Chapter 12

[Footnote 104: I confess I have still some doubt as to this island having received its name from a church founded by S. Columba-_cill_, or that he ever resided in it, and I should like to have your present opinion upon the matter. Fordun _alone_ seems to me a very insufficient authority for a fact which is very improbable; and the legend of the seal, which I published, appears to me to be a better authority for the ancient name of the island--"_Colmanus nomine, qui ab alijs Mocholmocus._ Quia Colmoe & Colman sunt diminutiva, a _Colum._ 1. Columba, et affectus vel venerationis causa additur _mo_; et hinc _Mocholmocus_," Colgan, vol. i. p. 155. Colgan's authority is of no value, as his statement is wholly founded on Fordun. This is proved by his notice of the monastery in his catalogue of the churches founded by Columba. "Colmis-inse Monasterium canonicorum Regularium in AEmonia insula inter Edinburgum et InverKithin. _Fordonus, ibid._" As the cautious Dr. Lanigan observes--"Colgan was, to use a vulgar phrase, bewitched as to the mania of ascribing foundations of monasteries to our eminent saints." Further, it should not be forgotten that Fordun tells us that in his time the island was called "_Saint Colmy's Inche_." See the passage quoted by Ussher, _De Brit. Ec._, p. 704. Now, I know of no instance of the corruption of Columb, or Columba, into Colmy, which appears rather a corruption of Colmoc or Colman.

If this be not the Insula Colmoci of the _regal_ seal--"round seals have something royal"--where are we to find it? Not in Ireland, certainly, though our calendars record the names of two islands called Inch Mocholmoc, from saints of that name. One of these was in Leinster; the locality of the other is unknown. They also record the patron day of a St. Mocholmoc, _na hainse_, "of the island," at the 30th October. Could we find what was the patron day of the saint of Inche Colm it might help to settle the matter. One of the above saints is called Colman _Ailither_, or the pilgrim. Chattering in my discursive way, let me add that a Saint Mocholmoc appears to have been a favourite with the Danes of Dublin in the twelfth century, for we find in the lists of the Danish Kings of Dublin that of Donald MacGilloholmoch as reigning from 1125 to 1134; and another of the name is noticed by Regan as an Irish king, who lived not far from Dublin, and who offered his services to the English against the Irish and Danes in 1171. There was a Gillmeholmoc's Lane in Dublin, near Christ's Church, where, as Harris conjectures, he, or some of his family, inhabited. Did this royal Danish family adopt its surname in honour of St. Colman of Lindisfarne, of whom it must have heard a great deal during the Danish occupation of Northumbria, the kings of which were for a long time also kings of Dublin? Or may it have been from a remembrance of the shelter and honourable interment to their dead, given to their predecessors in the little island of St. Colme (or Colmoch!) something more than a century before--said island having derived its name from the Lindisfarne Saint, who may have occasionally occupied it as his desert or hermitage? I do not expect that you will not laugh at all this! but a hearty laugh is not a bad thing in this gloomy weather.--P.]

[Footnote 105: See extract in Goodall's edition of the _Scotichronicon_, vol. i. p. 6. (footnote), and in Colgan's _Trias Thaumaturga_, vol. ii. p. 466.]

[Footnote 106: Dr. O'Donovan's _Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland_, vol. i. p. 557.]

