Spiritual Descendants of St. Columba (part 2 of 2)

propagation of the faith in all Christian countries. A vast

and continual development of literary and religious effect ^^^ is there apparent, superior to anything that could be seen in any other country of Europe. Certain arts— those of architecture, carving, metallurgy, as applied to the decoration of churches — Avere successfully cultivated, without speaking of music, which continued to flourish both among the learned and among the people. The classic languages — not only Latin but Greek— were cultivated, spoken, and written with a sort of passionate pedantry, which shows at least how powerful was the sway of intellectual influences over these ardent souls. Their mania for Greek was even carried so far that they wrote the Latin of the church books

^"^ This occurred in 753, 757, and 778.

=«^ Annals of Ulster, aim. 817.

292 u Scripturarum tarn liberalium quara ccclesiasticaruQi."

VOL n. 11 in Hellenic characters.^^^ And in Ireland more than anywhere else, each monastery was a school, and each school a workshop of transcription, from which day by day issued new copies of the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers of the primitive Church — copies which were dispersed through all Europe, and which are still to be found in Continental libraries. They may easily be recognized by the original and elegant character of their Irish writing, as also by the use of the alphabet common to all the Celtic races, and afterwards employed by the Anglo-Saxons, but to which in our day the Irish alone have remained faithful. Columba, fmlfau^oL^of ^^ ^^^^ been seen, had given an example of this unwearied labor to the monastic scribes; his example was continually followed in the Irish cloisters, where the monks did not entirely limit themselves to the transcription of Holy Scripture, but reproduced also Greek and Latin authors, sometimes in Celtic character, with gloss and commentary in Irish, like that Horace which modern learning has discovered in the library of Berne.^'-** These marvellous manuscripts, illuminated with incomparable ability and patience by the monastic family of Columba, excited, five hundred years later, the declamatory enthusiasm of a great enemy of Ireland, the Anglo-Norman historian, Gerald de Barry; and they still attract the attention of archaeologists and philologists of the highest fame.^'-'^

Exact auuals of the events of the time were also made out in all the monasteries. These annals replaced the chronicles of the bards; and so far as they have been preserved, and already published or about to be so,

*^^ Eeeves's Adam7ian, pp. 158, 354. In a MS. life of St. Brendan this curious passage occurs: " Habebat... missalem librum scriptum Graecis litteris.... Et positus est ille liber super altare.... Illico jam litteras Grsecas scivit sanctus Brendanus, sicuti Latinas quas didicit ab infantia. Et coepit missam cantare."

^^^ Orelli, in his edition of Horace, says that this Codex of Berne, M'ith its Irish gloss, is of the eighth or ninth century: " Scotice scriptus, antiquissiraus onaniuni quotquot adhuc innotuerunt."

295 "jjcec equidem quanto frequentius et diligentius intueor, semper quasi novis obstupeo, semperque magis et magis admiranda conspicio." — Giral- Dus Cambrensis, Topogr. lEber., ii. c. 38. Most of these admired and quoted MSS. in Continental or Anglo-Saxon libraries, are of Irish origin, as has been proved by Zeuss, Keller, and Reeves. The MSS. used by the celebrated philologist Zeuss in the composition of his Grammatica Celtica (Lipsia;, 1853) contain Irish glosses upon the Latin text of Priscian, at St. Gall, on St. Paul's epistles, at Wurzburg, on the commentary of St. Columbanus upon the Psalms, which has been brought from Bobbio to Milan, and on Bade, brought from lleichenau to Carlsruhe. they now form the principal source of Irish history .^^^ Ecclesiastical records have naturally a greater place in them than civil history. They celebrate especially the memory of the saints, who have always been so numerous in the Irish Church, where each of the great communities can count a circle of holy men, issued from its bosom or attached to its confraternity. Under the name oi sanctllogy or festllogy (for martyrs were too little known in Ireland to justify the usual term of martyrology), this circle of biographies was the spiritual reading of the monks, and the familiar instruction of the surrounding people. Several of these /e.s^i7o(/ies are in verse, one of which, the most fimous of all, is at- Ancrus, the tributed to Angus, called the Culdee, a simple broth- C"Wee. er, miller of the Monastery of Tallach.^'^^ In this the principal saints of other countries find a place along with three hundred and sixty-five Irish saints, one for each day of the year, who were all celebrated with that pious and patriotic enthusiasm, at once poetical and moral, which burns so naturally in every Irish heart.

