Page:Chronicles of the Picts, chronicles of the Scots, and other early memorials of Scottish history.djvu/172

 clxiv PREFACE. kingdom till the year 710 ; that between that year and 7 1 7 it was superseded by a church of a different character, and her monastic clergy diiven out, while secular clergy of a different race replaced them ; that the kingdom, which had venerated St. Columba as its apostle, was placed under the patronage of St. Peter, and that the great power acquired twenty years later by Angus, son of Fergus, was accom- panied by the foundation, in the year 736, of the church of St. Andrews, and the general adoption of St. Andrew as the patron saint of the kingdom ; that a century later the establishment of a king of the Scottish race on the Pictish throne was accompanied by the return of the Scottish clergy ; and that the Scottish Church again acquired the supremacy in the reign of Constantin, under the primacy of St. Andrews and its bishop. This Church now represented in a peculiar manner the Scottish population, and was intimately connected and closely allied with the Scottish royal house that occupied the throne. The territory forming the diocese of St. Andi'ews would almost seem to point out the limits of the Scottish population and the districts actually occupied by them as a people. North of the Firth of Forth it comprised the whole of Fife, Kinross, and Gowrie — what may be called the central portion of the Scottish kingdom, which was peculiarly, the kingdom of Scone. In Angus and Mearns it shared the churches with the diocese of Brechin in a manner so irregular and unsystematic