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VOLUME 3 CONTENTS.

Chapter 1 UNION OF THE PICTS AND SCOTS-REIGN OF KENNETH MACALPIN. Importance of the Union, - Its Way prepared by great Battles, - The historic Career of the Picts closed, - Legends of their Massacre false, - Causes of permanence of Union, - Two Peoples, but one Faith, - After War comes Legislation, - The “Code Macalpin,” - Early Laws relating to Land, - Specimens of the Code Macalpin, - The Code the Compilation of several Ages, - Chair of Columba and Stone of Destiny placed at the Center of the Kingdom, - Death of Kenneth Macalpin, - His Burial, .

Chapter 2 DONALD-CONSTANTIN-FIRST BATTLE WITH THE DANES.

With Kenneth Macalpin the Light departs, - Clearness of the Columban Age compared with following Centuries, - Scotland retrograding, - The Scots must be placed on the Anvil, - King Donald, - Two Portraits of him, - King Constantin, - Quells a Disturbance in Lochaber, - The Danes land on the Coast of Fife, - Battle and Defeat of the Danes on the Leven, - Danish Fleet in Balcombie Bay, - Bloody Battle at Crail, - Defeat of Scots and Death of King Constantin, - Burial of Constantin, - Contrasted Modes of Emigration in Ancient and Modern Times, - Shall Scotland be blotted out and Daneland substituted? .

Chapter 3. ETH-GRIG-PICTISH PERSECUTION OF COLUMBAN CHURCH-TOLERATION. Outlook after the Battle of Crail, - Accession of “Swiftfoot,” - A Shoal of “Sea Monks,” - Accession of Grig, or Gregory, - Gives Freedom to the Scottish Church, - First Use of the Term “Scottish Church,” - The “Pictish Bondage” of Scottish Church, - King Nectan and a new Easter Calendar, - Nectan’s Clergy shorn in the Roman Fashion, The Recalcitrants expelled, - Nectan’s Edict revoked by Gregory, Evils of Nectan’s Policy, - Columbites recalled by Kenneth Macalpin - Nectan dies in a Monk’s Cowl, .

Chapter 4. GREGORY OF SCOTLAND AND ALFRED OF ENGLANDNORSEMEN-THE FADING COLUMBAN LAMP. A strong Hand at the Helm, - Treason among the Picts, - Gregory chastises them, - Gregory’s Exploits on the Border, - His Conflicts with the Danes and the Britons, - Crosses to Ireland, - Ravages of Hardnute in North of England, - Expelled by Gregory, - Friendship betwixt Gregory and Alfred of England, - Beauty of Alfred’s Character, - Adversities of his Youth, - Illustrious Labors of his riper Years, - Heads Army of Bible Translators, - A dying Lamp, .

Chapter 5. DONALD-CONSTANTIN-LOST BATTLES AND THEIR LESSONS. Accession of Donald, - Return of the Danes, - The Scottish Alliance with Alfred renewed, - The Danes repulsed, - A Danish Colony settled in Northumbria, - Donald fights two Battles in Moray, - His Death, - Accession of Constantin, - Under Constantin Scotland retrogrades, - A National Assembly at Scone for the Reformation of the Church, - Its Significance, - Civil Divisions of Scotland, - The Country known as Alban, - Boundaries of the Kingdom of Alban, - Out- lying Regions north and south of Alban, - Saxonia on the south and Norwegia on the north, - Divisions of the Kingdom of Alban, - Names and Boundaries of its five Provinces, - Subdivisions of the province, - Constantin joins the Danes against England, - Is defeated in Battle, - Invades England a second time, - Stratagem of Anlaf, - Battle of Brouny, - Lesson of Defeat, - Retreat of Constantin pursued by Athelstan, - Scottish Boundary recedes to the Forth, - Convention at Abenqethy, - Constantin abdicates and enters the Monastery of St.. Andrews, .

Chapter 6. SPECIAL MISSION OF SCOTLAND-SYNOD OF SCONE- ATENTH CENTURY REFORMATION. The Silent Forces the Mightier, - Power of Christianity is in the ratio of its simplicity, - Shown in the Power of Columba’s Mission, - Sources of Scottish History, - Adamnan’s Life of Columba; Book of Deer, &c., - Dr. Johnson’s eulogy, - General Assembly of the Scottish Church at Scone, - Independence of Scottish Church, - Reformation on the lines of the Bible, - Proceedings closed with an Oath to go forward in Reformation, - Delays the Triumph of Rome, - Revival, - Columban Church in Existence and Action in the Twelfth Century, .

Chapter 7. DESTRUCTION OF EARLY SCOTTISH LITERATURE-THE COLUMBITES METAMORPHOSED-WAS IONA AROMAN OR A\parPROTESTANT CHURCH? Causes of the Destruction of Early Scottish Literature, - The Columbites claimed in our day by Romanists, - This a Hallucination, - Iona and Rome contrasted in their Foundation- stone, - Bede’s testimony to the Columbites, - Testimony of Columbanus, - Iona and Rome contrasted in their Top- stone, - The Columban Eucharist and the Romish Mass, -Extraordinary Statement of Father Innes, - Testimony of Claudius Scotus, - The use of the terms “body and blood of Christ,” “Altar,” “Sacrifice,” &c.; no proof that the Church of Columba believed in Transubstantiation and the Mass, - - Cave on the Communion Tables of the Early Church, - Dr.. Lindsay Alexander on the Columbite Supper, , Footnote- Wooden Communion Tables in Early Irish Church, - The Mass of the Primitive Church, - What the phrase means and how it came into use, - Still used in Eastern Church, - No witness from the dead needed, .

Chapter 8. REIGNS OF MALCOLM-INDULF-DUFF-CULLENSCOTLAND’ S ONE TALENT. Disorders repressed, - Malcolm assassinated, - Indulf ascends the Throne, - The Danes in Firth of Forth, - Battle at Cullen in which Indulf falls, - Edinburgh, - Duff the Black, - Change in Office of Abbot, - Vigor of Duff, - He is assassinated, - Cullen King, - His Profligacy and Death, - Scotland’s one Talent, Bible Christianity, - Scotland trading with its one Talent, - The rich harvest it yields it, - The Scots burying their Talent in the Earth, .

Chapter 9. REIGN OF KENNETH-BATTLE OF LUNCARTY-HOUSE OF HAY-ALTERATION OF LAW OF SUCCESSION. Mission of the Norsemen, - Kenneth III., - State of the Hebrides, - A Norse Flotilla on the East Coast, - Battle of Luncarty, - The Scots flee, - Arrested by Hay and his two Sons, - Defeat turned into Victory, - Historic Proofs of the Incident, - Revival of Arts and Agriculture, - Succession to the Crown: the Fittest chosen, - Law of Succession changed, - Death of Prince Malcolm, - Story of Kings Death, .

Chapter 10. MALCOLM II.-CESSION OF LOTHIAN TO SCOTS-BATTLES OF MURTLACH AND BARRY-KINGDOM OF SCOTIA. Evil Years, - Claimants to the Throne, - Malcolm II. mounts it, - His Character, by Fordun, - Battle of Carham, - Lothian ceded to Scotland, - Danish Fleet off the Spey, - Devastations, - Spread of the Danish Power in Scotland, - Battle of Murtlach, - Growth of the Danish Power, - The Danes aim at Subjugation of all Scotland, - A Danish Fleet at the Red Head, - Danish Ravages, - The Scots Muster at flurry, - Battle of Barry, - Death of Camus, -” Kingdom of Alban” dropped, and “Kingdom of Scotia” substituted, - Last of Male Line of Fergus, - Malcolm II. dies by the Dagger, - The Laurel entwined with Cypress, .

Chapter 11. DUNCAN AND MACBETH. This Era in itself trivial, - Lighted up by a great Genius, - Who was Macbeth? - His Genealogy and History, according to Scottish Chroniclers, - According to the Orkneyinga Saga, - Grandeur of Shakespeare’s Drama, - We accept the Fiction of the Poet in place of the real History of the Time, - Macbeth a good Ruler, - His Gifts to the Culdees, - Nevertheless Nemesis follows, - Return of Malcolm, Son of Duncan, - War for the Throne, - Macbeth is slain, - Malcolm ascends the Throne, .

Chapter 12. MALCOLM CANMORE AND WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.

With Malcolm Canmore a new Age, - Invaders in Frock and Cowl, - Battle of Hastings, - William of Normandy, - England receives a New Master, - War betwixt Malcolm Canmore and William the Conqueror, - William invades Scotland, - William at Abernethy, - Terrible Devastations, - William fails to conquer Scotland, - His Failure a Blessing to both Countries, .

Chapter 12.* QUEEN MARGARET-CONFERENCE WITH CULDEE PASTORS. A Royal Closet, l- Malcolm Tower at Dunfermline, - Arrival of Edgar Aetheling and his Sister Margaret at Queensferry, - Character of Margaret’s piety, - Her Fastings, Charities, and Religious Acts, - Her Church Reforms, - Conference with Culdee Pastors, - Bishop Turgot, - Scottish Church of Eleventh Century, Anti- Papal, - Points debated in the Conference: st, Uniformity of Rite, - nd, The Lenten Fast, - rd, The Lord’s Day, - th, The Question of Marriage, - th, The Question of the Eucharist, - Culdee “Lord’s Supper,” - Irish Culdees and the “Supper,” - The “Hour of Temptation” to Scotland, .

Chapter 13. GLIMPSES OF THE COLUMBAN CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE AGES-EASTER CONTROVERSY-FALL OF IONA. Continuity of Columban Church, - Glimpses of it in Middle Ages, - Its Golden Age, - Its first Ebb, - Marked Decadence in Eighth Century, - Expulsion of Columbite Clergy from Pictish Territory, - An Eighth Century Exodus, - Persecutions and Sufferings of the Exiles, - War follows betwixt Pict and Scot, - The Easter Controversy, - Difference betwixt the Eastern and Western Observance of Easter, - Council of Nicea, - The Moons do not revolve in accordance with the Council’s Decree, - The Nineteen Years’ Cycle, - The “Elders” rebel against the Easter Decree, - In Iona submits, - The Material Iona falls, the Spiritual Iona flourishes, - Monastery burned and Monks slain, .

Chapter 14. TRANSLATIONS OF THE CHAIR OF COLUMBA-THE ONE BISHOP OF ALBAN- AGREAT TEMPEST IN WHICH SCOTLAND DOES NOT SINK. Service rendered by Sword of Dane, - Continued Organization and Vigor of Columban Church, - Proofs furnished by Rome herself, - Roman Synods at Chalons- sur- Soane and Celcyth, - Translations of Columba’s Chair to Dunkeld, Abernethy, St.. Andrews, - Boundaries of Alban in Tenth Century, - Wreck of Kingdoms and Peoples, - Scotland escapes, .

Chapter 15. EPOCHS OF REVIVAL IN COLUMBAN CHURCH. Alban’s one Bishop, - Who consecrated Cellach? - Rome includes Bishop and Presbyter in the same Order of Clergy, - Re- establishment of Columban Clergy in East of Scotland, - Enlargement of Liberties of Scottish Church, - Synod of Mote Hill, - The Columban Church comes again into view in Queen Margaret’s Days, - Her success with the Scots small, - They are still outside the Pope’s Church, .

Chapter 16. THE CULDEES-THEIR ORIGIN-THEIR FUNCTIONS-THEIR DIFFUSION. Dissolution of Columban Brotherhoods, - Rise of the Ascetic or Anchorite System, - The Culdees or Keledei, - Name signifies “the Servants of God,” - Two Theories of their Origin, - First, that they are sprung from the Roman Church, - Proofs: Legend of St..

Serf, - First Pope, next Abbot of Lochleven, - Another form of this Legend, - Legend of St.. Andrew, Patron Saint of Scotland, - Legend of founding of St.. Andrews, - The first Ceile De, - This Theory inconsistent with the Fact that the Culdees were persecuted by Romanists, - Inconsistent with the Fact that they were the Evangelizers of the Continent, - The Culdees a Continuation of the Columban Church, - Great historic Proofs of this, - Culdees Pioneers of the Reformation, .

Chapter 17. NORWEGIAN KINGDOM OF ORKNEY-MARGARET REVOLUTIONIZES SCOTLAND-DEATH OF MALCOLM AND MARGARET-ESTIMATE OF MARGARET’ S CHARACTER AND SERVICES. Bye Drama in Orkney and Shetland, - Their early Religion Druidism, - Christianized by Missionaries from Iona, - Norwegian Kingdom in Orkney, - Heathenism returns, - Christianized a second time under Olave Tryggvosson, - From A. D. the Norwegian Power in Scotland begins to decline, - Crinan, Abbot of Dunkeld, - Margaret changes her Tactics, - Builds a magnificent Church at Dunfermline, - Pomps and Ceremonials, - Margaret’s Ideal of Worship, - Tendency of dying Churches to effloresce into Rites and Ceremonies, - Last Days of Malcolm and Margaret, - Death of Malcolm Canmore, - Margaret’s illness, - Her Death, - Estimate of her Character and Services to Scotland, .

Chapter 18. DONALD BANE-KING EADGAR-ALEXANDER I.-ALEXANDER’ S BATTLE WITH THE BISHOPS-ALEXANDER’ S VOW AND MONASTERY OF INCHCOLM. A double vacancy, - Unpopularity of the Reigning House, - Donald Bane, - Eadgar Ascends the Throne, - Introduction of Lowland Scotch, - Alexander the “Fierce,” his zeal for the “Church,” - His religious benefactions, - Turgot becomes Bishop of St.. Andrews, - Quarrel over his Consecration, - Another vacancy in See of St.. Andrews, - Eadmer elected, - Battle of Jurisdiction betwixt the Bishop and the King, - Eadmer leaves the Kingdom, - The “Fatal” Chair of St.. Andrews, - Alexander makes more Bishops, - Scotland changing its appearance, - The Storm, - Alexander’s Vow, - Founding of Inchcolm, - Career of the monastery, - Walter Bower and Thomas Forret, .

Chapter 18.* DAVID I.AND NEW AGE OF EUROPE-DAVID’ S PERSONAL QUALITIES AND HABITS-WAR TO RESTORE THE ANGLO-SAXON LINE IN ENGLAND-BATTLE OF THE STANDARD. Battle betwixt the Spiritual and the Temporal Powers, - The Spiritual conquers, - Scotland brought within the sphere of this Conflict, - Personal qualities of David, - Painstaking in Administration of Justice, - A lover of the Chase, - His peregrinations: Stirling, Perth, Jedburgh, Edinburgh, - His efforts to raise his Niece to the English Throne, - Treaty at Durham, - Second Invasion of England, - The two Armies at Cutton Moor, - Battle of the Standard, - Subsequent negotiations, - The Nonnan keeps the English Throne, .

Chapter 19. KING DAVID’ S ECCLESIASTICAL POLICY-ERECTION OF FIVE NEW BISHOPRICS-SUPPRESSION OF THE CULDEES. David’s two projects: Restoration of Saxon Line in England and substitution of the Roman for the Columban Church in Scotland, - Alexander I. leaves four Bishoprics, - David’s new Bishoprics, - Rossemarkie, - Aberdeen, - Caithness, - Suppression of the Culdees, - At Dornoch, - At Lochleven, - Continuity of Culdees in Lochleven Monastery, - Legend of Servanus, - Culdees of Monimusk, - Culdees of St.. Andrews, - Their Firmness and Fidelity, - Their Battle of Two Hundred Years, - Their Existence traced till the Reformation, .

Chapter 20. FOUNDING AND ENDOWING OF HOLYROOD. Abbey of Holyrood, - Edinburgh in King David’s Days, - David and the Wild Boar, - The King’s Vow, - Building of Abbey, - Its Monks Augustinian, - Its Endowments, - Numerous Benefactors, - Its Chapels and Altars, - The Monks at Breakfast, Dinner, Supper, - Evening Recreations, .

Chapter 21. INTERIOR OF ABBEY-ROUTINE OF DAILY SERVICESDUTIES OF THE SEVERAL FUNCTIONARIES-BENEFIT TO SOCIETY?

Divisions of the Monastic Day, - Monastic Discipline, - Tierce, - Sext, Nones, Prime, Compline, - Officers of Abbey: Abbot, Prior, &c., - Cellarer, Treasurer, Refectioner, &c., - Question of Benefits flowing from the Abbey, .

Chapter 22. FOUNDING OF ABBEYS CONTINUED-ABBEYS NORTH OF THE GRAMPIANS-IN VALLEY OF THE TWEED,MELROSE,KELSO, ETC.-VARIOUS ORDERS OF FRIARS-OUTLOOK OF SCOTLAND.

Scotland’s Aspect changing, - Inchcolm, Buildings, - Rich Endowments, - Drowning and Miracle, - Turned into a Lazaretto, &c., - Fertile and picturesque spots selected by Monks, - Build on Columban Foundations, - Monimusk, &c., - Abbey of Melrose, - Jedburgh, - Kelso, - Its Regalities, - Right of Sanctuary, - More Friars, - Houses for Women, - Rural Deaneries, - Worship of New Church, - Sermons of the Friars, - Examples, - Outlook of the Scots, - Coming purification, .

Chapter 23. DEATH OF DAVID-HIS CHARACTER. His latter Days darkened, - Death of his only Son, Prince Henry, - Arrangements for the Succession, - His Death, - His Character, -Difficult to estimate accurately, - His Character as a Ruler rested by Time, - His great Error his Ecclesiastical Policy, - Its Influence most Disastrous, - Scottish Patriotism benumbed, .

Chapter 24. REIGNS OF MALCOLM IV.-WILLIAM THE LIONALEXANDER II.-ALEXANDER III.-BATTLE OF LARGS. Malcolm IV., - Gathering Clouds, - Why called the “Maiden,” - Malcolm’s Softness with Henry of England, - More Religious Houses, - Accession of William the Lion, - Why styled “The Lion,” - Taken Captive by the English Barons, - Buys his Liberty with the Surrender of the Independence of his Kingdom, - A great Price for one Man, - Abbey of Arbroath, - Scotland under Interdict, - Richard Coeur de Lion gives Scotland back its Independence, - More Priests, - Independence of Scottish Papal Church, - Alexander II., - His Troubled Reign, - More Friars, - Alexander III., His Coronation, - The Comyns, - Alexander’s Marriage, - Founding of Abbey of Sweetheart, - Translation of Queen Margaret’s Relics, -Last Appearance of the Vikings, - Haco’s Armada, - Destructive Storm. - Battle of Largs, - Haco conquered by the Elements, - Battle of Largs, an Epoch in Scottish History, - Death of Alexander III., .

CHAPTER - A. D. 843- 860. UNION OF THE SCOTS AND PICTS- REIGN OF KENNETH MACALPIN.

THE middle of the ninth century saw the Scots and Picts united under the scepter of Kenneth, the son of Alpin. The advent of this union was Long deferred: it was at last consummated in A. D. 843; but even then it received no enthusiastic welcome from those to whom, as might have been foreseen, it brought great increase of power and prestige. The idea of mixing their blood to form one nation, and uniting their arms to establish one central throne, and so taking pledges for the maintenance of peace at home, and the acquisition of influence abroad, however meritorious it seems to us, does not appear to have approved itself to the two races that inhabited the one country of Caledonia. They entertained this idea only when it came to be forced upon them by the stern lessons of the battlefielda school in which it would seem the education of infant nations must begin.

This union was preceded and prepared by a series of great battles. The question at issue in these fierce conflicts was, To which of the two nationalities, the Scots or the Picts, shall the supremacy belong, and by consequence the right to govern the kingdom? The wars waged to determine this point ended in a supreme trial of strength on the banks of the Tay near Scone. F370 The engagement was a desperate one. Seven times the Picts assailed, and seven times were they driven back. Their king, Bred, fell in battle, and his armor, afterwards presented to Kenneth MacAlpin, was sent by him to be hung up at Icolmkill. F371 From that bloody field the Scots and Picts emerged one nation. Supremacy, which had been the object aimed at by the combatants till now, was abandoned for the more practical and wiser policy of union. Battle had swept away one of the two thrones which had hitherto borne sway in Caledonia, and the one throne left standing was that of the prince whose progenitor, Aidan, Columba had made to sit on the Lia- Fail, or Stone of Destiny, and anointed as the first really independent sovereign of the Scots.

The Picts closed their distinctive historic career when they lost this battle.

They were by much the earlier inhabitants of the country, and doubtless regarded the Scots as a new people. The Picts or Caledonians, if not the first, were among the first races that found their way to Caledonia after its plains and mountains had looked up from the waters of the flood. Yet this ancient people were content to lose name and record in the annals of a race whose arrival in the mountains of Argyllshire dated only five centuries back. The award of battle had decreed that the cider should serve the younger, and to that award they bowed.

Not Pictish blood alone, nor Scottish blood alone, but the two streams commingled, were to form the one blood which was to inspire the valor and fight the battles of the future. Scotland had made a great stride forward, and it was a happy omen of the future career of the united people that in making this new start they put the helm into the hands of that race in whose hearts glowed the faith of Columba.

We refuse to credit the legends which say that battle was succeeded by massacre, and that the glory of victory was dimmed and the fame of the victors tarnished by the utter and cruel extermination of the vanquished people. It is true, no doubt, that from about this time the Picts disappear, or nearly so, from the page of history. Some historians have been able to find no solution of this mystery, save in the supposition that they were swept from off face of their country by the unsparing and unpitying sword of the victorious Scot. “The extermination of the Picts,” says Fordun, “was total and final; not only were their kings and leaders destroyed, but their race and generation and even their language failed.”

F372 This is too ready and obvious solution of the problem to be the true one. It is inherently most improbable. If the Scots of that day were guilty of cringe so enormous, they had sat for three centuries to little purpose, verily, at the feet of Columba and his successors. The deed would have been as impolitic as it would have been cruel. The hour was near when a foe, which their fathers had not known, fierce as the vultures of the land from which he came, was to invade their country. Already the piratical fleets of the Norseman were beginning to be seen on their coasts. The Scots, in these circumstances, could have committed no more deplorable error than stamp out a valor which might on a future day do them good service on the battlefield. When the invader should be crowding, horde on horde, into their land, and the clash of swords rose loud, how sorely would the Scots miss those stalwart Caledonian warriors, who, if not locked in the sleep of death, would have contended by their side for a common country, and chased the Norse marauder to his galleys.

Besides, it must be taken into account that massacre in the circumstances would have swept off a full half of the population of Scotland, and left the surface of the country to a large extent unoccupied. Yet we are not conscious of any diminution of the population in the times subsequent to the victory of Kenneth MacAlpin. Scotland is as full of men as before. It has no lack of warriors to fight its battles. Whence come these armies? Not merely from the narrow territories of the Scots in Chron., Lib. iv. Buchanan limits the extirpation of the Picts to those who remained in arms against Kenneth after the great battle which gave him the crown. This would gain all the ends of the conqueror, and we may safely conclude that this was the whole extent of the slaughter.

The western border, but from the less mountainous and more thickly peopled districts on the east and north, the very regions which, on the supposition of massacre, had been converted into a desert. How came these parts to be again so quickly populated? Did the Scots, by some marvelously rapid process of increase, fill in that short time the empty land?

Or did new races spring from the ashes of the slain to repair the ravages of the sword? These considerations make the theory we are discussing wholly untenable, and force us to the conclusion, which is certainly by much the more agreeable alternative, even, that the Picts, although the more numerous people, loyally accepted the award of battle, and putting the good of country before the considerations of race, permitted the sword, which had already shed quite enough of blood, to be sheathed, and the wounds of their country to be closed. It is deserving of our notice, moreover, that the monarch under whom we see the united races beginning their career as the one Scottish nation, was the son of that King Alpin, whose bloody head had been affixed as a trophy of the Pictish arms to the gates of Abernethy. The dishonor put upon the father was wiped out when the son entered these same gates in triumph to fill the throne of an united people, and stretch his scepter from west to east across the entire country, and from the banks of the Forth to the great ocean stream that rolls betwixt the promontory of Cape Wrath and the precipices of the Orkneys.

It is not always that unions accomplished on the battlefield are lasting. It sometimes happens that when the pressure of the sword is removed the old rivalries and enmities break out afresh, and the nationalities united for a moment again fall asunder, to be parted, it may be, more widely than before. It was not so, however, in the union effected betwixt the Scots and the Picts on the battlefield on the Tay. Nor is it far to seek for the causes that gave that union permanency. In the veins of Kenneth MacAlpin there flowed the blood of both races. A Scot by the father’s side, and a Pict by the mothers, both people had a share in him. Moreover, he enjoyed the prestige of having been crowned on the Lia- Fail. With that stone were linked the traditions of dominion and rule. These traditions stretched back to the remote times of the Irish monarchs, who were said to have received consecration upon it. What is more, this stone was supposed to possess the mysterious power of imparting a peculiar sacredness and a kingly virtue to the man who was crowned upon it. It had been the privilege of no Pictish monarch to take his seat on that venerable stone. That honor was reserved for the kings of the Scottish nation alone. In our days the ceremony, though still practiced, does not count for much; but in that age it was the better half of the coronation. Where that stone was there was the legitimate sovereign, and there was the rock of the kingdom, in the popular belief at least.

There was another and mightier clement of cohesion in the union of which we speak, than either the blood that flowed in the veins of Kenneth MacAlpin, or the virtue of the august chair in which his coronation had taken place. The two peoples were by this time of one faith. When the northern Picts were converted from Druidism to Christianity by Columba, the way was opened for their becoming one with that nation of which the great missionary as a Dalriadan Scot was a member. Columba was the true apostle of union. Pict and Scot had sat together in the school of Iona. Pict and Scot had gone forth together in the same missionary band to evangelize in the fields of France and Germany; and if they could be members of the same church organization, and sit at the same eucharistic table, surely they could meet in the same national Council, and pay their homage at the foot of the same throne. After all it was the Rock of Iona rather than the Stone at Scone that was the bond of union between the Scots and Picts.

The work of the sword at an cud, the labors of the legislator must now begin. This second task, we may well imagine, was even harder than the first. During the fierce struggle for supremacy which had been going on during the previous reigns, many disorders had grown up, doubtless, which called loudly for correction. There had been a loosening of the bonds of society all over the land. In the Highlands especially the clans had enjoyed a larger than usual measure of license, and were not to be easily broken into orderly and settled courses. Yet the attempt must needs be made. The time was favorable, for the throne was stronger than it had ever before been, and around it was now a united nation. And Kenneth, the chroniclers say, did not let slip the opportunity that offered, but devoted the latter half of his reign to reforming the laws, repressing and punishing crime, and improving the administration of justice, than which no greater boon could he have conferred upon a people whose latent forces, which waited the great occasions of the future, would amply repay all the pains it might cost to discipline and regulate them.

In all ages the glory of the legislator has been held by the wise to Surpass that of the conqueror. A code, of enlightened jurisprudence is worth more than a hundred victories on the battlefield; though it may sometimes happen that the rough work of the sword must prepare the way for the quiet and patient labors of legislation. The old chroniclers credit Kenneth with being the author of a body of laws which they dignify by the name of the “Code MacAlpin.” The exploits of Kenneth on the battlefield are well authenticated, we can speak only hesitatingly of his labors in the Cabinet.

Without attributing to him the work and fame of a great or original legislator, we may concede, nevertheless, that before descending into the tomb he made it his study to leave behind him some monument of his juridical industry and wisdom. Kenneth could hardly avoid, one should think, making some rude essay towards framing laws for the altered circumstances of the now united nation, embodying what was best and wisest in the forms and administration of both peoples.

Of the laws of Scotland before the days of Kenneth we are altogether ignorant. They are said to have been composed by Ethfin, “son to Eugene with the crooked nose,” and that is all we know about them. But our ignorance is no proof that there was no code in Scotland till Kenneth came to the throne. “Wherever society exists,” says Mr. Cosmo Innes, “life and the person must be protected. Wherever there is property there must be rules for its preservation and transmission. Accordingly in the most ancient vestiges of the written law of Scotland we find constant references to a still earlier common law.” The laws relating to land must have been simple indeed, for in those days no one had any personal right in the soil; it was the property of the tribe. But as the people lived by the land, and the staple industry was agriculture, there must have been laws regulating and defining the extent to which the individual members of the tribe might use that soil which was the common property of all. The first approximation to the creation of individual right in the soil, so far as we can perceive, was the grants made to the Columban monasteries. When a Columban Brotherhood was established in a district, a certain amount of land was gifted to it by the King or the Mormaer. The brethren were to cultivate the portion assigned them with their own hands or those of their converts. The monastic glebe was both a means of subsistence to the monastery, and a model farm which served to stimulate and guide the rural industry of the neighboring population. They dotted the land with Christian nations in miniature, exhibiting to the surrounding pagan population the whole economy of Christian civilized life. These. grants created no individual rights in the soil.