The name of Culdee leads us to point out in passing the absurd and widespread error which has made the Culdees be looked upon as a kind of monkish order, married and indigenous to the soil, which existed before the introduction of Christianity into Ireland and Scotland by the Roman missionaries, and of whom the great abbot of lona was the founder or chief. This opinion, propagated by learned Anglicans, and blindly copied by various French writers, is now universally acknowledged as false by sincere and competent judges.^^^ The Culdees, a sort of third ^"^ These precious collections were continued by the more recent Orders after the English conquest, and even after the lieformation, up to the seventeenth centurj'. See especially the valuable collection entitled Annals of the Four Masters, that is to say, of the four Franciscans of Donegal, which conic down to 1634.

^'^ See the analysis made of it by O'Curry, Lectures, &c., pp. 3G4, 371, and, after liim, M. de la Villemarque in his Pocsie cles CloUres Celtiques.

2^^ According to Dr. Reeves, the name of Culdee or Ceile Dei, answering to the Latin terra Servus Dei, appeared for the first time in authentic history with the name of this Angus, who lived in 780. It was afterwards applied to the general body of monks, that is to say, to all the clerks living under a monastic rule in Ireland and Scotland. According to the lamented O'Curry, the Culdees were nothing more than ecclesiastics or laymen, attached to the monasteries, and whose first founder was a St. Malruain, who died in 787 or 702. This information, which the author has derived from the two princes of Irish erudition, agrees perfectly with the conclusions of Dr. Lanigan in his very learned and impartial ecclesiastical history of Ireland, vol. iv. p. 205- 300; as also with those of the new Bollandists, vol. viii. of October, p. 86, Disquisitio in Culdeos, ap. Acta S. lleguli. According to the worthy conorder, attached to the regular monasteries, appeared in Ireland, as elsewhere, only in the ninth century, and had never anything more than a trifling connection with the Columban communities.299 Missionary Still moro striking than the intellectual developtheirish^ ment of which the Irish monasteries were at this monijsout period the centre, is the prodigious activity disof Ireland,

pj^^g^] ]^y ^\^q Jngh monks in extending and multiplying themselves over all the countries of Europe — here to create new schools and sanctuaries among nations already evangelized — there to carry the light of the Gospel, at peril of their lives, to the countries that were still pagan. We should run the risk of forestalling our future task if we did not resist the temptations of the subject, which would lead us to go faster than time, and to follow those armies of brave and untiring Celts, always adventurous and often heroic, into the regions where we shall perhaps one day find them again. Let us content ourselves with a simple list, which has a certain eloquence even in the dryness of its figures. Here is the number, probably very incomplete, given by an ancient writer, of the monasteries founded out of Ireland by Irish monks, led far from their country by the love of souls, and, no doubt, a little also by that love of travel which has always been one of their special distinctions: —

Thirteen in Scotland,
Twelve in England,
Seven in France,
Twelve in Armorica,
Seven in Lorraine,
Ten in Alsatia,
Sixteen in Bavaria,

Fifteen in llhetia, Helvetia, and Allemania

tinuators of the Acta Sanctorum, the Culdees were not monks, but secular brothers, or rather canons, and appeared at soonest in the year 800. At the same time our learned contemporaries remit to the ninth century that translation of the relics of the apostle St. Andrew, who became the patron saint of Scotland in the middle ages, which the legends have attributed to the fourth or sixth. This translation, made by a bishop named Regulus (Rule), occasioned the foundation of the episcopal see and town of St. Andrews on the east coast of Scotland, in the county of Fife, which was made metropolis of the kingdom in 1472, and possesses a university, which dates from 1411. Very fine ruins of the churches destroyed by the Reformers in 1559 are still to be seen there. Since the preceding note was written, a new publication, by Dr. Reeves, The Culdees of the British Islands as they a2:)pear in History, with an axopendix of Evidences, Dublin, 18G4, has summed up and ended all controversy upon this long-disputed question, and given the last blow to the chimeras of sectarian erudition.

