing but "the altars with their tenths and oblations." Simeon of Durham, in the preface to his history of the church of Durham, speaks of similar abuses existing in England. It is the same cry from west to east. The lay abbot of Dunkeld was not singular in his sacrilegious usurpation of church titles and estates, though he was probably one of the greatest usurpers of that age, for to the abbacy of Dunkeld he added that of Dull, the abbey founded by Adamnan in Atholl. The Church's foes were those of her own household, and her worst foes then and afterwards were the nobles of the land. Their ancestors were in some instances the pious founders of abbeys and churches; the children figure too often in history as their robbers and desecrators. Uchtred, the son of the earl of Northumbria, who defeated Malcolm at Durham, was himself defeated and slain in 1016 by Canute the Dane, who became next year king of England. Malcolm thought the opportunity fitting for striking another blow for Northumbria, and with the assistance of the Cumbrians he fought successfully, in 1018, the battle of Carham, two miles above Coldstream, -a victory which virtually extended his kingdom southwards to the Tweed. The sub-king of Cumbria was slain in the same year, and Malcolm placed over it his grandson Duncan, a step which prepared the way for its annexation to the Scottish kingdom. Life of St. Malachy quoted by Skene, C. S., ii. 340. |