Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/497

Rh EARLY CELTIC PERIOD.] SCOTLAND 475 Corrnac, the navigator, the first missionary to the Orkneys, who perhaps reached the Faroes and Iceland ; and Drostau, the founder of the Scottish monastery of Deer. eltic The character of the Celtic Church of Columba was, like its lurch of mother church in Ireland, modified by migration to a country only alumba. in small part Christian. It was a missionary church, not diocesan but monastic, with an abbot who was a presbyter, not a bishop, for its head, though the office of bishop for ordination existed, and bishops were, in Ireland at least, more numerous than in the later church. It spread, not by the erection of parishes and the care of parochial clergy, but by the reproduction of similar monasteries, the homes of those who adopted a religious life, the only schools in an age of war. It preferred islands for its monasteries for safety, and, in the case of some of its members, who sought, in the language of those times, "a desert in the ocean," as hermitages where they might live and die apart from the world. But these were exceptions. The idea of the Celtic monastery was that of a Christian celibate society. Its inmates regarded themselves as being, and often were, members of a family or clan, preserving the customs of their race so far as consistent with celibacy and religious discipline. Of eleven successors of Columba as abbot nine were of his kin. The rule, though its confession is primitive, adapted to an infant and isolated church planted in a heathen world, did not differ greatly from that of later orders. Implicit obedience to the superior, poverty, chastity, hospitality, were the chief precepts. The observance of Easter according to the ancient cycle, the use of the semicircular instead of the coronal tonsure, and a peculiar ritual for mass and baptism were its chief deviations from the practice of the catholic church as fixed by the council of Nice, to which it yielded in the beginning of the 8th century ; frequent prayer, the singing of psalms and hymns, the reading of Scripture, the copying and illuminating of MSS., the teaching of children and novices, and the labour to provide and prepare the necessary food (the ser- vice of women being excluded) were the occupations of the monks. A similar conventual system of which St Bridget, abbess of Kildare, was foundress enlisted the fervour of her sex, and had followers in Darlugdach, abbess of Kildare, who founded Abernethy, in J2bba at Coldingham, and in Hilda at Lindisfarne. It was a form of Christianity fitted to excite the wonder and gain the affection of the heathen amongst whom the monks came, practising as well as preaching the self-denying doctrine of the cross. The religion of the Celts is a shadowy outline on the page of history. Notices of idols are rare. They had not the art necessary for an ideal representa- tion of the human form, though they learnt to decorate the rude stone monuments of an earlier age with elaborate tracery. They had no temples. The mysterious circles of massive stones, with no covering but the heavens, may have served for places of worship, as well as memorials of the more illustrious dead. The names of gods are conspicuously absent, though antiquaries trace the worship of the Sun in the Beltane fires and other rites ; but in the account of their adversaries we read of demons whom they invoked. Divination by rods or twigs, incantations or spells, strange rites connected with the elements of water and of fire, "choice of weather, lucky times, the watching of the voice of birds," are mentioned as amongst the practices of the Druids, a priestly caste revered for superior learning and, if we may accept Csesar as an authority, highly educated. This, rather than fetish or animal worship, appears to have been their cult. It was, so far as scanty indi- cations allow a generalization, by an empirical knowledge of the minor and secondary rather than the greater phenomena of nature that the Druids of Britain and Ireland exercised influence, the tempest and its elements wind and rain and snow, thunder and lightning rather than the sun, moon, and stars. Whatever its precise form, this religion made a feeble resistance to the Chris- tian, taught by the monks, with learning drawn from Scripture and some acquaintance with Latin as well as Christian literature, and enforced by the example of a pure life and the hope of a future world. The charms of music and poetry, in which the Celt de- lighted, were turned to sacred use. Columba was a protector of the bards, himself a bard. " It is not with the ' screod ' our destiny is, Nor with the liird on the top of the