2^* Reeves's Adamnan, p. 368. without counting many in Thuringia and upon the left bank of the Lower Rhine; and, fioally, six in Italy.

And that it may be fully apparent how great was the zeal and virtue of which those monastic colonies were at once the product and the centre, let us place by its side an analogous list of saints of Irish origin, whom the gratitude of nations converted, ediGed, and civilized by them, have placed upon their altars as patrons and founders of those churches whose foundations they watered with their blood: —

A hundred and fifty (of whom thirty-six were martyrs)

in Germany,

Forty-five (of whom six were martyrs) in Gaul,

Tlairty in Belgium, Thirteen in Italy,.

Eight, all martyrs, in Norway and Iceland.^*"'

In the after part of this narrative we shall meet many of the most illustrious, especially in Germany. Let us confine ourselves here to pointing out, among the thirteen Irish saints honored with public veneration in Italy, him who is still invoked at the extremity of the peninsula as the patron of Tarento under the name of San Cataldo.

His name in Ireland was Cathal, and before he g^^^ ^^^^^^ ' left his country to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, do, bishop and to become a bishop at Tarento, he had presided ° ^"'"^^oover the great monastic school of Lismore,-^oi [^ i\^q south of Ireland.^*^^ Thanks to his zeal and knowledge, this school had become a sort of university, to which he attracted an immense crowd of students, not only Irish, but foreigners, from Wales, England, France, and even from Germany. AVhcn their education was concluded, a portion of them remained to increase the already numerous communities in the holy and lettered city of Lismore; the others carried back with them to their different countries a recollection of the advantages which they owed to Ireland and her monks.^^ ^"" Stephen White, Apologia, in Haverty's History of Ireland. ^"' See his acts, in Colgan, p. 542-5G2, and the Bollandists, vol. ii. May, p. 5C9-578. Lanigan (vol. iii. p. 121-128) quotes a life of this saint in Latin verse by Bonaventura Moroni. His father, St. Donatus, is supposed to have been bishop of Lecce, in the same province as Tarento.

^°- See the legend of the founder of Lismore, Book VIII. chap. iii. oj u Eirregia jam et sancta civitas est Lismor, cujus dimidium est asylum, in quo nulla mulier audet intrare, sed plenum est cellis et monasteriis Sanctis: et multitudo virorum sanctorum semper illi manet. Viri cnim religiosi ex omni parte Hibernian, et non solum ex Anglia et Britannia confluunt ad earn, volentes ibi migrare ad Christum." — ^c^. Sand. Bolland., vol. iii. May, p. 388. " Ad earn brevi excellentiam pervenit, ut ad ipsuni audicndum Galli, 126 ST. COLUMBA,

^01" it is important to prove that, while Ireland sent forth her sons into all the regions of the then known world, numberless strangers hastened there to seat themselves at the feet of her doctors, and to find in ^^^^^ ^^^^ Centre of faith and knowledge all the remnants of ancient civilization which her insular position had permitted her to save from the flood of barbarous invasions.

