many of them had come to be possessed by secular men of hereditary right.1 At St. Andrews, the monastery of St. Regulus, on which the piety of Hungus, the Pictish king, had conferred extensive lands and privileges, had become almost wholly secularised. Of its inmates, thirteen were commonly called Culdees. These transmitted their office " per successionem carnalem," by which we are probably to understand that the office was confined to members of a sept, in conformity with the arrangements in many of the Irish monasteries.2 After they were made Culdees, it was not lawful for them to keep their wives in their houses, nor any other woman through whom evil suspicions might arise.3 Although it was their duty to serve at the altar of the apostle, yet it was deserted by them, nor was mass celebrated there, except on the rare occasions when the king or the bishop was present, for the Culdees celebrated their office after their own fashion in a certain corner of their church, which was exceedingly small. 1 "Qualiter acciderit quod memoria Sancti Andree apostoli amplius in regione Pictorum, que nunc Scotia dicitur, quam in ceteris regionibus sit; et quomodo contigerit tante abbatie ibi facte antiquitus fuerint quas multi adhuc seculares viri jure hereditario possident."-(Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, p. 138.) 2 King's Early History of the Primacy of Armagh, p. 23. The monks of Lindisfarne, who towards the end of the ninth century had borne away from Holy Island the body of their great saint, thereby established for their descendants a heredi tary right to their clerical position and estates. (Reginaldi Liber de B. Cuthbert. cap. xvi. p. 29.) 3 Apparently when in residence, and while performing their duties. The popular belief about the Culdees of Dunkeld is preserved by Mylne in his History of the Bishops of Dunkeld, of whom he writes, 66 habentes tamen secundum orientalis ecclesiae ritum conjuges a quibus dum vicissim ministrabunt abstinebant; sicut postea in ecclesia Beati Reguli, nunc Sancti Andreae, consuetum tunc fuit."—(Vita Episcop. Dunkelden. p. 4; Bann. Club.) Besides the Culdees, the ecclesiastical community of St. Andrews consisted of seven " persona" or parsons, who, after allotting to the bishop one-seventh, and to the hospital another, divided among themselves the other five portions of the oblations of the altar, although they performed none of its duties, or of the church, beyond receiving such strangers as could not be received into the hospital. These parsons (who may have been the lay inheritors of the seven churches founded by St. Rule at Kilrimont), besides receiving the oblations, were possessed of separate rents and property, which, on their death, their wives, whom they publicly maintained, and their sons or daughters, their relatives or sons-in-law, divided among themselves.1 The lands thus abstracted from their religious destination included the territory granted with such solemnity by Hungus, and called the Boar's Chase. This condition of things has been thus described by Dr. Reeves :"From this laboured and ill-digested statement we learn that at some period anterior to 1107, the ecclesiastical community of Cill 1 This was contrary to monastic discipline. The great Columbanus, in the fourth chapter of his Regula Canobialis, "De paupertate ac de cupiditate calcanda," lays down "Ideo ergo nuditas et facultatum contemptus prima perfectio est monachorum." The Rule of St. Columkille also enjoined, "Be always naked, in imitation of Christ and the Evangelists." "Whatsoever little or much thou possessest of anything, whether clothing, or food, or drink, let it be at the command of the Senior and at his disposal, for it is not befitting a religious to have any distinction of property with his own free brother."- St. Righmonaigh had become parted into two sections, and that each carried with it a portion of the spiritualities and temporalities, which we may reasonably conceive had been originally combined. One party was the Keledei, consisting of a prior and twelve brethren, who numerically represented the old foundation, and as clerical vicars performed divine service, having official residences, and enjoying certain estates as well as the minor dues of the sacerdotal office. With them also, as the clerical portion of the society, rested the election of the bishop when a vacancy occurred in the see. The other party included the bishop, the eleemosynary establishment, and the representatives of the abbot, and other greater officers now secularised, yet enjoying by prescription another portion of the estates and the greater ecclesiastical dues."1 It is paralleled by the case of Winchester, where the canonclerics in the same way deserted the altar, and consumed the monastic revenues in riotous living and all kinds of excess. At Durham also the canon-clerics left the church desolate, and led scandalous lives. The remedy in these and like cases in England, was the expulsion of the canon-clerics or secular canons, and the introduction of regular canons. A choice was, however, given to them in both the cases just referred to, between ejectment from their churches and submission to monastic rule. At Winchester three, and at Durham one, of their number conformed.2 1 The Culdees of the British Islands, p. 39. of the bishop, "mandavit clericis ocissime dare locum monachis, aut monachicum suscipere habitum. At illi execrantes monachicam vitam, illico exierunt de ecclesia; sed tamen postmodum tres ex illis conversi When Alexander I. ascended the Scottish throne in the year 1107, the corruption at St. Andrews was unabated, presenting to him much which was in entire conflict with the new ecclesiastical customs and ideas of the period. Accordingly the king began by conferring on the church of St. Andrews many gifts and privileges, restoring for the establishment of "religyoun," the lands which had formerly been granted for that purpose, but had been in the possession of the crown as royal coarbs, or hereditary abbots of the monastery of St. Regulus. The intention of the king for the institution of a monastic family" at St. Andrews was not fully effected till about twenty years after his death, in the time of his successor David I., when a community of canons-regular, under the rule of the order of St. Augustine, was finally established. David, in dealing with the Culdees of St. Andrews, was in some respects less peremptory than the English reformers were with the canon-clerics at Durham, Winchester, and elsewhere. He empowered the canons-regular to receive into their body the Culdees of Kilrimont if they consented to become canons; if sunt ad regularem conversationem."- ordine disciplinati vitam ducerent. Sed they should decline, they were to be permitted the enjoyment of their possessions during their lives, and on their death, regular canons were to be instituted in their place.1 The same monarch conferred on the canons of St. Andrews the island of Lochleven, that they might there institute their order in the ancient monastery of St. Serf. To the Culdees who might be in the latter he offered, that if they would live canonically, they might remain in peace, while those who resisted were at once to be ejected.2 A few years later, Pope Eugenius III. decreed that vacancies among the Culdees should be filled up by the appointment of regular canons.3 Their subsequent history consists of their struggles to resist the new order of things, and of the controversies arising out of them. In 1147, Pope Eugenius had vested the election of the bishops of St. Andrews exclusively in the canons-regular, but it was not till the year 1273 that the Culdees were formally debarred from their prescriptive right to take part in the election. In 1332, when William Bell was elected to the see, the Culdees were absolutely excluded from any voice in the election, nor was their claim revived. But they continued their corporate existence, under another name, in the church of St. Mary de Rupe, with an establishment of a provost and ten prebendaries. After the Reformation the provostry became vested in the crown, and in 1616 was annexed to the See of St. Andrews.* 1 The history of the Culdees of Monymusk, a house of early 1 Registr. Priorat. S. Andree, p. 186. 4 Reeves' Culdees of the British Islands, pp. 40-41. |