Early Churches founded in the Western Isles. sufficient to convert the mass of the people to be devoted adherents of the Church. The great evidence, however, of life and energy in a church is her missionary spirit towards foreign countries, and the irrepressible desire of her members to carry her teaching and her institutions into the neighbouring countries; and this evidence of her vitality the Irish Church at this period manifested in a very remarkable degree. It was natural that the opposite coast of North Britain and the islands which lay between it and Ireland should attract these missionaries at once to their shores. The first impulse seems to have been given by Brendan of Clonfert, who, it is said, soon after he had been ordained priest by Bishop Erc and assumed the monastic habit, sailed with fourteen of his monks in search of the land of promise of the saints, and spent seven years in the search before he returned home. The narrative of his seven years' voyage became one of the most popular tales of the Middle Ages, and numerous editions exist of it. In its present shape it is, no doubt, a mere romance or monkish dream, in which the narrator, under the fiction of an imaginary voyage to different unknown islands, endeavours to realise his ideal of monastic and eremitical life, and it possesses some truly picturesque features. But there must have been some historic foundation for it; and such a romance could hardly have been interwoven into the acts of a real Brendan, if there had not been in the events of his life a missionary adventure in which he sought to extend the Christian Church to some distant island. There are not wanting some indications that this was so; but be this as it may, there seems no reason to refuse credit to the statement that, after his return from this voyage, he went to Britain to visit St. Gildas,75 who, as we have seen, was one of those from whom the monastic life passed to Ireland 75 Postea navigavit Sanctus Brendanus in peregrinatione ad Britan niam, adivitque sanctissimum senem Gilldam, virum sapientissimum in through the medium of Finnian of Clonard and his twelve disciples, of whom Brendan was one. After leaving Gildas, Brendan appears to have gone to the Western Islands, and to have founded in one of the islands a monastery called Ailech, and a church and its surrounding village in the land of Heth, and then returned to Ireland.76 This land of Heth we now know to have been the island of Tyree,77 but the precise situation of the other it is more difficult to fix. It must, however, certainly be looked for in one of the islands belonging to Britain.78 The name of Brendan is connected with more than one of the Western Isles. Fordun tells us that the island of Bute bore the name of Rothesay 'until, when the faith of our Saviour had been diffused through all the ends of the earth, and the islands which are afar off, Saint Brandan constructed thereon a booth-in our idiom, bothe, that is, a shrine.' 79 But though the old chronicler's etymology of the name of Bute is bad, the name of Brendan is preserved in the designation given to the people of Bute of the Brandanes,' and in the Kilbrandan Sound, which separates the island of Arran from Kintyre. The principal Britannia habitantem, cujus fama sanctitatis magna erat.-Act. Brendani, c. xv. It is usually stated that he went to Armorica, or Bretagne, but by Britannia, when used without qualification, Britain can only be meant. 76 Et benedicentibus se invicem Sanctus Brendanus et Sanctus Gilldas cum suis fratribus civitatisque illius habitatoribus, recessit inde. Et in alia regione in Britannia monasterium nomine Ailech sanctissimus Brendanus fundavit. Atque in loco alio in Britannia in regione Heth, ecclesiam et villam circa eam assignavit et ibi magnas virtutes beatus Pater Brendanus fecit: et postea navigavit ad Hyberniam.— Vit. Brendani, c. xvi. The passage is thus given in the Brussels edition :Postea flentibus omnibus profectus est ac in Britanniam remeavit ac duo monasteria, unum in insula Ailech, alterum in terra Ethica in loco nomine Bledua fundavit. 77 See Reeves's Adamnan, ed. 1874, p. 303. 78 In the Life quoted, the term 'regio' is applied equally to both; but Dr. Reeves has shown that this term is used for an island, and in the Brussels edition of the Life, it is ex pressly called 'insula.' It is supposed by Dr. Lanigan to be Alectum in Armorica, but the name of Britannia usually designates Britain. 79 Fordun's Chronicle, ed. 1872, vol. ii. p. 24. Mission of church in the island of Seil, which lies off the coast of Lorn, is also dedicated to Brendan, and one of the small islands forming the group called the Garveloch Isles, bears the name of Culbrandan, or the retreat of Brendan. This island is next to that called Eilean na Naoimh, or the Island of the Saints, and as the latter appears to have borne the name of Elachnave, it is not impossible that here may have been the monastery of Aileach. This visit to the Western Isles took place some time before the foundation of his principal monastery in Ireland, that of Clonfert, the date of which is known to have been 559; and we shall probably not be far wrong if we fix the the year 545 as the probable date. 80 The mainland of Argyll, off the coast of which these islands lay, was at this time in the occupation of