Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

EARLY CELTIC PERIOD.]
SCOTLAND
475
Cormac, the navigator, the first missionary to the Orkneys, who
perhaps reached the Faroes and Iceland ; and Drostan, the founder
of the Scottish monastery of Deer. , „ ^ , ......
Celtic The character of the Celtic Church of Columha was, like its
Church of mother church in Ireland, modified by migration to a country only
icolumba. 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 latei
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 oi 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 leligious
discipline. Of eleven successors of Columba as abbot nine were oi
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 ot
the semicircular instead of the coronal tonsure, and a peculiar ritual
for mass and baptism were its chief deviations from the practice ot
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
anlilluminating 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 mon s.
A similar conventual system of which St Bridget, abbess of Kildare,
was foundress enlisted the fervour of her sex, and had followers m
Darlugdach, abbess of Kildare, who founded Abernethy, m Affiba
at Coldingham, and in Hilda at Lindisfarne. It was a form ol
Christianity fitted to excite the wonder and gam the affection oi
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 ot idols
are rare. They had not the art necessary for an ideal representa-
iion of the human form, though they learnt to decorate the rude
stone monuments of an earlier age with elaborate tracery. 1 iey
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 o
gods are conspicuously absent, though antiquaries trace the worship
of the Sun in the Beltane fires and other rites ; but m 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 ol 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 Caesar 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 ol the
minor and secondary rather than the greater phenomena of natui e
that the Druids of Britain and Ireland exercised inliuence,—
the tempest and its elements—wind and rain and snow, thunder
and lightning—rather than the sun, moon, and stars, vv hateyer
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, m which the Celt de¬
lighted, were turned to sacred use. Columba was a protector ol
the bards,—himself a bard.
‘ It is not with the 1 screod’ our destiny is,
Nor with the bird 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 Ahbot, >(
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Adamnan relates miracles of Columba scarcely above the lev el
of the practices of the Druids. But superstition is not vanquished
by superstition. Celibacy was a protest aganist thc promiscmous
intercourse for which Christian fathers condemn the Celts. lasts
and vigils contrasted with the gross, perhaps cannibal, practices
still in use. The intense faith in Christ, of lives such as Patuck s
and Columba’Sj 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
Wales, shortly after Columba’s death by the rapid advance
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 Piets’ 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 Piets 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- re_
land during these centuries. It planted in Lothian yj-'V-) maCyt
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¬
eval 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 m 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 Iona, and who became monastic
bishop of Lindisfarne—a southern Iona—from which the
Celtic form of the Christian church spread amongst the
Ano-les 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 Iona. Oswald’s brother Oswy extended the
dominion of Northumberland over a portion of the country
of the northern Piets beyond the Forth. In his reign lived
Cuthbert (r/.v.), the apostle of Lothian, where the monas¬
tery of St iEbba 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