The lands were the property of the Columbites, not as individuals but as a community. Still, as set apart from the tribal territory, and held by a distinct tenure, they were an approximation to the system of personal holdings, which afterwards came into use.

The jurisprudence of Ireland was more advanced than that of Scotland. Its political and social arrangements were settled at an earlier period. And what so likely as that the Scots, when they came across to Argyll, brought with them some of the Irish codes. Ireland was their mother country. They turned to it for their models in framing both Church and State. Columba worked on the same lines in evangelizing Scotland which Patrick adopted when, a century before, he crossed the sea to spread the light of Christianity in Ireland. We are safe, therefore, in assuming that the “Code MacAlpin” had its first beginnings on the other side of the Irish channel.

These beginnings were the foundation on which Kenneth built when, resting from his wars, he set to work to legislate for the united nation. Whatever in these ancient codes was adapted to the new circumstances of his subjects he would preserve; what was lacking in them his own wisdom would supply; and in this way doubtless the code that bears his name came into existence. Only part of it is his; much of it was in being before he began his legislative labors, and much has been added since. The code is the composition of no one man, nor the production of any one age. It reflects the image of various ages.

The spirit of the “MacAlpin Code” and the justice of its enactments may be best shown by a few examples. “I. That in every shire of the kingdom there should be a judge, for deciding of controversies, well seen in the laws; and that their sons should be brought up in the study of the laws.... III. He that is convicted of theft shall be hanged; and he that is guilty of slaughter, beheaded. IV. Any woman convict of a capital crime, shall be either drowned or buried alive. V. He that blasphemes God, or speaks disrespectfully of his saints, of his king, or of his chieftains, shall have his tongue cut out. VI. He that makes a lie to his neighbor’s prejudice, shall forfeit his sword, and be excluded the company of all honest men. VII. All persons suspected of any crime, shall suffer the inquest of seven wise and judicious men, or any number of persons above that, provided the number be odd. IX. All vagabonds, sturdy beggars, and other idle persons, that may, and do not, gain their livelihood by some honest calling, shall be burnt upon the cheek, and whipt with rods.... XIV. He that is injurious to his father, by any member of his body, shall have that member cut off, then hanged, and remain unburied above ground.... XVI. All witches, jugglers, and others that have any practiced with the devil, shall be burnt alive. XVII. No seed shall be sown till it be first well cleansed from all noxious grains. XVIII. He who suffers his land to be over- run with poisonous and hurtful weeds, shall pay, for the first fault, an ox to the common good; for the second, ten; and for the third, he shall be forfaulted of his lands. XIX. If you find your comrade and friend killed in the field, bury him, but if he be an enemy, you are not bound to do it. XX. If any beast be found straying in the fields, restore him, either to the owner, the Tocioderach, or searcher after thieves, or to the priest of the parish and whoever keeps him up for three days, shall be punished as a thief.... XXIII. If a neighbor’s kine fall a fighting with yours, and if any of them happen to be killed, if it be not known whose cow it was that did it, the homyl- cow (or the cow that wants horns) shall be blamed for it; and the owner of that cow shall be answerable for his neighbor’s damage.”

There was surely some occult reason for this law. Why the blame should be laid on the cow which nature had made incapable of committing the offense we cannot even conjecture unless it were that by way of compensating for her want of horns the cow had received a double dose of quarrelsomeness and pugnacity. The laws that follow are without doubt the product of the times subsequent to the reign of Malcolm Canmore. No Columban missionary needed the protection which they provide for the person and life of ecclesiastics. The Columbite Father could journey from north to south without the slightest risk of injury or insult. The reverence entertained for his character and office was a more effectual defense than any enactment could be. But when these laws had birth it is obvious that the state of matters had changed. They are a confession that the clergy were unpopular, that the Roman rites were liable to be contemned and scoffed at, and that the Columban feeling, whatever may be thought of this way of expressing it, still strongly pervaded the Scottish people. “XXVII. Altars, churches, oratories, images of saints, chapels, priests, and all ecclesiastical persons, shall be held in veneration. XXVIII. Festival and solemn days, fasts, vigils, and all other ceremonies instituted by the church, shall be punctually observed. XXIX. He who injures a churchman, either by word or deed, shall be punished with death. XXX. All sepulchers shall be held in great veneration, and a cross put upon them, that they may not be trampled upon. XXXI. The place where any man is killed or buried, shall be untilled seven years. XXXII. Every man shall be buried according to his quality. If he be a nobleman that has done great actions for the commonwealth, he shall be buried after this manner: Two horsemen shall pass before him to the church; the first mounted upon a white horse, cloathed in the defunct’s best apparel, and bearing his armor; the other shall be upon a black horse, in a mourning apparel; and when the corpse is to be interred, he who is in mourning apparel shall turn his back to the altar, and lamentably bewail the death of his master; and then return the same way that he came: the other shall offer his horse and armor to the priest; and then inter the corpse with all the rites and ceremonies of the church.” F373 The bulk of these enactments embody an admirable wisdom. Some of them are obviously borrowed from the great Hebrew lawgiver, with whose code the Columban teachers were, of course, familiar. The enactment which doomed the spot where innocent blood had been shed to lie for seven years untouched by the plough, was well fitted to deepen in the popular mind the abhorrence of murder. Waving with rank and noxious weeds, it warned the wayfarer not to pollute himself by treading on so accursed a spot.

Touching the statute against witchcraft, we shudder when we think that for this imaginary crime the terrible doom of burning was awarded and inflicted. But before charging our ancestors with cruelty, it may be well to reflect that up to the beginning or middle of last century, the highest judicial tribunal in Scotland held witchcraft to be a crime, and burned the poor unhappy creatures convicted of it at the stake.

So far this relic of the legislation of early days. Success in arms may be a glory, or it may be an infamy. Whether it is the one or the other, depends altogether on the use to which the victory is put. But the work of the legislator can hardly be other than beneficial, and therefore glorious. The man who establishes a great and righteous principle, and embodies it in law, is greater than the man who wins a hundred battles. He has done a work for all time. What the sword of one conqueror has set up, the sword of another casts down; but a Truth once established can never be lost. Even should the Gates of Error war against it they cannot overthrow it. It has become the possession of the race, and it goes down the ages ruling and blessing mankind.

The measures of Kenneth at this crisis were admirably adapted to make the two nations coalesce, and give stability to the throne by which henceforward they were to be ruled. The old seat of the Scottish kings was amid the Argyllshire mountains. This was by much too remote for the now enlarged kingdom of Alban. Its continuance there would have weakened the central authority, created impediments to justice, and delayed intelligence when, it might be, the safety of the kingdom depended on its quick transmission. Accordingly Kenneth established his capital at Forteviot, in the valley of the Earn. The spot was about equally distant from both seas. It lay betwixt the Highlands and the Lowlands. The Tay afforded ready access to the ocean. The watchers on the Red Head could espy the Norseman, and quickly notify his approach in the royal palace of Forteviot; and what perhaps was not the least of the considerations that weighed with Kenneth in fixing here the seat of his government, was that the site was within the Pictish dominions, and the residence of the king among them would naturally help to conciliate this brave and ancient race, still smarting from defeat, to the rule of the new dynasty.

The ecclesiastical capital, too, Kenneth removed to an inland and central position. The Rock amid the western seas, Memorials), and Chalmers (Caledonia). The more probable opinion is that stated in the text, even, that this code the is production of several ages, Kenneth adding what was required by his own times and the circumstances of his nation.

So long the headquarters of Scottish Christianity, was ex changed for a little valley in the southern Grampians, enclosed by woody crags, and watered by the Tay. Kenneth ordained that at Dunkeld should be the seat of the Scottish primacy (851). To impart to the second Iona something of the sanctity and prestige of the first, which the Vikings had made utterly desolate, Kenneth brought hither the relics of Columba. F374 What was of better augury for the renown of his new cathedral and the prosperity of his enlarged dominions, he transported across Drumalban the Columban clergy whose ancestors Nectan had driven out of his kingdom a century and a half before because they refused to conform to the Roman customs. These religious teachers he diffused through the Pictish territory, planting many of them in the places from which their fathers had been expelled. By this tolerant measure he did an act of reparation for a great wrong, and strengthened his own influence among his Pictish subjects.

One other symbol of authority and rule brought out and put conspicuously before the nation. This was the Lia- Fail, or Fatale Chayre as the Scots styled it. With the reverence due to so venerable a symbol of dominion, this stone was brought to Scone, that the kings of Scotland might receive consecration upon it, and possess that mysterious and awful sanctity which, in popular belief, belonged to monarchs who had sat in this august seat.

These three, the Throne, the Primacy, and the Stone of Consecration, were grouped at the center of the kingdom, and within the Pictish territory, that the new subjects of Kenneth might feel that the union was complete, and that the Scottish monarchy had crossed Drumalban, not to make a transitory stay, but to find a scat of permanent abode.

After these labors the Scottish nation and its monarch enjoyed a few years of peace. We see the good king living tranquil days in his palace of Forteviot, in the quiet valley which the Earn waters, and the heights of Dupplin on the one hand, and the swellings of the Ochils on the other so sweetly embosom. On the west, the long vista guides the eye to where Drumalban rears its summits, and looks down on the two nations which it no longer divides. We read, indeed, of some raids of King Kenneth in his latter years into the country of the Saxons beyond the Forth, for that river was still the southern boundary of Alban. F375 But the record of these incursions is so doubtful, and their bearing, even granting they took place, on Scottish affairs is so insignificant, that they hardly deserve historic mention. Kenneth reigned sixteen years after the union of the two nations.

He had served his country equally by his valor “in the field and his wisdom in the closet. He died in 860 in his palace at Forteviot. His mortal malady was fistula.

The tidings that King Kenneth was dead would fly far and fast over Scotland, and wherever they came they would awaken sincere and profound sorrow. There was mourning in Dalriada, which, sixteen years before, had seen the son of the slaughtered Alpin descend its mountains to begin that campaign which had ended in a union that decreed that there should no more be battle betwixt Scot and Pict. There was mourning in Pictavia, which, though compelled to bow to the sword of Kenneth, had found that his scepter was just and equitable. There was mourning amid the wild hills of the north onward to the strand of Caithness, for the clans had learned that the monarch win reigned in the hails of Forteviot was not a conqueror but a father. And now come his obsequies. What a multitude gathers at the royal gates of Forteviot! Mormaer and Tioseach, with their respective clans, from the Pentland to the Forth, are there, including warriors who aforetime, it may be, had mustered to fight against the man whose dust they are now carrying in profound grief to the grave. The vast procession is marshaled, and proceeds with slow and stately march, along the valley westward. The pibroch flings out its wail of woe, summoning dweller in hamlet and glen to join the funeral cortege and swell the numbers of this great mourning. The procession wends its way betwixt lakes and mountains which have since become classic, though then they were unsung by bard or poet. Many days the march continues, for the way is long to the royal sepulchers amid the western seas. At last the desolate and lonely isle is reached. Iona is still the proudest fane in Europe, despite that the Vikings have ravaged it with fire and sword, and left it nothing but its indestructible name. The greatest of the Scottish kings, and even monarchs of other lands, leave it as their dying request to be taken to Iona, and buried in the Isle which the memory of Columba like a mighty presence still overshadows. We see the funeral party arrive at Port na Churraich; they pass along the “Street of the Dead,” and they deposit the remains of Kenneth in the burial place of the kings who have sat on the stone of destiny. They leave him there, the thunder of the Atlantic singing his requiem, for psalm and chant have ceased amid the fallen shrines of Iona.

CHAPTER - A. D. 860- 877. DONALD- CONSTANTINFIRST BATTLE WITH THE DANES.

THE good king Kenneth has gone to his grave, and the light would seem to have departed with him. No sooner is he laid in the tomb than the shadow of an eclipse falls upon the historic landscape, and for some time we travel onwards in comparative darkness. Several successive reigns pass away before we can see distinctly what is passing on the soil of Scotland. The chroniclers who narrate the transactions of these dark centuries- and they are the darkest of Scottish history- were not eye- witnesses of what they record; they gleaned their information from a variety of traditional and monumental sources, and however painstaking and truth- loving they may have been, it was impossible for them to avoid being at times wrong in their conclusions, and mistaken as to their facts. F377 We are all Hector Boece wrote in 1533. His work is in classical Scotch prose. Great events bring their own light with them, and write their own history. This is especially true of events which have the spiritual for their basis, and which summon into action the souls rather than the bodies of men. Such epoch has an electric brilliancy which keeps it above the horizon despite ages of intervening darkness. How distinct and palpable is still the Scotland of the sixth and seventh centuries! We follow as vividly the voyage of Columba across the Irish Sea to the shores of Iona, as if we had sailed with him in the osier- ribbed vessel which carried him across. We watch from day to day the rising walls of that humble edifice within which he is to gather the youth of many lands, and there train them in a theology drawn from the pure fore, rains of Holy Scripture. We become his companions when he goes forth on his missionary tour among the Picts, and see him roll aside the darkness of Druidism from the north of Scotland, and revive the dying lamp of the faith in the Lowlands. Our interest in his labors grows as his work draws nigh its completion, and we see Scotland dotted with Columban brotherhoods, schools of Christian knowledge, and centers of Christian industry and art. We are parted from the men who accomplished this great work by thirteen centuries, yet we think of them as if they had been our contemporaries, and had only recently rested from their labors.

But with the Death of Kenneth MacAlpin, or rather with the decay of the Columban age, there comes a great change. Scotland hardly looks the same country as when Columba stood at the head of its scholars and Kenneth MacAlpin lead its armies. It has receded into the far distance, and we stand gazing into a haze. Scotland, it is true, does not lack kings. Kenneth MacAlpin has successors who have sat upon the LiaFail at Scone, but they pass before us like phantoms. Nor does Scotland lack warriors; at least it does not lack battles. The land rings incessantly with the clash of arms. But if the sword is busy, we fear the plough rests. The acres under tillage diminish instead of multiplying, and fields which had been redeemed from the wilderness by the skillful and diligent husbandry of men who had learned their agriculture as well as their Christianity from the elders of Iona, fail back again into the desert and become covered with bracken, while the wild boar, dislodged from his convert, comes back to his old haunt and lies in wait for the traveler. The lamp has waxed dim, and its flame sunk low in the schools of learning and in the sanctuaries of religion. We hear of armies crossing the Tweed to fight for the doubtful possession of Northumbria, and extend the Scottish, dominions to the banks of the Tyne, or even the Humber, but hardly do we hear of missionary bands in their home- spun woolen garments and sandals of cow hide, setting forth, as aforetime, from the Scottish shore to carry the name of Scot and the faith of Culdee to countries afar off.

The moment was critical. All that had been won- and much had been wonwas on the point of being lost. Scotland had begun to work its way back to its former condition of divided and warring nationalities. So would it have appeared to an onlooker. But no; Pict and Scot must now part company. If they would fulfill their destiny they must contend side by side on the same battlefield, and feel the purifying and elevating influence of a great common cause, prosecuted through toil, through painful sacrifices, through disheartening reverses, till, borne to victory, it has been crowned with complete achievement. It is not the success that comes with a rush, but the success that comes as the fruit of slow, patient, and persistent labors and conflicts that anneals, hardens, and at last perfects nations destined to rise to a first place, and to render the highest services to mankind. It is on such a process that Scotland is about to be taken. It is to be put upon the anvil and kept on it for seven generations, till Pict and Scot shall not only have mingled their blood but fused their souls, and for the narrow aims of Clan substituted the wider and nobler aspirations of Nation.

Even before Kenneth was laid in the sepulchral vaults of Iona, the Scots had warning that the clouds were gathering, and were sure to break in storm. They had seen what the sea could bring forth. Ships of ominous build, swift as the eagle, and as greedy of prey, had once and again appeared off their coast, and sent a thrill of terror along the sea- board.

These unwelcome visitors would retreat, and after disappearing in the blue main would suddenly return, as if they took pleasure in tormenting their destined victims before pouncing upon them. To come and see and go back would not always suit the purpose of these plundering sea- kings. One day they would strike. Already they had swooped upon the extreme northwestern parts, and struck their cruel talons into the quivering land. Iona gone, its monks slaughtered, and its buildings blackened with fire, remained the monument of their visit. These were the “hammers” which by long- continued and terrible blows were to weld into homogeneity and consistency the rugged and unruly mass of humanity that occupied Scotland.

The first to take his seat on the Stone of Scone and assume the government of the kingdom after Kenneth MacAlpin was his brother Donald. Had the nation forgotten the services of the father, seeing they pass by the son and place the brother on the vacant throne? No, Scotland is not unmindful of what it owes to Kenneth MacAlpin; but in those days the succession to the crown was regulated by what is known as the law of Tanistry. This was a wise law in times so unsettled as those of which we write, and must have largely helped to steady the nation. When it happened that a monarch died leaving a son to succeed him who was of tender years, it was held unwise to put the scepter into his hands. The vigor of manhood was needed to cope with the saucy and turbulent chieftains of the then Scotland, and in the hands of a child the scepter would have run great risk of being contemned. On the death of a monarch, therefore, his nearest collateral relative, or that one of the royal family who was deemed fittest for the office, was selected, and the son meanwhile had to wait till years had given him experience, and the death of the reigning king had opened his way to the throne. F378 As regards the prince now on the Scottish throne, nearly all we can say of him is that he wore the crown for four years. He stands too far off in point of time, and he is seen through too thick a haze to permit us to take his measure. Historians have given us two different and opposite portraits of King Donald, painting him, probably, as they wished him to have been, rather than as he really was, for they had hardly any better meansof judging of his true character than we have. Boece and Buchanan represent him as given up to all sorts of vicious indulgences, as governed entirely by low flatterers, and as neglecting the business of the state, and wasting his own time and the public revenue on “hunters, hawkers, and parasites.” The scandals of the court came at last to such a head that the discontented chieftains among the Picts thought that the time had come for asserting their independence and restoring their ancient monarchy. With this view they formed an alliance with the Saxons of England, assuring them that the northern kingdom was ready to drop into their arms would they only unite their forces with theirs iii the effort to wrest the ancient Pictland from the Scottish sway. The Saxons marched northward as far as the Forth. Had the raid succeeded it is probable that the Saxons would have kept the country to themselves, and left the mutinous and treacherous Picts to find a kingdom where they could. Happily the arms of Donald prevailed, and Scotland remained the united nation which Kenneth had made it.

In Donald, as the old chroniclers have striven to reproduce him from the mists of a remote time, we have, as we have said, a picture with two totally unlike sides. On the side which we have been contemplating there is shown us a profligate prince and a kingdom falling in pieces. Turn the obverse.

We arestartled by the grand image that now meets us. The voluptuary and trifler is gone, and iii his room is a prince, temperate, brave, patriotic, sustaining the state by his energy and virtues.

So have Fordun and Winton, both of whom wrote before Boece, represented Donald. They tell us, too, that not only was he careful to preserve the splendid heritage of a united people which his brother had left him, but that he was studious to keep war at a distance by cultivating friendship with neighboring kings. We make no attempt to reconcile these two widely divergent accounts. We see in them the proof that the real Donald is not known, and now never can be known. In a question of this sort it is the earliest authorities who are held to speak with the greater weight, seeing they stand nearest the sources of information; and as it is the earlier chroniclers that give us the more favorable portrait of Donald, he is entitled to the presumption thence arising in his favor. Donald closed his short reign of four years- too short if he was the virtuous prince which some believe him to have been, but too long if he was the monster of vice which others say he was- in the year 864. The rock in the western seas received his ashes.

On the death of Donald the succession returned to the direct line. We now see Constantin, the son of Kenneth MacAlpin, assuming the crown. The memories of the great father lend prestige to the throne of the son, and give authority to his scepter. And, verily, there was need of all the rigor which could possibly be infused into the government of the kingdom, for the hour was near when Scotland would have to sustain a severer strain than any to which it had been subjected since the days of the Romans. The tempest which had rolled up from England in the previous reign, and which had discharged itself on the southern shores of the Forth, was a summer blast compared with the hailstorms which were gathering in the countries on the other side of the North Sea. The battle with the Norseman was now to begin in deadly earnest. A few premonitory blows, sharp and quick, had the Viking dealt on the borders of the country, but now he was to assemble all his hordes, and come against the land like a cloud, and strike at the heart of the kingdom. For two centuries to come the kings of Scotland would have other things to think of than the wine cup and the boar hunt, and the Scots would do well to reserve their blood for worthier conflicts than a raid into Northumbria. Before the great battle opened Constantin found that he had a little war on his hands at home. The district of Lochaber suddenly burst into flames. This provincial conflagration had been kindled by a Highlander named MacEwan, whom Constantin had appointed to be governor of the district. The ambition of this man was not to be bounded by the narrow confine of his Highland principality. He had higher aims than he could find scope for in Lochaber.

A number of discontented men, who too doubtless thought that their great merits had been overlooked, gathered round him and offered him their help in his attempt on the throne. Constantin had timely’ notice of the tempest that was brewing amid the mountains of Lochaber, and without giving it time to burst, he crossed the hills and appeared on the scene of the disturbance. MacEwan, who did not dream that his treason had traveled as far as the valley of the Earn, and was known in the Palace of Fort- Teviot, was surprised to find himself face to face with his sovereign. His followers dispersing, left their leader to enjoy alone whatever promotion Constantin might be pleased to confer upon him. That promotion was such as his services deserved. He was hanged before the Castle of Dunstafnage, which he had made his headquarters, and the rebellion expired.

After this appeared a portent of even worse augury which struck alarm into the heart of both king and people. The tempest this time came not from the land but from the sea. The Danes had landed on the coast of Fife, and had already begun their bloody work. The tidings of what had happened sent a shock through the whole kingdom. Contrary to their usual custom the invaders had made their descent on the eastern coast, where they were not looked for, and as the Scotland of that age had no army of observation, their landing was unopposed. They held no parley with the natives, they offered no terms of submission, but unsheathing their swords, they began at once to hew their way into the interior of the kingdom. Their course lay along the fertile vale of the Leven, and its green beauty under their feet quickly changed into ghastly red. The cruel Dane was merciful to none, but his heaviest vengeance fell upon the ministers of the Christian Church. A considerable number of ecclesiastics is said to have made good their escape to the Isle of May, but their persecutors followed them thither, and remorselessly butchering them, converted the little isle into a horrible shambles. Possibly the Danes deemed their slaughter a pleasing sacrifice to their god Odin, for paganism in all its forms is a cruel and blood- thirsty thing.

King Constantin, assembling his army, marched to stay the torrent of Scottish blood which the Danish sword had set flowing. He found the Danish host divided into two bodies, and led by Hungan and Hubba, the two brothers of the Danish king. One corps was robbing and slaughtering along the left bank of the Leven, and the other was engaged with equal ardor in that to them most congenial work on the right bank of the same stream. Constantin led his soldiers against the Danish force on the left.

Recent rains had swollen the Leven, and the Danes on the other side durst not tempt the angry flood by crossing over to the assistance of their comrades. Left alone with the Scottish army they were utterly routed, and Constantin inflicted a sever chastisement upon them, cutting them off almost to a man. When the Danes on the right side of the river saw how complete was the victory of the Scots they fell back before them, and resolved to make their final stand in the neighborhood of their ships. Their fleet lay at anchor in Balcombie Bay, in the eastern extremity of Fife, two miles beyond the town of Crail. A sweet and peaceful scene is this spot, seen under its normal conditions. The blue sea, the bright sandy beach, the vast crescent of rocks and shingle, steep and lofty, that sweeps round it, a full mile in circuit, lying, moreover, in the bosom of a far mightier bay of which the southern arm finds its termination in the promontory of St. Abbs, and the northern in the precipices of the Red Head, make as fine a piece of coast scenery as is almost anywhere to be beheld. Yet dire was the carnage that day enacted on this usually quiet and secluded spot. The Danes strengthened their position by drawing round the bay atop, a bristling barricade of rocks and stones, with which the spot plentifully supplied them. They dug entrenchments on the level plain outside their bulwark, which further strengthened their camp. Immediately beneath, in the bay,- they might almost drop a pebble upon their decks,- were moored their galleys, ready to carry them across the sea, if the day should go against them, and they lived to go back to the country whence they had come. The Danes fought for life, the Scots for country, and both with fury and desperation. The battlefield was the open plain above the bay, in our day an expanse of rich corn fields, all the richer, doubtless, from the blood that then so abundantly watered it. The hottest of the strife would rage at the barrier of boulders thrown up to break the onset of the Scots. It was the object of the latter to drive the Danes over their own rampart, and roll them down the slope into the sea; but the invaders made good their footing on the level ground, and forcing back the body of their assailants, escaped the destruction that yawned in their rear. The slain lay all about, and the blood of Scot and Dane trickling down in the same stream dyed the waters of the bay, and gave terrible intimation to those in charge of the galleys of the desperate character of the struggle that was going on on shore.

The good fortune of Constantin did not attend him in this second battle.

This was owing to no lack of spirit or bravery on his part, but grew out of the fret and discontent that continued to smolder in the Pictish mind against the sway of the Scottish scepter.

A contingent of Picts is said to have left the field while the battle was going on, and their desertion disheartening their comrades, turned the scale in the fortunes of the day. When the battle had ended, Scotland was without a king. As Constantin was fighting bravely in the midst of his fast- falling ranks, he was surrounded by the Danes, seized and dragged to a cave in the rocks, and there beheaded. Ten thousand Scots are said to have perished in that battle. Of the Danes the slain would be even more numerous, for the entire force on the left of the Leven was cut in pieces in the first battle, and considering how desperately the second was contested, the Danish dead in it would count at least man for man with the Scots. The Danes sought no closer acquaintance with Scotland meanwhile. Making their way to their ships, they set sail, leaving behind them a land over which rose the wail of widow and orphan, to be answered back by an equally loud and bitter cry from the homes to which they were hastening, as soon as they should have arrived there with the doleful tidings they were carrying thither. F379 The body of the king was found next day. A sorrowing nation carried it to Iona, and laid it in the sepulchers of the Scottish kings. It was only twenty years since the funeral procession of Kenneth MacAlpin had been seen moving along the same tract, in greater pomp, it may be, but not in profounder grief. The father had died on the bed of peace, the son had gone down in the storm of battle, and now both rest together in the sacred quiet of the little isle. Constantin had reigned fourteen years, dying in A. D. 877. F380 Such was the first burst of the great storm. The clouds had rolled away for the moment, but they would return, not once, nor twice, but many times in years to come. Hence- forward the Scottish peasant must plough his fields and reap his harvests with the terror of the Dane hanging over him. At any moment this flock of Norse vultures might rise out of the sea, and swoop down upon his land and make it their prey. He must be watchful, and sober, and provident. He must care for the interests of his country, and know that his individual security and defense lay not in the strength of his clan, but in the strength of his nation; in the unity and power of all its clans, near and remote. He must cease to seek occasions of quarreling, lest, Imply, the common enemy should come suddenly, and finding him fighting with his neighbor, should have an easy victory over both.

The Danes of that day were the most powerful of the German nations.

Their narrow territory, overstocked with inhabitants, was continually in labor to relieve itself by sending forth new swarms of piratical adventurers.

Its youth, hardy and martial, were always ready to embark in any enterprise that offered them the chance of waging battle and of gathering spoil. They had been born to slay or to be slain, and better not to have lived than to live and not to have mingled in the carnage of the battlefield. Their welcome at the gates of Valhalla, There are, however, very great difficulties in the way of this theory. The Danes, of course, would cross to Scotland in their ships. On arriving, and beginning their march through the whole breadth of the country what did they do with their fleet? They could only send it round the north of Scotland by the Pentland, to wait the arrival of the army on the east coast. Considering the hazard of a march through a country whose whole population was hostile, were not the Danes more likely to accompany their ships, and make their assault in unbroken force on the east coast, whence, if they were beaten, they had an open road to their own country? It is extremely unlikely that the expelled colony of Danes should have been able to drive the Scots before them across the entire island, and that the Scots should make a stand only when they had no alternative but fight or be driven into the sea. These improbabilities are so great that we may venture to say they never took place. and their place among its heroes, would, they knew, be in strict accordance with their prowess in war and the enemies they had slaughtered. Such was their ethical creed. They troubled themselves with no questions of casuistry touching the rights of the inhabitants of a country marked out for invasion.