twig, Nor with the trunk of a knotted tree, Nor with a ' seadan ' hand in hand. I adore not the voice of birds, Nor the ' screod ' nor destiny nor lots in this world, Nor a son nor chance nor woman ; My Druid is Christ the Son of God, Christ, Son of Mary, the Great Abbot, The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." Adamuan relates miracles of Columba scarcely above the level of the practices of the Druids. But superstition is not vanquished by superstition. Celibacy was a protest against the promiscuous intercourse for which Christian fathers condemn the Celts. Fasts and vigils contrasted with the gross, perhaps cannibal, practices still in use. The intense faith in Christ, of lives such as Patrick's and Columba' s, won the victory of the cross. When we pass to civil history our knowledge is restricted 597-685. to a list of names and battles ; but the labours of recent scholars allow a brief account of the Celtic races from the end of the 6th to their union in the middle of the 9th century, in part hypothetical, yet a great advance on the absolute blank which made historians of the 18th century decline the task in despair. The Britons, whose chief king had ruled at Alclyde, Britons were separated from their fellow-countrymen, the Cymry in of Strath- Wales, shortly after Columba's death by the rapid advance cl y de - of the Anglian kingdom of Northumberland, founded in the middle of the 6th century by Ida of Bamborough. One of his successors, Ethelfred, struck the blow, completed by the wars of the next king, Edwin, which severed modern Wales from British Cumbria and Strathclyde. Even Mona, the holy isle of both heathen and Christian Britons, became Anglesey, the island of the Angles. A later incursion towards the end of the century reached Carlisle and sepa- rated the kingdom of Alclyde, which had for its boundary the Catrail or Picts' trench between Peel Fell and Gala- shiels, from English Cumbria (Cumberland south of the Solway), and reduced for a short time Strathclyde to a subject province. When Bede wrote in 731 an Anglian bishopric had been established at Whithorn, which con- tinued till 803. The decline of the Northumbrian king- dom in the 8th century enabled the kings of Strathclyde to reassert their independence and maintain their rule within a restricted district more nearly answering to the valley of the Clyde, and in Galloway, in which there are some faint indications of a Pictish population, till it was united to the kingdom of Scone by the election of Donald, brother of Constantine II., king of the Scots, to its throne. Of the Scots of Dalriada somewhat more is known. Their history is interwoven with that of the Picts and meets at many points that of the Angles of Northumber- land, who during the 7th and the beginning of the 8th century, when their kings were the greatest in Britain, endeavoured to push their boundaries beyond the Forth and the Clyde. The history of this kingdom see NORTH- North- UMBERLAND (KINGDOM OF) forms part of that of Scot- umbrian land during these centuries. It planted in LOTHIAN (q.v.) su P re ' the seed from which the civilization of Scotland grew. To an early period of the contest between the Angles and the Britons, and to the country between the Forth and the Tweed and Solway, perhaps belong the battles magnified by successive poets who celebrated the hero of British medi- aeval romance. Whether these battles were really fought in southern Scotland and on the borders, and Arthur's Seat was one of his strongholds, still "unknown is the grave of Arthur." Before Edwin's death (633) his kingdom extended to the Forth, and the future capital of Scotland received the name of Edwinsburgh from him in place of the Mynyd Agned and Dunedin of the British and Gaelic Celts. During the reign of Oswald (635-642) the North- umbrians were reconverted by Aidan, a monk whom Oswald summoned from lona; and who became monastic bishop of Lindisfarne a southern lona from which the Celtic form of the Christian church spread amongst the Angles of the north and east of England, until the council of Whitby and the election of Wilfrid to the see of York restored the Roman ritual and diocesan episcopacy, when Colman, their Celtic bishop at Lindisfarne, retired with his monks to lona. Oswald's brother Oswy extended the dominion of Northumberland over a portion of the country of the northern Picts beyond the Forth. In his reign lived CUTHBERT (q.v.), the apostle of Lothian, where the monas- tery of St ^Ebba at Coldingham, the church on the Bass, the three churches of St Baldred at Auldham, Tynning- hame, and Preston, and the sanctuary of Wedale (Stow) kept alive the memory of the Celtic Church. His name