there without his leave, and sends to have him killed. There is then the usual deadly sickness of the king, and the cure through the prayers of the saint; and the king gives him the place where he inhabits as an offering for ever. Servanus then founds and dedicates the church and cemetery at Culenros, or Culross. Then he goes to Lochleven to see Adamnan, who receives him there, and shows him an island in that lake well adapted for his religious community which is granted him. Servanus founds a monastery in that island in which he remains seven years, and from thence he goes about the whole region of Fife, founding churches everywhere. The other places mentioned in this life in connection with him are the cave at Dysart on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, where he had his celebrated discussion with the devil, and where the memory of St. Serf is still held in honour; Tuligbotuan, or Tullybothy, Tuligcultrin, or Tillicoultry, Alveth and Atheren, now Aithrey, all in the district on the north side of the Forth, extending from Stirling to Alloa. The only other place mentioned is his 'Cella Dunenense,' or cell at Dunning in Stratherne, where he slew a dragon with his pastoral staff, in a valley still called the Dragon's Den. Finally, 'after many miracles, after divine virtues, after founding many churches, the saint, having given his peace to the brethren, yielded up his spirit in his cell at Dunning, on the first day of the kalends of July;' and his disciples and the people of the province take his body to Culenros, and there, with psalms and hymns and canticles, he was honourably buried; and so ends the life.56 Here we have the same strange eastern origin, the same journey to the west, the same occupation of the papal throne, as we found in the legend of Boniface. This feature seems to characterise the legends of those missionaries who promoted the great change by which a new order of clergy, under the influence of the 56 This life is printed from the Marsh мs., Dublin, in the Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, p. 412. VOL. II. R Servanus introduces Keledei, who are hermits. Roman Church, superseded the Columban monks in the eastern and northern districts of Scotland; and probably the invention had no greater motive than to separate them, in a very marked manner, from the clergy of the older church, and to give weight and authority to their promotion of the influence of the Roman party. In this case, however, an older Irish document gives him a closer connection with the west. In the tract on the mothers of the saints, which is ascribed to Aengus the Culdee, in the ninth century, we are told that Alma, the daughter of the king of the Cruithnech,' or Picts, 'was the mother of Serb, or Serf, son of Proc, king of Canaan, of Egypt; and he is the venerable old man who possesses Cuilenros, in Stratherne, in the Comgells between the Ochill Hills and the sea of Giudan." 257 Here Alpia, a name which has a very Pictish look, the daughter of the king of Arabia, becomes Alma, the daughter of the king of the Picts, and the husband of a Pictish princess must have belonged to a race nearer home than the people of Canaan, here placed on the west bank of the Nile and connected with Egypt. The Scotch part of the legend, like that of Bonifacius, is supported by the dedications, all the churches in the places mentioned in connection with him being dedicated to St. Serf. The chronology of this part of the Life, too, is quite consistent; we find no anachronisms in it, and there is not a syllable about his being a disciple of Palladius or the teacher of Kentigern. The Brude, son of Dargart, of the Life, may be identified with Brude, son of Derile, who reigned from 697 to 706, and preceded that Nectan, son of Derile, who expelled the Columban monks from his kingdom. Brude 57 Alma ingen rig Cruithnech mathair Sheirb mec Proic rig Canand Eigeipti acus ise sin in sruith senoir congeb Cuilendros hi Sraith Hirend hi Comgellgaib itir sliab Nochel acus muir nGiudan.-Book of Lecan, fol. 43. bb. Reeves's British Culdees, p. 124. The sea of Giudan is the Firth of Forth, so called from the city of Giudi, which Bede says was in the middle of it, and which may be identified with Inchkeith. It is called in the Latin life Mons Britannorum, a mistake perhaps for Mare. appears in one of the chronicles, which seems to have been connected with Lochleven, as Brude, son of Dergart; and the chronicle adds, in which time came Saint Servanus to Fife.' 58 Then Adamnan, who is brought into such close connection with Servanus, died in 704, only two years before the death of Brude; and there were, as we know, the most friendly relations between them. Now there is in the Chartulary of St. Andrews a memorandum of some early charters in the Celtic period, and one of them is a grant by which Brude, son of Dergard, who is said by old tradition to have been the last of the kings of the Picts'-which however he was not 'gives the isle of Lochlevine to the omnipotent God, and to Saint Servanus, and to the Keledei hermits dwelling there, who are serving, and shall serve, God in that island.' In another, Macbeth, son of Finlach, and Gruoch, daughter of Bodhe, king and queen of the Scots, give to God