The monasteries which gradually covered the soil of Ireland were thus the hostelries of a foreign emigration. Unlike the ancient Druidical colleges, they were open to all. The poor and the rich, the slave as well as the freeman, the child and the old man, had free access and paid nothing. It was not, then, only to the natives of Ireland that the Irish monasteries, occupied and ruled by the sons of Columba, confined the benefits of knowledge and of literary and religious education. They opened their door with admirable generosity to strangers from every country and of every condition; above all, to those who came from the neighboring island, England, some to end their lives in an Irish cloister, some to search from house to house for books, and masters capable of explaining those books. The Irish monks received with kindness guests so greedy of instruction, and gave them both books and masters, the food of the body and the food of the soul, without demanding any recompensed*^* The Anglo-Saxons, who were afterwards to repay this teaching with ingratitude so cruel, were of all nations the one which derived most profit from it. From the seventh to the eleventh century English students flocked into Ireland, and for four hundred years the monastic schools of the island

Angli, Scoti, Teutones aliique finitarum regionurn quam plurimi Lesmorium conveniunt."— Officium S. Cataldi, ap. Lanigan, loco cit. This monastic town of Lismore, the seat of a bishopric since united with that of Waterford, must not be identified with another bishopric called Lismore, situated in an island of the Hebridean archipelago. The Irish Lismore is now specially remarkable for a fine castle of the Duke of Devonshire on the picturesque banks of the Blackwater.

³⁰⁴ a Erant ibidem multi nobilium simul et mediocrium de gente Anglorum qui... rclicta patria, vel divinae lectionis, vel continentioris vitse gratia illo secesserant. Et quidam mox se monasticaa conversationi fideliter mancipaverunt, alii magis circumeundo per cellas magistrorum lectioni operam dare gaudebant, quod omnes Scoti libentissime suscipientes victum eis quotidianum sine pretio, aliis quoque ad legendum et magisterium gratuitum prajbcre curabant." — Bede, iii. 27, ad ann. GG4. There still existed in Armagh, in 1092, a locality called Trien-Saxon, inhabited by Anglo-Saxon students. CoLGAN, Trias Thaum., p. 300; compare Lanigan, iii. 490, 493. cessive generations to dip deeply there into the living waters of knowledge and of faith.

This devotion to knowledge and generous munificence towards strangers, this studious and intellectual life, nourished into being by the sheltering warmth of faith, shone with all the more brightness amid the horrible confusion and bloody disasters which signalize, in so far as concerned temporal affairs, the Golden Age of ecclesiastical history in Ireland, even before the sanguinary invasions of the Danes at the end of the eighth century. It has been said with justice that war and religion have been in all ages the two great passions of Ireland. But it must be allowed that war seems almost always to have carried the day over religion, and that religion did not prevent war from degenerating too often into massacres and assassinations. It is true that after the eighth century there are fewer kings murdered by their successors than in the period between St. Patrick and St. Columba; it is true that three or four of these kings lived long enough to have the time to go and expiate their sins as monks at Armagh or lona.^*^^ But it is not less true that the annals of the monastic family of Columba present to us at each line with mournful laconism a spectacle which absolutely contradicts the flattering pictures which have been drawn of the peace which Ireland should have enjoyed. Almost every year, such words as the following are repeated with cruel brevity: —

Bellum. the monastic graft. We can thus perceive with what ferocious natures Columba and his disciples had to do. If notwithstanding the preaching of the monks, a state of affairs so barbarous continued to exist, what might it have been had the Gospel never been preached to those savages, and if the monks had not been in the midst of them like a permanent incarnation of the Spirit of God?

The monks were at the same time neither less inactive nor more spared than the women, who fought and perished in the wars precisely like the men, up to the time when the most illustrious of Columba's successors delivered them from that terrible bondage. A single incident drawn from the sanguinary chaos of the period will suffice at once to paint the almost atrocious habits of those Celtic Christians, and the always beneficent influence of monastic authority. A hundred years after the death of Columba, his biographer Adamnan ^^^ ninth successor, Adamnan, was crossing a plain, Carrying his old mother on his back, when they saw two bands fighting, and in the midst of the battle a woman dragging another woman after her, "whose breast she had pierced with an iron hook. At this horrible spectacle the abbot's mother seated herself on the ground, and said to him, '*' I will not leave this spot till thou hast promised me to have women exempted forever from ' this horror, and from every battle and expedition." He gave her his word, and he kept it. At the next national assembly of Tara, he proposed and carried a law which is inscribed in the annals of Ireland as the Law of Adamnan, or Law of the Linocents, and which forever freed the Irish women from the obligation of military service and all its homicidal consequences.^oo