All lands were theirs if only their sword could give them possession. If it was a Christian land the point was so much the clearer, for in that case it belonged, without dispute, to the people of Odin, and nothing could be more pleasing to this deity that that his worshippers should take possession of it, and consecrate it by the erection of his altars. Such were the people that hung upon the flank of the Scotland of the ninth and following century.

It is after a different fashion that the overcrowded or hungry populations of our day go about the business of seeking out and occupying new settlements. Crossing the sea with his wife and little ones, the emigrant sets to work with his axe, felling not men but trees, and having cleared a space in the primeval forest, he sets up his homestead, and begins those operations of spade or plough which soon teach the earth around his humble log- house to wave with cornfields or blossom with orchards. But so prosaic a mode of finding for himself a new home was little to the taste of the emigrant of the ninth century. The country that could be won without battle was scarce worth possessing. The claimant of new territories in that age crossed the main in a galley blazoned with emblems of terror: the prow the head of horrid dragon, and the stern the twisted tail of venomous snake. The earth grew red at his approach. The invaded region was cleared out with the sword, and its new occupant set himself down on the gory soil.

This fate had already been meted out to South Britain. Descending on it with the swift and destructive force of one of their own hailstorms, the Anglo- Saxons made the country their own. They cleared out the inhabitants with the summary agencies of fire and sword, and driving a few miserable remnants of the population into the corners of the land, they gave to the country a new race and a new name. They called it Anglo- land. A similar fate had been allotted to Scotland by the Dane. Its ancient people were to be hewn down. Some few might be spared to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the conqueror, but the Dane was to be its lord and master. Its ancient name was to be blotted out: the sanctuaries of the Culdee were to be razed and the shrines of Thor set up in their room. It was this tremendous possibility that made the two nationalities coalesce. They were fused in the fire. Every battle with the Dane, every heap of slain which his sword piled up, and every shipload of booty which he carried across the sea, only helped to strengthen their cohesion and fan their patriotism. The question was no longer whether shall Scot or Pict take precedence in the government of the realm? The question now had come to be, shall either of the two be suffered to rule it, or indeed to exist in it? Shall the name of Caledonia cease from the mouths of men, and shall the country in all time coming be known as Daneland?

CHAPTER - A. D. 377- 889. ETH- GRIG- PICTISH PERSECUTION OF COLUMBAN CHURCH- TOLERATION.

WHEN Scotland looked up from the battlefield of Crail there appeared on every side nothing but disaster and apparent ruin. The throne empty, the flower of the army fallen on the field, and the adhesion of the Picts become doubtful, the Union appeared to be in greater peril than at any time since the great battle on the banks of the Tay, which brought the Scots and Picts together in one nation. But the dynasty of Fergus is not to end here; the little country must gather up its strength and repair its losses before the Danes have time to return and strike a second blow.

The first care of the Scots was to select one to fill the vacant throne. The choice of the nation fell on Eth or Aodh, the brother of Constantine. This prince had been present in the recent battle, and when the king fell he rallied the broken ranks and led them off the field. Of all his exploits this only has conic down to us. He is known as Eth of the Swift Foot, from an abnormal nimbleness of limb which enabled him to outstrip all his fellows.

John Major calls him an Asahel, and tells us that no one could keep pace with him in running. F381 Of Eth, as of all the Scottish monarchs of the time, very different portraits have been drawn. It were vain to plunge into the darkness of the ninth century in search of the real Eth. He is gone from us for ever, but we have no proof that he conspicuously possessed the talents fitting him for governing in the unsettled and unhappy times in which it fell to his lot to occupy the throne. A brief year summed up the period of his reign, and “Swift Foot” was carried to Iona.

While events of great importance are passed over as unworthy of record, the early chroniclers often detain us with occurrences of no significance whatever, especially if they have about them as much of the marvelous as to make them pass for prodigies. If we may credit these writers, the earth, the sea, and the air were, in those ages, continually sending forth supernatural omens to warn or to terrify men. During the reign of Eth a shoal of the fish called “sea monks” appeared on the coast. These denizens of the deep had their name from the resemblance they bore to the cowled fraternity whose habitat is the land. They looked like an army of monks immersed in the waves and struggling to reach the shore. The peasantry who regarded them as the certain prognosticators of disaster, beheld their approach with alarm if not with horror. There was no need surely to send a shoal of sea- monks to foretell calamities which were already palpably embodied in the war galleys of the Danes, in the graves at Balcombie Bay, and the sounds of grief that still echoed in castle and cottage throughout Scotland.

With the next reign came better complexioned times. The deep wound Scotland had received in the battle- field of Crail began to be healed. We now find Grig, or, as he is sometimes termed, Gregory, on the throne. The lineage of this man cannot be certainly traced. The presumption is that he was outside the royal line, or at best but distantly related to it, and that he opened his way to the crown by his ambition and talents, favored by the distractions of the time. He stood up amongst the kings of Scotland as Cromwell at a later day stood up among the monarchs of England, to show that men not “born in the purple” may nevertheless possess the gift of governing, and that nations are not shut up to accept a foolish or a wicked prince as their master simply because he happens to be sprung of a family which has given kings to them aforetime. The vigor and firmness of Gregory steadied a reeling state, and brought back to the throne the prestige it had lost during the previous reign. He had won his high position over not a few rivals, but he knew how to conquer enemies by pardoning them. The first act of his administration was to issue an indemnity to all who had been in arms against him- an act of grace which augured well for his future reign.

The reign of Gregory has been made famous by a law passed by him in favor of the ministers of religion. It is recorded of him in the “Pictish Chronicle,” and in the “Register of the Monastery of St. Andrews,” both ancient documents of the highest authority, that “he was the first who gave freedom to the Scottish Church which had been in bondage till that time, according to the rule and custom of the Picts.” F382 The church of those days is kept very much out of sight. The old chroniclers, so full of talk on other things, are very reticent on this subject. Columba and Iona would seem to have fallen out of their memory. But there come in the course of their narrations incidental statements which are a lifting of the veil, and which give us a momentary glimpse of the position of churchmen and the state of religion. This is one of those incidental statements. It is brief but pregnant, and warrants one or two not unimportant conclusions.

First of all, it is noteworthy that this is the first time that we meet in history the term the “Scottish Church.” This alone is of great significance. We have not yet met the name “Scotland” as applied to the whole country. It is still Alban. The church takes precedence of the country, and we read of the “Scottish Church” before we read of the “Scottish Kingdom.” There can be no question that the “church” which we here see Gregory liberating from Pictish thraldom was the church of which the Columban clergy were the ministers. There was as yet no foreign priesthood in the country. There were, it is true a few propagandist missionaries and itinerant monks in the land doing business for Rome, but their proselytizing labors were confined mostly to the court of princes or the monastery of the abbot, where they strove to insinuate themselves into confidence by an affectation of a sanctity which they did not possess, and all the while scheming to supplant the clergy of the nation by accusing them of practicing a worship of barbarous rites, and throwing ridicule upon them as wearing the tonsure of Simon Magus. They were shut out, however, from carrying on any great scheme of propagandism among the people by their ignorance of the tongue of the country’. No ecclesiastical body at this hour in Scotland had any pretensions to the status of a church, save that spiritual organization which had its cradle in the Scotch colony of Dalriada, its center in the Scotch school of Iona, and which from that center had spread itself over the Scottish land. This church had all along been served mostly by Scotsmen in both its home and foreign field, and when this little sentence lifts the veil in the end of the ninth century, it is seen still existing in its corporate condition, and receiving royal recognition as the National Church of Scotland. It may be that neither trunk nor bough are so robust and vigorous as they were in the sixth and seventh centuries, but there stands the old tree still, and there around it are the Scottish people, and in this royal edict we see room made for its spreading itself more widely abroad. We may venture to infer further that the “Church of Scotland” of that age enjoyed a measure of liberty among the Scots which was denied it among the Picts. The bondage in which the “Scottish Church” is here seen to be held is spoken of as a bondage distinctively Pictish. Whatever may have been the nature of that bondage, which it is not easy to conjecture from so brief a statement, it would seem to have been restricted to Pictland, and unknown in the territory of the Scots, where a more liberal treatment was adopted toward the clergy.

It may throw a little light on this matter if we recall an occurrence that had taken place among the Picts a century and a half before the days of Gregory, the first liberator of the Scottish Church. Nectan was at that time on the Pictish throne (A. D. 717). Three came to Nectan’s court certain missionaries, “ecclesiastical touters, “from the South, who cried up the Roman rites in general, and mightily extolled in particular the tonsure of Rome and her Easter celebration, and as loudly decried all the usages of the Scottish Church. “The rites of your clergy,” said these strangers to the Pictish monarch, “have no efficacy in them, and are displeasing to the Deity. Your priests have no true tonsure and no true Easter. The courses they follow are contrary to the universal Church; we come to lead you and your people into the right path, that you may no longer offend God and hazard your salvation by the observance of a barbarous ritual.” These words had all the more influence with Nectan that they were fortified by a letter from Abbot Ceolfrid of Jarrow, Northumbria, who was of great repute as a canonist and churchman, and to whom King Nectan had previously written on the subject, for he had begun to weary of the simple Columban rites, and to Iona for the more ornate ceremonies and the more pompous worship of Rome, with which he desired to ally himself. It required, therefore, no elaborate argument to make a convert of a man who was already more than half convinced. Having tasted the new wine of Rome, the juice of the vine of Iona had lost its relish for him. The new, said Nectan, is better than the old.

The historian Bede has given a minute and graphic description of the scene, and in doing so he is narrating what took place in his own day. The letter of Abbot Ceolfrid is addressed in as magniloquent terms as if the monk had been writing to a great Eastern potentate instead of a Pictish king. The inscription runs: “To the most excellent Lord ;red most .glorious King Naiton.” “This letter,” says Bede, “having been read in the presence of King Naiton, and many others of the most learned men, and carefully interpreted into his own language by those who could understand it, be is said to have much rejoiced at the exhortation, in so much that, rising from the midst of his great men who sat about him, he knelt on the ground, giving thanks to God that he had been found worthy to receive such a present from the land of the Angles, and, said he, ‘I knew indeed before that this was the true celebration of Easter; but now I so fully know the reason for the observance of this time, that I seem convinced that I knew very little of it before. Therefore I publicly declare and protest to you who are here present, that I will for ever continually preserve this time of Easter, together with all my nation; and I do decree that this tonsure, which we have heard is most reasonable, shall be received by all the clergy of my kingdom. ‘ Accordingly he immediately performed by his regal authority what he had said. For the cycles of nineteen years were by public command sent through all the provinces of the Picts to be transcribed, learnt, and observed, the erroneous revolutions of eighty- four years being everywhere obliterated. All the ministers of the altar and the monks adopted the coronal tonsure; and the nation being thus reformed, rejoiced as being newly placed under the direction of Peter, the most blessed prince of the Apostles, and made secure under his protection.” F383 Bede drops the curtain while the scene is at its best, the king praising and giving thanks, and the nobles and people joining their acclamations with their sovereign over this great religious reformation ! And verily they might well give vent to their joy, for a wonderful feat truly had been accomplished in an astonishingly brief space, and by amazingly simple and summary means! A whole clergy had been transformed into orthodox by a few “clips” of the scissors fetched from Rome. The festivals of the Church had been placed on the sound and solid basis of a reformed calendar; and a kingdom, aforetime blighted and mocked with heretical and barbarous rites, and ministered to by priests with the horrid tonsure of Simon Magus, had become enriched and fructified by ordinances full of efficacy and mystic grace, and served by priests without doubt holy, seeing they have “holiness” written upon their heads by the scissors which have imprinted upon them the orthodox tonsure. Well might Pictavia rejoice! It has opened a new epoch ! And well might “the most excellent Lord and most glorious King Nectan” rejoice, seeing he has found- what has he found?- that Word which maketh wise unto salvation? that Word which a king of old made a lamp to his feet? that Word which has showed to nations the road to greatness?- no ! “the most excellent Lord and glorious King Nation” has found- a rectified Easter Calendar! There is another side to this bright picture. Voices not altogether in unison are heard to mingle with this chorus of national rejoicing.

Whence come these discordant sounds These are the protests of certain recalcitrant members of the Columban clergy who refuse to submit their heads to be shorn after this new and strange fashion. It matters not, we can hear them urge, whether the head be tonsured after this mode or after that, or whether it be tonsured at all. Ours is not a gospel of tonsure one way or other. Columba did not cross the sea and institute his brotherhood at Iona merely to initiate Scotland into the mystery of the tonsure. The truth of our doctrine and the efficacy of our sacraments do not lie in the peculiar tonsure of the man who dispenses them. That were to make Christianity a system of childish mimicry or of wicked jugglery. Nor does the power of the eucharist to edify depend on its being solemnized on a particular day. It is the grand fact of the Resurrection that gives the Christian festival its sublime significance. Tonsure or no tonsure is therefore nothing to us. But it is everything to us to submit our heads to have imprinted upon them the badge of subjection to Rome. That were to renounce the faith of our fathers. It were to arraign and condemn Columba and the elders of Iona as having been in error all along, and guilty of schism in living separate from Rome, and following rebelliously the precepts of Scripture when they ought to have submitted to the councils of the Church. Know therefore, O King, that we will not obey your command nor receive your tonsure.

This was conduct truly faithful and magnanimous. It shows that the spirit of Columba still lived in the Scottish Church, and that the people of Scotland, instructed by pastors who could intelligently and firmly sacrifice status and emolument at the shrine of truth, had not so far degenerated as the silence of the monkish historians of after days would make us think.

There must yet have been no inconsiderable amount of piety and Christian knowledge in Scotland.

But to Nectan these pleadings were addressed in vain. He was so filled with the adulation of Abbot Ceolfrid and the flatteries of the missionaries of Rome that he had no car to listen to the remonstrances of his own clergy. He could in brook the slight on his authority which their courageous resolution implied, and was but the more set on carrying out his “reformation.” Accordingly, as Bede informs us, “he prayed to have architects sent him to build a church in his nation after the Roman manner, promising to dedicate the same in honor of the blessed Peter, the prince of the Apostles, and that he and all his people would always follow the custom of the Holy Roman Apostolic Church, as far as they could ascertain the same in consequence of their remoteness from the Roman language and nation.” F384 He followed this up by immediate steps for completing the revolution in his church and kingdom by sending messengers throughout his dominions to have the Easter tables altered from the cycle of eightyfour to the cycle of nineteen years, and the festival kept in accordance with the new reckoning; and further, the messengers were commanded to see that all the ministers of religion had their heads shorn after the Roman fashion, and if any one refused to conform he was to be told that there was no longer place for him in the dominions of King Neetan. We do not know how many, but there is reason to conclude that a very great number of the Columban clergy refused compliance, and had to go into exile. They were hospitably received by their brethren on the Scottish side of Drumalban.

In this occurrence we see the “Scottish Church” in the Pictish dominions passing into bondage. She must submit henceforth to the royal will, and do the royal bidding in the matter of the tonsure and Easter. It is probable that these two things were only the beginnings of the servitude in which the clergy were kept by the Pictish kings. It is of the nature of such bondage to grow. The men who had so far yielded, rather than go into exile with their brethren, would have to yield still farther, and have other burdens imposed upon them. Possibly secular exactions were in time added to their ecclesiastical and spiritual sacrifices and disqualifications. Burdens would be laid on their estates as well as on their consciences. It had been customary to exempt their lands from the imposts and taxes of the State: these immunities they would no longer enjoy. Possibly they were spoiled of their lands altogether. And now for a century and more the Columban clergy had been subject to this servitude in the Pictish dominions.

When we know what the bondage was, we can the better conjecture the kind and extent of the liberty which King Gregory gave the “Scottish Church.” In the decree of Nectan we have the “law and custom” of the Pictish monarchy in ecclesiastical affairs. It enjoined, under heavy penalties the Roman observance. It was this that drove the Columban clergy across Drumalban, and not the secular burdens and imposts which possibly were added afterwards. The latter they could have submitted to with a good conscience, although they might have accounted them unjust and oppressive; but the first, the Roman observance to wit, touched the conscience, and left them no alternative but to leave their country. Here then, in the revocation of Nectan’s edict even, must the liberation of the “Scottish Church” begin. This was the part of the “servitude” that pressed on the soul. Release from the burdens and exactions of a secular kind which may have been laid on their lands, and which would be exigible by the King or the Mormaer, would follow in due course; but first, release must come to the conscience, and that could be given only by revoking Nectan’s decree, and leaving the Columbites at liberty to resume the customs of their ancient Church. That this decree was revoked, and the ancient liberty of worship restored to the Columban clergy, we have undoubted proof. Two hundred years afterwards, when the Columban pastors met in conference with Queen Margaret and her bishops, the charge against them was that they practiced barbarous rites, and neither in the matter of the tonsure nor the matter of the eucharist did they conform to the laws of Rome. No more satisfactory evidence could we have of the liberty which Gregory gave the Scottish Church, and the use she made of it. It gave her two hundred years more of her ancient discipline and worship.

This tyrannical measure recoiled on Nectan and his kingdom. It created a rupture between the Picts and Scots, which issued in long and bloody wars betwixt the two races. The conversion of- the Pictish nations by Columba was followed by an instant sheathing of the sword; and now for a century and a half, hardly had there been battle betwixt Pict and Scot. No mightier proof can we have of the power of Christianity to bind nations in amity and banish war, than that in a country like the Scotland of that day, and between two such nations as the Picts and Scots, there should have been a peace of more than a century’s duration. Yet such is the fact. The two nations were drawing together, and the union betwixt them would have conic without fighting and bloodshed, had not the bigotry Nectan rekindled the old fires, and made it impossible that the two races should unite till first it had been shown a series of terrific and bloody contests which of the two was the stronger on the battlefield. Nor is this all. It is probable that Nectan’s policy cost the Picts the sovereignty of Scotland. They were the more numerous, and in some respects the more powerful of the two nations: and had the union come by peaceable means, the Picts undoubtedly would have given kings to the throne and their name to the country, but when they forced the matter to the decision of arms, they found that the injustice and cruelty of Nectan the Columban Church weighed upon their sword and turned its edge in the day of battle. They fought with the valor of their race, they shed their blood in torrents, but they failed to win the kingdom, and their name perished.

King Nectan and his line disappear, but the church of Columba which he had chased out of his dominions comes back to dwell again in the old land.

One of the first measures of Kenneth MacAlpin after ascending the throne of the united kingdom was, as we have seen, to recall the Columban clergy and place them in the old ecclesiastical foundations left vacant by the expulsion of their fathers. Another half century passes, and the Columban church obtains another enlargement under King Gregory, and now, after having been plucked up and cast out of the Pictish territory, we see her again taking root and flourishing in the enjoyment of her ancient privileges and liberties. Historians have been little observant of this fact, and certainly little observant of its lesson, but it is full of instruction. It adds another to the many examples in history of the truth of Beza’s saying, not yet uttered, that “the church is an anvil which has worn out many a hammer.” Nectan struck with all his force, but when dying in the cowl of \¢ t monk he saw doubtless that the blow had effected little, and had he lived longer he would have seen that it had missed the anvil and struck his own throne. These well- authenticated facts make the silence of the monkish chroniclers of the tenth century regarding the condition of the Columban church a matter of less moment. We are independent of their testimony; for here have we great historic monuments which assure us that the church of Columba had not passed out of existence, as their silence would almost lead one to conclude, but, on the contrary, that it remained rooted in the land as an independent organization, maintaining divine service according to the simple formula of Columba; that it lived on into the darkness of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, keeping alive the Christian knowledge of the Scottish people, of whose successive generations it was the instructor, in short, that it was the sheet anchor of the country, staying it in the midst of the furious tempests that burst upon it, now from the mountains of the north, now from the Danes beyond the sea, and now from the Saxons of England.

CHAPTER - A. D. 878- 889. GREGORY OF SCOTLAND AND ALFRED OF ENGLAND- NORSEMEN- THE FADING COLUMBAN LAMP.

WE fail to discover in succeeding Pictish sovereigns that excess of proselytizing zeal which turned King Nectan into a persecutor. We read of no second act of bigotry similar to that which disgraced his reign. His successors on the throne could hardly fail to see that Nectan had committed a great error. The proofs of this were but too visible. He had created a great void at the heart of his kingdom. He had weakened the moral power and endangered the civil order of the nation; he had kindled the flames of war after they had been extinct for a century and a half; in fine, he had brought revolution on himself, and been fain in the end of his days to seek the shelter of a convent, and after having worn a crown, die in a monk’s cowl.

These evil consequences had followed the tyrannical act which the Pictish king, influenced by the flattery of Abbot Coelfrid, and the persuasions of the Roman missionaries, and impelled moreover by his own fanatical zeal, had been driven to commit. His successors, warned by his example, would learn not to be enamored of Roman novelties, or open their ear too readily to monkish counselors. Still, though they saw Nectan’s error, they might not be in a position to rectify it. To revoke the edict and recall those whom it had driven into banishment might not now be in their power. They had a war on their hands with the Scots, which demanded all their attention.

While that war lasted it would not be a wise policy to recall the Columban clergy. They were mostly Scotch, and might have difficulty in maintaining the attitude of neutrals during hostilities. They would at least be liable to be suspected of secretly favoring the triumph of the Scotch arms. The correction of Nectan’s error must lie over for the present. And hence it was that, although there is no evidence that the Roman innovations meanwhile made much progress beyond the court of Nectan, or found favor with the Pictish people, farther than the royal edict might compel them to an outward uniformity in the Easter celebration, the return of the Columban clergy to the Pictish dominions did not take place till the war between the two races had ended in their union into one nation. The return of the Columbites, as we have seen, was under Kenneth Macalpin: their full restoration to their ancient liberties was half a century later in the reign of King Grig, or Gregory, to whom we now return.

The strong hand of Gregory on the helm, Scotland began again to make headway (883). It had stood still, or gone back, during the troubled but, happily, short reign of the “Swift Foot,” whose policy had nothing of the progressive quality with which nature had so largely endowed his limbs.

While he sat on the throne the gloom kept thickening above the country, but with the new ruler there came a new dawn. Gregory had opened his reign with a measure of good augury, and not less of wise policy: for it is not necessary to suppose that in relaxing the bonds of the Columban clergy he was actuated solely by religious considerations. He had respect, no doubt, to the benefit which himself and his nation would reap from this act of justice. If, as is strongly suspected, his title to the throne was doubtful, he did well to make sure that so influential a body as the Columbites should be on his side and in favor of his government.

Having by one and the same act enlarged the liberties of the “Scottish Church,” and strengthened his own throne, Gregory addressed himself to the task of correcting the disorders in which the defeat at Crail and the reign of “Swift Foot” had involved the kingdom. A portion of the Pictish nation had brought their loyalty into suspicion. Their behavior in the late disastrous battle had been equivocal. Their treachery or cowardice was believed to have led’ to the loss of the day, and the many calamities that followed thereon. Gregory did not choose that so grave a dereliction of duty on so critical an occasion should go without chastisement. Since the battle other circumstances had come to light which tended still farther to strengthen the doubt entertained respecting the thorough devotion of a section of the Picts to the cause of the union. The Danes, on quitting the country after the battle of Crail, left this part of the coast in the possession of the Picts. This looked like keeping open the door for the return of the enemy. Gregory could not permit the keys of his kingdom to be in the hands of men who were disaffected to his Government, and who seemed not unwilling to sacrifice the union between the two races provided they recovered thereby their standing as a separate and independent nation. He drove this body of disaffected Picts out of Fife across the Forth. He pursued them through the Lothians to Berwick, in which they shut themselves up, and where Gregory made them captive, the citizens having opened their gates to him.

These successes at home would seem to have tempted the Scottish monarch to venture on exploits outside his own kingdom. Instead of returning within the limits of Alban, which were already considerably overpassed, he led his army farther into Northumbria. These parts were then much infested by the Danes. When repulsed from the coast of Scotland they not unfrequently turned their galleys in the direction of England, and over- spreading the northern counties, then almost defenseless, they gathered no end of spoil, and shed very much blood.

Gregory doubtless reckoned that if he could clear out these invaders from the northern counties of England the chance was so much the less of having to fight them on the soil of Scotland. As an acknowledgment of the services Gregory had rendered them by ridding them, for the time at least, of these troublesome visitors, the petty sovereigns which then ruled in England, seem to have given him some sort of authority or dominion over the border counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland, happy to commit their defense against foreign invasion to the sword of Gregory.

The Scottish monarch is described as pursuing his triumphant career further west. We next find him with his army in Strathclyde. The Britons of the Kingdom of Cumbria had offended by appropriating a narrow strip of Scottish territory which lay on the northern banks of the Clyde, and which included that famous rock (Dumbarton) at the foot of which the great apostle of Ireland had passed his youth. The stolen territory’ was all the more likely to have interest to the man who had “given liberty to the Scottish Church,” inasmuch as it was the birthplace of that great Scotsman who had been the founder of the “Scottish Church,” first by christianizing Ireland, and in the next place by putting the evangelical torch into the hands of Columba that he might carry it across and light with its sacred flame the dark land of Caledonia. Having rescued this hallowed spot, for such doubtless it was to Gregory, and having chastised the Britons for appropriating it, it was given back to Scotland.

Not yet had Gregory finished his victorious course, if we are to believe his Scotch chroniclers. He next crossed to Ireland, where he is said to have waged a campaign with great glory, quelling an insurrection which had broken out against the King of Dublin, an ally of Gregory’s, and restoring him to his throne. It must be added, however, that the record of these wars is somewhat dubious, and we dispatch them with brevity. The English and Irish chroniclers are .silent respecting them. We hear of them only from Fordun and other Scotch historians. That, however, is no sufficient reason for regarding them as altogether apocryphal. The “Registry of the Priory of St. Andrews” says expressly “that Gregory conquered Ireland and the greater part of England,” by which we understand it to be meant that his conquests in these two countries were extensive, and had a decisive effect on the governments of both kingdoms. Those who maintain that these campaigns were never waged, and that their record is illusory, defend their allegation by salving that Gregory was a munificent patron of the Church, and that the monks of St. Andrews, to show their gratitude, carved out this brilliant career for the Scottish king, and exalted him to the rank of a hero.

But it does not appear that Gregory surpassed other Scotch kings of his age in the gifts he bestowed on churchmen, his one well- known act of grace excepted. Besides, the benefactions of Gregory were bestowed in the end of the ninth century, whereas his apotheosis as a great warrior, which it is insinuated was done in recompense of his liberality to the church, did not take place till the middle of the thirteenth century, the Registry of St.

Andrews having been written in 1251. It is truly refreshing to find the gratitude of the monks remaining fresh and green after four centuries.

Seldom is it found that the sense of obligation to benefactors is so deep and lasting on the part of corporate bodies whether lay or cleric, as to call forth warm expressions of thanks centuries after the authors of these good gifts have exchanged their thones for their stone coffins. Long before this wreath was placed on his tomb by the monks of St. Andrews, Gregory was nothing more than a handful of ashes.

In that age it was difficult to keep England and Scotland apart, so as that their affairs should not intermingle. The same terrible people from beyond the sea were the enemies of both, and made their hostile descent now on the coast of the one country and now on the coast of the other. This drew England and Scotland together, and helped to maintain the peace betwixt them. If so be the Danish hordes were driven back, and their galleys chased off the coast, it mattered little whether the feat had been achieved by Scotch or by English valor, since both countries shared in nearly equal measure in the benefits of the victory. So did it happen in this instance.

Gregory on arriving in Northumbria, whither his pursuit of the fleeing Picts had led him, found the Danes, under their leader Hardnute, laying waste the country and slaughtering the inhabitants. The England of that day was miserably distracted and torn. The Danes were inflicting upon the Saxons all the horrors which the Saxons had inflicted on the Britons at a former epoch. The throne of Wessex was filled by one of the bravest and wisest princes of his age, nevertheless a great part of the reign of Alfred was passed on the battlefield to prevent his dominions being overrun and devastated by these northern marauders. Occupied with these greater cares, the remote Northumbria was left largely to take care of itself. It was here that the barbarian leader and his merciless followers were now ravaging. Although he found them on English soil, Gregory not the less recognized in Hardnute and his warriors the enemies of his own country, and gladly seized the opportunity now offered him of :avenging upon them in Northumbria the injuries they had inflicted upon his nation in Fife. If a brother sovereign should be the first to reap advantage from the success of his arms, this consideration, so far from making the Scottish king hold back, made him only the more eager to effect the expulsion of the Danes.

