Church of St. Andrews. The dedication took place on the 5th of July 1318, in presence of King Robert the Bruce, seven bishops, fifteen abbots, and a vast congregation. Then the King handsomely endowed the Cathedral out of his private revenues in gratitude 'for the illustrious victory of Bannockburn.' The sacristies of the Scottish church were enriched after Bannockburn. The cathedral of Aberdeen could show robes and hangings made from the cloth of gold taken in the English tents;1 and it is probable that many of the most beautiful altar frontals, copes and chasubles, had been adapted by the skilful needles of the Scottish nuns from banners originally embroidered by the dames and maidens of England. Bishop William died in 'the prior's chamber of the abbey,' probably in June 1328. He was succeeded by Sir James de Bane, Archdeacon of St. Andrews. Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow, who had absolved Bruce from the slaughter of Comyn, was only released after Bannockburn. He had become blind during his captivity, and died in 1316. In William de St. Clair, Bishop of Dunkeld, we have an example of a warlike ecclesiastic. When, in 1317, the Earl and Sheriff of Fife, with their men, were obliged to take flight before a body of English soldiers who had landed at Inverkeithing on a pillaging expedition, Bishop William hastily collected his vassals, and advanced to oppose the enemy. He met his flying countrymen, who explained, 'The English are more numerous and stronger than we, and we dare not fight them. Our lord the King,' shouted the Bishop, 'would do well to hack your gilt spurs from off your heels. All who love their King and country, follow me.' Throwing off his chimere, and grasping a lance, the Bishop triumphantly

1 See Preface (p. xxvi) to the Inventories of the Jewels of Queen Mary, by Joseph Robertson.

drove the English back to their ships; and as a reward for this intrepid exploit King Robert ever after styled him his own Bishop. David de Moravia, who in 1299 had been consecrated to the See of Moray, was a zealous adherent of the King's, and taught his flocks that to fight for him was as meritorious as enlisting in the Holy Wars.

There were peculiar forms of self-deceit gaining ground at this time among Christians. There were many who would fain get to heaven, but who tried to do so by devious methods, and by paths of their own choosing. When Edward I. was on his dreadful last journey to Scotland, when he was dying by inches, we find him eagerly negotiating for the canonization of a certain holy person, richly endowing Lanercost, while all the time the fury of his temper and hatred of his enemies seemed increasing as he drew near the grave. The abuse of indulgences—that is, of the Church's power to relax penance for sin-had already begun, and the foundation was laid of a huge fabric of corruption. In the year 1300 Boniface VIII. issued a Bull of Jubilee, inviting the faithful to frequent the Basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul, promising that if they did so with penitence, or if they did so, and became penitent in any future year of the century, they should receive the fullest pardon of all their sins. The growth of a system very attractive in the facilities it afforded for leading easy or sinful lives was rapid, it was manifestly calculated to undermine society, to overturn men's conceptions of right and wrong, and virtually to deprive thousands of souls of the salutary discipline of confession. It was an easier matter to make a pilgrimage that one might freely sin now and hereafter, than it was to kneel down before God and His priest, and laying bare one's secret hideousness, to confess with 'repentance not to be repented of.' Men, too, were placing too much trust in relics, and while the spiritually-minded kissed the sacred