[Footnote 107: In Scotland we have various alleged instances of caves being thus employed as anchorite or devotional cells, and some of them still show rudely cut altars, crosses, etc.--as the so-called cave of St. Columba on the shores of Loch Killesport in North Knapdale, with an altar, a font or piscina, and a cross cut in the rock (_Origines Parochiales_, vol. ii. p. 40); the cave of St. Kieran on Loch Kilkerran in Cantyre (_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 12); the cave of St. Ninian on the coast of Wigtonshire (_Old Statistical Account of Scotland_, vol. xvii. p. 594); the cave of St. Molio or Molaise, in Holy Island, in the Clyde, with Runic inscriptions on its walls (see an account of them in Dr. Daniel Wilson's admirable _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, pp. 531 to 533, etc). The island of Inchcolm pertains to Fifeshire, and in this single county there are at least four caves that are averred to have been the retreats which early Christian devotees and ascetics occupied as temporary abodes and oratories, or in which they occasionally kept their holy vigils; namely, the cave at Dunfermline, which bears the name of Malcolm Canmore's devout Saxon queen St. Margaret, and which is said to have contained formerly a stone table or altar, with "something like a crucifix" upon it (Dr. Chalmers' _Historical Account of Dunfermline_, vol. i. pp. 88, 89); the cave of St. Serf at Dysart (the name itself--Dysart--an instance, in all probability, of the "_desertum_" of the text, p. 124), in which that saint contested successfully in debate, according to the _Aberdeen Breviary_, with the devil, and expelled him from the spot (see _Breviarium Aberdonense_, Mens. Julii, fol. xv, and Mr. Muir's _Notices of Dysart_ printed for the Maitland Club, p. 3); the caves of Caplawchy, on the east Fifeshire coast, marked interiorly with rude crosses, etc., and which, according to Wynton, were inhabited for a time by "St. Adrian wyth hys cumpany" of disciples (_Orygynale Chronykel of Scotland_, book iii. c. viii.); and the cave of St. Rule at St. Andrews, containing a stone table or altar on its east side, and on its west side the supposed sleeping cell of the hermit excavated out of the rock (_Old Statistical Account_, vol. xiii. p. 202). In _Marmion_(Canto i. 29) Sir Walter Scott describes the "Palmer" as, with solemn vows to pay,

"To fair St. Andrews bound, Within the _ocean-cave_ to pray, Where good St. Rule his holy lay, From midnight to the dawn of day, Sung to the billows' sound."]

[Footnote 108: _Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum_, lib. v. cap. 12.]

[Footnote 109: _Ibid._ lib. v. c. 9. Bede further states that this anchoret subsequently went to Frisland to preach as a missionary there, but he reaped no fruit from his labours among his barbarous auditors. "Returning then (adds Bede) to the beloved place of his peregrination, he gave himself up to our Lord in his wonted repose; for since he could not be profitable to strangers by teaching them the faith, he took care to be the more useful to his own people by the example of his virtue."]

[Footnote 110: Published in 1845 by the Surtees Society, _Libellus de Vita, etc., S. Godrici_, p. 65, etc.]

[Footnote 111: _Ibid._ pp. 45 and 192.]

[Footnote 112: See Wordsworth's beautiful inscription--"For the spot where the hermitage stood on St. Herbert's island, Derwentwater."--Ed. of 1858, p. 258.--P.]

[Footnote 113: _Ibid._ footnote, p. 46.]

[Footnote 114: Bede's _Vita Sancti Cuthberti_, cap. 16, 28, 46, etc.]

[Footnote 115: _De Beati Cuthberti Virtutibus_, pp. 63 and 66.]

[Footnote 116: See, _The Flowers of the Lives of the most renowned Saincts of the Three Kingdoms_, by Hierome Porter, p. 321.]

[Footnote 117: Boece's _History and Chronicles of Scotland_, book ix. c. 17, or vol. ii. p. 98; Leslie's _De Rebus Gestis Scotorum_, lib. iv. p. 152; Dempster's _Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Scotorum_, lib. ii. p. 122, or vol. i. p. 66.]

[Footnote 118: The poem alluded to is designated "De Pontificibus et Sanctis Ecclesiae Eboracencis." A copy of it is printed in Gale's _Historiae Britannicae, etc. Scriptores_, vol. iii. p. 703, _seq._ The famous author of this poem, Alcuin, who was brought up at York, and probably born there about the year 735, became afterwards, as is well known, the councillor and confidant of Charlemagne. The application to the Bass of the lines in which he describes the anchoret residence of St. Balther is evident:

Est locus undoso circumdatus undique ponto, Rupibus horrendis praerupto et margine septus, In quo belli potens terreno in corpore miles Saepius aerias vincebat Balthere turmas; etc.