Gregory inflicted such a slaughter upon them that it broke their power in the north of England, and delivered the petty sovereigns that then ruled in that land, as well as the great prince of Wessex, from their terror. The bonds of amity betwixt the two nations and their rulers were strengthened by this interchange of friendly acts. The bloody fields of the borderland were effaced from the memories of men by the bloodier fields of the Dane.

Northumberland was placed under the suzerainty, if not the formal sovereignty, of the man whose sword had redeemed it from the spoiler.

Alfred appears to have felt no alarm at the nearer approach of the Scottish border to his own dominions. What stronger defense could he have on his northern frontier than the arms of Gregory? He rightly judged, doubtless, that ruled by him Northumbria would be a protecting wall to himself against the tempests from the German Sea. And as regards the Anglo- Saxons now professedly Christian, how much more preferable, as allies a, were the Scots to the Danes, in whom the wolfish instincts of paganism were yet unbroken and rampant. The Saxons of the north of England, says Fordun, “thought it better willingly to submit to the Catholic Scots, though enemies, than unwillingly to the Pagan infidels.”

In the dark sky of the ninth century there is seen a star of pure and brilliant radiance, on which we love to fix our eyes. We cannot come within the proximity of its orbit without pausing to admire and speak of it. In no age would a creation so lovely have failed to attract and fascinate our gaze, but shining out amid the clouds and tempests of this age, we hail it with wonder and delight. Alfred, Prince of Wessex, exhibited the rare union of the scholar, the legislator, the warrior, and the patriot. To these he would have added, had his days been longer, the Christian reformer. Such, indeed, he was, but only in limited measure, for hardly had he begun to develop his enlightened plans for the reformation of his realm when the grave closed over him, and with Alfred went down into the tomb the hopes of England for four centuries. Till the days of Wyckliffe there came no second dawn to Christendom.

Few princes- not one in an hundred- have had the inestimable privilege of the same training and discipline through which Alfred passed. The range of his education extended far beyond the science and philosophy of his day.

His instruction in the liberal arts was not overlooked: not only was he a patron of men of letters, he himself cultivated letters, and the success with which he did so is seen in his translation of the Pastoral of Gregory I. and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. But to these accomplishments Alfred added a higher wisdom than that of the schools. His great qualities were rooted in a piety which was drawn from the Sacred Writings, rather than from the precepts and traditions of churchmen. Moreover, Adversity had taken him to school, and for some terrible years that stern instructress made him give good heed to her lessons. At one time the Danes had well nigh wrested his kingdom from him. He was obliged to flee in disguise and hire himself out as a cowherd. In the quiet of the woods and fields thoughts would arise which had not come into his mind amid courts and armies. When he recovered his throne and had rest from war, these thoughts bore fruit. He gave himself to the work of establishing order, promoting industry, cultivating commerce, and extending the maritime powers of England. his son and grandson, Edward and Athelstan, followed in their father’s steps, and these three princes were among the first to show the world that the road to fame is open to the man of peace not less than to the man of the sword. In the successful voyages of Other and Ulfstan into the then unknown northern seas, the English nation under Alfred early displayed their natural bent, and gave prognostication of what they were destined to accomplish in the field of discovery in after ages.

But these were not the highest of the labors of Alfred. He panted above all things to effect a religious reform of his realm. What instrumentality did Alfred employ for effecting his grand purpose? Did he send to Rome for instructors? Did he multiply his “celebrations”? A dogma, till then unheard of, was just beginning to be broached by Paschasius Radbertus in France, that in the eucharist the communicant receives the literal flesh and blood or’ Christ for his eternal life. Shall Alfred illuminate his realm with this new gospel? What England ,needed was not more mystery, but more light. The darkness was thick enough already, and there was no need to turn twilight into midnight by promulgating the Cimmerian dogma of transubstantiation.

Alfred took up his position on ground which no churchman of his century had courage to occupy. Turning away from priest and sacrament he went to the Word of God. He conceived the great idea of translating the Scriptures into the vernacular of the Saxon people. He assembled a select body of learned men at his court, and set them to the work of translating the Bible: he put his own hand to the work, so much was his heart set upon it, and, like Columba, he was engaged in translating the Psalms at the time of his death. F386 Alfred stands at the head of the noble army of Bible translators. It is a higher glory than his fifty battles by land and sea. The work in which he led the way call know no termination till the Word of Life has been translated into the tongue of every people on earth, and its light has shone round and round the globe. It would be interesting to know the personal relations that subsisted betwixt Gregory and Alfred. If the character of the first approximated the portrait which the Scottish chroniclers have left of him, these two princes must have been drawn to one another by a warmer sentiment than mere conventional friendship. Both, we are permitted to believe, were magnanimous, princely, and patriotic; and it is interesting to see two such men occupying contemporaneously the thrones of Scotland and England.

Alfred was surrounded by men who loved and admired him, and who have painted him in colors that remain fresh to this day. We are sure we see the true likeness of the great English prince of the ninth century. His Scottish contemporary enjoyed no such advantage, and we are not certain that we have the real features of Gregory. But it corroborates what has been transmitted to us concerning him to know that, like Alfred, he aimed at effecting a religious reform, more or less extensive. For no other interpretation can we put upon the statement that Gregory gave freedom to the Scottish Church which till his time had been kept in bondage among the Picts.

During the century and a half going before, great deadness, doubtless, overspread the cast and north of Scotland, the ancient territory of the Picts.

The Columban Church in those parts had been all but rooted out. The Sabbath services in many places had ceased; and where they were still continued it was with great inefficiency and coldness by the poor substitutes which had been found for the expelled Columbites; men from the north of England, where the influence of Rome was now dominant, or monks from the houses of Adamnan foundation, in which, as in the case of Adamnan himself, the spirit of the Roman Egbert was struggling with the spirit of Columba for the mastery. The schools had been closed, and the instruction of the youth was neglected. There is no evidence to show that the Roman ideas and customs had infected the people to any great extent.

It was religious apathy and Pictish coercion, rather than Papal propagandism that weighed upon the land. In the old days when Columba directed the evangelization of Scotland from Iona, no royal will circumscribed his plans or fettered the steps of the missionaries he sent forth. The land was before them, and they might go whither they would and kindle their light at all the great centers. They did so, and in a generation or two the country was dotted with evangelical beacon- fires, and the Aryan darkness of the Druid was dispelled. This was a freedom of action which had been known to the Columban Church in Pictland for a century and n half. The consequence was that, denied the liberty of evangelistic enterprise, the inclination to enter upon it departed.

The Columban Church in Pict) and lay down and sunk into slumber, leaving her lamp untrimmed, and the region around immersed in spiritual gloom. With her release from thraldom there came, doubtless, to the church in Pictland, and, perhaps, also in the ancient territory of the Scots, a reawakening of zeal and a revival of the light. That light, it is true, burned less brightly now than when it was first kindled on Iona, four centuries before. But the old lamp was not to be permitted to go out. The appearance of the Roman tonsure on the heads of certain of the Columbite clergy gave emphatic warning that years, and it might be centuries, of darkness were yet in store for Scotland. In presence of these gathering shades, what could the friends of the gospel do, except watch around their lamp and feed its flame, and if they could not bring back its pristine brightness, they could keep it alive, till the night had numbered its watches, and the hour had struck for that great dawn to appear for which the world was waiting.

CHAPTER - A. D. 889- 942. DONALD- CONSTANTINLOST BATTLES AND THEIR LESSONS.

THE royal vaults at Iona had received another tenant, and Donald, the third of that name, the son of Constantin II., now filled the throne (A. D. 889), The keen eye of Gregory had not failed to mark the virtues of the youth, and on his death- bed, it is said, he recommended him to his nobles as ), is fittest successor. “Nor did he deceive,” says Buchanan, “the judgment of that wise king.” F388 No long time elapsed till occasion presented itself for testing the capabilities of the new sovereign. Across the German Sea had sped the tidings that Gregory was dead, and in a brief space the black galleys of the Norsemen were again seen ploughing the waves, their dragonheaded prows turned in the direction of England.

They arrived off the coast of Northumbria, and for some days they remained inactive, as if uncertain whether to swoop down upon the northern or upon the southern half of the island. Alfred, who was still alive, fearing that the tempest now hanging on the Northumbrian coast might finally burst upon his own dominions, made advances to Donald of Scotland. He reminded the Scottish king of the alliance which had subsisted betwixt the two kingdoms in his predecessor’s time, and which had been fruitful in benefits to both countries, and proposed that the old friendship should be continued, and that each should assist the other, as occasion required, against the enemies which the sea was continually sending forth against both. These overtures were cordially met by King Donald. An armed force was sent to the help of Alfred of England, and there followed a bloody battle with the common enemy, in which the bulk of the Danish invaders were slaughtered. The remnant that survived the carnage having, it would seem, but little heart to go back to their own country, were permitted to settle in Northumbria, on condition of their embracing the Christian faith. These worshippers of Odin accepted without scruple the easy stipulation; but their conversion brought neither honor to their new religion, nor in the end safety to the country in which it opened to them a settlement.

Scarcely had this cloud passed away till another arose in the opposite quarter which tested still more severely the spirit of the Scottish king. The clans of Moray and Ross had fallen out and were fighting with one another.

It were vain to seek for the cause of quarrel, for it needed but little to kindle at any moment the flames of internecine war on this region of normal disturbance. What added to the gravity of the affair was the circumstance that a body of Danes, lured by the scent of plunder, had joined the fray, and were increasing the effusion of blood which already exceeded what would have been spilt in a pitched battle. On receiving the tidings that his chieftains were quarreling, Donald turned his face towards the north and marched right into the heart of the tempest. He met the insurgent host,- a ravaging horde of stranger Danes, mutinous Picts, and rebellious chieftains, and he defeated them in two successive battles, the one fought at Cullen, and the other in the neighborhood of Forres. The well- known stone in the latter locality, which has engaged the attention of the curious for centuries, but which no one has yet indubitably deciphered, is not unnaturally conjectured to be in some sort the memorial of these events, and to mark, it may be, the grave of King Donald. His death is variously recorded, but the preponderance of opinion is that he died at Forres, having fallen in the battle, or sunk under the fatigues consequent on the campaign. So says Fordun. Boece, on the other hand, prolongs his life, and makes him visit Northumbria to see how it fared with the Danish colony planted there, and whether those worshippers of Odin, who had been so summarily transformed on the battlefield into the professors of the Christian faith, were conducting themselves as became loyal subjects and good Christians.

The old historian John Major hints his concurrence with Boece. F390 All agree, however, that King Donald breathed his last in the eleventh year his reign. His career was brief but full of stirring events, and now that it was over he was borne amid the grief of his nation to rest in the solemn quiet of Iona.

Donald was succeeded by Constantin (A. D. 900), the son of Swift Foot.

During the reign of the man whom we now see mounting the throne the shadow on the dial of Scotland was destined to go back several degrees.

His wavering faith and unsteady friendships wrought greater vexations to himself, and brought greater calamities upon his country, than if he had been a bad and not simply a weak prince.

The Scottish reigns of that day were short. The throne was beset by too many enemies to permit any long interval of time to part the “Fatayle Chayre” at Scone from the royal sepulchers of Iona. War, or foreign invasion, or domestic treason were never far from the royal seat, and its occupant was given but few years to possess it, and these full of anxiety, and darkened by the shadow of the all but certainty of a tragic end. But King Constantin was an exception. His reign was prolonged for forty years, and when at last he came to die, he expired on the bed of peace. His reign, as we have hinted, wore a somber complexion, yet its mistakes and reverses are redeemed by an event that sheds a halo round the man, and gives a singular interest to his epoch. That event was the convocation, in the sixth year of his reign, of a national Assembly at Scone for the reformation of the Scottish Church. Our curiosity and interest are intensely awakened by the unexpected occurrence of a reforming Assembly in the tenth century of Scotland. What, we naturally ask, were the subjects discussed, and what the practical resolutions adopted? But instead of full information on these points, we are balked and mortified by receiving only a few meager details.

Neither the ancient chroniclers nor the modern historians have appreciated the significance of this convention. They dismiss it in six lines: and yet it clearly indicates a rallying of the Columban forces, all the more remarkable that it takes place in what we have been accustomed to regard as one of the deadest periods of Scottish history. What further adds to its significance is the fact that this convention at Scone is one in a chain of events, all of which point in the same direction, even the continued corporate existence of the Scottish Church, and its systematic progressive action. First comes the restoration of the Columban clergy to the east and north of Scotland by Kenneth MacAlpin. Next they have their ecclesiastical status and freedom restored to them by King Gregory, and now the Scottish Church, cast and west, united in one, and her liberty of action given back, assembles under Constantin to reform herself according to her ancient laws and the Word of God. Looking at it in this light, the convocation records its own history, and refuses to be wiped out from the nation’s annals, despite that chronicler and historian have virtually ignored it, and all but consigned it to oblivion. Waiving this matter for the present, we shall devote the following chapter to the special consideration of this convention.

Before entering on the political and military events of the reign of Constantin, we must pause here to sketch the civil divisions and arrangements of Scotland which were made about this time. First of all it behooves our readers to bear in mind that the Kingdom of Scotia has not yet made its appearance. The Scots and Picts are there, fusing their blood into one nation, and uniting their fealty before one throne, but the territory they occupy is still known as the Kingdom of Alban. What is the extent of the Kingdom of Alban, and where are its boundaries placed?

Alban is bounded on the south by the Firth of Forth, and on the north by the Spey. So small was the area, and so restricted the limits of Alban at the opening of the tenth century. Both north and south of the Kingdom of Alban was a broad margin of territory over which the tides of war were incessantly flowing and ebbing. The fealty of the inhabitants of these districts was regulated by the turnings and shiftings of battle. On the south of the Forth was Saxonia; and when victory inclined to the Scots the men of the Lothians and the Merse recognized their ruler in the occupant of the royal palace at Scone, and did his bidding; but when the Anglo- Saxons proved the stronger, they carried the tribute of their homage across the Tweed to lay it at the feet of the Northumbrian monarch.

It was much the same in the counties on the north of the Spey. The Kings of Norway, having subjected the Orkneys, pushed their conquests southward into Caithness and Sutherland, and onward to the fertile region which is watered by the Findhorn and the Spey. But their dominion over these parts was precarious and transitory, and was always challenged by the Kings of Alban. The Albanic monarchs claimed to be the lords superior of these counties, and the Norwegian Jarls, whom the Kings of Norway appointed to govern them in their name, had frequently to pay verbal homage, and at times more substantial tribute to the Scottish Kings. While these outlying regions north and south of Alban were in this transition state, neither included in Scotland, nor yet wholly excluded from it, the condition of the inhabitants was far from enviable. Their territory was the battlefield of contending Kings, and they were continually familiar with war in its most barbarous forms. They escaped from the yoke of one master only to fall under that of another, and after a brief space to return into bondage to their former tyrant. So passed their lives; much reason had they to wish that the time would come when their absorption into the Kingdom of Alban would bring them rest. That time was now near. It remains that we indicate the civil divisions of the Kingdom of Alban. As stated above, this little kingdom, soon to grow into the greater Scotland, was meanwhile included within the modest limits of the Forth and the Spey. It was divided into five regions. On the west was the province of Fortrenn. It consisted of the modern districts of Menteith and Strathearn, and its population, mainly Pictish, was spoken of as the men of Fortrenn. The second region, lying next on the east, consisted of the territory embraced by the Forth and the Tay, Fife and Fotherif. To this was attached the Carse of Gowrie. The inhabitants of this province were eminently the Scoti of Alban. This was the nucleus or heart of the kingdom, and here, at Scone, was placed the royal palace of the Scottish Kings. The third province, beginning at Hilef, extended to the Dee and the German Ocean. It included Angus and Mearns; the districts known in our day as the shires of Forfar and Kincardine. There is some doubt as regards the position of Hilef, the starting point on the west of the third province. It is probably Lyff, on the north bank of the Tay, and the present boundary between the counties of Perth and Forfar. The inhabitants were called the Men of Moerne, and had as their stronghold the Castle of Dun Fother or Dunotter. The fourth region stretched northward from the Dee to the River Spey, and included the modern counties of Aberdeen and Banff. The fifth province extended from the Spey to the mountains of Drumalban, including the present Breadalbane and Athol.

These were the five regions that constituted the body of the kingdom; but we have said the boundaries of Alban were not fixed and immovable. A successful raid or victorious battle would at times enlarge them beyond their normal lines. When this happened on the north, the county of Moray formed a sixth province, and the ancient Dalriada, lying along the western sea- board, formed a seventh.

These five regions were subdivided into smaller sections, each under its respective ruler. In this division the unit was the Tuath, or tribe. When several Tuaths were combined, it became a Tuath- Mor, or great tribe.

When two Tuaths- Mor were united, it constituted a Coicidh, or Province.

At the head of the Tuath was the Toisech. At the head of the Tuath- Mor was the Mor- maer. At the point where the four southern provinces met, was the seat of the capital and the palace of the king. That point was Scone. F391 We return to Constantin, whom we now find filling the throne. His misfortunes began with the colony of Odin worshippers which had been so unwisely planted in Northumbria, in the belief that the mystic but mighty rite of baptism had extinguished in them all the vices of paganism and replenished them with the virtues of Christianity. This body of Danes, who had come back unchanged from the baptismal font, parted like a wedge the dominions of the Scottish and the English kings, and were a thorn in the side of both monarchs. Their position gave them an importance far beyond their numbers, and their alliance being sought now by the one and now by the other, they were able to turn the scale in the frequent contests waged at this time betwixt England and Scotland. The great Alfred was now in his grave, and his son Edward, known as Edward the Confessor, occupied his throne. The two predecessors of Constantin, Gregory and Donald, had remained the incorruptible friends of Alfred and his Christian subjects of England, despite all the seductions and promises of the Danes. Not so Constantin III. Departing from the lofty policy of his predecessors, and deluded by the vain hope of enlarging his dominions on the south, he formed a league with the Danes, and set out in company of his new allies to attack the English, and win new territories over which to sway his scepter.

But his cause did not prosper.

When the two armies appeared on the field, the English host was found to be much smaller than the Scotch, but stratagem supplied the place of numbers. Hardly had battle been joined when the English made a feint of retreating. The confederate Scotch and Danish host, thinking that they had not to fight but only pursue, broke their ranks, and with headlong ardor followed the fleeing enemy. Suddenly the aspect of the battle was seen to change. The foe, which the Scotch believed to be routed, rallied at a preconcerted signal, and, turning on their pursuers, hewed down their scattered groups, and continued the merciless slaughter till hardly one of the northern army was left to carry tidings to their countrymen of what had befallen them on this bloody field.

Soon after these events Edward, the English monarch, went to his grave, and his son, the warlike Athelstan, ascended his throne. A full decade passes away during which it is impossible to see what is transacting in Scotland. When the veil is lifted disaster has again returned, and a deeper gloom is brooding over the little kingdom than the former reverse of its arms had brought with it. The Scottish king, forgetful of his former error, and heedless of the lesson its bloody chastisement was meant to teach him, has re- entered the same ill- omened path, and is contracting alliance with the enemies of his nation and religion. The suspicions that clung to Athelstan touching his father’s death, led to conspiracies against him among his own subjects, and the Northumbrian Danes, seeing in his perplexities their own opportunity, marched southward and seized upon the city of York. The Scots permitted themselves to be drawn into the quarrel. The illusion of a kingdom on the south of the Tweed, fairer and more fertile, if not so large, as the great mountains and broad straths over which Constantin reigned in the north, had resumed its fascination over the king’s mind, and blinded him to the essential injustice and great risks of his crooked policy. This time the omens were favorable. The Scoto- Danish army was reinforced by the Welsh, the Danes of Dublin, and the Britons of Strathclyde. Each nationality had its own particular cause of quarrel with Athelstan, and if only this vast confederacy can be brought into the field and kept together till they have struck a blow at the power of the English king, there can be little doubt of the issue. The Scots this time will carry back not the doleful news of a crushing defeat, but the welcome tidings of a glorious victory.

A great tempest was rolling up on all sides against Athelstan, who meanwhile was making vigorous preparations to meet it, and direct its destructive fury past himself and his subjects. The Scottish army was transported by sea, and landed at the mouth of the Humber. They marched into the interior of the country to meet their allies, and deliver their meditated blow with united and decisive force. They sighted the encampments of their confederates, as they believed, but no friendly shout welcomed their coming. The Scots halted, for the ominous silence told them that it was the camp of Athelstan to which they were drawing nigh.

The Welsh and other confederates had not yet arrived. The promptitude of Athelstan had anticipated the junction of the allies. He struck at once, and with vigor.

A gleam of romance heralded the dark tragedy that followed. So says the legend. Along with the Scots came Anlaf, a son of Godfrey, king of the Danes of Dublin, and a relative of King Constantin. Anlaf knew, like most of his countrymen, how to handle the harp. The thought struck him that his gift of music might be turned to account in the cause of his royal relative.

He had read of an adventure not unlike what he was now meditating, successfully carried out by the great Alfred. Disguising himself as a minstrel, he appeared at the gates of the English camp, and was instantly admitted. Anlaf touched his harp, and to the music of its strings added the yet sweeter music of his voice. Even in monarch’s hall the well- played strains would have brought praise to their author, but heard on the battlefield, where they naturally suggested with the force of contrast the rougher sounds by which they were so soon to be succeeded and drowned, they entranced the English soldiers. The musician was left to range at will through the camp. He was brought before the English king, that he might display in the royal presence the marvelous melody of his harp when touched by the skillful hand of its owner. Athelstan was delighted with his music, and dismissed him with a reward. The musician was not so carried away by the triumph of his art as to forget his object in coming hither. He carefully noted the disposition of the English army, and in particular the position of the royal tent, so as to be able to lead in a nocturnal assault upon it.

It so happened, however, that a soldier who had formerly served in the Irish army, and was now with the English, recognized Anlaf under his disguise, and communicated to the king his suspicions that the minstrel, whose performance had so delighted the army, was a spy. The king, profiting by the hint, made a priest occupy his tent for the night, himself sleeping in the priest’s bed. The night assault came of Anlaf leading in it.

The priest was slain, and the king lived to lead in the battle of the morrow.

That morrow brought with it emphatic intimation to the Scottish king that his dream of conquering a kingdom in England was not to be realized. Still the omens continued to be favorable. The dawn witnessed the arrival on the field of action of the looked for Danish reinforcements. To these were added some Cumbrian Britons, making the Scottish army superior in respect of numbers to the English host. Athelstan, knowing that delay would only lessen the hopes of victory by increasing the number of his enemies, immediately joined battle. The action was fought near the Humber, at a place which Fordun calls Brounyngfeld, most probably the modern Brumby (A. D. 937). Athelstan, at the head of his troops, rushed sword in hand into the midst of the Scottish entrenchments. Both sides fought with desperation. Locked in deadly grapple with each other they contended on ground which was every moment becoming more slippery with the blood, and more cumbered with the bodies of the fallen. The Londoners and Mercians, the flower of the English army, threw themselves upon the Scots. The latter, for some time, bravely sustained their onset, but at last they were compelled to give way. With them went the fortunes of the day; for though the slaughter was prolonged, it was not for victory but for vengeance. It was with difficulty that the Scottish king made his escape alive from the field, but it must have sadly embittered the pleasure arising from his own safety to reflect that he had left behind him the bulk of the Scottish army, including the flower of his nobility, to be buried by the English, or devoured by the birds of prey which in those days gathered in flocks to feast at such banquets as that which was now spread for them on the banks of the Humber. F392 On both sides the loss was great. Speaking of the Scots army, Fordun says that “the slain were innumerable.” He specifics, moreover, three princes and nine generals as having fallen. The English chroniclers magnify still more the carnage, and call the battle of Brunanburgh the bloodiest ever fought in Britain. Of course they could compare it only with battles which had happened before their day, and which had been stricken on a very limited territory. The “Britain” of their day, we need not remind our readers, did not mean the far spreading empire which the name calls up to our minds; it did not even include the northern hills, and the southern plains which the “four seas” of our insular home enclose; the “Britain” of the English chroniclers of that time lay within the two walls of Hadrian and Severus. It had Anglo- land on the south, and Alban, now beginning to be called Scotia, on the north, and was restricted to the strip of territory lying between the Tyne, or at the utmost the Humber, and the Forth. Still in judging of the rank assigned to this battle by the English historians, we must bear in mind that the district where it was fought was conspicuously a region of battles. Such had been its history from the days of the Romans downwards, and its evil destiny still clung to it; and of all the bloody conflicts waged upon it, the last we are told was the bloodiest.

The humiliation which had befallen the Scottish monarch, and the reverse which had been sustained by the Scottish arms, had in it a great lesson to the nation, though we greatly doubt if that lesson was understood at the time or seriously laid to heart. It emphatically taught the Scots that their allotted portion of earth was the mountains of the north. It taught them that where shone the lamp of Iona there were their tents to be spread, and it effectually rebuked that ambition which impelled them to seek an enlarged territorial domain at the sacrifice of interests of infinitely higher importance than a great Scottish Kingdom. It would have been a great misfortune to the world, and to the Scots themselves not less, if they had conquered England and placed Constantin on the throne of both countries.

If they had come to mingle with the Saxon race their peculiar fervor and fire would have been extinguished. Their energies would have been relaxed and their strength abated if, instead of being concentrated in their own little country, against the narrow boundary of which we so often find them chafing, they had been permitted to overflow into the wider spaces of Great Britain. In a word, they would have been lost as the Scottish nation to Christendom, and the Scotic element so intense and so vitalizing might have disappeared from the forces of the world. The Scots were a reserve force for the ages to come. How much their national individuality would have been missed at certain great epochs of the future, the record of the long past can alone enable us to judge. The Scots were taught by these disasters to eschew the path of foreign war, and seek conquests on other fields and with other weapons than those with which they had contended so fatally for themselves on the field of Brunanburg.

After this terrible battle the Scottish king made haste to go back to his own country, but Athelstan, like an avenging Nemesis, trode close behind him.

The darkness as of a thunder cloud fell upon the land as he pursued his way northward, and the allies, discomfited and dispirited, were fain to propitiate the conqueror by yielding a ready submission to whatever chastisement he chose to mete out to them. Athelstan tightened his yoke on those ceaseless plotters, the Northumbrian Danes. He stript Constantin of the provinces of Cumberland and Westmoreland, which, when attached to the Scottish crown, were commonly governed by a prince of the blood, the heir presumptive, like our Prince of Wales at the present day. Crossing the Tweed, Athelstan traversed the Merse, broke into the Lothians, marking his steps through the terrified country with devastation, and finally rolled back the Scottish frontier once more to the banks of the Forth. Such ending had this expedition which had begun amid so many auguries of success, was supported by the arms of a multitude of confederates, and which had promised a rich spoil to all concerned in it, and to Constantin a new kingdom stretching southward to the meadows of the Humber, if not to the richer banks of the Thames.

By this time the chair of Columba had ceased to be astricted to the island in Which it was originally set up. It had become a moveable seat. The kings of Scotland had already transported it from Iona to Dunkeld, from Dunkeld to Abernethy, from Abernethy to St. Andrews, where it now stood. With every removal of the Scottish capital came another transportation of that chair. It gave sanction to the Scottish power; it was the prop of the throne, and therefore never far from the seat of royalty. If Constantin had succeeded in extending his kingdom so as to include the great capitals of York and London, the chair of Columba, following the established custom of the Scottish kings, would have been set up first at York and finally at London. But how long would the lamp of Iona have burned at either place? That lamp had not now the vigor of its early days: it had waxed dim. Moreover, the air of England had become mephitic and murky by reason of the fast gathering shades of Romanism in the southern kingdom. The light of the Scottish lamp would have gone out in the unfriendly air, and the extinction of Scottish Christianity would have been speedily followed by the death of the Scottish genius.