At the same time, nothing was more common in Ireland than the armed intervention of the monks in civil wars, or in the struggles between different communities. We may be permitted to believe that the spiritual descendants of Columba reckoned among them more than one monk of character as warlike as their great ancestor, and that there were as many monastic actors as victims in these desperate con-

3°8 " Lex Adamnani.... Adarananus ad Hiberniani pergit et... dedit legem innocentium populis." — Annales UltonicB, an. 696. Compare Peteie's Tara, p. 147. Reeves, pp. 51, 53, 179. The assembly was composed of forty ecclesiastics and thirty-nine laymen. They also decreed an annual tribute to be collected over all Ireland for the benefit of the abbot of lona and his successors. flicts. Two centuries after Columba, two hundred monks of his abbey at Durrow perished in a battle with the neighboring monks of Clonmacnoise; and the old annalists of Ireland speak of a battle which took place in 816, at which eight hundred monks of Ferns were killed. The Irish religious had not given up either the warlike humor or the dauntless courage of their race.

Nor is it less certain that the studious fervor and persevering patriotism which were such marked ofthe^irish features in the character of Columba remained the inalienable inheritance of his monastic posterity — an inheritance which continued up to the middle ages, to the time of that famous statute of Kilkenny, which is an ineffaceable monument of the ferocious arrogance of the English conquerors, even before the Reformation. This statute, after having denounced every marriage between the two races as an act of high treason, went so far as to exclude all native Irish from the monasteries — from those same monasteries which Irishmen alone had founded and occupied for eight centuries, and where, before and after Columba, they had afforded a generous hospitality to the British fugitives and to the victorious Saxons.

But we must not permit ourselves to linger on the Irish coasts. We shall soon again meet her generous and intrepid sons, always the first in the field, and the most ready to expose themselves to danger, among the apostles and propagators of monastic institutions, upon the banks of the Scheldt, the Rhine, and the Danube, where also they were eclipsed and surpassed by the Anglo-Saxons, but where their names, forgotten in Ireland, still shine with a pure and beneficent light.

The influence of Columba, so universal, undeni- j^fiuence able, and enduring in his native island, should not ofcoiumba have been less so in his adopted country — in that Caledonia which became more and more an Irish or Scotic colony, and thus merited the name of Scotland, which it retained. Notwithstanding, his work has perhaps left fewer authentic traces there. All unite in attributing to him the conversion of the Northern Picts, and the introduction or reestablishment of the faith among the Picts of the South and the Scots of the West. It is also pretty generally agreed to date from his times — even though there is no evi- Remains of dence of their direct subordination to lona— the eJ.'JeXuiaa great monasteries of Old Melrose,^'^'' Abercorn, Tyn-

'*" Old Melrose, which was the cradle of the great and celebrated Cisterninghame, and Coldingham, situated between the Forth and the Tweed, and which afterwards became the centres of Christian extension among the Saxons of Northumbria. Further north, but still upon the east coast, the round towers which are still to be seen at Brechin and Abernethy bear witness to their Irish origin, and consequently to the influence of Columba, who was the first and principal Irish missionary in these districts. The same may be said of those primitive and lowly constructions, built with long and large stones laid upon each other, without cement, which are to be found in St. Kilda and other Hebridean isles, and also upon certain points of the neighboring shore, resembling exactly in form the deserted monasteries which are so numerous in the isles of western Ireland.so^ Another relic of the primitive Church is found in the caves, hollowed out or enlarged by the hand of man, in the cliffs or mountains of the interior, inhabited of old, as were the grots of Subiaco and Marmoutier, and as the caves of Meteores in Albania ^^^ are still by hermits, or sometimes even by bishops (as St. Woloc, St. Re- Apostle- gulus 3^0). Kentigern, the apostle of Strathclyde, siiipofst. appears to us in the legend at the mouth of his ° '° "^ episcopal cave, which was hollowed out in the side of a cliff, and where the people looked at him from afar with respectful curiosity, while he studied the direction of the storms at sea, and breathed in with pleasure the first breezes of the spring.

