Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/499

Rh EARLY CELTIC PERIOD.] SCOTLAND 477 fell in battle at Mugdoch in Stirling ; and Angus, with his ally Ecbert, king of Northumberland, retaliated by burning Alclyde (756). About this time (752) Coilin Droighteach (the Bridgemaker), abbot of lona, removed most of the relics of his abbey to Ireland, and this is the most probable date of the legend of the relics of St An- drew being brought from Patras to St Andrews, where the sons of a Pictish king, Hungus (Angus MacFergus), who was absent in Argyll, or, according to another ver- sion, Hungus himself, dedicated Kilrighmont (St Andrews) and the district called the Boar's Chase to St Andrew. The ascription of the foundation to an earlier king of the same name in the 4th century was due to the wish to give the chief bishopric of Scotland an antiquity greater than lona and Glasgow, greater even than Canterbury and York. After the death of Angus MacFergus no king is connected with any event of importance except Constantino, son of Fergus (died 820), who is said to have founded the church of Dunkeld, 226 years after Garnard, son of Donald, founded Abernethy. This fact, though the earlier date is not certain, points to the Perthshire lowlands as having been for a long time the centre of the chief Pictish mon- archy. Probably Scone was during this period, as it cer- tainly became afterwards, the political capital ; and the kings latterly are sometimes called kings of Fortren. If so, the chief monarchy under the pressure of the Norse attacks had passed south from Inverness, having occupied perhaps at various times, Dunottar, Brechin, Forfar, Fort- eviot, and Abernethy as strongholds ; but it is not possible to say whether there may not have continued to be inde- pendent Pictish rulers in the north. irly The annals of Dalriada are even more perplexing than of those of the Picts after the middle of the 6th century. otT There is the usual list of kings, but they are too numer- ous, and their reigns are calculated on an artificial system. The forty kings from Fergus MacEarc to Fergus MacFerch- ard, who would carry the date of the Scottish settlement back to three centuries at least before the birth of Christ, have been driven from the pale of history by modern cri- ticism. The date of the true settlement was that of the later Fergus, the son of Earc, in 503. From that date down to Selvach, the king who was conquered by Angus MacFergus about 730, the names of the kings can be given with reasonable certainty from Adamnan, Bede, and the Irish Annals. But the subsequent names in the Scot- tish chronicles are untrustworthy, and it is an ingenious conjecture that some may have been inserted to cover the century following 730, during which Dalriada is supposed to have continued under Pictish rule. This view is not free from its own difficulties. It is hard to explain how Kenneth Macalpine, called by all Scottish records a Scot, though in Irish Annals styled (as are several of his succes- sors) king of the Picts, succeeded in reversing the conquest of Angus MacFergus and establishing a Scottish line on the throne of Scone, in the middle of the 9th century. This difficulty is supposed to be solved by the hypothesis that Kenneth was the son of a Pictish father, Alpine, but of a Scottish mother, and was entitled to the crown by a peculiarity of Pictish law, which recognized descent by the mother as the test of legitimacy. The records which speak of the destruction of the Picts are treated as later inventions, and it is even doubted whether the connexion between Alpine and Kenneth and the older race of Dalriad kings is not fictitious. 1 1 The above statement is a brief outline of the reconstruction of this period of Scottish history due to two scholars who have done more than any others to elucidate it, Father Innes and Mr Skene. Their negative criticism, which destroys the fabric reared by a succession of historians from Fordun or his continuator Bowmaker to Buchanan, is a masterly work, not likely to be superseded. Whether the construc- tive part will stand is not certain, but it explains many of the facts. Whatever may be the solution ultimately reached as to 756-867. Kenneth Macalpine's antecedents, his accession represents Union of a revolution which led by degrees to a complete union of icts and the Picts and Scots and the establishment of one kingdom ts ' at first called Albania and afterwards Scotia which included all Scotland north of the Forth and Clyde, except Caithness, Sutherland, Orkney and Shetland (the northern isles or Nordreyar), the Hebrides (the southern isles or Sudreyar), and Man ; these fell for a time into the hands of the Norsemen. This revolution had two causes or concomitants, one religious and the other poli- tical. Kenneth Macalpine in the seventh year of his reign (851) brought the relics of St Columba from lona to a church he built at Dunkeld, and on his death he was buried at lona. A little earlier the Irish Culdees, then in their first vigour, received their earliest grant in Scotland at Loch Leven from Brude, one of the last kings of the Picts, and soon found their way into all the principal Columbite monasteries, of which they represent a reform. The Irish monastic system did not yet give place to the Roman form of diocesan episcopacy. The abbot of Dun- keld succeeded to the position of the abbot of lona and held it until the beginning of the 10th century, giving ecclesiastical sanction to the sovereign at Scone, as Columba had done in the case of Aidan. As early as the beginning of the 8th century, however, a Pictish bishop of Scotland appears at a council of Rome, and he had at least two successors as sole bishops or primates of the Celtic Church before dioceses were formed. Scotland north of the firths thus remained at a lower stage of church organization than England, where a complete system of dioceses had been established in great part answering to the original Anglo-Saxon kingdoms or their divisions, with Canterbury and York at their head as rivals for the primacy. But the Celtic clergy who now conformed to the Roman ritual preserved some knowledge of the Latin language, and a connexion with Rome as the centre of Latin Christianity, which was certain to result in the adoption of the form of church government now almost universal. The other circumstance which had a powerful influence on the foundation of the monarchy of Scone and the consolidation of the Celtic tribes was the descent on all the coasts of Britain and Ireland of the Norse and Danish vikings. The Danes chiefly attacked England from Viking Northumberland and along the whole east and part of the raids - southern seaboard; the Norsemen attacked Scotland, especially the islands and the north and west coasts, going as far south as the Isle of Man and the east and south of Ireland. It had now become essential to the existence of a Scottish Celtic kingdom that its centre should be removed farther inland. Argyll and the Isles, including lona, were in the path of danger. No monk would have now chosen island homes for safety. In 787 the first arrival of the viking ships is noticed in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Some years later the Irish Annals mention that all " the islands of Britain were wasted and much harassed by the Danes." Amongst these were Lindisfarne, Rathlin off Antrim, lona (794), and Patrick's island near Dublin (798). lona was thrice plundered between 802 and 826, when Blathmac, an abbot, was killed. A poem composed not long after the event states that the shrine of Columba was one of the objects in search of which the Norsemen came, and that it was concealed by the monks. It was to preserve the relics from this fate that some of them were transferred by Droighteach, the last abbot, to Ireland and others by Kenneth to Dunkeld. For half a century the vikings were content with plunder, but in the middle of the 9th they began to form settlements. In 849 Olaf the White established himself at Dublin as king of Hui Ivar ; in 867 a Danish kingdom was set up in Northumberland ;