Constantin’s first care after his arrival in his own country was to convoke his nobles and take counsel with them on the position of affairs. He assembled them at the old Pictish capital of Abernethy. Many words were not needed to depict the deplorable condition into which his ill- fated expedition had brought the kingdom. It was not one but a multitude of calamities that were weighing upon it. The King indeed had returned safe, but with him had not returned that numerous and highspirited army he had led into England. Its strength and valor lay rotting on the gory field of Brunanburg. The many vacant places in the circle around the King gave mournful proof that of the nobles who had accompanied him to the war a few only now lived. Scotland was not nearly so large as it had been a few short months before. Its boundaries had suddenly shrunk to the shores of Fife, and the sway of Athelstan had reached at a bound the banks of the Forth. The reign of Constantin had now been prolonged for thirty- five inglorious years. The task of governing was becoming too heavy for him, and he was anxious to lay down the scepter. His subjects, we may well believe, were not unwilling that the burden should be transferred to stronger shoulders, and another chance given the little, valorous, but of late ill- governed country of gathering up its energies, and of vindicating for itself its rightful position and influence among the nations of Europe.

The conference at Abernethy ended in the abdication of Constantin. When he laid down the crown and assumed the “cowl,”- using the phrase in a loose sense, for monkery, in the modern meaning of the word, had not yet been introduced into Scotland,- the monarch selected as his retreat the Monastery of Kilrimont (St. Andrews), where he might pass the evening of his life in the society of the Culdees, “retiring,” says Buchanan, “as to a safe haven, and passed the remaining five years of his life in their society.”

F394 He died in the fortieth year from his accession to the throne, and in A.

D. 943. We take leave of Constantin at the gate of his monastery. As he passes from our view we may be permitted to drop an expression of sympathy with him amid the many misfortunes which have bowed him down. Subject to illusions, mistaking the path of ambition for the path of honor, in a word, a weak rather than a flagitious ruler, we see him not ungracefully closing a reign, clouded with many calamities, by acknowledging, if he could not repair, the errors into which he had fallen.

St. Berchan touchingly describes his latter end: “Afterwards God did call him to the monastery on the brink of the waves. In the house of the Apostle he came to death: undefiled was the pilgrim.” He came not into the sepulchers of his fathers! The same spot which had given Constantin a shelter for his age, gave him a grave for his ashes.

CHAPTER - A. D. 906. SPECIAL MISSION OF SCOTLAND- SYNOD OF SCONE- A TENTH CENTURY REFORMATION.

GOING aside from the noise of battles, let us withdraw for a brief space into a region where quieter forces are at work. Although quieter it by no means follows that the forces in the presence of which we now find ourselves are weaker. On the contrary, they possess a strength unknown to those agencies .which in the midst of tumult and uproar overturn the throne of kings and dissolve the fabric of empires. It is the silent influences that accomplish the mightiest results. The turbulent activities dwell on the surface, the still powers descend into the depths, and working there unheard make their presence known and their power felt only when they have prepared the way for some tremendous revolution, or brought to the birth some epoch of new and grander promise for the race.

Were the rude. agencies of the battlefield the only influences that were at this hour shaping and molding the nation of the Scots? Above most countries in Christendom, Scotland possessed a dual character. There was an outer Scotland, the theater of wars, invasions, and battles; and there was an inner Scotland, the seat of a great spiritual movement which had for its end the educating and training of a nation to serve the cause of truth and liberty in the ages to come. Was this education making progress? It is the chronicles of the inner Scotland we should most like to write. Amid the wars in which we see the Scots engaged now with the Dane and now with the Saxon was the soul of the nation growing. Was Scotland becoming fitter for its great purpose? Scotland was growing in skill and valor on the battlefield, but this was not progress with reference to its special end.

Scotland was not destined to build up a great empire by arms like Rome.

Its mission came nearer to that of Greece: it came still nearer to that of Judea: only it was greatly more intellectual and spiritual than that of either.

The special mission of Scotland was to apprehend and hold forth to the world Christianity- the last and perfected form of Divine Revelation- in all the simplicity and spirituality in which man on earth is able to receive it. To say that this was the special mission given to the Scottish nation may seem a merely transcendental idea. Second thoughts however will satisfy us that it is far indeed from being so. Of all systems in the world Christianity is the most powerful in both its individual and its national action. But the power of Christianity is in the direct ratio of its spirituality. The man who rises to the full realization of what is spiritual and eternal in Christianity, dropping what is temporary, symbolical, and mundane, is the highest Christian. In him we are sure to find the fullest development of its moral and spiritual virtues, because on him Christianity acts in the plenitude of its power. It is so as regards a nation. The nation that attains to the fullest conception of Christianity as a purely spiritual system is the nation where we shall be sure to find the finest manifestation of both the evangelic graces and the civic virtues such as patriotism, valor, philanthropic enterprise, which Christianity nourishes, because it there operates in the fullness of its moral and spiritual power. It is like the sun shining direct from the firmament without any intervening or obstructing medium to weaken the power of his beams.

It is instructive in this connection to mark that, contemporaneously with the corruption of Christianity at Rome, there came in Britain a great revival of it in its purely spiritual character, first in the ministry of Patrick, and next in that of Columba. In the early days of Iona Christianity was severely simple- simple to severity, and it was then that it won its greatest pre- Reformation triumphs. This simplicity or austerity has all along been a characteristic of Scottish Christianity, and has been conspicuous at every period of its revival. This, doubtless, it owes to the stamp impressed upon it in the age of Columba. This characteristic is sometimes mistaken for coldness or rudeness, nevertheless it is in this that the strength and glory of Scottish Christianity lies. In this form only, disrobed of the garments of Paganism, and set free from Jewish symbol, Greek ceremony, and Roman rite, and presented in all the simplicity that appertains to a spiritual system, can it go round the earth and convert the nations. Observing the behavior of the Scots at all the testing periods of their history, we discover in them a disinclination to permit their religion to be mixed with ceremony, and a steady desire to preserve the ancient simplicity of their faith and worship.

This was shown in the Synod at Scone, which is now to come under our notice; it was shown again in the days of Malcolm Canmore, and it was shown still more conspicuously at the era of the Reformation. So far Scotland ins understood and fulfilled its mission.

The materials are scanty for constructing the religious history of Scotland all down the centuries since Columba’s day, and noting the advance of the nation at each several epoch in moral righteousness and spiritual power.

That the Columban Church continued to exist all down these ages we know. We come upon the incidental notices of it under the various names of Iona, the Columban Brotherhood, and the Culdees. But we should like to know in what state of purity did that Church exist, and what amour of influence did it exert on the population. The interest of knowing this is great, but the difficulty of ascertaining it is equally great. These ages passed away and left us no written records of the state of personal and family religion in Scotland during them. We know the church arrangement and services, but we are unable to enter the homes of the people and mark the forms in which social and domestic piety displayed itself. We have pictures of the great leaders, but we should have liked a nearer view of the converts and ordinary workers. The first book known to Scottish literature- Adamnan’s “Life of Columba “- is not very satisfactory on this head. As our earliest information it is invaluable. It brings out the grand personality of Columba, and the thoroughly evangelical and spiritual character of his great enterprise,- an enterprise which redeemed the age from darkness, and filled half of Europe with light; but around Columba and his work Adamnan has hung an atmosphere of miracle and prodigy.

This environment has the effect of lifting him up into a region above the earth, and makes us fain that he would come down and walk among men.

It also shrouds his work in an atmosphere that magnifies and mystifies it, and we rise from its perusal uncertain and unsatisfied. Legend, and not fact, was plainly the forte of Adamnan’s pen.

The next earliest composition in our country’s history is the “Book of Deer.” Its genuineness is unquestioned. To Celtic scholars it is a curious and precious relic, and it determines some not unimportant points in our nation’s history, and attests, along with other proofs, the marvelous facility of the clerical caligraphists of those days, the extraordinary beauty that marked the productions of their pens, and the delight they took in transcribing the Holy Scriptures. But when we have said thus much, we have exhausted the claims of the “Book of Deer” on our admiration and gratitude. It is not till we come to the reign of David I. (A. D. 1124) that we find anything like firm historic footing. With the times of David we reach the age of charters. Among the earliest engrossed charters extant is one given by that monarch, and is contained, with some six hundred others, in the chartulary of the monastery of Dunfermline. The period covered by this collection extends from the end of the thirteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth. These chartularies form the earliest history of our country, though they do not furnish much information on the special subject of our present inquiry- the Church’s purity and doctrine, and the knowledge and piety of her people.

In truth the evidence for Iona as the great Christian Institute of the ageless than Rome in one sense, far greater than Rome in another- is not so much written as monumental. There is the tradition, which time has not been able to conquer, of its vast renown. There is Pictland, rescued from the darkness of Druidism, and opening its astonished eyes on the dawn of the Christian day. There are hundreds of spots throughout the country, where the names of the great Columban missionaries are still living names, being perpetuated in the churches the Columbites founded, and the parishes in which they labored, and where they made to flourish the industrial arts and the Christian virtues. Nor is it Scotland only that offers these indubitable proofs of the learning and evangelical ardor of the pastors of its early church. In what land of northern Europe do we not see the footprint of the Culdee? We trace his steps- blessed of all peoples to which they came- from the Apennine to the North Sea, and from the borders of Bohemia to the shores of the Atlantic. Whose hand save that of the Culdee created those inimitable manuscript volumes which are the pride of so many princely cabinets and conventual libraries on the Continent? These are the memorials of the large development attained by the Columban Church, and the wide area over which it diffused its spirit and teaching.

These memorials are daily multiplying as the past comes to light under the researches of the Celtic scholars. But already we know enough to justify the remark that there are few things in history more marvelous than the blaze of intellectual and spiritual light into which our remote and barbarous country burst forth in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries under the presidency of Iona. Could letters and philosophy alone have kindled such an illumination? The history of nations supplies us with no similar example.

The glory into which Greece burst under Pericles, and the splendor of the Renaissance in Western Europe in the fifteenth century; were but fitful and short- lived gleams- meteors of the night- compared with the Columban evangelization of the centuries named. The eloquent tribute of Dr. Johnson to the little isle which was the focus of that illumination is often quoted with applause; it is just, nay generous, and yet it expresses only half the truth, and not even half: and were the great lexicographer to pronounce a second eulogium, if he did not express it in more glowing terms, he would give it a wider application, and in doing so, make it more in accordance with the fact. In addition to “the savage clans and roving barbarians” of the ancient Caledonia, to whom Iona gave “the benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion,” he would speak of tribes beyond the sea, of famous schools, of princely courts and great monarchs who saw and rejoiced in the light which shone from Icolmkill.

We get glimpses as we pass on of the Columban Church. These however occur at very considerable intervals of time; they are moreover exceedingly fragmentary, and we can only doubtfully infer from them the real state of that Church at the epochs when these glimpses bring her before us. We have come to a record of this sort. In the midst of the wars and calamities of Constantin, whom we have just seen exchanging his throne for a Culdee cell at St. Andrews, the Columban Church comes into view. She is seen only for a moment, and again disappears. But as these glimpses are rare, it is all the more incumbent on us to mark rightly what they disclose, touching a society in which was bound up the life of the nation.

In the sixth year of the reign of Constantin (A. D. 906), a great church assembly was holden at Scone. It was presided over by Constantin the king and Kellach the bishop. It was attended, we are told, by the nation of the Scots, that is, by both clergy and laity. The object of this national convention was the reformation of religion, in accordance with the laws and discipline of the faith, the rights of the Church and the precepts of the Gospel. F395 How much one wishes that one had in full the proceedings of this assembly. How interesting to read at this day what was proposed, concluded, and sworn to nine centuries ago. We would willingly give any half- dozen battles of the time for the record of this assembly on the Mote Hill, Scone. But brief as the statement regarding it is, it makes clear and undoubted some not unimportant points in the constitution of the Scottish Church at the opening of the tenth century. One of these points is her completeINDEPENDENCE. No “Letters Apostolic” have summoned this convocation: no papal legate presides over the pastors and members assembled on the Mote Hill. No ecclesiastical functionary of whatever grade from outside Scotland takes part in the debate, or offers advice, or, so far as we can discover, is even present in the gathering. The Scottish Church has met of her own motion, for the transaction of her own business, and she knows nothing of any church authority outside her own territory. At the opening of the tenth century she is seen to beFREE.

And farther, as a second point to be specially noted, she reforms herself on the lines of her own original constitution. Her standard of reformation is the “laws and discipline of the faith,” the “rights of the churches,” and the “doctrines of the Gospel.” Nothing is here said of the canons of Rome; no extrinsic rule or model fetters her in her reformation: what she aims at is a return to the “old paths.” It is to Iona, not Rome, that the faces of this great gathering are turned. The time is not now very distant when a cardinal legate will be seen taking his seat in the synods of the Scottish Church, lint as yet no such functionary had crossed the Tweed, nor had the Roman purple come to mingle its gleam with the woolen robes of the assembled Culdee pastors.

And further, we accept this national convention as a confession on the part of the Columban clergy of the declension of their church. Their church was now nearly four hundred years old, but when they thought of what that church had been in its youth, when not content with cleansing its own territory from the impurities of Druidism, it had flung itself into the heathenism of Germany and dethroned its time- honored deities, nay made the thunder of its protest, as in the case of Columbanus, be heard at the gates of Rome itself; and when they contrasted these achievements of its past with its powerlessness now, when not only had it coursed to extend its conquests abroad, but even on its own proper territory it was losing its footing and falling back before its great rival, it was impossible not to feel how melancholy the change which had passed upon their once aggressive and triumphant church. In truth the Columban Church for a century and a half had been on “the down grade.” The scissors of Rome had passed upon the heads of some of her clergy, and the very touch of these scissors was benumbing. But now again, by some means or other, there had come to be an awakening; and that awakening was not confined to a class or to a locality, it was general and wide- spread in the land, for here is the nation gathered together to discuss the evils of their time, and set on foot a reformation, not in the way of an approach to Rome or Canterbury. There is not the slightest evidence that this assembly wished to move in that direction; their course is the very opposite; it is back to first principles. The goal at which they wished to arrive, as distinctly defined in the words of the original record, is the “faith,” the “church,” and the “gospel”: not Rome but Iona.

This assembly fittingly crowned their proceedings with a vow or oath in which they bound themselves to prosecute their reformation. So we are expressly told. F396 Nothing could better attest the importance of this council, and the gravity of the matters determined in it, than the solemn act with which they close it. We are not told the shape into which they put their resolutions, nor the heads of their projected restoration, but there can be no doubt about the leading aim and general scope of their reform, and as little can there be doubt about the unity of sentiment and the earnestness of purpose that animated the members of the council. Errors and corruptions had crept in during years of deadness; these must be purged out. The discipline of the church had been relaxed; it must be invigorated.

The standard of national morals had been lowered; means must be taken to elevate both the social and family life of the nation. A growing languor and feebleness had afflicted the clergy; fresh oil must be brought to the dying lamp of Columba. And whence was this oil to be fetched? Not from the Seven Hills, not from the traditions of the Pope, but from the fountain at which this lamp had been replenished at first, and its flame lighted, even Holy Scripture. This was the reformation needed. Raising their hands to heaven, the Scottish nation, king, clergy, and people, vow to go forward in this work. A remarkable assembly for the tenth century! We owe not a little to the scribe who has handed down to us this brief but pregnant record of it. It discloses, if only for a moment, the undercurrent of moral and spiritual influence that was flowing in the nation, on the surface of which little was to be seen save the spectacles of oppression and distraction and war. The church of Columba was not dead. Nay, it is seen to have still some centuries of life in it.

The Council at Scone has finished its business. The Columban presbyters have descended the Mote Hill, henceforward to be known as the “Hill of the Faith,” and once more the darkness closes in around the Scottish Church. Much would we give to be able to follow this Assembly in subsequent years, and trace its workings in the Columban brotherhoods and in the homes of the people. That it bore fruit in a quickened zeal and in purer lives we cannot doubt; but here our information abruptly stops, and our knowledge for a century onwards is only inferential. The Columban church kept its place at the heart of the nation, and though no pen of scribe has given us the picture of those days, and the higher prosperity that brightened them, many incidental facts assure us that for years to come the Scottish Church was instinct with a new life, and, doubtless, gave proof of in the greater vigor and success with which she worked. We think we may fairly ascribe to this assembly, and the new departure it gave the nation, the arrest of the Roman advance, and the delay for an hundred and fifty years of its triumph. And when at last this triumph was accomplished in the days of Queen Margaret, it was not by the conversion of the Scotch people to the faith of Rome, but by the intervention of the royal power, and the influx into Scotland of a crowd of foreign partisans which brought Rome with them.

This convention was held in the beginning of the tenth century; in the end of the twelfth century we find the Columban churches still in existence and in action throughout Scotland. This fact, we think, warrants the conclusion that there was a rallying of the spiritual forces and a revival of religion in this Assembly on the Mote Hill, and that the movement did not expire when the members broke up and returned to their homes. They felt the obligation of their oath, the people caught the quickened zeal and new spirit of their pastors, and the forces set in motion continued to act as propelling powers on the country, and kept it on the road of progress despite the retarding influences of war, and of other calamities.

CHAPTER - DESTRUCTION OF EARLY SCOTTISH LITERATURE - THE COLUMBITES METAMORPHOSED- WAS IONA A ROMAN OR A PROTESTANT CHURCH?

HOW comes it that we are without written record of these times? The day was not long past when Scotland could boast some hundreds of expert pens all busy at work, and to such good purpose that scarce was there glen or hamlet which had not its copy of the Bible. Columba is said to have placed a copy of Holy Scripture, written with his own hand, in every house which he founded. The first care of these sacred scribes was, doubtless, to multiply copies of the Word of God; but, over and above, following the example of Adamnan, it is probable that they compiled an occasional “life” or “chronicle” or “short history” of events. What has become of these compositions? A hundred enemies- the moth, the mildew, the flame- make war on the manuscript volume. To these foes of the early church history of Scotland, we have to add another, peculiar to the age of which we writethe Norseman, to wit. In his eyes these treasures had no value, and were left to perish in the same flames which consumed the monastery in which they had been written and were laid up.

Beset by so many dangers, it was hardly to be looked for that these fragile productions should preserve their existence for a period of time which suffices for twenty generations to run their course and disappear in the grave. Of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of MS. Bibles that undoubtedly existed in Scotland in these centuries, only some three or four remain to us; and is it wonderful that those other compositions so very much fewer, and so much less sacred, should have disappeared, and that the life of Columba by Adamnan should remain the one solitary exception to the universal destruction of early Scottish literature?

When we come down to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it is still more hopeless to look for information regarding the state of the early Columban Church. The writers in the times succeeding Malcolm Canmore knew not Columba Or if they knew him, they knew him only as the founder of a schismatical sect, whose heads bore the tonsure of Simon Magus, who celebrated the eucharist with barbarous rites, and who walked not in the ways of Roman Christendom. They judged it a wise policy, therefore, to let Columba and his followers sink into oblivion, or to speak of them only in the language of apology and pity, as men who inhabited regions so remote from the center of Christendom, that they were to be forgiven the errors of doctrine and the eccentricities of worship into which they had fallen. They forgot that the man who possesses the Bible is at the center of Christendom, let his dwelling place be at the ends of the earth.

Since the days of Malcolm Canmore, Columba and his church have suffered a still greater wrong. Ecclesiastical writers of the Roman and Prelatic school have, in our own day, done worse than ignore the “Elders of Iona:” they have completely metamorphosed them. They have converted them into the partisans of a cause of which they were the avowed and strenuous opponents. From the day that Columba laid the foundationstone of the Scottish Church onward to the time that Romanism gained the ascendancy by the force of the royal authority, the disciples of Columba, inheriting the spirit of their great chief, ceased not to maintain the war against Rome, at times with signal and triumphant rigor, at other times more feebly, but all throughout they retained their attitude of protest and resistance. Even after Malcolm Canmore and his queen had summoned them to lay down their arms, they did not absolutely surrender. Their submission was partial. A remnant still kept up the faith, the traditions, and the name of their country’s once famous, free, and virtually Protestant Church. They dwelt in cloisters, in islands, and in remote places of the land, but they continued a distinct body; they compelled recognition and toleration, and they thus made palpable the fact that Rome was not the country, of their birth; that their lineage was distinct from that of the clerics who now occupied the edifices from which they had been thrust out, and that they were the children of a more ancient and purer faith. If there is anything true in our country’s history, this is true; and to go on claiming these men as professing a theology and practicing a worship substantially the same as that of Rome, differing, it may be, only in a few rites and customs, owing to remoteness of position, yet in heart one with Rome, loving her and obeying her, is to exhibit a marvelous clinging to a fond hallucination, and a bold but blind fight against established and incontrovertible facts. This is a method of warfare which may bring wounds and death to the assailants, but cannot bring victory save to the cause that is assailed.

This subject of the entire contrariety of Iona to Rome has already come before us. However, we may be permitted here to supplement what we have already said upon it. We shall compare the Columban and the Roman Churches in two most essential points- their foundation- stone and their top- stone. Hardly could two things be more diametrically opposite than are these two churches in these two points.

The first foundation- stone of the Roman Church was the Bible. Next it was the Bible misinterpreted; and long before the time at which we are arrived, the tenth century, the Bible had been thrown aside, and the rule of faith in the Roman Church was the decrees of Councils. The church had become a rule to herself, and so continues to this day. It is a human voice that speaks from the Seven Hills.

The voices of prophets and apostles, silent in Rome, were still speaking in Iona. The echoes of these voices filled the land. By these voices alone were the members of the Columban Church guided. The Bible was their alone rule of faith. This much we learn even from their accusers. We beg again to refer to an authority we have already quoted, the venerable Bede. After telling us that the great light, the “Church,” to wit, had never risen on the pastors of Iona, anti that they had to grope their way in dubious paths by the Bible alone, he charitably excuses these benighted men on the ground of remoteness from the seat of councils. “For,” says he, “dwelling far without the habitable globe, and, consequently, beyond the reach of the decrees of synods... they could learn only those things contained in the writings of the prophets, the evangelists, and the apostles; while they diligently observed the works of piety and love.” F397 The unequivocal testimony of Bede then is, that in the Church of Iona and its branches, in the eighth century, the rule of faith was the Bible, and the Bible alone. The phrase, “the prophets, the evangelists, and the apostles.” was the common one used to designate the Old Testament, the Four Gospels, and the Epistles, that is, the whole inspired canon. And hence Bede adds, “that they had a zeal for God, but not altogether according to knowledge.”

Were the divines of Iona really ignorant, as Bede supposes, of the decrees of the councils, and was it because they knew no clearer light that they followed that of the Bible alone? Why then did not Bede, who compassionated the condition of these men, and so earnestly desired to lead them into canonical paths, send a copy of the decrees of the Church to the monastery at Iona? All over the very district in which Bede lived, the Presbyters of Iona were going out and in teaching the natives. Why did not Bede put these doctors in the way of seeing these canons, and so temper and regulate their zeal, which he tells us was not “altogether according to knowledge”? In truth, the Columban evangelists knew well the synodal decrees, but they rejected them because they believed them to be unscriptural. The missionary bands which traversed France and Switzerland and the north of Italy could not have avoided making acquaintance with these decrees, even had they wished to remain in the ignorance which Bede bewails. They were often subjected to persecution because they transgressed the canons in the matter of Easter. We find Columbanus, for instance, writing to Pope Gregory on the subject, and vindicating his own mode of celebrating Easter on the ground that it was strictly scriptural.

Ridiculing as “frivolous and silly” the objection that “it was the same as that of the Jews,” he warns the Pope, “that to add aught of our own to the Scriptural path would be to incur the censure of that divine command in Deuteronomy, ‘Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it.’” And referring to the faith held by himself and his brethren, he tells Pope Gregory that it was in “all things indubitably grounded on the divine Scriptures.” F398 And once more Columbanus, in his letter to the local bishops, lets it be known that he was not ignorant of the canons of the Church, which they accused him of violating, but that he owed no allegiance save to “the true and singular canons of our Lord Jesus Christ.” And affirming that the churches of Scotland and Ireland grounded their faith on the Scriptures, he exclaims, “Our canons are the commands of our Lord and His Apostles; these are our faith; lo! here are our arms, shield, and sword... in these we pray and desire to persevere unto death, as we have seen our elders also do.” F399 Anticipating the well- known saying of Chillingworth, the great Culdee missionary exclaims, “The Bible, the Bible is the religion of Columbites.”

So much for the foundation of the Columban Church.

We come to the other point. What of the crowning rite in the worship of the two churches- the eucharist and the mass. Was the eucharist of Iona substantially the same as the mass of Rome? An attempt has been made by recent ecclesiastical writers to establish, at least, strongly insinuate, that the Columban eucharist and the Roman mass were substantially the same. We find, for instance, a recent historian, not of the Romish communion, saying, “The doctrine of the Scottish Church, in regard to the eucharist, was in accordance with the ritual by which it was celebrated. Its sacrificial character was distinctly recognized, and it was believed that after consecration the bread became the body of Christ. This much is implied in the passages which allude to the eucharist, but in none of them is there any attempt to define the mystery.” F400 To what does this statement amount? It amounts to this even, that the two essential principles in the mass were constituent parts of the Columban theology; for when the writer uses the term “sacrificial,” we must understand him as using it in the sense of expiatory, and when he speaks of the body of Christ, we must understand him as referring to that which becomes literal by consecration. If this is not the meaning of the terms, they have no bearing whatever on the point they are adduced to establish, and the passage is a platitude and nothing more.

An earlier writer, Father Innes, of the Roman Church, quoting a number of phrases which Adamnan and Cuminius make use of when speaking of the eucharist, argues from them that the Columbite doctrine of the Supper was the same in substance with that of the Church of Rome in his own day, and in all former ages. In thus gravely affirming that the Elders of Iona in the days of Adamnan believed substantially in transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the mass, and expressed this belief in the rites of their worship, he assumes his readers to be ignorant, though he himself could not possibly have been so, that the dogma of transubstantiation was not even heard of till nearly two hundred years after Adamnan had gone to his grave, and not till other seven centuries had passed away was the mass decreed to be a propitiatory sacrifice. How these two notable doctrines of the Roman theology should have come to be known in Iona so many centuries before they were known in Rome, Father Innes does not explain. This one consideration alone might be held to settle the question, Was the Columban eucharist and the Roman mass identical? For to show that it was impossible for a thing to have existed, is to show that it did not exist. But the writers to which we refer are not in the habit of permitting themselves to feel discouragement, much less dismay, in the presence of the most tremendous difficulties. They see no absurdity in maintaining that Columba took precedence of Boniface by five centuries, and that while the system of Popery was only in embryo on the Seven Hills, it had reached its maturity on the Rock of Iona, and blossomed into the crowning doctrines of transubstantiation and the mass. Hence the assertions to which we are so often called to listen, that the early Christianity of Scotland was Romanism, that we rendered evil for good at the Reformation when we cast down the altars of a church which had been our first instructress, and abjured a faith which our nation had been taught in its cradle. So stoutly is this maintained, that it becomes necessary to look at the kind of proof which is offered in its support.

The point has not been proved when it is shown that the early church sometimes called the sacramental symbols “the body and blood of Christ,” or styled the Lord’s Supper “an offering,” or spoke of Christ as “present in the sacrament.” The question here is not, Did the ancient Church believe in a spiritual presence of Christ in the sacramental action, and in a spiritual communication of Him to the worthy receiver? The writers to which we refer know well that this is not the question. The question is, Did the ancient Church believe the consecrated bread to be literally and corporeally the Savior? Neither is the question, Did that Church call the elements the body and blood of Christ? for all antiquity called the consecrated elements so, as our Lord Himself did at the first Supper. Our Reformers called the bread and wine in the sacrament the body and blood of Christ; so did Calvin style them; and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the descendant, as we hold, of the Columban Church, speaks of them at this day as the body and blood of Christ. The question is, What did they mean by that language? The words, “the body and blood of Christ,” in themselves decide nothing. They may indicate a material fact or a spiritual doctrine; a change wrought by the priest’s potency, resulting in a physical product, or a change wrought by the recipient’s faith, resulting in a spiritual benefit. The question to be ascertained from history is, In which of the two senses, the figurative or the literal, was the words used?

They were used figuratively only. On this point the evidence is abundant.

