Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/496

Rh 474 SCOTLAND [HISTORY. 5th and half of the 6th century is peopled by Cruithne or Picts in 6thcents. the north and central Highlands, having their chief royal fort on the Ness, and by Scots in Argyll and the Isles, as far north as lona and on the mainland Drumalban, the mountain ridge which separates Argyll from Perth and Inverness ; there is a British king ruling the south-west from the rock on the Clyde then known as Alclyth or Alclyde, now Dumbarton; and Saxony, under Northum- brian kings, is the name given to the district south of the Forth, including the eastern Lowlands, where by this time Angles had settled. The scarcity of Celtic history l belonging to Scotland indicates that its tribes were less civilized than their Irish and Welsh kin. Conver- It is in the records of the Christian church that we first siou to touch historic ground after the Romans left. Although the legends of Christian superstition are almost as fabu- lous as those of heathen ignorance, we can follow with reasonable certainty the conversion of the Scottish Celts. Three Celtic saints venerated throughout Scottish history Ninian, Kentigern, Columba Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, David, the patron saint of Wales, and Cuthbert, the apostle of Lothian and patron saint of Durham, be- longing to the Celtic Church, though probably not a Celt, mark the common advance of the Celtic races from heathenism to Christianity between the end of the 4th and the end of the 6th century. The conversion of Scot- land in the time of Pope Victor I. in the 2d century is unhistoric, and the legend of St Rule (Regulus) having brought the relics of St Andrew in the reign of Constan- tius from Achaea to St Andrews, where a Pictish king built a church and endowed lands in his honour, is, if historical at all, antedated by some centuries. There is no proof that amongst the places which the Romans had not reached, but which had accepted Christianity when Tertullian wrote, there was any part of modern Scotland ; but, as Christian bishops from Britain without fixed local- ity begin to appear in the 4th century, possibly the first converts in Scotland had been made before its close. Ninian. NINIAN (q.v.), the son of a British chief in Galloway already Christian, after converting or reforming his countrymen one of his converts being Tudwalla, king of Alclyde (? Tothael, father of 1 Of the three branches of the Celts which appear as the first known inhabitants of Scotland the native records are scanty and of late date. Respecting the Britons nothing remains except the history of Gildas in the 6th and that of Nennius in the 9th century, of which very small parts relate to Scotland ; the poems of Aneurin and Taliessin, commonly called Welsh bards, but perhaps natives of Strathclyde ; the lives of saints ; and a fragment of criminal law, common to them and the Scots, preserved at the time of its suppression by Edward I. Dealing with the Picts there is a Latin Chronicle of the 10th cen- tury and additions of later date, containing a valuable list of kings in their own language, and the entries in the Book of Deer of the gifts to that monastery by the Pictish mormaers (chiefs) of Buchan ; but the earliest of these is in an old form of Gaelic. The Scots are noticed in the Life of Columba, the Diian Albanach of the llth century, a Latin Chronicle of the 12th century, a few poems treating of their origin and migration, later Latin tracts de- scribing their settlement in Scotland, and the lives of saints, not written in their existing form till the 12th century. But a consider- able amount of legendary material, chiefly consisting of additions to or glosses on the earlier sources, has been collected. When all is told, Scotland has nothing to compare with the Irish A nnals and the Welsh Triads, whose fulness of detail and fabulous antiquity in the early portions raise suspicions as to the later which are perhaps undeserved. It has no equivalent to the collection of laws contained in the Senchas Mor or Kain Patrick of Ireland and the Dimetian and Venedotiau codes of Wales, where, in the midst of a crowd of minute customs implying a long settlement in western lands, there are traces of others that seem to have come with the Celts from their far-off Eastern birth- place. From these sources especially from the Irish Annals, and in particular the Annals of Tigernach, who died in 1088, the Synchronisms of Fl.inn Mainistreach, who died in 1056, the Annals of Innisfallen, compiled in 1215, and of Ulster, compiled in 1498, but from older authorities the dearth of proper Scottish material has been supple- mented ; but this source of information has to be used with caution. The whole materials are collected in the Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, edited by Mr Skene for the lord clerk register of Scotland. Rydderick Hael) and organizing a diocese, went as a missionary to the southern Picts, who lived amongst or near the mountains north of the Forth and Clyde in the modern counties of Stirling, Perth, and Forfar. His fame grew with the clnm-h, and as far north as Shetland, as far south as Westmoreland and Northumber- land, churches were dedicated