The bishop, Welsh by birth, has already been mentioned in connection with the principality of Wales, where, as we have already seen, he founded an immense monastery during an exile, the cause of which it is impossible to ascertain, but which was the occasion of a relapse into idolatry among his diocesans.211 The district of Strathclyde or Cumbria, on the west coasts of Britain, from the mouth of the Clyde to that of the Mersey — that is to say, from Glasgow to Liverpool —

cian Abbey of Melrose, whose ruins are admired by all travellers and readers of Walter Scott. The site alone now remains.

^°^ Studied carefully by Lord Dunraven and other members of the learned company called the Irish Arclifeological and Celtic Society.

^'^^ Curzon's Monasteries of the Levant.

^"' See above, the note of the Bollandists upon the apostolic labors of St. Eegulus. An aiige or lavatory in stone is still shown near the ruined church of Strath Deveron, which is called St. Woloc's bath, and -where mothers came to bathe their sick children. This holy bishop lived in a house built like the first church of lona. "Pauperculam casam calamis viminibusque contextara." Breviarium Aberdonense, Propr. SS., p. 14.

^" Ada SS. Bolland., vol. i. January, p. 819. was occupied by a mingled race of Britons and Scots, whose capital was Al-Cluid, now Dumbarton. A prince called Roderick (Ryddercli Had), whose mother was Irish, and who had been baptized by an Irish monk, hastened, when the authority fell into his hands, to recall Kentigern, who returned, bringing with him a hive of Welsh monks, and established definitively the seat of his apostleship at Glasgow, where Ninian had preceded him nearly a century before without leaving any lasting traces of his passage. Kentigern, more fortunate, established upon the site of a buryingground consecrated by Ninian the first foundation of the magnificent cathedral which still bears his name.^^'-^

It was consecrated by an Irish bishop, brought from Ireland for the purpose, and who celebrated that ceremony without the assistance of other bishops, according to Celtic customs. Kentigern collected round him numerous disciples, all learned in holy literature, all working with their hands, and possessing nothing as individuals — a true monastic community .-^^-^ He distinguished himself during all his episcopate by his efforts to bring back to the faith the Picts of Galloway, which formed part of the kingdom of Strathcl'yde; and afterwards by numerous missions and monastic foundations throughout all Albj^n— a name wdiich was then given to midland Scotland. His disciples penetrated even to the Orkney Isles, where they must have met with the missionaries of Iona.31^

The salutary and laborious activity of Kentigern must often have encroached upon the regions which were specially within the sphere of Columba. But the generous heart of Columba was inaccessible to jealousy. He was besides the personal friend of Kentigern and of King Roderick.'"!'' The fame of the Bishop of Strathclyde's apostolic

''- St. Mungo's. This is the name borne by Kentigern in Scotland, and means dearest. Kentigern seems to be derived from Ken, which means head, and Tiern, lord, in Welsh (Bolland., p. 820). The existing cathedral of Glasgow was begun in 1124 by Bishop Jocelyn, a monk of Melrose, who at the same time caused a life of his predecessor Kentigern, derived from ancient authorities, to be written by another Jocelyn, a monk of Furness.

^'^ " .Accito autem de Ilibernia uno episcopo, more Britonum et Scotorum, in episcopum ipsum consecrari fecerunt. ... In singulis casulis, sicut ipse sanclus Keiitigernus, commorabantur. Unde et singulares clcrici a vulgo CalluUi nuncupabantur." — Jocelyn, Vita S. Kentig. This last passage, quoted by Keeves, The Ciddees of the British Isles, p. 27, is not in the text given by the Bollandista.

^'* See above, p. 81.