Let it be observed that the early church called everything presented to God or laid on His table an “offering,” an “oblation,” or a “sacrifice.” Therefore, the use of these phrases by the early Scottish Church proves nothing.

Commenting on Hebrews x. 3, Sedulius, the well- known theologian and commentator of the ninth century, says:” A remembrance is made of sin, whilst every day, and year after year, a victim was offered for sins. But we offer daily for a remembrance of our Lord’s passion, once performed, and of our own salvation, the sacrifice of bread and wine.” Nor is this all.

In his commentary on the second chapter of Colossians he lays it down as a settled canon of exposition, “That where the truth is present there is no need of an image.” F403 Expounding the institution of the Supper as in Corinthians xi., Sedulius anticipates Zwingle, not in the substance of his doctrine only, but also in the figure which he employs to illustrate it: “Do this in remembrance of Me.” Having quoted these words of Christ, he goes on:” He left us His remembrance, just as one setting out for a far away country leaves behind him some pledge to him whom he loves, that as often as he beholds it he may be able to call to mind his benefits and friendships.” Again, on verse 29, he adds:” Not discerning the Lord’s body, that is, making no difference between it and common food.” F404 Here the rite is seen simple and holy, even as it was beheld at the first table, and as it was to be again beheld in the sixteenth century, when, emerging from the ghastly obscuration of the Middle Ages, it became once more the simple, beautiful, and touching memorial of the death of Christ it was designed to be.

We adduce the testimony of Claudius Scotus in the ninth century. “Our Savior’s pleasure,” says he, “was first to deliver to His disciples the sacrament of His body and blood, and afterwards to offer up the body itself on the altar of the cross. For as bread strengthens the body, and wine works blood in the flesh, so the one is emblematically referred to Christ’s body, the other to His blood.” F405 There is here a plain distinction between the sacrament and the body. The one is the sacrament of the body, that is, the sacred sign or instituted symbol of the body, the other is the body itself.

Nor does the commentator leave us to mere inference: he tells us in express words that the one is the emblem of the other; even as Augustine had defined a sacrament to be “the sign of a sacred thing.” F406 Not less Protestant is the verse of Sedulius the poet. Celebrating the Supper in song, he asks, Who else is “present in it but its great Institutor, the true Melchizedeck, to whom are given gifts that are his own, the fruit of the corn, and the joys of the vine”? f407 In truth, it was impossible for the divines of that age to think or write of the sacrament of the Supper in any other way. No one had yet hinted that the elements on the table were other than they seemed, simple bread and wine, though set apart from a common to a holy use, and not dreaming that their meaning could possibly be misunderstood, they spoke of them all the more freely at times as the “body and blood of Christ.” But soon, like some phantom of the night, transubstantiation arose, challenging the belief of an amazed and stupefied Christendom. The year 831 is a memorable one in the annals of ecclesiological development. In that year an enormity, which four hundred years after came to bear the barbarous name of transubstantiation, had its first conception in the human mind. In 831 appeared the book of Paschasius Radbertus, a French monk, in which for the first time it was propounded to the world that the body of Christ in the sacrament is the very same which was born of the Virgin, and was nailed to the cross. The whole Western Church was astounded. The greatest theologians of the age declared the notion to be absolutely new, and offered it their most strenuous opposition. Nowhere was the repudiation of this stupendous novelty more emphatic than in the Scottish Church and her allied branches. In the front rank of its opponents were the Scoto- Irish divines, among whom was Johannis Scotus, Erigena, the founder of the University of Paris. Scotus was then residing at the Court of Charles the Bald of France, and that monarch called upon him to enter the lists against Paschasius. The great Culdee scholar responded to the royal call, and wrote a book in condemnation of the revolting dogma, for so did the French Church of that age regard it. Another distinguished divine, Bertram by name, took part with Scotus in his war against the new and monstrous proposition. The book of Bertram, written in refutation of Paschasius, is still extant, and occupies a distinguished place with the Bible in the Index Expurgatorius of Rome. The work of Johannis Scotus had ultimately a different though a not less honorable fate. About two hundred years after, when the doctrine of transubstantiation, strengthening as the darkness deepened, began to make way in Germany and France, Berengarius stood forth as its uncompromising opponent. To maintain himself in the storm of persecution which his bold defense of the truth drew upon him, he appealed to the work of Scotus, as showing that his own views of the sacrament were those of the Church of the ninth century. This drew the tempest upon the book of Scotus without diverting it from Berengarius.

The work of our countryman had the honor of being committed to the flames by order of Pope Leo IX., A. D. 1050. But its title has been preserved in the records of the age, and remains to this day to witness to the orthodoxy of the Scoto- Irish Church and of the Church universal, on the head of the sacrament, till towards the opening of the tenth century.

That title runs thus: “The Sacraments of the Altar are not the real Body and Blood of Christ, but only the commemoration of His Body and Blood.” F408 Nor does the use of the term “altar” on the part of the early church in the least assist the Romanist in his argument. It is admitted that the phrase often occurs in the records of early Christianity, but the question is as before, In what sense was the phrase used? History furnishes us with an answer which is noways doubtful. The “altar” of the early church was a wooden table. The “mass” of the early church was a commemorative offering or sacrifice of bread and wine, and the “priesthood” that stood around the table on which this sacrifice was laid were the Christian people, their worship being led by the officiating minister. We find no Roman dogma under the “altar” of the primitive church when historically interpreted. We can see neither sacrificial meaning nor expiatory virtue in the simple offering of bread and wine on the wooden table, transubstantiation and the mass being yet a great way off, and neither in the sight nor in the thought of the early church. All as yet is natural, simple, and spiritual. How absurd, then, is it for the Romanist to maintain that these terms were used by the early church as expressions or symbols of ideas and dogmas which were then, and for many centuries afterwards, unheard of in the world! And it is equally absurd to attempt fastening upon the Columban Church the belief of these undiscovered theological enormities, simply because she made use of the same phraseology when speaking of her religions services which was employed by the whole early church of Christ, that church being ignorant of what unthought- of things the future was to bring forth. The argument of the Prelatist and the Romanist is really this, that seeing the Roman Church after her declension continued to apply to her newly- invented novelties of doctrine and worship the phraseology which the early church had employed concerning a very different doctrine and worship, therefore the Roman dogmas, though not yet promulgated, were the belief of the Primitive church; and of the church of Columba also. It is a hard task, verily, which these reasoners impose upon themselves. We will not say that they are arguing with conscious absurdity; on the contrary, we willingly admit that they believe in the soundness of their position, for otherwise we cannot account for the persistence with which they press their view upon others, and the boldness with which they maintain an argument which all outside their circle see to be preposterous.

Let us mark how the picture which Cave gives us of the worship of the early church corroborates what we have said. The strict accuracy and truth of his “Primitive Christianity” have not been questioned, certainly not disproved. “As for Altars,” says he, “the first Christians had no other in their churches than decent Tables of wood, upon which they celebrated the holy eucharist. These, ‘tis true in allusion to those in the Jewish temple, the fathers generally called altars; and truly enough might do so, by reason of those sacrifices they offered upon them, namely, the commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice, in the blessed sacrament, the sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving, and the oblation of alms ,red charity for the poor, usually laid upon these tables, which the apostle expressly styles a sacrifice. These were the only sacrifices, for no other had the Christian world for many hundreds of years, which they then offered upon their altars, which were much of the same kind with our communion tables at this day.” F409 The simplicity of the early church was retained at Iona. The “altar” in the monastery of Columba was a wooden table. The sacrifices offered upon it, of which Adamnan so often speaks, were the simple offerings of bread and wine. And so, too, as regards the altars of the Columban churches throughout Scotland: they were wooden tables. Even after King Malcolm Canmore had introduced popery with its stone altars and their rich symbolic embellishments, the Culdees stuck to their “honest wooden tables.” We are told of the Culdees of St. Andrews that they “celebrated the eucharist in a corner of the church,” doubtless at their wooden table, and that “this was the Culdee manner of celebrating the sacrament.” F410 Dr. Lindsay Alexander puts the right interpretation upon this statement when he says: “They administered the sacred ordinance in a way totally different from the Romish ritual, not at the altar, but in a corner of the church- not with the ceremonial of the mass, but with simplicity and humility.” F411 And such, too, were the altars of the early church of Ireland. The bread and wine of the eucharist were presented on wooden tables. These continued in use in Ireland in many places, at least, down to the end of the twelfth century. When the bishops of Adrian IV. and the soldiers of Henry II. (1155) conquered Ireland, and bound the yoke of popery upon the necks of its sons, it is significant that the wooden tables were cleared out and altars of stone substituted.

We quote in proof the constitutions and canons made by John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin, and confirmed by Pope Urban III. in 1186. The first canon “prohibits priests from celebrating mass onWOODEN TABLES, according to the usage of Ireland, and enjoins that in all monasteries and baptismal churches altars should be made of stone. And if a stone of sufficient size to cover the whole surface of the altar cannot be had, that, in such a case, a square entire polished stone be fixed in the middle of the altar, where Christ’s body is consecrated, and of a compass broad enough to contain five crosses and the foot of the largest chalice. But in chapels, chantries, and oratories, if they are necessarily obliged to use wooden altars, let the mass be celebrated on plates of stone, of the beforementioned size, firmly fixed in the wood.” F412 With the change in the altar has come a change in the spirit of the worship.

This sacrifice is no longer one of thanksgiving and commemoration: it is one of expiation, and can be fittingly offered on an altar of stone onlyalthough the altar on Calvary was of wood. Neither are the materials of the sacrifice the same: the bread and wine have undergone a change strange and awful: they embody stupendous mystery, for which Christendom has as yet found no name, and which it has not dared to define, but which continues to shape itself more and more into dogmatic form, till at last Innocent III., in the thirteenth century, gives it dogmatic decree, and, coining a new name for the new prodigy, calls it Transubstantiation, and commands it to be piously received and believed by all the faithful.

The use of the term “mass” in the early church would seem to favor even more the Romanist contention, yet, when examined, it is found to possess not one particle of weight in the argument. Nothing is more easy of explanation than the simple and natural, we might say Protestant, use of the term “mass” by the primitive church. When the sermon was ended, and the Supper was to be administered, the catechumens, and all others not members of the congregation, were bidden depart. The church was careful to exclude from participation in the eucharist all whose knowledge was defective or whose lives were unholy. This was called the dismissal, or the missio. In no long time the term- missio- was appropriated to the ordinance which followed immediately on the departure of the ordinary hearers, in which the “faithful” only were permitted to take part. Such was the origin of the term “mass,” which was in use for ages before transubstantiation was decreed or the ceremonial of the Roman mass enacted. Let us hear Cave, whose statement is in strict accord with all ancient history on the point. “No sooner was the service thus far performed,” says Cave, “but all who were under baptism or under the disciple of penance, i. e., all that might not communicate at the Lord’s table, were commanded to depart, the deacon crying aloud, O Those that are catechumens go out. In the Latin Church the form wasITE MISSA EST; depart, there is a dismission of you: being the same with missio; as missio, oft used in some writers for remissio, and so the word missa is used by Cassian, even in his time, for the dismission of the congregation. Hence it was that the whole service, from the beginning of it until the time that the hearers were dismissed, came to be called Missa Catechumenorum, the mass or service of the catechumens, as that which was performed afterwards as the celebration of the eucharist was called Missa Fidelium, the mass or service of the faithful, because none but they were present at it; and in these notions and no other the word is often to be met with in Tertullian and other ancient writers of the Church. ‘Tis true, that in process of time, as the discipline of the catechumens wore out, so that the title which belonged to the first part of the service was forgotten, and the name missa was appropriated to the service of the Lord’s supper, and accordingly was made use of by the Church of Rome to denote that which they peculiarly call the mass, or the propitiatory sacrifice of the altar, at this day. And the more plausibly to impose this delusion upon the people, they do with a great deal of confidence, muster up all those places of the fathers where the word missa is to be found, and apply it to their mass; though it would puzzle them to produce but one place where the word is used in the same sense in which they use it now, out of any genuine and approved writer of the Church for at least the first four hundred years.” F413 A shadow of this ancient custom has continued to linger in the Greek Church to our own day. We find a recent traveler in the East thus describing a scene which he witnessed in St. Sophia, the venerable cathedral of Justinian at Constantinople. “The Epistle and Gospel for the day having been read, the Liturgy of the common service proceeded to its close, when the catechumens, according to primitive eastern custom, were, with a blunt force, bidden depart, although, now, nobody stirs, or is at all expected to do so. The liturgy of the faithful, as it is called, or of the members of the church proper, then began, which bore from its commencement on the dispensation of the Holy Communion.” F414 One cannot help wishing that the age of miracles would return, and that Columba would rise from his grave and tell us what he thinks of those who put this strange sense into his words, and whether he judges them true interpreters of his meaning. We can imagine the warmth with which he would repudiate the belief of notions which were only then beginning to have their first feeble inception in certain minds, and which it required seven centuries to bring to dogmatic form and embody in church ritual.

Not a little astonished, perhaps not a little indignant even would he be to find himself claimed as a disciple of doctrines which had not in his day found expression in human language, and which, when announced to the world three centuries afterward, startled and amazed it, and drew forth from an unanimous Christendom a declaration that till now these doctrines had been unheard of, and were as revolting as they were novel. But there is no need to bring up Columba or any of the Columban fathers to tender their evidence on the point.

These Fathers speak to us in the records of the past. The missionaries nurtured in the school of Columba and sent forth by his church, preached with one voice that Christ’s sacrifice was finished, that redemption was complete, and that the bread and wine on the communion table were the simple memorials of a death accomplished once for all, and never to be repeated. In their sermons and writings we hear the voice of Columba. The testimony of history is as decisive as a witness from the dead could be; and they who refuse to yield to its force would, we fear, remain equally convinced although Columba himself should rise from his tomb.

CHAPTER - A. D. 942- 971. REIGNS OF MALCOLM I.- INDULF- DUFFCULLEN- SCOTLAND’S ONE TALENT.

MALCOLM I., son of Donald, was the successor of Constantin, the monarch whom we saw, in a former chapter, descending from the throne to pass his age in the Culdean Monastery of St. Andrews. With Malcolm I. there opens a series of obscure reigns which it were tiresome and wholly without profit minutely to chronicle. Constantin had left to his successor a legacy of political troubles, the settlement of which occupied the first years of Malcolm’s reign. The task was a difficult one. The spirit of the nation had sunk low, its arms tarnished, its bravest leaders fallen in battle, and violence lifting up its head in the provinces, but the new king grappled manfully with the evils that confronted him on all sides. He first put himself right with his neighbors of England; he next gave the Danes to know that it was at their peril should they set foot on Scottish earth while he filled the throne. Finally, he addressed himself to the work of restoring order at home. He purged his tribunals from the corruption of venal judges. He coerced by the terrors of his justice those whom the sense of equity and honesty could not restrain. He repressed with a firm hand the lawlessness which had grown up under the former reign. These measures made every peaceable man his friend; but they made all who delighted in robbery and pillage- and they were not few- his enemies. He was occupied in pursuing some robbers in Moray, and attempting to make the power of his scepter felt beyond the Spey, the boundary of Alban, when he perished by the dagger of an assassin. The Pictish Chronicle says that the men of Moerne slew him at Feteresso, in the parish of Fordun, Kincardineshire; “but the later chronicles remove the scene of his death farther north, and state that he was slain at Ulurn by the Moravienses, or people of Moray.” F415 St.

Berchan places his grave at Dunotter. Malcolm’s death took place in A. D. 954, in the thirteenth year of his reign.

Malcolm I. was succeeded by Indulf, the son of Constantin. The most notable event of Indulfs reign was a fresh invasion of the Danes. These visits, which were growing more familiar but not more welcome, came to brace the patriotism of the nation when in danger of becoming relaxed. The Norsemen crossed the sea in a fleet of fifty ships. They ravaged the southern shores of England. Intent, however, on gathering more booty before returning to their own country, they sailed northward and entered the Firth of Forth. Their appearance spread terror along both shores of the Firth. The timid left their houses and fled. The courageous hastened to the beach, and mustered in such force that the Danes deemed it prudent to withdraw. Dropping down the Firth past the May, their galleys crept round the “Neuk” of Fife and entered the estuary of the Tay. Again a phalanx of determined combatants lined the shores of the river, and the invaders saw that neither here was there safe landing place. They sailed away, and coasting along the shores of Angus and Mearns, they arrived off Buchan, searching all the way for unguarded creek or bay into which they might run their galleys and let loose their ravaging hordes like a flock of vultures upon the land. The coast bristled with defenders ready to grapple with the foe should he dare to land, and throw him back into the waves. The invaders put their helms about and bore away to the Danish shore. It was a feint. After vanishing in the blue, they suddenly reappeared. Finding the coast unguarded, they landed unopposed in Banffshire near Cullen. Brief time was given them to pillage and slay. Indulf soon came up with them, and the two armies were instantly in hot combat. The Danes were worsted and driven to their ships, and hoisting sail, this time in earnest, they made off to their own country. King Indulf had fallen in battle, and the throne of Scotland was again vacant. F416 One other event in Indulf’s short reign of eight years must we note. His father, Constantin, fleeing before Athelstan, had abandoned the Lothians, and with the Lothians a city destined one day to be the capital of Scotland, to the English. What the father lost the son recovered; for in Indulf’s days Edinburgh took its place once more among Scottish cities, not again to come into possession of strangers, or be ruled by any but a Scottish scepter. F417 Duff, the Black (969), was the new king. He was an excellent prince, if the uncertain records of these far off times may be believed. Fordun calls him a man of dove- like simplicity, yet the terror of rebels, thieves, and robbers.

Cullen, the son of his predecessor, attempted to seize his throne, in violation of what in those days was the established order of succession, even, that the brother or nephew and not the son succeeded the deceased monarch. Cullen carried his cause to the battle- field and was defeated.

Among the slain was Dunchad, Abbot of Dunkeld. F418 One wonders what business he had in the battle at all. The incident, however, is significant. It tells us that a great change had now taken place in the office of abbot. The temporal possessions of the abbacies had been disjoined from the spiritual duties of the office, and these institutions had come to have a dual head.

The lands, converted into a hereditary lordship, were owned by families of high rank, and the spiritual duties were performed by a prior. This enables us to understand why an abbot should appear in arms on the field, and his corpse be found among the slain when the fight had ended.

Duff the Black had vindicated on the battlefield his fight to reign, but now he was attacked by an enemy from whom arms were powerless to defend him. The king was seized with a strange disorder. His physicians did not understand his malady; they certainly failed to cure it, and accordingly they found it convenient to refer it to a cause which their art did not enable them to cope with. The king, it was said, was pining away under the withering power of wicked spells. His illness shut him out from superintending in person the administration of justice, and this was almost tantamount to a suspension of government; for unless the king were present to pass sentence, and see it carried into execution, crime went unpunished. The king’s sickness was a golden opportunity for the thief and the robber. The lawless waxed the bolder from the confident belief that the king was on his death- bed, and would never again put himself at the head of affairs. Duff, however, falsified these evil auguries. Shaking off his malady, he arose from his couch, to the terror of the evil- doer, and proceeded to call to account marauders of every degree, from the serf to the noble. The king, according to the later chroniclers, visited the counties of Moray and Ross, which had become hotbeds of arson and rebellion. He succeeded in apprehending the ringleaders, and, bringing them to Forres, he made them be publicly executed. But this act of righteous vengeance, which the king hoped might inspire a salutary dread of law in districts where it was flagrantly set at nought, gave mortal offense to the governor of the royal castle of Forres. Among those who had expiated their crimes on the gallows were some of the governor’s and his wife’s relations, for whose lives they are said to have made supplication to the king in vain.

They waited their opportunity of revenge. On his way to the south the king halted to pass the night at the castle of Forres. Occupied in tracing to their haunts robbers and outlaws the king’s fatigues had been great, and his sleep was deep. The guards at his chamber door were drugged. At midnight two assassins were admitted into his bedroom, and these promptly did their cruel work. How was the gashed and mangled corpse of the monarch to be disposed of? The morning would reveal the bloody deed of the night. In the darkness the current of a neighboring river was diverted from its course, a grave was hastily dug in the bed of its channel, and when the body of the murdered king had been deposited in it, the waters were again turned on, and the stream was made to flow in its accustomed bed.

The spot where the royal corpse was hidden was near or under the bridge of Kinloss. The regicide, despite this ingenious device for concealing it, did not long remain undiscovered, nor did its perpetrators escape the punishment their crime merited. The body of the king was exhumed and carried to Iona. His death is placed in 967. Cullen, the son of Indulf, who, as we have seen, had attempted to snatch the crown from the brows of a worthier man than himself, now held the scepter. The power he had so ardently coveted he now lawfully possessed, but notoriously and shamefully abused. There is a consent amongst historians that Cullen, the son of Indulf, was one of the worst kings that ever reigned over the Scots.

He set no bounds to his licentious pleasures. John Major calls him “the Scottish Sardanapalus.” F419 He infected the youth of the nation with a vice which of all others saps manly virtue, and is fatal to noble resolve. The cares of government were neglected: the nobles fled from his court and the people were fleeced to maintain the revels of the palace. Such a course could have no other than a violent ending. An assembly of the Estates met at Scone to concert measures for correcting the disorders of the State.

Cullen was invited to meet them, and on his way thither he was waylaid and slain at Methven by Rohard, Thane of Fife, into whose family his liasons had brought dishonor and distress. He had reigned four years and six months. F420 Scotland, at this hour, gave but small promise of ever attaining the high destiny to which it seemed to be so surely and so rapidly advancing under Columba and his immediate successors. Its strength had been weakened in the way; it had turned aside from the only road that led to the goal which in former years it had so eagerly striven to reach. It looked as if fated to fall back into its primeval barbarism, and never see the good land of a perfected spiritual and political liberty. Scotland had received but one talent: it was therefore all the more incumbent on it to preserve that one talent, and trade with it, and turn it to the best possible account. Some of its neighbors had received ten talents. They had been gifted with ample territories, with a fertile soil, with a delicious climate, and the arts and letters which their ancestors had perfected and transmitted to them. But none of these rich endowments had fallen to the lot of the “land of brown heath and shaggy wood.” Scotland had received but one talent, and that one talent was Bible Christianity. If it should trade upon it and wax rich and great, and outstrip its neighbors with their ten talents, well; but if it should fold its one possession in a napkin and bury it in the earth, what had Scotland besides? It had squandered its all, and had nothing before it in the ages to come but poverty and serfdom.

This was now no mere untried theory to the Scots. They had tested the lower of their one talent, and seen that it had in it the promise of a richer recompense to those who should trade with it in the market of the world than all the ten talents of their neighbors of France and Italy and other countries. It was Iona, in other words Bible Christianity, which had made Scotland to burn like a lamp in ages not long gone by. It was this which drew kings and princes from afar to its shore, and made them proud to breathe its air, and converse with its wise men, and be taught the wisdom of its schools. When Iona arose the fires of Baal ceased to blaze, and the cruel sacrifices of the Druid were no longer offered. Then Scot and Pict, instead of meeting in deadly strife on the battlefield, met in peaceful assembly in the sanctuary. The painted Caledonian disappeared from his native straths and hills: the savage transformed into the civilized. The plough went forth to make war upon an ancient sterility, and bid the barren field rejoice because the time had come for the springing of flowers and the waving of golden harvests. Commerce was putting forth her earliest buds in that tender spring time. The artisan was perfecting the cunning of his right hand in homely achievements. Architecture was training its infant skill for the erection of more pretentious structures than the wattle- built hut.

The loom was sending forth fabrics of finer textures and richer colors, which shewed that the weaver’s art was as yet far from having reached the limits of its resources. The trader had begun to make ventures beyond seas, and the return visits of the foreign merchant gave a powerful stimulus to the industry of the country by the proffered interchange of home commodities with foreign products. The marvelous transformation now passing on the face of the country was the work of influences as silent but as irresistible as those by which Spring transforms the landscape, bringing it out of death into life and beauty; but all these influences had their fountain- head in Iona. Scotland was trading with its one talent, and reaping an hundred- fold.

But the men of the tenth century only dimly apprehended all this. Their fathers of the sixth and seventh saw it clearly, and knew what they did when they laid the foundations of Iona. They called into existence a church, simple and pure, whose glorious mission it should be to redress the moral and spiritual balance of Christendom which had been destroyed by the corruption of Christianity in its original seats, and so repair the wrong done the world by churches which had betrayed their great trust. It was a bold enterprise, but they acted in fairly, and faith is the truest foresight and the highest statesmanship.

Its work alone endures, rising triumphant over opposition and temporary defeat, and surviving those changes and revolutions which sweep away the clever schemes of the mere Church and State politician, and bury the name and fame of their author in oblivion. But the men of the tenth and eleventh centuries in Scotland had waxed weak in a virtue which has been the strength of all strong men in every age, and which was eminently the strength of their fathers. “What good,” they had begun to ask, “will this old- fashioned creed do us?” It may have served to guide our fathers, but our sky is brightening apace with a new light! Surely we shall not err if we exchange the pale and dying ray of Iona for the rising glory of that ancient and apostolic church which has her seat on the Seven Hills. Let us not be singular; let us not separate ourselves from the rest of Christendom; let us not dwell alway outside the habitable world. So spoke many of the Scots.

How plain is it that they had begun to despise their “one talent,” and were burying it in the earth A decline had set in which called for an immediate corrective. That spiritual force which had its seat in the hearts of the people, and, though unseen, acted night and day upon the nation, ministering nurture and upholding order, was large] v withdrawn, and unless some terrible danger shall arise to absorb all passions in the one great passion of enthusiasm for country, the nation will consume and waste away in the enmities, the outrages, and the bloody feuds, which, in the relaxation of their great bond of cohesion, have already deformed the country, and, continuing to operate, will ultimately destroy it, converting the glory of the seventh century into the byeword of the eleventh. Better that the cruel Viking should burn and slay, than that Scot should fall by the hand of Scot; and that strangers in time to come should point to the fallen country, and say: Its sons perished in no battle for their independence, nor were they crushed by the force of foreign arms; their undoing came from themselves. They allowed their light to go out, and now they sit in darkness.

CHAPTER - A. D. 971- 995. REIGN OF KENNETH- BATTLE OF LUNCARTYHOUSE OF HAY- ALTERATION OF LAW OF SUCCESSION.

THE Scots had halted in their path, or rather they had stepped out of it, and gone aside from the straight course, and they needed to be beaten back to it with the rod of national calamity. In no long time we find them smarting from a stroke, which doubtless they deplored as a misfortune, but which they ought to have accepted as a benefit. There, again, on their eastern coast were the Norse galleys filled with warriors athirst for blood, wielding battle- axes rudely fashioned of bog iron, and swords sharpened and tempered by more skilled artisans than the armorors of Scandinavia.

These marauders had crossed the main to load their ships with booty and captives, and go back to their own land and there revel in the spoil. That was all the Vikings thought of or cared for. They had come forth, however, on another errand, though they knew it not. They had been summoned from their fiords to reunite the sundered parties of the Scots, by concentrating in one supreme struggle for independence the passions and energies which meanwhile were being expended on petty personal feuds, and recall to a sense of duty a nation that was becoming unconscious of its high mission.

But first an occupant has to be found for the vacant throne. The dissolute life and brief reign of Cullen had, as we have seen, been brought to a sudden end on the highway by an act of violence which had been provoked, though not justified, by his own criminal amours. It required some courage, one should think, to sit down on the fatal Stone of Scone, after recent experiences of the cares and risks that waited on royal power in Scotland. Kenneth, the third of that name- an honored name in the royal line of the Scots -the brother of Duff the Black, was the successor of Cullen. No sooner had he mounted the throne (971) than he addressed himself to the task of setting in order a kingdom which had, as might well be believed, under such a ruler as Cullen, fallen into confusion. It was rare indeed that there was not a smoldering rebellion in one or other of the northern counties. But this danger was greatly aggravated by an evil which it was more difficult for Kenneth to reach with his arms than insurrections in Lochaber or Ross- shire. The numerous islands which besprinkle the western seas, and which charm the eye of tourist with their picturesque beauty or their rocky grandeur, were in those days so many “cities of refuge,” whither the thief, the robber, the man- slayer, and the rebel could flee, and where he might defy justice. The difficulty of coping with this evil was the greater from the circumstance that the Norwegians had begun to exercise at times the sovereignty of these islands, and were not unwilling to weaken the power of the kings of Alban by extending their protection to the enemies of their government. If Kenneth could have submerged this harborage of outlaws and freebooters in the waves of the Atlantic, he would, no doubt, have robbed our western coast of much of its attractiveness, but he would have lightened the cares of his government, and consolidated the peace of his kingdom. He had begun to grapple with the monster evil, and was making some progress in its suppression, when his attention was called away to another quarter of his dominions. Nothing, Kenneth doubtless thought, could be more unfortunate at this moment. It placed the king and the Scottish nation between two fires. On the west were a score of isles about to blaze into insurrection; in the east hung the Norwegian warcloud, in the dark folds of which slumbered the lightnings.

