CHAPTER X.THE CHURCH.
At some remote and long-forgotten period, Christianity was first preached amongst the Provincials of Britain; and it became the established religion of the Romanized portion of the island after the great revolution effected by Constantine. Three British bishops accordingly sat at the Council of Arles, as representatives of the three Imperial provinces; and the presence of a similar deputation from the island is occasionally noticed in the accounts of other important councils. After the Faith had reached Britain from the neighbouring coasts of Gaul, it appears to have passed across the western Channel into Ireland—for there were believers in that country at the beginning of the fifth century;[340]although, from the success attending the labours of St. Patrick amongst the leading clans of the north and west, the conversion of the whole island has been generally attributed to the preaching of that celebrated missionary. From the date usually ascribed to the arrival of Patrick in Ireland, it is not improbable that his mission to that country was connected with one of the visits of Germanusand his companions to the neighbouring island of Britain.[341]The progress of the Pelagian heresy in the country of which its originator was a native, had excited the alarm of the orthodox Britons, who craved the assistance of their brethren in Gaul to aid them in eradicating the evil, and at a council which was held by the heads of the Gallican Church, Germanus and Lupus, the bishops of Auxerre and Troyes, were commissioned to cross the Channel, and refute the doctrines of the arch-heretic Pelagius; whilst about the same time, the notice of Celestine, Bishop of Rome, being attracted towards the state of the West, he dispatched Palladius, the Deacon, to exercise episcopal functions amongst the Irish believers in the name of Christ.[342]The actions of Palladiushave long been consigned to oblivion, but the name of Patrick is still venerated as the great Apostle of the Truth to Ireland.[343]
Born of parents of senatorial rank in one of the British provinces, at the age of sixteen Patrick was carried off by a party of marauders, and sold as a slave amongst the northern Irish.[344]Six years he passed in captivity before he was enabled to effect his escape; and upwards of twenty more elapsed, the greater part of which he probably spent amongst the monasteries of Gaul, before he returned to settle in the land of his birth, where his kindred earnestly entreated him to remain. But he had long felt an ardent desire to effect the conversion of the heathen Irish, and listening at length to the promptings of his fervent zeal, he revisited the scene of his early captivity, and undertook the holy task in which he was destined to be blessed with such complete success. His lengthened residence in Gaul must have familiarised him with the system so prevalent in that quarter; and the manner in which Patrick appears to have planted his religious communities throughout the provinces ofIreland, evinces the extent to which he had been affected by the monastic spirit of the age.
Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli, about the middle of the fourth century, was the first to introduce into Western Europe the custom of the bishop and his clergy residing together according to monastic rule, and to familiarize the inhabitants of cities with the presence of ascetics, hitherto confined to the desert and the wilderness. His example was followed by Augustine of Hippo, and Martin of Tours; and through the latter, the founder of monachism in the Gallic provinces, the system appears to have penetrated into the British Isles. Beda has left upon record a description of the Church of Lindisfarne, founded by Aidan in the best days of the Gaelic Church, which identifies the customs of that bishopric, still remaining in force at the time of the Norman Conquest, with the practice of Eusebius and Augustine.[345]Nor is it necessary to adduce the traditionary relationship between St. Martin and the Apostle of Ireland, as a proof how largely the Churches, which preceded the mission of Austin to the Anglo-Saxons, must have been indebted for their characteristic features to the celebrated Bishop of Tours.[346]
Many of the Gaelic monasteries were founded in remote and inaccessible situations; but the most important appear to have been placed, in exact imitationof the Abbey of Tours, at a short distance from the capital, or chief fortress, of the neighbourhood. Such was the case at Armagh, Lindisfarne, and St. Martins near Canterbury—that ancient British church which is said to have retained the early privilege of maintaining a bishop within its walls down to the time of the Norman Conquest.[347]Here the bishop dwelt with his clergy, and the rest of the brethren, of whom the great majority were laymen. All were bound to the observance of the same Rule; and all, as monks, were under the superintendence of the abbot of the community. In one point, however, a wide difference was observable between the constitution of the Gaelic Church, and the ecclesiastical system elsewhere prevailing; and this peculiar variation from the general rule may, in a great degree, be attributed to the circumstances under which monachism was originally introduced amongst the Gaelic people.
After Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire, the ecclesiastical system was naturally much influenced by the political institutions of a highly civilized and artificial state of society. The bishop and the city were inseparably connected; the diocese was not unfrequently bounded by the city walls; and when a large country district was included within the limits of the episcopal jurisdiction, the Diocesan was assisted by one or more Chorepiscopi, or Country Bishops, whose duties were strictly confined to that part of the diocese from which their name was originally derived. Nothing, indeed, more convincingly demonstrates how completely the Christianity of early times must have been confined to thecities of the Empire, than the epithet ofPagans, or “Country people,” which was used to distinguish those who persisted in adhering to the antiquated superstitions of their heathen forefathers. To the two great Christian divisions of clergy and laity, a third was added, when the increasing multitudes of ascetics and anchorites were collected by various pious men, and established in communities as cænobites; and when the ordination of certain members of the fraternity—which in early times was exclusively composed of laymen—and the introduction of the system into cities, brought these societies within the jurisdiction of the bishop, the authority of the Secular Head of the diocese clashed with that of the Regular Superior of the monastery, and frequently became a matter of dispute. Accordingly, the submission of the monks to the Diocesan, in ecclesiastical matters, was strictly enforced, by the rule laid down in various councils of the fifth and sixth centuries, “that no monastery should be erected without the consent of the bishop of the diocese.” In societies already existing, the limits of episcopal and abbatial jurisdiction were carefully defined, whilst a few monasteries preserved the privilege of retaining within their walls a bishop expressly for their own community, as was the case in the abbeys of St. Denis, and of St. Martin at Tours.
Such was the manner in which the abbot eventually assumed a subordinate position beneath the recognized Head of the clerical order, wherever the monastery was introduced upon a state of society, amongst which a settled ecclesiastical system had long prevailed. But neither regular dioceses, nor secular clergy, existed in Ireland at the time when Patrick disseminated throughout that country therule, and the discipline, with which he had become familiarized in Gaul. Monachism may be said to have brought in Christianity; and the Faith was ingrafted on the Rule, rather than the Rule on the Faith. The monastery was all in all, and the whole scheme of Church government was based upon a monastic foundation. Instead of dioceses under the jurisdiction of metropolitan and suffragan bishops, wide districts were under the sway of different monasteries, the greater number dependant upon some leading community, like that of Armagh, or Iona. It is not to be supposed, however, that there were no bishops.[348]Every monastic establishment of any pretensionpossessed one bishop, sometimes several, within the walls; but as the prelate was without a diocese, he was in an anomalous, and in some measure in a subordinate situation. It was amongst the privileges of the monastery of Bobbio, founded in Italy by the Irish Columbanus, that the bishop of the diocese was never allowed to enter the precincts of the abbey except for clerical purposes alone; and the position in which the Italian prelate must have been placed, during the brief period for which he remained amongst the brotherhood of Bobbio, was the normal condition of a bishop in the Gaelic and British Churches. As a priest, he was the ecclesiastical Head of the whole community, upon whom he alone could confer orders; whilst as a monk he observed the same rule as the rest of the brethren, asserting no authority in this respect over the abbot, who, as the Regular Superior of the Fraternity, became in reality the leading churchman of the district.