The Bass was not the only hermit's island on our eastern coasts which was imagined, in these credulous times, to be the occasional abode of evil spirits. According to Bede no one had dared to dwell alone on the island of Farne before St. Cuthbert selected it as his anchoret habitation, because demons resided there (propter demorantium ibi phantasias demonum). _Vita Cuthberti_, cap. 16. See also the undevilling of the cave of Dysart by St. Serf in the footnote of page 125, _supra_; and some alleged feats of St. Patrick and St. Columba in this direction in Dr. O'Donovan's _Annals of the Four Masters_, vol. i. p. 156. Two other islands in the Firth of Forth are noted in ancient ecclesiastical history--viz., Inch May and Inch Keith. "The ile of May, decorit (to use the words of Bellenden) with the blude and martirdome of Sanct Adriane and his fallowis," was the residence of that Hungarian missionary and his disciples when they were attacked and murdered about the year 874 by the Danes (Bellenden's _Translation of Boece's History_, vol. i. p. 37); see also vol. ii. p. 206; Dempster's _Historia Eccl. Gentis Scotorum_, lib. i. 17, and vol. i. p. 20; and Fordun, in the _Scotichronicon_, lib. i. c. vi., where he describes "Maya, prioratus cujus est cella canonicorum Sancti Andreae de Raymonth; ubi requiescit Sanctus Adrianus, cum centum sociis suis sanctis martyribus." Inch Keith is enumerated by Dr. Reeves (_Preface to Life of Columba_, p. 66) as one of the Scotch churches of St. Adamnan, Abbot of Iona from A.D. 679 to 704, and the biographer of St. Columba[119]--Fordun having long ago described it as a place "in qua praefuit Sanctus Adamnanus abbas, qui honorifice suscepit Sanctum Servanum, cum sociis suis, in ipsa insula, ad primum suum adventum in Scotiam." Andrew Wynton, himself the Prior of St. Serf's Isle in Lochlevin, describes also, in his old metrical _Orygynale Chronykil of Scotland_, vol. i. p. 128, this apocryphal meeting of the two saints

"at Inchkeith, The ile betweene Kingorne and Leth."

_The Breviary of Aberdeen_, in alluding to this meeting, points out that the St. Serf received by Adamnan was not the St. Serf of the Dysart Cave, and hence also not the baptiser of St. Kentigern at Culross, as told in the legend of his mother, St. Thenew, or St. Thenuh--a female saint whose very existence the good Presbyterians of Glasgow had so entirely lost sight of, that centuries ago they unsexed the very name of the church dedicated to her in that city, and came to speak of it under the uncanonical appellation of St. Enoch's. This first St. Serf and Adamnan lived two centuries, at least, apart. In these early days Inch Keith was a place of no small importance, if it be--as some (see Macpherson's _Geographical Illustrations of Scottish History_) have supposed--the "urbs Giudi" of Bede, which he speaks of as standing in the midst of the eastern firth, and contrasts with Alcluith or Dumbarton, standing on the side of the western firth. The Scots and Picts were, he says, divided from the Britons "by two inlets of the sea (duobus sinibus maris) lying betwixt them, both of which run far and broad into the land of Britain, one from the Eastern, and the other from the Western Ocean, though they do not reach so as to touch one another. The eastern has in _the midst of it_ the city of Giudi (Orientalis habit in medio sui _urbem Giudi_). The western has on it, that is, on the right hand thereof (ad dextram sui), the city of Alchuith, which in their language means the 'Rock of Cluith,' for it is close by the river of that name (Clyde)." (Bede's _Hist. Ecclesiast._, book i. c. xii.) In reference to the supposed identification of Inch Keith and this "urbs Giudi," let me add (1.) that Bede's description (in medio sui) as strongly applies to the Island of Garvie, or Inch Garvie, lying midway between the two Queensferries: (2.) it is perhaps worthy of note that the term "Giudi" is in all probability a Pictish proper name, one of the kings of the Picts being surnamed "Guidi," or rather "Guidid" (see Pinkerton's _Inquiry into the History of Scotland_, vol. i. p. 287, and an extract from the _Book of Ballymote_, p. 504); and (3.) that the word "urbs," in the language of Bede, signifies a place important, not so much for its size as from its military or ecclesiastic rank, for thus he describes the rock (petra) of Dumbarton as the "urbs Alcluith," and Coldingham as the "urbs Coludi" (_Hist. Eccl._, lib. iv. c. 19. etc.),--the Saxon noun "_ham_" house or village, having, in this last instance, been in former times considered a sufficient appellative for a place to which Bede applies the Latin designation of "urbs."]

[Footnote 119: As I have not the _Life of Columba_ at hand to refer to, I must assume that so able an archaeologist as my friend Dr. Reeves had sufficient authority for this statement. If it rested only on Fordun or Wynton, I should deem their authority insufficient to establish as a fact what seems to me so improbable. Assuming the story to have had a foundation, might not the real Adamnan have been the priest and monk of the monastery of Coludi or Coldingham, of whom Bede has written? Coldingham, in his time, belonged to the Northumbrian kingdom.--P.]