fragment for love of the holy being to whom it had belonged, and for love primarily of Him in whose Divine footsteps the saint had walked, the sinful, the ignorant, and the coarse, knelt in formal piety, fondly hoping that the act would atone for some evil deed which conscience told them they had done, or some good deed left undone. The consoling doctrine of the communion of saints, which unites the Church militant with the Church at rest, and which gladdens the loneliest life by the thought of the friends in paradise, for ever being prayed for, for ever praying for us, was also being perverted. The Holy Mother of God, whom all generations shall call blessed, whose spotless virgin purity had in subordination to the Divine Humanity of her Son softened and edified the human race, was often thrust into a position of 'delegated omnipotency,' and men who had deeply sinned came to her when they trembled to draw near the awful majesty of God, forgetting that the Blood of Jesus cleanseth from all sin. These and other evil tendencies of the age flourished upon the local influences of the Wars of Independence. These just wars, which terminated in confirming to Scotland the immense blessing of freedom, were also instrumental in bracing the national character, and in developing certain of its most remarkable traits, but for the present they checked the progress of every improvement in trade and national industry, and were lamentably injurious to the preservation of even the most ordinary branches of human knowledge. So early as the reign of Malcolm iv. there is abundant evidence of the existence of burgh and convent schools—these were under the superintendence of the monks; for instance, the schools of Roxburgh were cared for by the monks of Kelso, those of Perth and Stirling by the monks of Dunfermline, and yet, despite such means of education, it has been said that 'during the long period from the accession of Alexander III. to the death of David II.

it would be impossible to produce a single instance of a Scottish baron who could sign his own name.1

Immediately after the worst of the great wars were over, exertions began to be made to set agoing the long neglected public schools. The difficulties in finding qualified teachers were, however, serious, and in the absence of any university at home, students were constrained to travel abroad to finish their education at some foreign establishment. In 1326, David de Moravia, Bishop of Moray, instituted in the University of Paris a college for Scotch students, called the Scots College, and in that corner of Paris, then known as the Rue d'Ecosse, many of his countrymen took up their abode for the purposes of study. But the journey from Scotland to Paris was a stupendous undertaking in those days, and many of the superiors of monasteries preferred obtaining 'safe-conducts' for their best scholars to travel to Oxford or Cambridge. Even when armed with his 'safeconducts,' and provided with letters of introduction to the monasteries by the way, the poor Scotch student had unknown perils to risk in unfriendly England. Hence arose the office of travelling tutor, or 'fetcher of scholars.' He was a personage of eminent experience and importance, and sometimes rose to be a commissioner to foreign courts, or the head of a band of pilgrims, or he even arrived at high places in the Church. He travelled about the country picking up one lad here, and another there, until he had a

1 Tytler's Hist. of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 353.

'But let us not forget . . . that books are but one of the roads 'to knowledge, and that the higher training of the disposition and of the heart, moral and religious instruction, and the discipline even of the understanding and memory, may be successfully prosecuted without them.'-Scotland in the Middle Ages, Cosmo Innes, c. ix. p. 272.

large party well armed and mounted.

Then they turned

their horses' heads towards England, and made the journey by regular stages.1. Before very long such hazardous journeys were rendered unnecessary by the foundation of the university of St. Andrews. The intense hatred of all that was English had already begun to tell on ecclesiastical matters. It was, in combination with other influences, tending to thrust Scotchmen back once more within the limits of their own church and land, and to recall the realities and traditions of the native past. In the Scottish camp at Bannockburn there was a sacred relic of St. Fillan, and the night before the battle King Robert ‘made his orisoun to God and Sanct Phillane.' The part which the great Perthshire saint was supposed to have taken in the victory was not forgotten, henceforth the reverence for the caves and wells of our holy departed countrymen, which in the Anglicanization of the church had been obscured, began to revive, and in the devotions of the people the old Celtic saints were not superseded.2

Robert the Bruce's first wife was Isabella, the daughter of Donald, Earl of Mar. By her he had one daughter, Marjory. She married Walter, the High Steward of Scotland, and bare him one son, Robert Stewart, afterwards Robert II. By his second wife, Elizabeth, the daughter of the Earl of Ulster, he had one son, David, who succeeded him, and two

1 'See Scottish Students at Oxford 500 years ago,' Thomas Lindsay, Macmillan's Magazine, February 1870. The Scottish clergy, studying as they did at continental universities, partook of whatever line of religious thought distinguished the age. Among those Scotchmen who were famous as professors of scholastic theology were John Duns Scotus, and Richard de S. Victor, born in the thirteenth century.

2 See Preface to Kalendars of Scottish Saints, p. xxiii, by the Bishop of Brechin