the Scots of Dalriada, who had now possessed these districts for upwards of forty years. Their king was Gabhran, grandson of that Feargus Mor mac Erc who had led the colony from Ireland to Scotland in the beginning of the same century. Ireland had become nominally Christian before they left its shores, and they were, in name at least, a Christian people, and, during the first sixty years of the colony, had extended themselves so far over the western districts and islands, as to bear the name of kings of Alban. Whether Tyree was at this time included in their possessions may be doubted, but Seil certainly would be. They sustained, however, a great reverse in the year 560. Brude, the son of Mailchu, whom Bede terms a most powerful monarch, became king of the northern Picts, and had his royal seat at Inverness. By him the Dalriads were attacked, driven back, and their king Gabhran slain. For the time their limits were restricted to 80 The parsonage and vicarage teinds of the islands of Ilachinive and Kilbrandon belonged to the priory of Oronsay, and were in 1630 granted, with the lands of Andrew, bishop of Raphoe and prior of Oronsay, to John Campbell, rector of Craignish.—Origines Parochiales, vol. ii. part i. p. 276. the peninsula of Kintyre and Knapdale and probably Cowal; but the islands were lost to them.8 81 This great reverse called forth the mission of Columba, commonly called Columcille, and led to the foundation of the monastic church in Scotland. In investigating the lives of these great fathers of the Church, and endeavouring to estimate the true character of their mission, we have to encounter a very considerable difficulty. They filled so large a space in the mind of the people, and became in consequence the subject of so much popular tradition, that the few authentic facts of their history preserved to us became overlaid with spurious matter stamped with the feelings and the prejudices of later periods; and these popular conceptions of the character and history of the saint and his work were interwoven by each of his successive biographers into their narrative of his life, till we are left with a statement of their career partly true and partly fictitious, and a false conception is thus formed of their character and mission. So it was with Patrick, the Apostle of Ireland; and Columba, the Apostle of Scotland, shared the same fate. In both cases it is necessary to separate the older and more authentic tradition from the later stratum of fable. For this purpose we possess, in the case of Patrick, his own account of himself as contained in his Confession and his epistle to Coroticus, and can test the statements of his later biographers by their consistency with these documents. In the case of Columba we have no such record to appeal to, and can only bring the narratives of the later biographers to the test of a comparison with the statements of those who wrote more near to his own time. Fortunately for us, his two earliest biographers, Cummene and Adamnan, were both his successors in the abbacy of the 81 This appears from the notice in the Annals of Ulster, in 568, of an expedition to the Western Region or Western Isles, by Colman Beg. son of Diarmait, and Conall, son of Comgall (of Dalriada). The Four Masters in the parallel passage have 'Sol and Ile '-Sheil and Isla. monastery founded by himself, and collected its traditions regarding its founder within so short a period after his death that we may appeal to their statements of fact, irrespective of the colouring given to them by the circumstances of the time in which these biographers lived, with some confidence as affording us the means of testing the later narratives. Cummene became abbot just sixty years, and Adamnan eighty-two, after Columba's death. We are warranted therefore in concluding that supposed facts in his life, which either are ignored by them or are inconsistent with their narrative, are the fruit of later and spurious tradition. In the old Irish Life, which Dr. Reeves considers to be a composition probably as old as the tenth century, and which was originally compiled to be read as a discourse upon his festival, a few statements are found which bear this character; but the grand repertory of all these later and questionable additions to his biography is the elaborate Life by Manus O'Donnell, chief of Tyrconnell, compiled in the year 1532, which professess to be a chronological digest of all the existing records concerning the patron of his family.82 The tale which it tells of the cause of Columba's mission to Scotland, and which is popularly accepted as true, is shortly this-In the year 561 a great battle was fought at a place called Cuil-dremhne in Connaught, not far from the boundary between that province and Ulster. The contending parties were Diarmaid son of Cerbaill, head of the southern Hy Neill and king of Ireland, on the one side, and, on the other, the northern Hy Neill under the sons of Murcertach mac Erca, chiefs of the Cinel Eoghain, Ainmere, son of Sedna chief of the Cinel Conaill, and the people of Connaught under their king Aedh. The king of Ireland was defeated with great slaughter, and the cause of the battle was twofold: First, that King Diarmaid had taken Curnan, the son of the 82 See Preface to Dr. Reeves's Adamnan for an account of these Lives. |