Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

474 SCOTLAND [history.
5th and half of the 6th century is peopled by Cruithne or Piets m
6th cents, 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 Iona 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 history1
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
sion to touch historic ground after the Romans left. Although
Chris- tpe legends of Christian superstition are almost as fabu-
tiamty. jous ag tilose 0f 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¬
tins from Achsea 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 f7,v.), tli6 son of a 1 iritisi 1 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 Piets 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 Duan Albanach
of the 11th 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 Annals 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 Yenedotian
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 Flann 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 Piets 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 Piets, 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 church, 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 Whithorn2 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 Piets, and his disciples Serf and
Ternan converted respectively the Piets of Fife and those of the
lowlands of Aberdeen. Kentigern (q.v.) of Strathclyde was sup- Kenti-
ported by Rydderick or Roderick, called Hael (“ the Liberal ”) from gem.
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 prince
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 Columba.
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 Doire
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 wras 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 Iona (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 ; hut
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 Derry obtained the exemption of the Dalriads of
Iona from tribute, though they were still bound 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 Iona, 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 Iona 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
Piets, 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.