Never had such a flotilla of Norse war- galleys been seen as now cast anchor off the Red Head oil the Angus coast. For some days they did not move from the spot, but hovered above the shore, like a flock of birds of prey, as if they wished to render the inhabitants helpless through terror before swooping down upon them with their battle- axes and sharp- edged swords. It was being debated on board whether they should make their descent on England or on Scotland. England, it was argued, was the richer land, and there they would gather greater abundance of spoil, whereas in the northern and poorer country they could hope to glean but little, and that little with greater peril owing to the fiercer nature of the people. But over against this the Norsemen had to set the consideration that in either case they should be unable to avoid an encounter with the Scots, who might possibly hasten to the help of the English, if only to ward off the danger from themselves, and thus they should have to fight two nations instead of one. The wise men of the Norse council therefore resolved to strike where they were. Rounding the tall cliffs of the Red Head, their galleys entered the estuary of the Esk at Montrose, and the invaders leaping on shore, carried sack and slaughter along the banks of the river; and meeting with no opposition some days, they extended their ravages southward to the Tay, and westward along the great valley of Strathmore.

The king was at Stirling when the news reached him of this new invasion of the old enemies of his kingdom. Kenneth mustered what forces he had with him, and giving orders for the rest of the population to arm and follow, he set out to meet the invaders. The Viking host had by this time penetrated into the interior and come to Perth. The two armies met near the confluence of the Tay and the Earn. The battle that followed is one of the more famous in the history of these invasions. Both Dane and Scot burned with hereditary hate. What had the pagan Viking to do in this land? It was not his, and the Scot was determined that it never should be his. If he comes here to find a grave, he shall have it; but as regards these rains and plains, they have been the dwelling of the Caledonian from immemorial time, and what was the possession of our fathers, shall be the possession of our sons. So said the Scots. In this spirit it was that the battle was joined.

It raged with sanguinary fury. What a soft and gracious spot the scene of the conflict looked at sunrise; but before noon, battle had transformed it into a very shambles, frightful to behold, although the rage with which the combatants struggled with one another made them heedless of the horrors around them. Hacked and mutilated trunks, cloven skulls, lopped- off limbs, Dane and Scot stretched out and clutching one another, their faces darkening in death, and their eyes still burning with the fire of battle, strewed the fair meadows on which the conflict took place, and dyed the two rivers which water the valley which war had made as ghastly as its usual aspect is sweet and inviting. The day had gone against the Scots, and they were beginning to escape from the field in terrified crowds. It was now that an incident occurred which turned the fortunes of the battle, and threw a romantic gleam of patriotic heroism over its carnage.

It happened that a stout yeoman and his two sons were ploughing in a field which lay in the track of the fugitives. Indignant at seeing the Scots turn their back on the enemy, he stopped his plough, unyoked his oxen, and arming himself and his sons with the implements of their husbandry, he took his stand right in the path of the runaway’s, and, partly by reproaches and partly by blows, he arrested their flight, and compelled them to face about and resume the battle, himself and his two sons heading the fight.

Courage is as infectious as cowardice. The old Caledonian war spirit, which had stood its ground before the Roman legions at the foot of those very mountains which looked down upon this battle with the Danes, flamed up in the breasts of the Scots. The Viking host was defeated; and the day, which till now had been full of disaster, and was closing darkly over the Scots, was turned with almost magical quickness into one of victory.

The story, doubtless, has received some embellishments in its transmission downwards, but its historic supports are too numerous to permit of its being regarded as wholly legendary. The incident, in some form, must have occurred, for how otherwise could it have obtained the footing it has got in history, both written and heraldic, as well as in the traditions of the country? The ground itself witnesses to the fact. The broken weapons and the fragments of skeletons which are dug up in it, tell of some long past, but fiercely fought battle. The name of the stout and bold peasant who changed a moment of dire peril to his country into one of glorious triumph was Hay. He entered the field a simple ploughman, he strode out of it a belted knight. If ever after he put hand to plough, it was to till the wide acres which his grateful sovereign gave him as a reward of his valor in the fertile Carse of Gowrie. Thus were laid the foundations of the noble house of Errol.

Boece and Buchanan, and the historians who follow them, have told the adventure of Hay and his two sons in the battle of Luncarty with circumstances not, indeed, impossible or even improbable, but of a character so surprising axed romantic as to make the truth of the story be suspected. Why, it has been asked, should Hay and his sons have been ploughing their fields when a desperate battle was raging at no great distance from them? In occurrences like this there are always circumstances involving difficulty which a full narration of details would satisfactorily clear up. Were the whole facts of the case known to us, which they never can be, there is little doubt that the patriotism of Hay and his sons would stand clear of all suspicion. Against this one objection to the story we have to set numerous concurring testimonies in favor of its actual occurrence. That a battle of ;t very sanguinary description was fought with the Danes at Luncarty will, we suppose, be generally granted. That the stout Perthshire yeoman may have come in at a critical moment and turned the fortunes of the battle, is surely not an impossible occurrence. How often has it happened, in both ancient and modern warfare, that the heroism of one or a few men has all at once changed the aspect of conflict and turned defeat into victory? This is the substance of the story, disengaged from its accidental circumstances. That such a feat was performed by Hay we have many corroborative evidences. There is the widespread popular tradition. Boece and Buchanan did not create that tradition. It existed long before their day, and must have had its first origination in an achievement of the character ascribed to Hay. There is, moreover, the armorial bearing given the family of Errol, in which are conspicuous the agricultural implements which their brave ancestor so suddenly converted into weapons of battle to the discomfiture of the Danes. And finally, as corroborative of the achievement, we have the high position of the house of Errol from an early time. Their descendant was High Constable of Scotland in the reign of Robert the First, and if we mistake not, the present representative of this noble house fills the same high office.

After this, Scotland saw some tranquil years. Strengthened by this great victory, the king laid his hand more heavily upon the thieves and robbers that infested the northern counties. He brought in what would now- a- days be called an Option Bill, giving these worthies a free choice betwixt an honest life and the gallows. He taught the nobles reverence for the crown; he threw his shield over the common people, protecting them from rapacious exactions. Arts and agriculture revived in the breathing space given them from the home robber and the foreign plunderer, and Kenneth embraced the opportunity offered him by the quiet and contentment that prevailed to effect all important alteration in the law of succession to the crown, of which we shall speak presently.

After the battle of Luncarty, Kenneth, we are told in the Chronicle of the Picts, built forts on the banks of the Forth, doubtless to prevent the incursions of the Danes. It is interesting to know that in those days the Forth was liable to be visited by those black fogs which embarrass at times the navigator in the same waters in our day, and which kept Mary Stuart three days on end from landing when she came to take possession of the Scottish throne. In the Saxon Chronicle the Forth is termed Myrcford, the mirk or dark firth; and so does it figure in the Norse sagas, where the name given it is Myrk- va- Fiord. Having done his best to bar the entrance of the Danes into Scotland by way of the Dark Frith, Kenneth set out to ravage Saxonia. History throws no light on the causes which tempted him to this expedition, or the results that flowed from it, beyond the somewhat improbable statement that the King of the Scots carried captive a son of a king of the Saxons. If Kenneth carried off any one it was probably some Northumbrian ruler of inferior dignity. And here the Chronicle of the Picts closes with the intimation that this King (Kenneth) gave the great city of Brechin to the Lord.” F421 In the early ages of the Scots, and down to the reign of Kenneth III., the crown, as we already said, did not pass directly from father to son. On the death of the monarch it was not the next of kin, but the one of all his relations who was judged the most fit to govern, that was chosen to succeed him. The arrangement was demanded by the state of the country and the character of the Scots. It needed a man of mature understanding and firm will to govern a people so impetuous, and at times so intractable.

These qualities were not to be looked for in one of tender years.

Accordingly, on the demise of the sovereign, the Estates assembled and chose a successor, taking care only that the person elected, in addition to possessing the requisite qualifications, should be of the stock- royal- that is, a descendant of Fergus the First, King of the Scots. The nobles in the main were averse to a change in their ancient law, which had worked well.

But the king pressed the matter. He pictured the evils that attended the present mode of election to the throne, the intrigues and contentions of candidates, and the seditions, conspiracies, and wars that sometimes were fostered by disappointed competitors: and he represented on the other side that by enacting that on the death of the king the crown should pass directly to his son, and if that son were of tender age, that a regency, consisting of the wisest in the nation should be appointed till he attained majority, all the advantages of the present system would be retained, and all its inconveniences avoided. To these arguments Kenneth is said to have added others of a more palpable kind to gain the concurrence of the nobility. Be this as it may, the king carried his project, and the law of succession to the crown, which had obtained since the foundation of the Scottish monarchy, was from that day changed. It was enacted “that the king’s eldest son, for the future, should always succeed to the father, whatever his age should be; likewise, if the son died before the father, that the next of kin should succeed the grandfather. That when the king was under age, a tutor or protector should be chosen, being some eminent mail for interest and power, to govern in name and place of the king, till he came to be fourteen years of age, and then he had liberty to choose guardians for himself.” This change in the law extended to other things besides the throne. The law of succession in private families is said to have been altered or modified at the same time.

Boethius and Buchanan have loaded the memory of this prince, who on all the other transactions of his reign acted a wise and upright part, with the guilt of procuring the death of Malcolm, Prince of Cumberland, to make way for the direct succession of his own son. The Scottish king at that time held Cumberland as a feudatory of the English monarch. The arrangement was mutually advantageous, being a bond of amity between the two kingdoms, and a defense to England on its northern boundary against Danish invasion. The governor of Cumberland was commonly regarded as heir- apparent to the Scottish throne. He held an analogous position among the Scots, as Caesar under the early emperors, or as the Dauphin of France or the Prince of Wales in our own day. The management of the little principality was an admirable apprenticeship for the government of the larger kingdom. The Prince of Cumberland under Kenneth III. was Malcolm, the son of Duff. He was pre- eminent among the Scottish youth for manly and princely qualities, and his advent to the throne was looked forward to with eager expectation by the nation. It so happened that about the time that Kenneth began to agitate for a change in the law of succession, Malcolm, Prince of Cumberland, died. The king appeared touched with a genuine sorrow for the loss of the prince, and gave him a funeral becoming his rank, and the place he held in the nation’s esteem.

The fact that the two events- the change of the law of succession, and the death of Malcolm, son of Duff, who stood between Malcolm, son of the reigning sovereign, and the throne- were contemporaneous, or nearly so, has furnished Boethius and Buchanan with presumptive around for the grave charge they have advanced against this king. Fordun is silent. All the probabilities of the case appear to us to be against the two historians nailed and in favor of Kenneth, and we refuse to be partners in affixing so dark a stain on grounds so slight on the memory of a monarch who, during long reign, and under a variety of conditions, some of them sufficiently hard, had maintained a name unblemished as respects magnanimity and honor.

Nevertheless, Kenneth was far from reaping the advantages he had promised himself from the change he had been so anxious to effect in the constitution of the kingdom. The latter years of his life and reign were clouded by troubles springing out of that very matter. How often, whilst painfully shaping his steps amid domestic snares, he must have wished that the Danes would come back and give the Scottish thanes legitimate vent for their passions and ambitions, by summoning them to the red field of conflict for country! Even after the grave had closed over him, and all earthly tumults around him had been hushed, save that of the western billows where he lay entombed, this measure continued to vex the country, and to yield a harvest of conspiracies and wars.

The story of the king’s end has been variously told; one thing is certain, that Kenneth III., like so many of his predecessors, died by violence. He had gone, according to Johannis Major had Hector Boethius, on a pilgrimage to the grave of Palladius, whose bones by this time had acquired a wonderful repute for sanctity, and whose tomb had become a famous resort of pilgrimage. After performing his devotions at the shrine of the saint, the king turned aside to visit the castle of Fettercairn, of which Finella, a sort of Scottish Herodias, was mistress. This lady, who owed the king a grudge for hanging her son Crathilinth for the crime of making too free with the king’s laws and the lives of his subjects, took care that he should not leave her castle alive. Winton, however, says that the king was sent away with every token of good will, but that he was slain by horsemen who lay in ambush for him on the road. His death occurred in A. D. 995, and the twenty- fifth of his reign. A funeral cortege is beheld moving slowly westward along the great plain which the Sidlaws bound on the one side and the mightier Grampians on the other. The royal barge, followed by a flotilla of boats carrying numerous mourners, conveys the royal corpse across the Sound of Iona, and the sepulchers of the kings at Icolmkill receive another tenant.

CHAPTER - A. D. 995- 1034. MALCOLM II- CESSION OF LOTHIAN TO SCOTS- BATTLES OF MURTLACH AND BARRYKINGDOM OF SCOTIA.

THE first day of Scotland was over, and its second had not yet opened. The visit of Kenneth III. to the tomb of Palladius is a glimpse behind the scenes.

It shows that the memory of Columba, Scotland’s mightiest name and greatest benefactor, had begun to fade, and that his lamp was growing dim.

That lamp was to grow yet dimmer before the new day should shine out.

The interval that parted the first frown the second and brighter day was filled up with social disorders and political oppressions, under which the nation appeared to be hastening to dissolution. In the career of nations as in that of individuals, it is some only that reach the goal. The most part sink down on the road, and unable to resume the march, remain as wrecks on the highway of the world. Scotland again and again seemed on the eve of being overtaken by this disastrous and dishonorable fate. But ever as the die of its destiny appeared about to be irretrievably cast, the Dane presented himself, and the sight of his war galleys, from which savage faces and cruel eyes looked forth, woke up anew in the breasts of the emasculated Scots their sense of nationality, and gave them once more to feel how exhilarating is the air of the battlefield when the fight is for country and homestead.

Thus they were kept from sinking down outright, and carried through the evil years- and they had not yet seen the worst- till the time should come when they would resume their course on the old lines, but with a breadth and enlargement which they had not known in the first ages of their nation.

We have just seen Kenneth III. laid in his grave with the reputation of a great prince, not unworthily won by his efforts on the battlefield to save his country from the grasp of the Danes, and his less warlike but not less patriotic endeavors to maintain the authority of the laws. It was within five years of the close of the tenth century. Calamity is again seen gathering over the country. Hardly are there gloomier pages in its annals than those in which the early chroniclers record the history of the ten years that succeeded the death of Kenneth III. The succession to the crown was fiercely contested. These contests parted the nation into factions, and brought on civil war. The rapacious nobles took advantage of the confusion and license of the times to oppress the people. Robberies and murders were common. The peaceful pursuits of industry and agriculture were interrupted. The neglect of tillage brought on famine. After famine came pestilence. The miserable inhabitants had no way to flee from the host of evils that pursued them. they entered the city they were slain by the plague, and if they retired to the country they became the prey of the robber. It was not for the good of the Scots that the Danes should be long absent.

According to the new law of succession as now altered, Malcolm, the son of Kenneth III., was the rightful heir, and ought to have ascended the throne. The funeral obsequies of his parent called him to Iona, and before he could return, Constantin, the son of Cullen, who would have inherited the crown under the old law of tanistry, made himself be crowned at Scone. He collected a large force, and endeavored to support his usurpation by arms, but perished on the battlefield after a troubled reign of a year and a half. The throne was next claimed by Kenneth the son of King Duff. He too perished on the field of war, but not till eight years of calamities had passed over the country. Grim fallen, the son of Kenneth at last ascended his father’s throne (A. D. 1005) under the title of Malcolm II. Fordun gives us a brief but vivid sketch of the character and personal endowments of Malcolm. “The people,” says he, “were much better pleased with the actions of Malcolm than of Grim; for there was scarcely a man in the kingdom who could equal Malcolm in the exercises of the field, either in his wars or his amusements. Our Historical Annals represent him as skilful in the management of the sword and the lance; and of his bearing to a miracle, hunger, thirst, cold, and the longest watching ... his great strength and the beauty of his person became the universal theme of applause and praise, till at last the public voice pointed him out as the most worthy of the kingdom.”

Malcolm began his reign, as did almost every Scottish king of those days, with an attempt to annex the territory betwixt the Forth and the Tweed to his Kingdom of Alban. He burst into Northumbria at the head of a great army and besieged Durham.

The campaign, however, ended in disaster. Malcolm’s soldiers were nearly all slain, and the English celebrated their victory after a ghastly fashion.

They topped the walls of Durham with a grisly row of Scottish heads.

The Scottish king renewed this attempt in the year 1018 with better success. Entering Northumbria, he met the English army at Carham on the Tweed, and a great battle followed. The English were routed, and the slaughter was immense, for Simeon of Durham tells us that well- nigh the whole population betwixt the Tweed and the river Tees had been drafted into the army, and were left dead on the field. This terrible calamity, Simeon also informs us, did not happen without prognostication. For thirty successive nights before this great slaughter a comet blazed in the heavens and lighted up the skies of Northumbria with awful terror. The effect of the victory was the cession of the territory lying south of the Forth to the Scots: the Tweed was henceforth the boundary of their kingdom, and a long- cherished object of the Scottish kings had been at last attained.

Sheathing the sword of war, Malcolm unsheathed that of justice. He sent commissioners into all the provinces to see that the laws were enforced against offenders of whatever degree. Soon things began to change. The husbandman resumed his labors, for now he might hope to reap what he had sowed. The tides of commerce, such as they then were, began to flow in their old channels. The trader could carry his goods to market without fear of the robber. Life, under so wise and firm a king, began to wear its old aspect.

But more drastic remedies were needed to restore the tone of the nation.

Moral disorders and political antipathies had to a most lamentable extent unloosed its loins and dissolved its rigor. It needed that some great object should combine its strength in a common action. Such occasion arose. The Scots were again summoned to the battlefield to decide not what family or what clan should rule Scotland, lint whether there should be a Scotland at all. The nation was at this moment seriously threatened with effacement.

The Scots had seen this calamity overtake their neighbors. The ancient race had perished from the soil of south Britain. It had been conquered first by the Angles, next by the Saxons, and it was being overrun at this hour by the Danes. A new people was tilling its fields and occupying the cities of England. The Caledonian all the while had maintained himself on his native soil, and had given place neither to Roman nor to Dane. But horde after horde from the teeming sea coast of northern Europe was being precipitated upon the little nation. The Scots must gather their energies into a combined effort if they would preserve for the world, as one of its most vitalizing forces, their peculiar idiosyncrasy of spirit and fervor of genius. This was now made plain to them. Never before had so numerous an armament been seen on their coast as the fleet of Norse warriors which now entered the mouth of the Spey. It was clear that their purpose this time was not the loading of their ships with spoil, but the subjugation of the country and their permanent settlement in the land. Had they been able to compass their design it is curious to reflect what consequences would have grown from it. The lamp of evangelical Christianity in Scotland would have been extinguished. The divine seeds of the faith, and the consciousness of Scottish nationality, which lay quiescent in the soil during the four hundred dark years that followed, and which burst out afresh in the sixteenth century, would have been trampled utterly out, and would have had no resurrection. Bannockburn would not have been: the Scottish Reformation would not have been: the Solemn League and Covenant, which those who have most deeply studied the history of Europe will be the first to grant saved the liberties of Christendom, would not have been, and the action of the Scottish mind on England and on her vast colonies would not have been. It is impressive to mark that all these consequences hung largely upon the losing or winning of a battle on the shores of the Moray Firth.

The Scottish king had no warning of the coming of the Vikings, and their landing was unopposed. It was some days before a Scottish soldier appeared, and the invaders meanwhile did their pleasure on the defenseless country. They spread themselves over the rich province of Moray, slaughtering in city and hamlet, and making room with their merciless swords for their own wives and children who were to follow them across the ocean. When intelligence reached Malcolm of the atrocities that were reddening the plains of Moray, he hastily collected a considerable force, and marched to repel the invaders. The first sight of the Danish host struck the Scots with consternation, their ships were so many and their army was so numerous. But that feeling was soon changed into one of exasperation.

The frightful devastation around them kindled a desire for vengeance, and they could with difficulty be restrained till the necessary arrangements were made for joining battle. They rushed upon the Danes with a blind fury which cost them dear. They were driven back, and Malcolm was carried out of the field badly wounded. This was no auspicious commencement of a struggle on which so much depended for the Scots.

Was the Dane to conquer and leave Scotland as a heritage to his children?

This must have been the question that suggested itself to the mind of Malcolm as he led his dispirited troops southward in presence of the victorious Danes. The kingdom of the Norsemen was spreading like an eclipse over the Scottish land. Each new swarm from across the sea penetrated farther into the bowels of the country, and threatened ultimate extinction to that line of rulers who had received their anointing on the “Stone of Destiny.” Orkney and Shetland were already theirs. The Hebrides owned their sway. They had added Caithness and Sutherland and Ross to their kingdom. The retreat of Malcolm with his army looked as if Moray next was given up to them. The Danes believed that it had been so, and that the conquest of all Scotland would speedily follow. They had driven out the garrisons and inhabitants of Forres and Elgin. They treated the peasantry in every respect as a conquered people. They compelled them to cut down the corn for their use, and do whatever work they wished to have done. They fortified themselves in the castles on the seaboard like men who had no intention of removing; and sending to their friends at home, they invited them to come and plant themselves in the pleasant land.

The bloody day of Murtlach brought a change in the outlook, although it did not entirely dispel the danger that hung over the core, try. King Malcolm, who had retreated into Mar, worked day and night to save the monarchy. His efforts were rewarded with a more numerous and better disciplined host than the former. The men of Angus and Mearns, the warlike citizens of Aberdeen and other towns, the yeomen of Fife, rallied to the standard of their king at this great crisis, burning to do battle against the invader of their homes. Malcolm, putting himself at the head of this new army, again marched against the Danes. The two hosts joined battle at Murtlach. The action was contested on both sides with obstinate and desperate valor. The ranks thinned fast. The sword hewed terrible gaps in them. The corpses lay thick on the field: citizen and yeoman, Dane and Scot, were heaped up together. The living still continued to strive as fiercely as ever around their comrades, locked in the sleep of death, all heedless now of the ebb and flow of the strife. At length there came a turn in the battle, but it was against the Scots. They had sustained terrible losses, not in men only, but in generals. First Kenneth, thane of the Isles, fell mortally wounded. Next Grim, thane of Strathearn, was stretched dead on the field; and finally Dunbar, thane of Lothian, was struck down. The fall of these three chieftains filled the Scots with dismay, and they fell back.

They were not beaten: they had but retreated to rally on stronger ground.

At some distance in their rear was a narrow pass, where Malcolm had lain entrenched while occupied in sending the tocsin through the southern counties to rally his fighting men. The Scots halted in this stronghold, and waited with a determined front the arrival of the Danes. The latter, believing that the Scots were discomfited and in flight, came on with an impetuosity which lost them the victory which they thought was already secure. They were slain as they came up by the Scots, who waited for them behind their defenses. At this stage of the combat their leader fell, and his death disheartened the Danes. The Scots were in the same proportion inspirited. Malcolm saw that the critical moment had arrived. Rallying his warriors, he attacked the Danes with great fury, and the battle was won.

The Danish host retreated into Moray, and took up their winter quarters, the sea and their ships in their rear. The loss of the Scots on the battlefield had been so great that they did not venture to pursue the enemy.

Not yet was Scotland rid of the terror of the Dane. This fierce and warlike foe had determined that the Scot should wear his yoke, and Denmark was then a powerful country. Sweden and Norway were under the Danish crown, and this struggle of the little Scottish nation for very existence had to be maintained against the combined strength of three kingdoms. The Danes in addition to their continental territories were now masters of England. In 1017 Cnute the Dane became king of the whole of southern Britain, and the Danes wished to round off their possessions in the British Isles by the annexation of Scotland. This must have seemed to them a task of easy accomplishment after what they had already achieved. In truth the Danes already embraced the little country in their arms. For not only were the islands around its shores the property of the Danes: on the mainland their kingdom came up to almost the feet of the Grampians on the north, leaving only the southern half of the country to be subdued. This ought not to be long in doing. It seemed impossible for the Scots, weakened as they were by the loss of their northern provinces, and of many of their bravest warriors, long to hold their ground. The struggle was an unequal one: so did it appear to the Danes, whose ambition was excited by the rapid growth of their power, and the recent triumph of their arms on both sides of the German Sea. It would have gone as they reckoned but for the personal valor, intrepidity, and patriotism of King Malcolm, who neither despaired himself nor would permit the nation to despair, but kept it alive, bravely battling till he bad brought it through this great struggle on which depended far higher issues than perhaps the monarch foresaw.

The Danes had lost the battle of Murtlach, and tidings of their defeat were on their way to Sueno. Sueno was the representative of the Danish power in England, and governor of the realm in his father’s room. He received the tidings very coolly. The loss of one battle could be repaired by fighting another. The ill success of the day of Murtlach would cause only a little delay in the conquest of Scotland, an eventuality already assured, and which nothing but their dogged pertinacity prevented even the Scots seeing to be so. Without leaving his place Sueno issued his orders for a more powerful army, drawn partly from the mother country of Denmark and partly from England, to sail for the coast of Scotland. At the head of this great host he put Camus, the most famous Danish captain of the age. The armament destined to close the reign of the race of Fergus, and carry the “Stone of Destiny” to Westminster before its time, appeared at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. A thrill of battle, not of fear, ran through the Scottish counties, and brought to the shore thousands of defenders. Nowhere could the invaders find landing place without having first to fight a bloody battle on the sea. The fleet sailed away to Red Head, behind the precipices of which opens the spacious bay of Lunan, and here they found roomy anchorage and quiet landing. They began their operations by seizing the castles on the coast, for so was their usual strategy, seeing it kept open the way back to their own country, if necessity should arise, by a double line of defense, one of forts and one of ships. They marched to Brechin, leaving their track over the rich country but too easily traceable. They besieged the castle of Brechin which nature as well as art had fortified, but finding that its capture would too long delay them, they laid the town and church in ashes, and departed. Their next encampment appears to have been at Kirkbodo, on the ridge of the Sidlaws, where they had the Romans as predecessors, and where they looked down on the valley of Glamis on the north, and on the long slope that extends on the south to the shores of the Tay.

Malcolm meanwhile was not inattentive to the movements of the invading host. He was no more willing to put his scepter into the hand of Harold of Denmark than Bruce, in an after age, was to put his into the hand of Edward of England. Again the summons to arms went forth, and there flocked to the standard of the king an army of as fierce fighters as the Danes, and who were likely to be none the less brave from knowing that they fought in ¢- t better cause. They thought of the day of Murtlach, and of their brothers who were sleeping beneath the gory sod of that terrible field. The battle bequeathed to them by the men who had died there they would maintain with an equal valor. They would sooner lie in the same bloody bed than live as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the Danes.

The Scottish king took up his position at Barry, on the northern shore of the Tay. Camus, having information by his scouts of the approach of Malcolm, led down his men from the heights of Kirkbodo to Panbride, where he could fight with the sea and his ships in sight. Camus had headed the army that conquered England. Those who served under him in this Scottish expedition were veterans. There could await him nothing less than victory in the battle to which he was advancing, and the defeat of the Scots would fall with double force and effect, inasmuch as the blow would be struck, not at the extremities of the kingdom, not in the northern regions, but in the south, in the heart of the country. This must have been strongly felt on both sides, and if it gave hope to Camus it kindled in the Scots, whom Camus saw already vanquished, a courage as fierce as it was fearless.

The two armies were drawn up in order of battle. They stood a day confronting each other. The issue of the fight either way must be momentous, and neither side seemed in haste to begin it. On the second day the battle was joined. No eye witness gives us the particulars of that eventful field. Tradition alone has preserved the fact of its awful carnage. It speaks of the brook that adjoined the battlefield rolling seaward a torrent of blood. Victory was hard to win. Hour after hour the clash of swords and the groans of dying men resounded along the heights of Barry and Panbride. At length the fortune of the day began to incline to the Scots.