Tithes and parishes were unknown, and the income of the community was originally derived exclusively from dues and altar offerings; though, by degrees, lands were conferred upon monasteries, fines were levied upon offenders against certain laws, and the greater abbots asserted their right to acuairtorvisitation, similar to that enjoyed by the secular princes of the age.[349]The promulgation of the different laws, of which the infringement was punishableby fine, and the progresses of the great Abbots of Armagh upon their Visitations, with the tribute levied upon such occasions, are frequently to be met with in the Irish annalists after the commencement of the eighth century,[350]and as all fines, tributes, and other temporal advantages, fell to the share of the Regular Superior of the monastery, it is easy to conceive how the abbacy, rather than the bishopric, grew to be the object of an Irish or Scottish churchman’s ambition.[351]About the same time occurs the first mention of a personage, second only in importance to the abbot—the Herenach, or lay tenant of the lands of the monastery, answering in many respects to the Advocatus Ecclesiæ upon the Continent. According to the invariable custom of the Gaelic system of tenure, the possessions of the community, or Termon lands, were made over to a tenant, generally some powerful chieftain of the neighbourhood, in whose family the office remained as an inalienable duchas, and who acted as the abbot’s deputy, or maor, retaining the invariablethirdas his prerogative.[352]
A hundred years passed away after the mission of St. Patrick before a diversity of Rules crept into the Gaelic church, and a different mode of celebrating the service was introduced, amongst some of the Irish monasteries, from Britain.[353]In another centuryarose the question about Easter and the Tonsure, causing a temporary breach between the churches of the South of Ireland—which conformed to the practice of the Western Church towards the middle of the seventh century—and the churches of the North which, together with those of the Picts and Scots, and their Anglo-Saxon followers, clung to their ancient usage till the close of the same century, or the beginning of the next, when the Britons alone remained consistent in their attachment to the Eastern tonsure, and to the erroneous cycle.[354]Long before the deathof Beda flagrant abuses had crept into the English Church, and the venerable historian laments the condition into which most of the monasteries had fallen throughout the dominions of Northumbria.[355]Very similar causes to those which brought about such results in England, were rife both in Ireland and in Scotland; and the Gaelic Church had varied widely from its original form and spirit, when it presented to the astonished eyes of the dignified prelates of the Roman Church in the twelfth century a picture, in which the abuses of encroachment and neglect had left but the shadow of a long forgotten system of church government. The greater abbacies had become the hereditary appanages of powerful families, where they were not still the objects of bloody contention; and the leading members of the septs, who filled the office of abbot, had sometimes ceased even to be in holy orders.[356]The Termonlands were leased out as the hereditary property of Herenachs, members generally of the same families that possessed the abbacies; whilst the vast communities of monks, that Eastern peculiarity which formed so prominent a feature of the Gaelic Church in her best days, had dwindled into small bodies of Culdees, the representatives of the clerical portion of the brotherhood—thetwelvecompanions so invariably attending the abbots of the early period—who were frequently as remarkable for the amount of their private wealth, as their predecessors, in the times of Columba and Aidan, had been renowned for their disinterested reluctance to acquire property of any description.[357]
The Scottish Church, at the commencement of the twelfth century, must have presented many similar features to those which met the eyes of the English prelates in Ireland, towards the close of the same period. The whole of ancient Alban had once been subject to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Abbots of Iona, until the dispute between the members ofthat community and the Pictish king Nechtan appears to have resulted in transferring the supremacy to the Superior of Abernethy; who, in turn, yielded the predominance to the abbot or bishop of Dunkeld, after the establishment of that monastery by Constantine Mac Fergus. The primacy was eventually transferred during the reign of Cyric, from the foundation of Constantine to the establishment endowed by his brother Angus; and, from that period, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of St. Andrews extended in exact proportion with the temporal authority of the kings of Scotland.[358]Each of the provinces that were originally independent must, at one time, have possessed its own monastery and bishop; but as the district kings sunk under the dominion of the supreme sovereign, the bishops either disappeared altogether, or became subordinate to, and dependant on, the Bishop of St. Andrews; so that only three or, at most, four sees existed in Scotland when David ascended the throne.[359]One of these must have been the bishopric of Glasgow, created, or revived, by the king during the lifetime of his predecessor Alexander; whilst the three remaining sees were St. Andrews, Dunkeld, and Moray.[360]In two of the latter the old abbacies had become hereditary appanages of the reigning family, and the jurisdiction of the sees of St. Andrews and Dunkeld embraced the whole of Scotland immediately dependant upon the royal authority; whilst the North remained underthe superiority of the monastery, whichever that may have been, in which the earlier Bishops of Moray were accustomed to fix their residence; thus demonstrating how completely the two great provinces ofScotiaandMoraviamust at one period have been divided between the rival families of Atholl and Moray.