[Footnote 120: See his edition of Adamnan's _Life of Saint Columba_, p. 366.]

[Footnote 121: Colgan refers to the Life of _S. Fintani Eremita ad 15 Novemb., Tr. T._, p. 606:--"Tir mille anachoritas in Momonia est. S. Hibaro Episcopo cujusdam quaestionis decidendae causa simul collect [illegible] & Angelus Dei ad convivium a S. Brigida Christo paratum invitativies had so in auxilium per Jesum Christum." Quoted from the _Book of Litanies of S. AEngus_, on the same page.

See also the _Summary of the Saints_ in that _Litany_ in Ward's _Vita S. Rumoldi_, pp. 204, 205.

In short, the notices of deserts, hermits, and anchorites to be found, lives of saints, etc. etc., are innumerable.--P.]

[Footnote 122: I think it very improbable, if the monastery founded by Alexander be meant.--P.]

[Footnote 123: This is no fit place to discuss the ages of the two Round Towers of Brechin and Abernethy. But it may perhaps prove interesting to some future antiquary if it is here mentioned, that when Dr. Petrie, in his _Ecclesiastical Architecture of Ireland_ (p. 410), gives "about the year 1020"[124] as the probable date of the erection of the Bound Tower of Brechin, he chiefly relied--as he has mentioned to me, when conversing upon the subject,--for this approach to the era of its building, upon that entry in the ancient _Chronicon de Regibus Scotorum_, etc., published by Innes, in which it is stated that King Kenneth MacMalcolm, who reigned from A.D. 971 to A.D. 994, "tribuit magnam civitatem Brechne domino." (See the Chronicon in Innes' _Critical Inquiry_, vol. ii. p. 788.) The peculiarities of architecture in the Round Tower of Brechin assimilate it much with the Irish Bound Towers of Donoughmore and Monasterboice, both of which Dr. Petrie believes to have been built in or about the tenth century. If we could, in such a question, rely upon the authority of Hector Boece, the Round Tower of Brechin is at least a few years older than the probable date assigned to it by Dr. Petrie. For, in describing the inroads of the Danes into Forfarshire about A.D. 1012, he tells us that these invaders destroyed and burned down the town of Brechin, and all its great church, except "_turrim quandam rotundam_ mira arte constructam." (_Scotorum Historiae_, lib. xi. 251, of Paris Edit, of 1526.)[125] This reference to the Round Tower of Brechin has escaped detection, perhaps because it has been omitted by Bellenden and Holinshed in their translations. No historical notices, I believe, exist, tending to fix in any probable way the exact age of the Round Tower of Abernethy; but one or two circumstances bearing upon the inquiry are worthy of note. We are informed, both by the _Chronicon Pictorum_ and by Bede, that in the eighth or ninth year of his reign, or about A.D. 563, Brude, King of the Picts, embraced Christianity under the personal teaching of St. Columba. At Brude's death, in 586, Garnard succeeded, and reigned till 597; and he was followed by Nectan II., who reigned till 617. Fordun (_Scotichronicon_, lib. iv. cap. 12) and Wynton (book v. ch. 12), both state that King Garnard founded the collegiate Church of Abernethy; and Fordun further adds that he had found this information in a chronicle of the Church of Abernethy itself, which, is now lost; "in quadam Chronica ecclesiae de Abirnethy reperimus." But the register of the Priory of St. Andrews mentions Garnard's successor on the Pictish throne, Nectan II., as the builder of Abernethy, "hic aedificavit Abernethyn" (Innes' _Critical Inquiry_, p. 800). The probability is, that Garnard, towards the end of his reign, founded and commenced the building of the church establishment of Abernethy, and that it was concluded and consecrated in the early part of the reign of Nectan. The church was dedicated to St. Brigid; and the _Chronicon Pictorum_ (Innes' _Inquiry_, p. 778), in ascribing its foundation to Nectan I. (about A.D. 455) instead of Nectan II., commits a palpable anachronism, and very evident error, as St. Brigid did not die till a quarter of the next century had elapsed. (_Annals of the Four Masters_ under the year 525; Colgan's _Trias Thaumaturga_, p. 619.) Again, according to the more certain evidence of Bede, another Pictish king, still of the name of Nectan (Naitanus Rex Pictorum), despatched messengers, about the year 710, to Ceolfrid, Abbot of Bede's own Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow, requesting, among other matters, that architects should be sent to him to build in his country a church of stone, according to the manner of the Romans et architectos sibi mitti petiit, qui juxta morem Romanorum ecclesiam in lapide in gente ipsius facerent. (_Hist. Eccles._, lib. v. c. xxi.) Forty years previously, St. Benedict or Biscop, the first Abbot of Jarrow, had brought