III

DEDICATIONS TO ST. KENTIGERN

The

55 where by his preaching he had converted the people. Several of these were in Cumberland, on the occasion of his journey to Wales; and two in Scotland are mentioned by Jocelyn as working miracles down to his time. one in Glasgow stood in the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Trinity, and was of such gigantic proportions that machinery failed and miracle succeeded in its erection. The other was at Lothwerverd, supposed to be Borthwick in Midlothian. Maniacs were tied to the cross on Sunday evening and were found next morning restored to sanity and freedom. This crude custom, common in Jocelyn's days, survived to the verge of the Reformation, as we find from the satire of Sir David Lindsay

"They bryng mad men on fuit and horsse

And bindis thame at Sanct Mongose crosse."

What Kentigern lifted up as the sign of man's redemption, a credulous and superstitious age degraded into something like a fetish.

The memory of Kentigern has been overshadowed in history by the greater reputation of his contemporary Columba. The bishop was a less masterful man than the abbot. He had less force of character and of combativeness than the Irishman. But for unwearied willingness in well-doing, for patient persistence in the path of duty, for single-minded devotion to his Divine Master, and for love of the souls of men whom he toiled so long to save, the name of the gentle Kentigern, the "Mungo" of his Culross master, sheds a lustre of its own over the earliest pages of the Church in Strathclyde.

There is no information as to the successors of St. Kentigern in the episcopate. A tradition points to the Cumbrian Church taking part after his death in the conversion of their Anglic neighbours between the Forth and

the Tweed, and so continuing his missionary work.

And

mention is made of a certain Sedulius, "bishop of Britain of the race of the Scots," who was present at a council held at Rome A.D. 721, and signed its decrees as "Episcopus Britanniæ."1 Sedulius is a common Celtic name Latinised, and it is argued that he must have belonged to the Strathclyde Britons and not to the Welsh, because the former accepted the Catholic cycle of Easter in 703, while Wales maintained the old Celtic cycle for fifty years after the date of this council. The business of the council was the irregularity of marriages, and the presence of Sedulius of Strathclyde and Fergustus of Pictland is supposed to be accounted for by the prevalence of irregular marriages in North Britain.2 But the question is confessedly involved in great obscurity.

The later reliable history of the see of Glasgow begins with the Inquisitio made at the request of David (afterwards King David I.), when Prince of Cumbria, by “ the seniors and wise men of Cumbria," regarding the see and its endowments. It was then ascertained that Kentigern was followed by several successors, and that the estates of the see had, during the civil wars in Cumbria, been largely plundered by laymen. Prince David insisted upon the restoration of the Church's property, and presented his tutor, John, to the bishopric. This was probably about the year 1114; so that from Bishop Kentigern to Bishop John there is the long span of 500 years, and only one visible bishop, Sedulius, to bridge it. All others are shrouded in darkness.

1 About this time the name of North Britain was used of Cumbria.

2 See Forbes's Kalendars of Scot. Saints, pp. 337, 338.

CHAPTER IV

THE MISSION OF ST. COLUMBA

IRELAND repaid, in the mission of Columba, the debt she owed to Scotland for the services of St. Patrick. Had there been no Patrick in Ireland, there would in all probability have been no Columba for Scotland, nor Columbanus for the Continent. Patrick represented, as we have seen, the third generation of Christians in the country of his birth, a century before Columba was born. Contemporary with Columba, yet preceding him in his work, was Kentigern, the bishop of the Strathclyde Britons. The south-west and centre of Scotland had thus to a considerable extent been leavened by the teaching and example of Christian missionaries before Columba's arrival. South of the Forth the invasion of the Pagan Angles had crushed the probably weak and scanty missions of the Church; and that part of the country, once the Roman Valentia, now the Anglian Bernicia, had to be regained for Christ. The Northern Picts had remained pagan, although Christianity had been long introduced into the southern division of Pictland. The conversion of the Northern Picts was St. Columba's first and greatest work; this being accomplished, his zeal carried him across Drumalban to the banks of the Tay. Another division of Scotland was the Scotic kingdom of Dalriada in Argyll. Here lived the race, first known as "Scots" in Britain, Columba's own kinsmen from the

Irish Dalriada. They had been migrating from time to time and settling in Cantyre and the Western Islands before the great immigration in 502, which marks an epoch in Scottish history. These "Scots" were Christians when they came, the children in the faith of St. Patrick and his successors. Among them Columba found his home, and made it the centre of missionary work over a wide area. On Columba's arrival the two darkest patches in the Christography of the country were the paganism of the Picts north of the Grampians, and the paganism of the Angles and Frisians south of the Forth. Elsewhere there was light in the land, though struggling, as it must have done for generations, with ignorance and superstition.

It has also been observed that even in Iona there was a Christian establishment preceding the monastic institution of Columba, the remains of that peculiar foundation, traceable to the latter days of St. Patrick, of a collegiate church with seven bishops settled in every Tuath or tribe. Columba found and superseded two of these bishops in Iona.1

The early history of the Scottish Church is, to a great extent, the personal history of its most prominent missionaries. We have seen that it was so in the cases of Ninian and Kentigern. It is the same with Columba, but with this difference in his favour, that the Church had not to wait for hundreds of years for a life of the first abbot of Iona. Cumine and Adamnan, his successors in the abbacy, each wrote a life of Columba, and wrote it in Iona, while the traditions of the saint were still fresh.2

Cumine the Fair was seventh abbot, from 657 to 669, and Adamnan the ninth abbot, from 697 to 704.

1 Skene, Celt. Scot., ii. 34.

See also pp. 24, 87, 88, 491.

2 Cumine's treatise De virtutibus

Sancti Columba is incorporated with little change in the third book of Adamnan.

IV

BIOGRAPHERS OF ST. COLUMBA

59

Cumine was near enough in time to have seen Columba ; and Adamnan, born twenty-five years after Columba's death, conversed in his boyhood with persons who knew the first abbot. Adamnan, like Columba, was a Donegal man. He had spent many years in Iona as monk and abbot, was in possession of the literary remains of Columba, and conversant with all the traditions of the place touching his life and work. He was, moreover, the ablest and most accomplished of Columba's successors, and for his day a man of wide culture, which he had attained by both reading and travel. Besides his Life of St. Columba he wrote a work, in three books, De locis Sanctis, on the holy places of Palestine, from information supplied by Arculf, a French bishop, who had visited the Holy Land about the year 690, and on his return home was shipwrecked in the Western Isles.1

Adamnan (his name is the diminutive of Adam) wrote the Life of Columba in compliance with the urgent request of the brethren in Iona. It was composed, he says, partly from written materials and partly from oral tradition. The oldest existing copy of it was written by Dorbene, a monkish scribe in Iona, who died there in 713. It was formerly in the Irish monastery of Reichenau on the Lake of Constance, carried thither, doubtless, by the Irish missionaries of the eighth century, and is now in the public library of Schaffhausen. It is this copy which the late Dr. Reeves, bishop of Down, edited in 1856 with so much antiquarian scholarship as to make his work the standard authority on St. Columba's history. Dr. Reeves remarks in his preface: "To Adamnan is, indeed, owing the historic precision and the intelligible operation which

3

1 Burton, Hist. Scot., i. 256.

2 The writer is indebted for much of the information in this chapter to Reeves's edition of Adamnan, which

forms the sixth volume of the Historians of Scotland, edition 1874. 3 P. xxx.