The first step towards remodelling the Scottish Church was Alexander’s re-grant of the ancient donation of the Pictish Angus to the monastery of St. Andrews; but many years elapsed before David was enabled to complete the measures which his brother had only commenced. Five other bishoprics were added to the four already existing, and the sees of Dunblane, Brechin, Aberdeen, Ross, and Caithness, were created, or revived, in districts where hitherto the abbacy, rather than the bishopric, had been predominant; but it was long before all the Scottish dioceses attained the footing of regularly established bishoprics, like those of Glasgow and St. Andrews. In Dunkeld, the peculiar district of the royal family, all difficulties were originally overcome, by electing the last abbot of the Culdee monastery to be the first bishop of the remodelled see; but very little provision was made for the Canons before the episcopate of Geoffrey, towards the middle of the following century. In Aberdeen, the power of appointing Canons, and constituting a Chapter in his Cathedral, was conferred by Papal Bull upon Bishop Edward; but the first record of a constitution dates from the episcopate of Peter Ramsay, about 1259; whilst in Moray, the Chapter was first created by Bishop Bryce Douglas about the year 1220. In Caithness, the establishment dates from about 1245, the service before that time having been performedby a single priest, owing to the impoverishment, through war, of a see which appears to have owed little or nothing, in the way of endowment, to the Norwegian Magnates of the Orkneys. Dunblane was in a very similar condition about the same period; for although endowed by Gilbert of Strathearn with one-third of his earldom (if Fordun is to be credited) fifteen years after the death of this munificent patron the see had been ten years vacant through poverty—a single chaplain, as in Caithness, celebrating divine service in a church without a roof—a state of affairs which was remedied by Bishop Clement in 1238.[361]With the revival of these sees by David, the rule of discipline sanctioned by the Roman Church was introduced into the Scottish monasteries; and wherever the authority of the Crown was paramount, the numerous Culdee societies, which were scattered in every direction over the face of the country at the beginning of the twelfth century, were either suppressed altogether, or deprived of their most important privileges. The state of the Scottish Church at this period, and the nature of the changes brought about by David, may be best appreciated from a sketch of the royal proceedings in the diocese of St. Andrews, the principal bishopric of the kingdom.
A Prior and twelve Culdees constituted the College of Kilrimont, better known under the subsequent name of St. Andrews. The possessions, which they held in common, were small and poor; their private property, which was inherited or acquired by the gifts of friends and penitents, was large and valuable, reverting, upon the death of the possessors, to their wives, children, or relatives. Upon seven of the community devolved the duty of ministration at the altar; but the service was never performed before the high altar of St. Andrews except upon state occasions, in the presence of the king or the bishop; and at other times the Culdees celebrated their office, after their own peculiar manner, in a remote corner of the church. From the frequent allusion to Seven Churches amongst the early religious societies in Ireland and Scotland, it is probable that in ancient times each priest officiated in a separate chapel, set apart for his own particular ministration.[362]The altar-offerings were divided intoseven portions; one for the bishop, another for the hospital—that invariable appendage of a Culdee monastery, which alone survived the changes introduced by David; whilst the remaining five became the property of the five Culdees, who never officiated at the altar, on the condition of entertaining all pilgrims and strangers when the hospital (which contained six) was full; and upon such occasions the host was decided upon by lot. The origin of this custom may, probably, be traced to the practice amongst the early Religious, of giving up the greater part of the altar-offerings to a common fund, to be administered by the members of the community who did not officiate at the altar, in relieving the poor, and in exercising the duties of hospitality to pilgrims and strangers. No Culdee, after his election, continued to dwell in the same house with his wife and family.[363]
The privilege of electing the abbot, the bishop, and every member of the community, was vested in the Culdees, who exercised, within the walls of their monastery, the same rights that belonged in secular affairs to the district and provincial chieftains. The right of blood was as predominant amongst the ecclesiastics as it was all prevalent amongst the laityof the Gaelic people; and as the abbot represented the original Founder of the monastery, and came in time to be chosen from the leading family of the district, so the Culdees appear to have been selected from amongst the members of the same race who could claim the privilege of Founder’s kin. Latterly, the abbots of the greater monasteries in Scotland became altogether lay functionaries, proprietors of the abbey lands, out of which the remainder of the community were supported.[364]They seem to have resembled the Herenach rather than the abbot of the Irish Gael; whilst those ecclesiastical duties and prerogatives, which were very generally exercised by the Irish abbots until the arrival of the English prelates in that country, appear to have been divided in Scotland between the bishop and the prior.[365]
