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Falaise, was made in December 1174. The surrender of independence was unlimited, and the northern nation, bound hand and foot, was driven to pay a maddening homage to the English king. But it is like coming out of prison back to liberty and life to find that this thraldom was not lasting. In 1189, Richard the Lion-hearted ascended the throne of England, and one of his first acts was to annul the Treaty of Falaise for the sum of 10,000 merks.1

In 1176, King Henry and his archbishops had taken occasion to try if they could achieve the entire subjection of the Scottish Church. In the Treaty of Falaise, the Scottish clergy had with courageous fidelity introduced a clause which preserved entire the question of the independence of their Church. At a council called by Henry at Northampton, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that the Scottish Church was subject to his see, and the Archbishop of York said that the Bishops of Glasgow and Galloway were subject to his, so that the very arguments and differences arising from these conflicting claims saved our freedom. Only four years after emerging in person from the dungeons of Falaise, William the Lion plunged into an ecclesiastical broil. In 1178, Richard, Bishop of St. Andrews, died, and the chapter elected John the Scott, archdeacon of the diocese, to succeed him. But the king, who had not been consulted in the election, had set his heart on presenting the bishopric to Hugh, his chaplain; and he swore by the arm of St. James, as his fashion was, that he would have his own way. John immediately appealed to Pope Alexander III., and on Trinity Sunday, in the year 1180, his consecration took place at Holyrood, under the direct papal sanction ; and at the same time the Pope invested the Archbishop of York with legatine powers,

1

Equivalent to £100,000 sterling at this day.

empowering him to lay the kingdom of Scotland under an interdict, and to excommunicate William in the event of his perseverance in obduracy. The exasperated king defied the Papal edict, and accordingly the extreme measures authorized by Alexander were carried into effect, interdict and excommunication being pronounced in the year 1181. From the earliest times the Christian Church wielded the terrible power of excommunication, having in special view the conversion of the sinner, and the preservation in health of the whole body of the faithful, by cutting off the diseased member. The solemnly excommunicated or anathematized Christian was separated from the reception of the precious Body and Blood of our Lord, and from the society of all Christians, and excluded from the threshold of holy Mother Church in heaven and earth, and damned with the devil and his angels and all the lost in eternal fire, till he recover himself from the snares of the devil, and return to amendment and penance. In the ceremony of excommunication, thirteen candles dashed to the ground were the impressive symbol of the Christian delivered over to Satan 'for the destruction of the flesh, that his soul might be saved in the day of judgment.' An interdict was the same sentence levelled at a nation. In the land under anathema, divine service might not be publicly performed; the churches were shut, the bells were not rung, the dead were buried in ditches or holes, without any funeral rite, all diversions were forbidden, and every Christian was commanded to live in grief and gloom.

William and his people had not long experienced the bitterness of the Church's ban, when Pope Alexander III. died, and Joceline, Bishop of Glasgow, the Abbots of

1 See Bishop of Brechin on the Thirty-Nine Articles, vol. ii. p. 665.

Melrose and Kelso, and the Prior of Inchcolm, proceeded to Rome, and obtained from his successor, Lucius III., its removal and full absolution, whilst, in token of perfect pacification, the Holy Father sent to his son William the Golden Rose, accompanied by his pastoral benediction. The golden, red, and perfumed rose was borne by the Pope in his hand on Mid-Lent Sunday, and presented afterwards to one he particularly desired to honour or reward. By the rose Christ was figured, by the gold His kingly office, by the red colour His passion, and by the perfume His resurrection. Hugh and John having resigned their respective claims, the Pope restored St. Andrews to Hugh, and presented John with the diocese of Dunkeld. But this tiresome controversy broke out again during the two succeeding pontificates, and it was only under Clement III. that it finally subsided. From this Pope William obtained an immunity for the Church of Scotland in the year 1188. He declared her to be by special grace the daughter of the apostolic see, and exempted her from any supreme authority saving that of Rome. This declaration was intended effectually to check the English pretensions to supremacy, and it was confirmed in 1208 by Pope Innocent III. It was not in ecclesiastical matters alone that King William displayed his vigorous and somewhat imperious temper. He quelled

with a firm hand the disturbances that from time to time broke out among his wild subjects, and he left behind him the reputation of a just and in many respects an excellent ruler. In early life he broke the seventh commandment, but after his marriage in 1186 to Ermengarde, daughter of a French noble, the Viscount of Beaumont, he seems to have proved a good husband.

Towards the end of the twelfth century, John the Scott, who was now the Bishop of Dunkeld, requested the Pope to divide his diocese, because in the northern portion of it the

Gaelic language alone was spoken, and he being ignorant of that tongue found himself disqualified for its administration. The Pope, acceding to his request, erected the north of Dunkeld into the diocese of Argyle, which comprehended a great part of the county of Argyle and the island of Lismore, where the cathedral, perhaps the humblest in Britain, was erected. During the episcopate of Richard the building of the cathedral of St. Andrew steadily progressed, and the bishop took under his special protection the plasterers, masons, modellers, and other workmen engaged on it, and commanded that they should be at liberty 'to buy food and clothing, the same as any other burgess or stall-keeper.' Of Bishop Richard the old chronicler 1 tells us simply, 'his spyrit is intil paradise.' In 1181 Bishop Joceline laid the foundation of the cathedral of St. Mungo or Kentigern in his episcopal city of Glasgow, and just three years before the king founded and endowed, in 'most magnificent wise,' the Tyronensian abbey of Arbroath, dedicating it to St. Thomas à Becket, who, in 1170, had suffered martyrdom in Canterbury cathedral. This was a great age of church building. In every direction churches of majestic beauty were rising, and each was a 'sermon in stones,' exercising its own penetrating influence on the architect and beholder. William is said to have introduced the military order of Trinity Friars, and to have presented them with his house at Aberdeen for a monastery. The military orders sprung from the necessities of the Crusades; that is, the holy wars for the recovery of the sepulchre of our Saviour from the pagan Saracens. The ages we are passing through were the heroic ages of European history, and to a certain extent this corner of the earth partook of their spirit. At the end of the eleventh century, the voice of Peter the Hermit had

1 1 Wynton.

been like bells ringing in Christendom to the sacred enterprise, and till the year 1270 the flower of European chivalry took up the cross, animating each other by the cry, ‘O God, the heathen are come into Thine heritage, they have defiled Thy temple, and they have made Jerusalem an heap of stones.' If ever Scotland felt the deep sense of religion which the Crusades awoke in all classes, and realized what it was to belong to the brotherhood of Christendom, if ever her merchants came in contact with the treasuries of the East, it was in the reign of William the Lion. Already the coarse influence of these wonderful wars was setting in. The Church had announced that to 'those who go to Jerusalem to defend the Christians, and to aid in breaking down the tyranny of the infidels,' she conceded the remission of all their sins. Murderers, adulterers, robbers, the very outcasts of society, availed themselves of this absolution, and from mixing with such company the high ideal of the Christian knight was often mocked by the licentious reality. The design of the institution of Trinity Friars1 was to liberate the Christian captives in the Holy Land. The Knights of St. John,2 who kept hospitals for the accommodation of the weary pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre were provided by King David with a house at Torphichen, and the Knights Templars3 were also introduced by him, and established at the Temple in Mid-Lothian. These last knights defended the faith by force of arms, and their rule was framed on a very grand conception. The young man

1 They were called Trinity Friars because all their churches were dedicated to the Holy Trinity.

2 So called because their hospitals at the Holy Sepulchre were put under the protection of St. John the Almoner, Patriarch of Alexandria.

3 So called from a palace near the Temple at Jerusalem appropriated to their use.

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