omnipotent, and the Keledei of the said island of Lochlevine, Kyrkenes.' And in a third, 'Macbeth gives to God and Saint Servanus of Lochlevyne, and the hermits there serving God, Bolgyne.' We thus see that the establishment founded by Servanus about the beginning of the eighth century was one of hermits, and that they bear the name of Keledei. There is nothing inconsistent with probability that they may have been introduced by Adamnan, after he had himself conformed to Rome and was endeavouring to bring over his brethren, and that that part of the Life which brings him to the south shore of the Firth of Forth-in other words, from Northumbria-when he is met in Inchkeith by Adamnan, may be perfectly true. 59 Jocelyn of Furness, in his Life of Kentigern, tells us Keledei of Glasgow, that he joined to himself a great many disciples whom he who were trained in the sacred literature of the Divine law, and solitary 58 Brude fitz Dergert, xxx, ane. En quel temps ueint Sains Seruanus en Fiffe.-Chron. Picts and Scots, p. 59 Registrum Prioratus S. Andreæ, pp. 113-118. Reeves's British Culdees, pp. 125, 126. clerics. educated to sanctity of life by his word and example. They all with a godly jealousy imitated his life and doctrines, accustomed to fastings and sacred vigils at certain seasons, intent on psalms and prayers and meditation on the Divine Word, content with sparing diet and dress, occupied every day and hour in manual labour. For, after the fashion of the primitive church under the Apostles and their successors, possessing nothing of their own, and living soberly, righteously, godly and continently, they dwelt, as did Kentigern himself, in single cottages, from the time when they had become mature in age and doctrine. Therefore these solitary clerics were called in common speech Calleder.' 60 In assigning the Calleder, or Keledei of Glasgow to the time of Kentigern, Jocelyn is no doubt guilty of as great an anachronism as when he assigned to him Servanus as a teacher; and the statement belongs to the same period in Kentigern's supposed history, when he first became bishop of Glasgow; but this part of his life is very problematical, and the historical part of his legend probably begins only when he returned from Wales after the battle of Ardderyd. Here, however, he appears connected with the Monastic Church of Wales, he is followed by six hundred and sixty-six of his monks of Llanelwy, and Jocelyn tells us that these monks all rest, as the inhabitants and countrymen assert, in the cemetery of the church of the city of Glasgow.' Jocelyn, however, wrote while there existed bodies of Keledei in Scotland, and he is no doubt reporting a genuine tradition as to the original characteristics of the Culdean clergy before they became canons. What he here describes is simply a community of anchorites, or hermits. Servanus was contemporary with that Scottish Sedulius, bishop of the Britons, who had conformed to Rome, and whom we find bishop of the Strathclyde Britons after they had acquired their independence and became freed from the yoke of the Angles. It is to this 60 Bishop Forbes's Lives of S. Ninian and S. Kentigern, p. 66. period that these Calleder of Glasgow properly belong; and this connection with the real Servanus may have led to the history of this period having been drawn back, and both Calledei and Servanus associated with the great apostle of Glasgow in popular tradition. connected of St We have seen that in the year 710, Nectan king of the Legends Picts placed his kingdom under the patronage of St. Peter, with the and we have now reached the period when that apostle was foundation superseded by St. Andrew as the patron saint of the king- Andrews. dom. Two separate editions of the legend of the foundation of St. Andrews have come down to us. The older of these is a document of the twelth century, and appears in connection with the earliest of the chronicles in which the century which intervened between the last of the Scottish kings of Dalriada and the first of the Scottish dynasty which ascended the throne of the Picts is suppressed, and the line of the Scottish kings of Dalriada made immediately to precede Kenneth mac Alpin, the founder of the latter dynasty. The second form of the legend is longer and more elaborate, and emerges, at a somewhat later period, from St. Andrews itself. The older legend bears this title: 'How it happens that the memory of St. Andrew the apostle should exist more widely in the region of the Picts, now called Scocia, than in other regions; and how it comes that so many abbacies were anciently established there, which now in many cases are by hereditary right possessed by laymen.' 61 The legend itself obviously consists of five parts, very inartistically put together. In the first, we are told that St. Andrew, the brother-german of St. Peter, preached to the northern Scythian nations, and sought the Pictones, then the Achæans, and finally the town of Patras, where he was crucified on the second day before the kalends of December, and where his bones were kept down to the time of Constantine the Great, and his sons Constantine and Constans, that 61 This legend is printed in the Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, p. 138. |