in his name. His wonder- working relics in the shrine of Candida Casa (at Whithorn 2 in Galloway) became an object of pilgrimage for more than a thousand years. Three other missionaries belong to the period between Ninian and Kentigern, his successor amongst the Britons of the west : Palladius, sent to the Christians in Ireland by Pope Celestine, died at Fordoun in Mearns labouring amongst the Picts, and his disciples Serf and Ternan converted respectively the Picts of Fife and those of the lowlands of Aberdeen. KENTIGERN (q.v.) of Strathclyde was sup- Kenl ported by Rydderick or Roderick, called Hael (" the Liberal ") from geru, his bounty to the church. Columba visited Kentigern at the cemetery of Ninian, on the Molendinar Burn, where courtesies were interchanged between these representatives of the two branches of the Celtic Church in western Scotland, shortly before the British bishops declined at the meeting at St Augustine's oak to submit to the Roman missionary who had converted the Saxons of southern England. Jocelyn of Furness states that Kentigern was at Rome seven times and obtained the privilege of being the pope's vicar free from subjection to any metropolitan. The prince of Cumbria is even said to have acknowledged his precedency. These are inventions of a later age ; but the large possessions, extending over the whole western kingdom, conferred by Rydderick, and after a long lapse of time found by the inquest of David I. when prime of Cumbria to have belonged to the see, may be historical. He died about the beginning of the 7th century, and a long period of darkness hides the British kingdom and church of Strathclyde. St PATRICK (q.v.), succeeding where Palladius failed, Christianized Ireland in the middle of the 5th century. A passage in his Con- fession, if all of it applies to Scotland, seems to prove the existence of the church in Scotland for two generations before Patrick's birth, and the allowance during these of marriage to the clergy. Scotland gave Patrick to Ireland, and Ireland returned the gift in Coin Columba. A rare good fortune has preserved in Adamnan's Life the tradition of the acts of the greatest Celtic saint of Scotland, and a picture of the monastic Celtic Church in the 6th and 7th centuries, an almost solitary fragment of history between the last of the Roman and the first of the Anglo-Saxon historians. Born in 521 at Gartan in Donegal, COLUMBA (q.v.) spent his boyhood at Doirc Eithne near Gartan, his youth at Moville on Strangford Lough under Abbot Finian, called the foster-father of the Irish saints from the number of his disciples. Here he was ordained deacon, and, after completing his education under Gemmian, a Christian bard, at the monastery of Clonard, he received priest's orders. In 561 he took part in the battle of Culdrevny (in Connaught), when the chiefs of the Hui Neill (Dalriad Scots), his kindred, defeated Diarmid (Diarmait), a king of eastern Ireland. Excommunicated by the synod of Teltown in Meath, the country of Diarmid, for his share in the battle according to one account fought at his instance and moved by missionary zeal, he crossed two years afterwards the narrow sea which separates Antrim from Argyll with twelve companions and founded the monastery of lona (Hy), on the little island to the west of Mull, given him by his kinsman Conall. The Dalriad Scots, who had settled in the western islands of Scotland and in Lorn early in the 6th century, were already Christians ; but Columba soon after visited the Pictish king Brude, the son of Mailochon, at Craig Phadrich, the isolated hill fort on the Ness, whom he converted, and from whom he received a confirmation of Conall's grant. Columba, on the death of Conall, gave the sanction of religion to the succession of his cousin Aidan, and at the council of Drumceat in Deny obtained the exemption of the Daliiads of lona from tribute, though they were still oound to give military service to the Irish king, the head of the Hui Neill. He frequently revisited Ireland and took part in its wars : the militant spirit is strongly marked in his character ; but most of his time was devoted to the administration of his monastery of lona, and to the planting of other churches and religious houses in the neighbouring isles and mainland, till his death in 597. None of the remains now found in almost every island not even those in lona itself date from his time, when wood was still used for building. But the original foundations of the churches of Skye and Tiree were his work ; those extending from Bute and Cantyre on Islay, Oronsay, Colonsay, Mull, Eigg, Lewis, Harris, Benbecula, and even the distant St Kilda to Loch Arkaig on the northern mainland of Scottish Dalriada are to be ascribed to him or his immediate followers or successors in the abbacy, as well as those in the country of the Picts, from the Orkneys to Deer in Buchan. The churches which received his name farther south were later foundations in his honour. The most celebrated of his disciples were Baithene, his successor as abbot ; Machar, to whom the church of Aberdeen traces its origin ; 2 In a cave at Glasserton rude crosses incised on stone probably a font and the letters SANCT.NI.P. (?) have recently been found.