there from Gaul, masons (caementarios) to build for him "ecclesiam lapideam juxta Romanorum morem." (See Bede's _Vita Beatorum Abbatum_.) Now it is probable that the Round Tower of Abernethy was not built in connection with the church established there by the Pictish kings at the beginning of the seventh century, for no such structures seem to have been erected in connection with Pictish churches in any other part of the Pictish kingdom; and if at Abernethy, the capital of the Picts, a Round Tower had been built in the seventh century of stone and lime, the Abbot of Jarrow would scarcely have been asked in the eighth century, by a subsequent Pictish king, to send architects to show the mode of erecting a church of stone in his kingdom. Nor is it in the least degree more likely that these ecclesiastic builders, invited by King Nectan in the early years of the eighth century, erected themselves the Round Tower of Abernethy; for the building of such towers was, if not totally unknown, at least totally unpractised by the ecclesiastic architects of England and France within their own countries.[126] The Scotic or Scoto-Irish race became united with the Picts into one kingdom in the year 843, under King Kenneth MacAlpine, a lineal descendant and representative of the royal chiefs who led the Dalriadic colony from Antrim to Argyleshire, about A.D. 506. (See the elaborate genealogical table of the Scottish Dalriadic kings in Dr. Reeves' edition of _Adamnan's Life of Columba_, p. 438.) The purely "Scotic period" of our history, as it has been termed, dates from this union of the Picts and Scots under Kenneth MacAlpine in 843, till Malcolm Canmore ascended the throne in 1057; and there is every probability that the Round Towers of Abernethy and Brechin were built during the period between these two dates, or during the regime of the intervening Scotic or Scoto-Irish kings,--in imitation of the numerous similar structures belonging to their original mother-church in Ireland. We may feel very certain, also, that they were not erected later than the commencement of the twelfth century, for by that date the Norman or Romanesque style,--which presents no such structures as the Irish Round Towers, was apparently in general use in ecclesiastic architecture in Scotland, under the pious patronage of Queen Margaret Atheling and her three crowned sons. Abernethy--now a small village--was for centuries a royal and pontifical city, and the capital of a kingdom, "fuit locus ille sedes principalis, regalis, et pontificalis, totius regni Pictorum" (Goodall's _Scotichronicon_, vol. i. p. 189); but all its old regal and ecclesiastical buildings have utterly vanished, with the exception only of its solitary and venerable Round Tower. And perhaps the preservation of the Round Tower in this, and in numerous instances in Ireland, amidst the general ruin and devastation which usually surround them, is owing to the simple circumstance that these Towers--whatever were their uses and objects--were structures which, in consequence of their remarkable combination of extreme tallness and slenderness, required to be constructed from the first of the very best and strongest, and consequently of the most durable building materials which could be procured; while the one-storeyed or two-storeyed wood-roofed churches, and other low and lighter ecclesiastical edifices with which they were associated, demanded far less strength in the original construction of their walls, and consequently have, under the dilapidating effects of centuries, much more speedily crumbled down and perished.]

[Footnote 124: The recollection of the error which I made by a carelessness not in such matters usual with me, in assigning this date 1020 instead of between the years 971 and 994, as I ought to have done, has long given me annoyance, and a lesson never to trust to memory in dates; for it was thus I fell into the mistake. I had the year 1020 on my mind, which is the year assigned by Pinkerton for the writing of the _Chron. Pictorum_, and, without stopping to remember or to refer, I took it for granted that it was the year of Kenneth's death, or rather his gift.--P.]

[Footnote 125: I congratulate you warmly on the discovery of this interesting and most valuable notice. Surely Boece could have had no object to serve by forging such a statement, nor had he such antiquarian knowledge as would have enabled him to forge a statement so consistent with the conclusion fairly to be drawn from the entry in the chronicle, and the characteristics of the architecture of the tower itself. It appears to me that no rational scepticism can in future be indulged as to the conclusion that the erection of this beautiful tower must be referred to the last quarter of the tenth century.--P.]