"* Adamnan, i. 15. labors drew him from his isle to do homage to his rivah He His meet- arrived from lona with a great train of monks, whom ins with he arranged in three companies at the moment of " ""^ ^* their entrance into Glasgow. Kentigern distributed in the same way the numerous monks who surrounded him in his episcopal monastery, and whom he led out to meet the abbot of lona. He divided them, according to their age, into three bands, the youngest of whom marched first; then those who had reached the age of manhood; and, last of all, the old and gray-haired, among whom he himself took his place. They all chanted the anthem In viis Domini magiia est gloria Domini, et via justorum facta est: et iter sancto7'um prceparutum est. The monks of lona, on their side, chanting in choir the versicle, Ibunt sancti de virtute in virtutem: videhitur Deus eoriim in Sion. From each side echoed the Alleluia; and it was to the sound of those words of Holy Scripture, chanted in Latin by the Celtic monks of Wales and Ireland, that the two apostles of the Picts and Scots met at what had been the extreme boundary of the Roman Empire and limit of the power of the Csesars, and upon a soil henceforth forever freed from paganism and idolatry. They embraced each other tenderly, and passed several days in intimate and friendly intercourse.

The historian who has preserved for us the account of this interview does not conceal a less edifying incident. He confesses that some robbers had joined themselves to the following of the abbot of lona, and that they took advantage of the general enthusiasm to steal a ram from the bishop's flock. They were soon taken; but Kentigern pardoned them. Columba and his fellow-apostle exchanged their pastoral cross before they parted, in token of mutual affection.^^*^ Another annalist describes them as living together for six months in the monastery which Columba had just founded at Dunkeld, and together preaching the faith to the inhabitants of Atho, and the mountainous regions inhabited by the Picts.^^''.

I know not how far Ave may put faith in another narrative

^^® " Sancti viri famam audiens, ad ilium venire, visitare et familial itatem ejus habere cupiebat... cum multa discipuloruni turba. ... In tertia turma senes decora canitie venerabiles.... Appropinquantes ad invicem sancti in amplexus niutuos et oscula sancta ruunt.... Venerunt cum sancto Columba quidam filii Belial ad furta et peccata assueti. ... In signum rautuas dilectionis alterius baculum suscepit." Bolland., p. 821. The cross given by Columba to Kentigern was long preserved and venerated in the Anglo-Saxon Monastery of Ripon, Yorkshire.

^" Hector Boetius, Hist. Scotorum, 1. ix. of the same author, which seems rather borrowed from the Gallo-Breton epic of Tristan and Iseult than from monastic legend, but which has nevertheless remained Kentigern's most popular title to fame. The wife of King Roderick, led astray by a guilty passion for a knight of her husband's court, had the weakness to bestow upon him a ring which had been given to her by the king. When Roderick was out hunting with this knight, the two took refuge on the banks of the Clyde during the heat of the day, and the knight, falling asleep, unwittingly stretched out his hand, upon which the king saw the ring which he had given to the queen as a token of his love. It was with difficulty that he restrained himself from killing the knight on the spot; but he subdued his rage, and contented himself by taking the ring from his finger and throwing it into the river, without awakening the guilty sleeper. When he had returned to the town he demanded his ring from the queen, and, as she could not produce it, threw her into prison, and gave orders for her execution. She obtained, however, a delay of three days, and having in vain sought the ring from the knight to whom she had given it, she had recourse to the protection of St. Kentigern. The good pastor knew or divined all— the ring, found in a salmon which he had caught in the Clyde, was already in his hands. He sent it to the queen, who showed it to her husband, and thus escaped the punishment which awaited her. Roderick even asked her pardon on his knees, and offered to punish her accusers. From this, however, she dissuaded him, and hastening to Kentigern, confessed her fault to him, and was commanded to pass the rest of her life in penitence. It is for this reason that the ancient effigies of the apostle of Strathclydo represent him as holding always the episcopal cross in one hand, and in the other a salmon with a ring in its mouth.^^^