After the establishment and endowment of the Regular Priory of St. Andrews by David in 1144, nearly all the privileges originally belonging to the Culdees of Kilrimont were transferred to the Canons Regular. The Culdees themselves were permitted to retain their possessions for their own lives, or to embrace the Regular life and become Canons of the newly-founded Priory;[366]but the members of smaller Culdee establishments, like that of St. Servanson Loch Leven, were treated with far less ceremony; and when their possessions were disposed of in other quarters, they were peremptorily ordered to conform to the Regular discipline, on pain of summary ejectment from their monastery.[367]Whilst the lesser religious houses were thus converted into small dependant priories, filled with Regular monks, the more important communities seem frequently to have retained one part of their ancient establishment, and to have become “Hospitallers;” so much so, that in the succeeding century, the name of “Kildey” is used as an equivalent for a Hospital.[368]
The condition of the Culdees, after the reign of David, varied according to the circumstances of the dioceses in which they were placed. None can be traced to the south of the Forth, where they appear never to have existed; nor within the limits of the see of Moray, in which they must undoubtedly have been suppressed, upon the forfeiture of the ancient earls of the province. In Aberdeen, only those establishments seem to have been retained which were dependant on the bishop of St. Andrews; whilst little or nothing is known of the existence of Culdees in Ross and Caithness, though they probably lingered for some time amidst the mountains of those remote districts. In the bishoprics of St. Andrews and Dunkeld they remained in the character of Hospitallers, retaining the tithes of certain parishes, with the privilege of electing the prior and other members of their fraternity, subject to the approval of the bishop. But the case was widely different in thedioceses of Brechin and Dunblane, where the Culdees long shared in the privileges of the Chapter—a compromise that must be attributed to the peculiar circumstance of those bishoprics, in which the church-lands were held by powerful feudatories, whom it would have been dangerous and impolitic to offend.[369]
But even in those dioceses in which the church lands had reverted to the crown, either through hereditary succession, or from the forfeiture of their earlier possessors, the Culdees, chosen from amongst the leading provincial families, were far too powerfula body to submit without a struggle to the loss of their former privileges.[370]It appears to have been their object to establish themselves as Regular Canons, independent of the authority of the bishop; and they were occasionally assisted in their endeavours to promote their aim by the earl of the province, with whom they were frequently connected by the ties of relationship. At the opening of the thirteenth century, the Bishop of St. Andrews was obliged to obtain a Papal Bull to prevent the refractory brethren of Monymusk from exchanging the character of Hospitallers for that of Regular Canons; though the Culdees, who seem to have enlisted in their behalf the Earl of Mar and the Bishop of Aberdeen, eventually obtained their object, and before the middle of the same century, they were addressed by the pope as Regular Augustine Canons.[371]
Frequent contests between the Culdees of Kilrimont and the Prior and Canons of St. Andrews can be traced in the Register of that Priory. The Culdees seem to have been connected with the Comyns and their adherents, and to have profited by the preponderance of the national party during the stormy minority of Alexander the Third; for not only was a Papal Bull issued in favour of the married clergy of Scotland, representing that they were unjustly debarred from their rights,[372]but the Prior and Culdeeswere about this time converted, by the authority of a similar document, into the Provost and Chapter of St. Mary’s; though a proviso was introduced into the latter Bull to secure the privileges of the Canons of St. Andrews.[373]For a short time the Provost and Chapter of St. Mary’s appear to have been placed on a similar footing with the Culdee Chapters of Brechin and Dunblane, and to have re-established a claim to share in the election of the Bishop of St. Andrews; but they were once more reduced to their former subordination after the state of Scotland became more settled, and when the national party came to terms with the opposite faction, to which the Canons of St. Andrews appear to have adhered.[374]
At the close of the century the Culdees again make their appearance, when they elected their provost, William Comyn, to the bishopric of St. Andrews, and as they still followed the fortunes of the party which now supported Balliol, their appeal to Rome, in support of this election, was backed by the whole interest of Edward of England.[375]The pope, however, decided against the Culdees, and as they were now connected with the losing side, theyshared in the downfall of the Balliols, and were finally subjected to the jurisdiction of the bishop of St. Andrews.[376]From this time nothing more is heard of the Culdees, though their monastery still existed in dependance on their former rivals; and as in the sister island the Reformation found a prior and twelve Culdees amongst the recognized clergy at Armagh, so at the same era in Scotland, a prior and twelve prebendaries still remained in the little monastery of Kirkheugh, humble representatives of the once powerful and high-born Culdees of Kilrimont.