no place at all which the sons of the nobility or of veteran soldiers may occupy. . . . Others are guilty of a still more grievous offence. For, though they are themselves laics, and neither habituated to nor actuated by the love of a regular life, yet, by pecuniary payments to the kings, and under pretext of founding monasteries, they purchase for themselves territories in which they may have freer scope for their lust: and, moreover, they cause these to be assigned to them by royal edicts for an hereditary possession."

The motive of this was to reserve the privileges of these early foundations, to retain their right of sanctuary and exemption from military service, and enjoy the temporalities without fulfilling the obligations they implied. The appearance of the monastery was thus maintained without its reality, and the old foundation of Abernethy, like that of St Andrews, passed into the possession of a layman, who became the head of a great territorial family.

139

CHAPTER XII.

THE PICTS AND THE ANGLES OF NORTHUMBRIA-BATTLE OF MONCRIEFFE, 672 A.D.

IT is a striking feature in history that great ecclesiastical changes are accompanied by great political changes, and that they are generally parallel to each other. Religion and politics cannot be separated, and every political question is at heart a religious question. A social upheaval is the concomitant of a religious upheaval.

Contemporaries have rarely a true perspective of the circumstances amid which they live, and history frequently pronounces matters to be of secondary importance, which were regarded by those who had relationship to them as of primary importance. To-day we can afford to regard as ludicrous the importance attached to questions of outward ritual, that rent in twain the early Celtic Church; still they were not such to those who lived through them, and we have just seen that the attitude assumed by the Columbites ended in their expulsion from the kingdom. They were supported by a large section of the people, and that sympathy did not fail to influence matters political. It created parties, and found leaders for these parties; and in examining the secular period so far as it relates to Pictavia in the seventh century and during the first half of the eighth century, we find that the

ecclesiastical strife is accompanied by political strife, and that the latter is not less warm and unsettling than the former. It is therefore necessary to make a short divergence here and examine the political history in so far as it related to this district.

To understand the struggle it is necessary to recall that Scotland of the seventh century was divided into four kingdoms: on the west coast (1) there was the Dalriadic kingdom, founded by a colony of Scots from the north of Ireland, and including Lorn and Argyll; (2) there was the kingdom of the Britons occupying Strathclyde ; (3) the kingdom of the Picts, north of the Forth, and divided into two parts, that of the Northern and Southern Picts, separated from each other by the Grampian range; (4) to the south was the kingdom of the Angles, extending from the Forth to the Humber. In the seventh century we have a record of petty wars among these four divisions, and the ecclesiastical strife was deepened by the political disorganisation, while the social unrest seems to have intensified the religious animosity. It is not improbable that the conservative attitude of the Columban clergy is to be considerably explained by political antipathy. It is with the struggles between the Angles and the Picts that we have at present to do.

In 617 A.D., when their father lost a battle, Eanfrid, the elder son, fled for protection to the Court of the Pictish king, which was at that time in Abernethy; while the younger son, Osuald, went to Iona for refuge, where he accepted the Christian faith and was baptised. This was an important event, as when Osuald succeeded his brother in 634 to the throne of Northumbria, his influence was on the side of Christianity. He sent to Iona for missionaries, whose labours in his kingdom resulted in the founding of the Columban Church, with St Aidan as its presiding bishop. Bede brings him before us, too, as a warrior-king, for he sums up his reign by saying "he brought under his dominion. all the nations and provinces of Britain, which are divided into

four languages — namely, the Britons, the Picts, the Scots, and

the Angles."1

Now this statement enables us to understand the keen feeling which already existed between the Picts and the Angles prior to the Synod of Whitby in 664, and the adverse decision then given to the practices of the Pictish Church did not lessen but imbittered it. These facts are to be borne in mind at present, for they enable us to see the political currents; and when to them we add the racial antipathy to the Angles, who were called "barbarians," "wolves," "dogs," "whelps from the kennel of barbarism," "hateful to God and man," we can understand the ecclesiastical movements as well as the political ferment.

2

The kingdom of the Angles had reached through conquest to the Forth, and the Picts were making an attempt to be free from the servitude into which they had been brought. Eight years after the Synod of Whitby, in the reign of Ecgfrid, we hear of the revolt of the subjected Picts and of a fierce battle between them. There is an account of it preserved by Eddi in his Life of St Wilfrid, who evidently disliked the Picts as much as they disliked the new race in the south. He tells us "that in the first years of Ecgfrid's reign the bestial people of the Picts, despising their subjection to the Saxons, and threatening to throw off the yoke of servitude, collected together innumerable tribes from the north, on hearing which Ecgfrid assembled an army, and at the head of a smaller body of troops advanced against this great and not easily discovered enemy, who were assembled under a formidable ruler called Bernaeth, and attacking them, made so great a slaughter that two rivers were almost filled with their bodies. Those who fled were pursued and cut to pieces, and the people were again reduced to servitude, and remained under subjection during the rest of Ecgfrid's reign." This battle took place in 672, and the two rivers are evidently the Earn and 2 Green's Short History of the English People, p. 14.

1 Bk. iii. c. 6.

3 C. xix.

Tay, which unite at Abernethy. The fact that the capital was here, with a strong Columban monastery, seems to place it beyond doubt as the most likely place where, under the conditions already indicated, the contest would be. The Picts were defeated, and Drust, king of the Picts, was driven from his throne in favour of Brude, who was evidently friendly to the Angles.

We find Ecgfrid invading the north of Ireland in 684, and destroying the monasteries and churches: in 685 we find him. again invading Pictavia, where he was defeated and killed at Dunnichen in Forfarshire. While all these facts seem to speak of an incursion of the Saxon population into the district north of the Forth, they also indicate an early religious war, and the victory of the Picts at Dunnichen gave new zeal to the Columban party, and made them more obdurate in their nonconformity. "From that time," says Bede, "the hopes and strength of the Anglic kingdom began to fluctuate and to retrograde, for the Picts recovered the territory belonging to them which the Angles had held." 1

In 688 we find Adamnan visiting Northumbria, and he seems to have had as an object the conciliation of the Angles; for we have already seen that, Columban as he was in sympathy, he conformed to the Augustinian observances, and on his return to Iona succeeded in winning over a section of his monks to the same view. But even his advocacy did not succeed in conciliating the bulk of opinion on the subject, and flushed by the victory of 685, the antipathy was maintained. The ecclesiastical and political forces are again parallel until 710, when King Nectan conformed, and in 716 expelled the nonconformists from his territory. He was influenced by the Church of St Augustine, and through him that Church acquired power and strength in Scotland. Church and State have been very closely related in Scottish history, and we quote his letter as not only illustrating this relationship, but as bringing about a condition of things which affected this 1 Book iv. c. 26.