The Danish leader, seeing that he had lost the battle, withdrew his forces, and retreated toward the Sidlaws. He was pursued, and, before he had got two miles from the field, overtaken, his followers cut to pieces, and himself felled to the earth by some strong arm which sent the good sword it wielded at a single stroke right through his skull. The spot where Camus fell was named in memory of the event, Camuston, and a tall stone or obelisk in the woods of Panbride with the rust of nine centuries upon it marks his grave. F424 The rest of the Danish army, under covert of the darkness which had now set in, made their way through the downs and sand hillocks that here line the shore to their ships in the Tay. So ended this memorable day. When it opened the Scottish nationality trembled in the balance: when it closed the Scottish monarchy and nation had received new and stronger guarantees, although at the cost of one of the bloodiest of those many bloody battles which marked the course of that long strife, which gave union and solidity and hardness to the Scottish people, and furnished watchwords to kindle their patriotism in after years when new dangers should present themselves.

These two battles sealed the fate of the Danish project to subjugate Scotland. They showed that it was not to be. Every time the Danish spear touched the Scottish soil it sent a new thrill of life through the Scottish nation, and summoned into existence a new and more powerful phalanx of warriors to defend the country. The Dane at last desisted, for he saw that these repeated attempts were bringing him no nearer to what he sought, but on the contrary were teaching the Scots to beat him, and fattening, alas! the Scottish soil with Danish corpses.

From this time the “Kingdom of Alban” disappears from the page of history, and the “Kingdom of Scotia” comes in its room. This is significant of the advance made by the country under Malcolm II. The blood shed on his battlefields had not been spilt in vain; on the contrary it had borne good fruit in bringing to the birth the kingdom of Scotland. It was now a century and a half since the Scots and Picts were united under Kenneth MacAlpin.

The greater part of that time had been passed in struggles with the Danish and Norwegian power. We now see the final outcome. The two nationalities have been thoroughly amalgamated; the stronger of the two races has come to the front. The supreme effort of the Dane, who had all at once attacked the country from three sides- from England on the south, from Orkney oil the north, and from beyond the sea on the east- has been rolled back. The voice of events has unequivocally proclaimed that the future of this country belongs to the Scots. And in meet accordance therewith the Kingdom of Scotland now comes upon the stage. The first historic mention of it is in the chronicle of Marianus Scotus. Scotus, a native of Ireland, was born in the reign of this Malcolm, and he records his death as the “King of Scotia” on the 25th November 1034. F425 Prior to this the kings of Alban had sometimes been styled “Kings of the Scots,” but never “Kings of Scotia.” Ireland was the proper “Scotia” of the early centuries, and the transference of the territorial designation from the one side of the Irish channel to the other is the more emphatic from the fact that the first intimation of that transference comes from an Irishman. By the opening of the eleventh century there had come to be a general consent that the country into which the Scots had migrated, and made good on so many battlefields their title to possess and govern, would be the Scotland of the future.

Malcolm II. was the last of the male descendants of Kenneth MacAlpin. He had no son, nor was there male relative in the collateral line to succeed him on the throne. Nevertheless the ancient race of Scotland’s kings does not become extinct. The royal line of Fergus, the founder of the Scottish dynasty, and of Kenneth MacAlpin, the first king of the united nation of Scots and Picts, runs on in the female branch. Although Malcolm II. had no son he left two daughters, one of whom was married to Crinan, lay Abbot of Dunkeld. Her soil, Duncan, as we shall see, succeeded to the throne on the death of his grandfather.

Having ended his wars, Malcolm, it is said, devoted the remainder of his life and reign to effacing the ravages of the sword. He rebuilt the churches burned down by the enemy, and indemnified the clergy by liberal benefactions for the losses they had sustained. F426 The religious houses were the first to suffer in an invasion. They contained, it was believed, much treasure which might be harried at little risk, seeing its owners were not men of the sword. The dismantled castles were restored, and the plough was set agoing in districts which, trodden by armies and ravaged by plunderers, had become almost a desert. Malcolm is also said to have rewarded with an ample gift of land those nobles who had so bravely helped him in his campaigns. We meet with no such magnanimous and patriotic king as Malcolm II. till we come to Robert the Bruce. The former fought the battle of his country’s independence in circumstances almost as desperate as those in which the latter waged his great struggle.

After all these great services Malcolm II. was entitled, one would think, to end his days in honor and die on the bed of peace. Yet no! if we may believe the Scottish chroniclers. Some of them speak of plots springing up around the brave old king, now eighty years of age, thirty of which he had passed on the throne. If so it were, the conspirators belonged probably to the old factions of Kenneth and Grim, who had opposed his succession to the throne. Malcolm is said to have been massacred in the castle of Glammis. The murderers fled on horseback and mysteriously disappeared.

In their haste they rode unawares into the loch of Forfar, the surface of which was at the time frozen over and covered with snow. The ice giving way beneath them, they sank and were drowned. When the thaw came their bodies were discovered, and being taken out were hung in chains on the shore of the lake. Why was it that in the case of so many of the kings of early Scotland the cypress was entwined with the laurel? Whoever mounted the “Stone of Destiny” seemed fated to descend from it by a death of violence. It was pleasant for the Scottish monarchs to be assured that when their reign was over they should come into the sepulchers of their fathers, and sleep at Icolmkill, but not so pleasant to reflect that probably the dagger of an assassin would open to them the doors of the royal vaults.

CHAPTER - A. D. 1034- 1057. DUNCAN AND MACBETH.

THE times that immediately succeeded those of Malcolm the Second down to Malcolm the Third, better known as Malcolm Canmore, might be dismissed with but brief notice were it not for one circumstance to be immediately adverted to. The events that fill up the interval between the two Malcolms were, it is true, of a tragic character, and stirred deeply the passions of those who were the chief actors in them, but they were aside from the highway of Scottish history, and have left their mark upon neither the character nor the course of the nation. It was the wars of Malcolm II. that most largely contributed to fix the position which Scotland was to hold in time to come. At a great cost it was called to buy its nationality and independence. The effort welded its people together. They were not likely soon to forget Murtlach and Barry, and other red fields, nor value lightly what had cost them so dear, or, by yielding to the spirit of clanship, incur the risk of having to fight such terrible battles over again.

The contentions that broke out under the two reigns on which we are now entering were of a commonplace character, the fruit of an ignoble ambition, and they would by this day have been forgotten had it not chanced that the immortal light of genius fell upon them, and invested them with a halo which, despite their inherent triviality, has given them a place in Scottish story from which they never can be dislodged. Shakespeare, as is well known, has borrowed materials from the transactions of these reigns which he has woven into one of the grandest dramas of the world’s literature. We enter, as it were, upon enchanted ground when we come to this period of Scottish history. We are well aware of this, and know that the grandeurs and terrors amid which for some time our path lies are imaginary, and yet despite our every effort to dismiss the illusions that surround us, and see only the realities of the case, the creation of the poet stubbornly keeps its place before our eye as the true image and picture of the time.

More than one attempt has been made of late to unravel the vexed question of how Macbeth stood related to Duncan, and what claims he had, or whether he had any, on the throne. The problem, however, seems to defy elucidation, and after all attempts it remains, we are compelled to say, where it was. Neither Scottish chronicle nor Scandinavian saga- and both keys have been had recourse to- can unlock the mystery. Perhaps one would regret were the obscurity wholly dispelled. The gloom and darkness which overhang the stage, and through which the actors and their actions are contemplated, make them seem gigantic and awful, and fill the mind of the beholder with a vague and pleasurable terror which he would be unwilling to exchange, it may be, for the calm mood to which the prosaic narrative of the historian would recall him. Nevertheless, at the risk of disobliging or disenchanting our readers we must state the facts of the history so far as they are known.

Malcolm II., as we have seen, left no male heir. He had, however, two daughters, one of whom he married to Crinan, the lay abbot of Dunkeld, one of the most powerful noblemen of the day in Scotland, and the other he espoused to Sigurd the Stout, the Norwegian earl of Orkney. Through these marriages Malcolm had two grandsons, Duncan and Thorfin. Duncan was the son of that daughter who was the wife of Crinan, Abbot of Dunkeld, and ultimately succeeded his grandfather on the throne. Thorfin was the son of Sigurd the Stout, and lost his father in the battle of Clantarf, when only five years old. So far the lineage of Duncan. It is only’ when we ask, who was Macbeth? that the perplexity begins. We have been furnished with two different tracings of the antecedents of Macbeth, and the course of events which led up to the murder of Duncan. The Scotch chroniclers follow one line: the Orkneyinga Saga adopts another: we prefer that of our own historians as being the more probable. According to them Kenneth III., the immediate predecessor of Malcolm II., had a granddaughter named Gruoch. This Gruoch had a son named Luach, whose claims to the throne under the old law of succession were about as good as those of Duncan, and might have made him a formidable competitor to Duncan but for his weakness of intellect. Gruoch’s first husband dying, she took for her second Macbeth, the mormaer of Ross and Moray. The nearness of Macbeth’s son- in- law to the throne gave some color to Macbeth’s pretensions to it, the more so that he possessed in eminent degree the qualities for governing so signally- lacking in Luach.

The Scottish throne of those days was no seat for an indolent man.

Unhappily the “gracious” Duncan who now filled it was an easy, goodnatured prince. He loved to take his kingly duties leisurely. While the northern robber pillaged and murdered with expeditious haste, Duncan punished with, deliberate slowness. In no long time the Highlands were in a blaze. The easy- going king saw that he must bestir himself and stamp out the flame, otherwise it would spread to the other provinces of his kingdom, and the northern rebel would do what the Dane had not been able to effect.

The rising was headed by a chieftain named MacDowal, who had drawn to his standard the western islanders and the more daring of the Irish by the hope of plunder, and the assurance of perfect impunity under a monarch “fitter,” he said, “to reign over droning monks than over brave men.” The king sent a troop to quell the insurrection, but the soldiers were cut in pieces, and their leader was taken and beheaded. It was now that Macbeth came to the front. He offered, were the command of the army given him, along with Banquo, thane of Lochaber, speedily to crush the insurgents and restore the reign of law.

If Duncan knew the real character of the man he must have felt it equally difficult to accept or to decline his proffered help. Macbeth was possessed in eminent measure of those qualities which Duncan lacked. He was brave, energetic, of large capacity, of quick genius, to which he added a boundless ambition. Duncan had no choice except to put himself into the hands of Macbeth. He and Banquo were sent against the rebels. They smote them with discomfiture, and the land had quiet.

Macbeth could hardly feel other than contempt for the man who took his ease on the throne, while he left to himself the labor of governing the country. “Would that I were king,” we hear the ambitious Macbeth say to himself, “the country should soon have rest.” Perhaps he persuaded himself that the throne was rightfully his, on the principle of the fittest and not the nearest. On the point of fitness as between the two there could be but one opinion. .Moreover, the thane of Ross was mated to \¢ t wife who spurred him on in his resolve to be king. Not that she was the demon which the dramatist has painted her, so far as history discloses the character of Lady Macbeth, but her mood was masculine, and she was not likely to be swayed by any tenderness of heart where her husband’s advancement was at stake.

As regards the precise way in which Macbeth removed Duncan and opened his own way to the throne, there have been various conjectures.

Shakespeare makes Duncan perish by treachery in the castle of Glammis.

Others say that he was waylaid and slain on the road to Forres. Macbeth, a brave man, was not likely to seek to compass by treachery what he could attain by open and bold means. We incline to what is now the general opinion, that the mormaer of Moray found a pretext for coming to an open rupture with King Duncan, and taking the field against him. A battle is said to have been fought betwixt them on the 15th of September 1040, at Bothgouanan, probably the modern Pitgaveny, near Elgin, in which Duncan, after a reign of five years, fell, and Macbeth took the throne. F427 The Orkneyinga Saga gives a different version of the career and death of Duncan. It is in substance this. On the death of Malcolm II. a fierce war broke out betwixt the two cousins, Thorfin, earl of Orkney and Caithness, and Duncan, King of Scotland. Duncan demanded from Thorfin the cession of Caithness, as being part of the kingdom of Scotland, leaving him in possession of the sovereignty of Orkney. Thorfin refused to surrender Caithness, and Duncan prepared to wrest it from him by force of arms. Both sides raised great armies. There followed many sanguinary battles both a land and sea. The war drew at last into the province of Moray, and Macbeth, the mormaer of that province, became the leading general of King Duncan. In the end Duncan sustained a crushing defeat; and when Macbeth saw that Thorfin had conquered and would retain possession of all his authorities, he slew his sovereign, went over to the side of Thorfin, and divided the kingdom with him. So far the Orkneyinga Saga. F428 It is out of these doubtful and slender facts that the mighty dramatist has constructed his tale of crime and horror and remorse. If history has gone but a very little way to assist him in his work, the power of his genius is all the more conspicuous. The actors are commonplace, so too are their actions, but the touch of Shakespeare kindles these ordinary incidents into grandeur. It is like the rising of the sun on the snowy Alps: where before there stood a range of’ dull cold mountains, there is now a chain of blazing torches. The stupendous embodiment of ambition, of pride, of cruelty, and of iron will which is presented to us in the person of Lady Macbeth is not the Gruoch of history, it is the Gruoch of the poet’s creation. The remorse of Macbeth and its fearful workings are too a picture which Shakespeare only could have painted. How solemnly does he read to us in the horrorstricken man the lesson that the Nemesis of crime is within. It is not the ermined judge nor the black scaffold, it isCONSCIENCE that is the avenger; and the moment the act is done, the vulture begins to gnaw. It is himself whom the murderer has slain.

Not less is the genius of Shakespeare shown in finding a fitting scene for his awful tragedy. He has placed it just where such a drama was possible. It would have been out of place in France or Italy. In the actors in the drama there is a depth of passion, an undemonstrative but terrible force of purpose which are not within the capabilities of Frenchmen or Italians.

Their constitutional frivolity and levity would have unfitted them for sustaining their parts with seemly decorum amid such grandeurs and horrors. They could not have helped letting it be seen that they were moved by only a mimic rage and despair. In the remorse of Macbeth there is not a little of the Puritan. Such a remorse was possible only in a land where something of the strength and tenderness, the brightness and the gloom of Puritanism as it was afterwards to be exhibited, had already found entrance. And as regards Lady Macbeth, she is the exaggerated expression of some of the less amiable qualities of the Scottish characterits doggedness, its self- resource and self- control- qualities which we meet with every day in humbler examples, but which, in the great instance before us, are shown in colossal size. The triumph of the poet is complete. This epoch in our country’s annals he has made to disappear, and has put his own grand fiction in its room. And despite that we are perfectly conscious of the deception he practices upon us, we willingly yield ourselves to the spell of his genius, and would part with more regret with the fiction of the dramatist than with the facts of the historian. The three hags on the moor of Forres, the lady or demon of Glammis Castle, the midnight horror in the royal bed- chamber, the alarms and consternation which the morning brought with it, these never were, and yet they keep possession of history’s stage as if it were rightfully theirs.

Duncan has fallen, and Macbeth, the son of Finnlace, has climbed over the royal corpse into the vacant seat. We expect to see the usurper become the tyrant; and if we credit Fordun, we are shut up to the conclusion that the slayer of the king was the oppressor of the people. But all the indications of authentic history point in another direction. The picture of Scotland under Macbeth, as seen in the obscure records of the time, is not that of an oppressed and distracted country; it is rather that of a land at peace, and in the quiet of good government, prosecuting its husbandry, extending its commerce, and adding yearly to its wealth. The reign of Macbeth lasted seventeen years, and of those ten or a dozen were years of exceptional prosperity. “Brimful,” says St. Berchan, sketching in one vivid phrase Scotland under Macbeth, “brimful was Alban, east and west.” The next’ sovereign displayed excellent talents for governing. He was a man of penetration, and saw that the best means of making his subjects forget the iniquitous act by which he had become possessed of the throne was to use the power thus obtained for their good by the exercise of an upright and vigorous administration. Even a bad law is preferable to no law, that is, to absolute lawlessness; and tyranny is a less calamity than unrestrained license. Macbeth acted on this maxim when he made justice be administered and law obeyed in all parts of his dominions and by all classes of his subjects. Scotland now steadied itself, and forgot the distractions of Duncan’s reign in a ten years’ prosperity.

Nor was Macbeth unmindful of the Church. We read of “Macbeth, the son of Finnlace, and Gruoch, daughter of Bode, granting the lands of Kirkness to the Culdees of Lochleven, from motives of piety and for the benefits of their prayers.” And yet another gift, even, the lands of Balgyne to the same fraternity, “with veneration and devotion.” The deed of gift is in the simplest form. It is made to “Almighty God, and the Culdees of Lochleven.” It is to be noted that in this dedication there is no mention of Pope, or Apostle, or Bishop. Kirkness and the lands of Balgyne are given directly to the Culdees, who are described as “the servants of God,” no other party having right or interest or property in the inheritances bequeathed. F429 Nevertheless the Nemesis of the guilty act by which Macbeth had seized the power which he turned to so good account both for himself and for his subjects continued to dog his steps. It needed no “weird sister,” like those who are said to have greeted Macbeth on the moor of Forres, to foretell in what way he should descend from the Lia- Fail, to which he had raised himself by the dagger. Meanwhile no one was in a position to oppose him.

The sons of Duncan, Malcolm and Donald, were probably of tender years when their father was slain, and till they should be grown to manhood Macbeth might promise himself the quiet possession of the throne. When they saw that their father was dead and that his slayer was on the throne, the young princes fled from a land where their lives were no longer safe.

Donald is said to have made good his escape into the eastern isles.

Malcolm found refuge in England. Edward the Confessor was then on the throne of that kingdom, and having known what exile was, he gave all the more cordial and gracious a welcome to the young prince who sought his protection in his evil day. Years passed on: Malcolm grew to manhood: the time came for asserting his claim to his ancestral kingdom, and with it came the power of making it good. Siward, the powerful Earl of Northumberland, was a relation of Malcolm’s, the sister or the cousin of the Earl being Malcolm’s mother. Siward now resolved to assist his relative Malcolm to recover his paternal throne. The exp. edition undertaken for that purpose is obscurely hinted at in the Saxon Chronicle and in the Ulster Annals. We are told in the former that in the year Earl Siward went with a large army into Scotland, that he invaded it with both a land and a naval force, that he made great slaughter of the Scots, but that their king escaped. Siward only half accomplished his object in this expedition. He installed Malcolm in the provinces of Cumbria and the Lothians, but he failed to overthrow the usurper and give the throne to Malcolm.

Meanwhile Siward died, and the matter rested for a few years, Malcolm reigning as King of Cumbria, and Macbeth occupying the Scottish throne.

From this time Macbeth himself seems to have prepared the way for his own downfall. The approach of the rightful prince and the forebodings with which it filled the usurper brought back the memory of his crime, and appears to have wrought in him a morose and gloomy temper. He saw conspirators in the nobles of his court. His suspicions fell mainly on Banquo, the most powerful nobleman in his dominions, to whose posterity the prophecy of some witch, as tradition says, had given the throne after Macbeth. He is said to have invited him to a banquet, and dismissed him from the royal table with every mark of kindness, although he had already given orders that assassins should waylay him on the road as he rode homewards. Banquo murdered, Macbeth is said to have transferred his suspicions to Macduff, thane of Fife, and after Banquo the next most powerful nobleman in Scotland. One day, when it happened that Macbeth and Macduff were together, the testy monarch growled out a threat which made Macduff feel that his destruction was resolved upon. The thane of Fife fled into England, but Macbeth, baulked of his prey, confiscated his estates. The nobles made haste to get away from the court, not knowing on whom the royal displeasure might next light. The affections of the people toward their monarch were cooled. These latter acts effaced from their memory the many good deeds of Macbeth’s better years. They saw the man who had formerly been swayed by justice now governed by passion.

The friends of the late king who had feared to show themselves came forth and began to demand that the son of the murdered Duncan should be recalled and placed on his father’s throne.

Macduff, driven into England, would naturally open communications with Malcolm, who, these three years had been contentedly governing his kingdom of Cumbria. He would tell him that the Scots were tired of Macbeth, that they were ready to receive back the son of their former king, and he would urge him to take the field and strike for his paternal inheritance. Prince Malcolm resolved to do as the thane of Fife had counseled. Tostig, the new Earl of Northumberland, came to his help in this second attempt to recover the throne, and he soon found himself strong enough to advance into Scotland. The national sentiment rallied in his support as soon as he appeared. The force he brought with him was recruited by daily deserters from the standard of Macbeth; and so overjoyed were the soldiers at these presages of victory, that, as Buchanan tells us, they placed green boughs in their helmets, liker an army returning in triumph than one advancing to battle. They found, however, that the campaign was not to be ended by a single blow. Their antagonist was brave, resolute, and was now grown desperate, and a good deal of hard fighting was required to drive him from the throne. Few trustworthy details of the campaign have come down to us. One thing is certain, it ended in the defeat of Macbeth. He was driven across the Mounth, and slain by Malcolm at Lumphanan in Mar on the 15th day of August 1057. F431 The uproar of civil war was instantly drowned in the rejoicings of the Scottish nation around the Stone of Destiny, on which they now saw seated the scion of their ancient kings, and the crown, wrested from the usurper, transferred to the brow of its rightful owner. Malcolm Canmore was king.

CHAPTER - A. D. 1057- 1087. MALCOLM CANMORE AND WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.

SCOTLAND was on the threshold of great changes. The day on which Malcolm Canmore took his seat on the Lia- Fail at Scone and assumed the crown of his ancestors, may be said to have been the first day of the new age. The war with the Viking now lay behind the Scots. They had brought their nationality and independence out of these bloody fields not only intact, but more consolidated than ever. But the nation had not yet made its final escape from the refining fires of the battlefield: the struggles that lay before it were different in kind and higher in character than those rude contests which had exercised their strength till now. The past battle had lasted two centuries; the coming one was to continue four hundred years, and to conquer in it would demand greater patience and a more enlightened patriotism than had sufficed to win victory on previous fields.

The new invaders were not to come clad in mail and brandishing spear; they were to appear in the soft garb of peaceful ecclesiastics. This was a mode of warfare the simple- minded Scots did not understand. It was easier for them to withstand the battle- axes of the Dane than the sophisms of the priest. Armies of stealthy- paced men, with shorn crowns, hands clasped in prayer, and eyes up- turned, as if they deigned not to regard the earth on which they trod, or coveted aught upon it, were to cross the Tweed, and without fighting so much as one pitched battle, were to take possession of the country and spread their tents by its river sides, and appropriate its meadows and pasture- lands as their peculiar inheritance, leaving the more sterile parts, the bare moor, and the rocky mountain, to the children of the soil. For an invasion like this the Scots of the twelfth century were but ill prepared. The oil in Columba’s lamp was far spent, its flame had sunk low, and the consequence was that the men who had boldly met the Danes and chased them from their shores, or flung them into Scottish graves, were likely to offer only a feeble fight to the champions of an arrogant ecclesiasticism, and in the end bow their necks to an authority that claimed to be Divine.

For a short space, however, this battle was postponed. Other cares pressed on the attention of Malcolm the “big head” and his Scots, who, though they had waxed valiant in the fight of arms, were grown lukewarm in that other combat which it was their special mission to maintain with that great spiritual power which was trampling on the independence of all nations, and was about to put her yoke on their neck. Let us first briefly narrate these preliminary occurrences before coming to the greater battle beyond.

It is the 14th October 1066, and the knights and warriors whom William Duke of Normandy has led across the sea are mustering on the field of Hastings. The battle about to be joined betwixt Harold and William is for the crown of England. With the close of the bloody day comes a close to the life and reign of the English king. Harold is stretched a corpse on the field, and his crown has passed to the conqueror William. In the short, stout, iron- featured, deep- thoughted, slow- speaking Norman duke the English have found a master. They saw without alarm the scepter pass into his strong hand; but when it began to grow into an iron rod they knew what the Norman victory on the field of Hastings imported, and stood aghast at the vista it had opened. Nevertheless the tyrant of Normandy was the best friend of the England of that day. William found the country without unity, and therefore without power: it was transferring its scepter from one weak hand to another; it was wasting its blood in useless battles, and its patriotism in party strifes. Progress had become impossible to it; but when William stood up, this miserable antagonism of interests and parties, which was pulling England in pieces, had an end. Faction fled before him.

Angle and Saxon and Dane, to which we have now to add Norman, began to cohere and grow into one people, and now England entered on its great career.

William had fulfilled his mission. He had called into being the great English people of the future, and ought to have rested content with what he had accomplished. But like almost all men who have been the special favorites of fortune, and have been visited with sudden and overflowing success, William did not know when he had finished his work and come to the limit beyond which no effort of ambition and no strength or skill in arms could carry him. And now we are brought back to Scotland, the independence and nationality of which was again brought into jeopardy by the triumph of the Norman arms in England.

It is not easy to determine whether it was Malcolm Canmore or the English monarch who was to blame for the fierce war that now broke out betwixt England and Scotland. Certain it is there is no bloodier chapter in all the Border history of the two kingdoms than that which we are now called briefly to write. There were interested motives on both sides prompting to a policy of war. William might feel that his English conquests were not secure till he had enclosed them within the four seas, and could stretch his scepter from the Channel to the Pentland Frith. And it was equally natural for the Scottish king to seek to fortify himself against the formidable danger which had suddenly risen on his southern frontier by expelling the Norman from the throne of England, and seating upon it a scion of its ancient kings. Malcolm has been all the more open to this suspicion from the circumstance that the heir to the English throne was now his brotherin- law. And yet it does not appear to have been Malcolm but William who took the initiative in this enterprise.

Edgar Aetheling, the representative of the royal family of England, was now resident at the court of Malcolm Canmore. How he came to be so we shall immediately see. William the Conqueror saw danger to his throne in the escape of Edgar to the Scottish court, and demanded that the royal fugitive should be given up. Sooner than surrender into the hands of his enemy the prince who had cast himself upon his protection, Malcolm would risk crown and kingdom and all. His refusal incensed the haughty ruler of England, and his anger was still more inflamed by seeing Malcolm open the gates of his kingdom to the crowd of Saxon nobles who, chased from England by the terror of William, had flocked to Scotland. Flushed with success, the Conqueror would deal with the little country as he had dealt with the greater: he would add it to his English possessions, and of the two countries make one England. His victorious arms had already accomplished a greater achievement.

William sent his army, but did not come in person. According to the English chroniclers, the main authority for these warlike events, he gave the command of his forces to an Earl Roger. William’s lieutenant never returned to tell him how he had sped. Approaching the Scotch border his army was routed and dispersed, and himself slain by his own soldiers in expiation of his want of skill or his want of success. William sent a greater army, giving the command of it to the Earl of Glo’ster. Glo’ster perpetrated an harrowing amount of sack and pillage as he advanced northward, but won no victory. Before him was a champaign country, where the plough was at work, and villages smiled; behind him was a devastated land, strewed with corpses, and darkened with the smoke of burning habitations.

A third army, more numerous than the first two, William is said to have sent against Scotland. The command was given to his brother Odo, formerly Bishop of Beyaux, now created Earl of Kent. Odo had no better success than his predecessors. Having gleaned what remained of the spoil of these provinces, Odo was returning southward laden with booty, when Malcolm fell upon, dispersed his army with great slaughter, and returned to Scotland with troops of miserable captives in his train. Even yet William was incapable of perceiving that he had undertaken a task beyond his power.

Instead of dying out, the war acquired new life. The powerful monarch with whom the Scottish king maintained this combat now felt the necessity of bringing all his resources into it, and the flames burst out in greater vehemency and on a wider area. The Saxon chronicle tells us that in the year 1072 King William came in person into Scotland, sending his fleet into the Tay, and marching his land troops round by Stirling to Abernethy, and there he came to terms with Malcolm, the King of Scotia.

There is a consent of English historians as regards this march into Scotland of William the Conqueror. It receives some appearance of probability from the fact that in 1072 he had made a conquest of the Isle of Ely, and this might afford him leisure to raise an army and strike at the root of all his dangers by subduing Scotland. The English say he entered Scotland by Galloway, the provinces of Durham and Northumberland being so depopulated and ravaged that they could not subsist his army on its march through them. Ailred, Abbot of Rivaux, says that he traversed Lothian and Stirlingshire, crossing the Forth by the Carse, the great gateway of entrance into the northern division of the kingdo