But neither Kentigern, whoso labors can scarcely

tlio Aii<>rloinfluence upon the Picts and Scots was so powerful and lasting, exercised any direct or efficacious ac-

318 i( Contigit rcginam... pretiosum annulum ob immensum amorem sibi a rcgo oornmondatuni cidem niiliti contulisse.... Dincopuhitis canibus.... Fatigatus autem miles cxtenso bracbio dormire coepit.... Quum ilia sccrcto niiliti in vanum mittens profcrre non posset.... Lacrymosis precibus rem gestam sancto Kentigornopcr nuntium exposuit.... Contristatus rex proillatis reginaj injuriis, ct veniain flexis genibus petens." — Bolland., p. 820; compare p. 815. tion upon the Anglo-Saxons, who became stronger ^^*^ more formidable from day to day, and whose ferocious incursions threatened the Caledonian tribes Sore^° no less than the Britons. It is apparent, however, formidable, ^j^^^j. ^j^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^^ ^f i^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^IQ repugnance, which had hardened into a system of repulsion, of the Welsh clergy for the Saxon race: express mention, on the contrary, is made in the most authentic documents connected with his history, of Saxon Monks, who had been admitted into the community of lona. One of them, for instance, had the office of baker there, and Avas reckoned among Columba's intimates.^^^ But nothing indicates that these Saxons, who were enrolled under the authority of Columba, exercised any influence from thence upon their countrymen. On the contrary, while the Scotic-Briton missionaries spread over all the corners of Caledonia, and while Columba and his disciples carried the light of the Gospel into the northern districts where it had never penetrated, the Christian faith and the Catholic Church languished and gave up the ghost in the southern part of the island under the ruins heaped up everywhere by the Saxon conquest.

Paganism and barbarism, vanquished by the Gospel in the Highlands of the north, again arose and triumphed in the south— in the most populous, accessible, and flourishing districts — throughout all that country, which was destined hereafter to play so great a part in the world, and which already began to caU itself England. From 569 to 586 — ten years before the death of Columba, and at the period when his authority was best established and most powerful in the north— the last champions of Christian Britain were finally cast out beyond the Severn, while at the same time new bands of Anglo-Saxons in the north, driving back the Picts to the other side of the Tweed, and crossing the Humber to the south, founded the future kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria. It is true that at a later period the sons of Columba carried the Gospel to those Northumbrians and Mercians. But at the end of the sixth century, after a hundred and fifty years of triumphant invasions and struggles, the Saxons had

^'^ Cummineus (apud Colgan, p. 320) mentions two Saxons: " Quidatn religiosus' frater, Genereus nomine, Saxo natione, pictor opere." And subsequently: "Duo ejus discipuli, Lugneus filius Bias et Pillo Saxo genere." Adamnan (iii. 10-22) corrects the conclusions which some authors have drawn from the word pictor by employing the words, ojpus pistorium exercens. See ante, p. 36. not yet encountered in any of the then Christian, or at least converted nations (Britons, Scots, and Picts), which they had assailed, fought, and vanquished, either missionaries disposed to announce the good news to them, nor priests capable of maintaining the precious nucleus of faith among the conquered races. In 586 the two last bishops of conquered Britain, those of London and York, abandoned their churches and took refuge in the mountains of Wales, carrying with them the sacred vessels and holy relics which they had been able to save from the rapacity of the idolaters. Other husbandmen were then necessary. From whence were they to come? From the same inextinguishable centre, whence light had been brought to the Irish by Patrick, and to the Britons aod Scots by Palladius, Ninian, and Germain.

And already they are here! At the moment when Columba approached the term of his long career in his northern isle, a year before his death, the envoys of Gregory the Great left Rome, and landed where Caesar had landed, upon the English shore.

BOOK X.

ST. AUGUSTIN OF CANTERBURY AND THE ROMAN MISSIONARIES

IN ENGLAND. 597-C33.

" Hodie illuxit nobis dies redemptionis novae, reparationis antiquae, felicitatis seteiuse.''

Christinas Office, Jioman Breviary,