Now these two forms of the legend are in very striking contrast to each other, especially in the part which Regulus plays in each. In the former and older legend, he makes his first appearance when he meets the king at the gate called Matha with the relics. In the latter he is introduced into the history of the removal of the relics from Patras, and reserves a portion to be conveyed to a distant land; and thus, along with him, the whole history is removed back to the fourth century. His character too, and that of his foundation, is quite different in the two legends. In the older he is presented to us as a monk and abbot. He and all his people follow a monastic life at St. Andrews, and he founds abbacies or monasteries. He possesses the third part of all Scotia, and devotes it to the foundation of abbacies or monasteries throughout the whole of it. In the later legend he appears as a bishop. He has two presbyters and two Deacons among his followers, and he founds churches and oratories which are dedicated to St. Andrew. In the one we have a purely monastic foundation; in the other a church with secular clergy. The older legend, therefore, takes us back for Regulus to the Monastic Church which had been founded among the southern Picts by Columba towards the end of the sixth century, and to it we must look for the Regulus of this form of the legend. Now, we find it stated in the Acts of Farannan that, after the great synod of Drumceitt in the year 573, which was attended both by Columba and by Aidan, king of Dalriada, the former, before he returned to Britain, founded a church in the Region of Cairbre. This was the church of Drumcliffe, situated a little to the north of Sligo, in the barony of Cairbury and diocese of Elphin, the foundation of which is attributed to Columba in the old Irish Life. We are then told that on this occasion he was met by the leading ecclesiastics of the neighbourhood, with the men and women most noted for sanctity, who accompanied him in some of his wanderings. Now, among these ecclesiastics we find recorded the name of Regulus, or Riagail, of Muicinis, an island in the lake formed by the river Shannon called Loch Derg;^[493] and this Regulus appears in the old Irish Martyrologies on the 16th day of October. In the Felire of Angus the Culdee there is commemorated, on that day, ‘Riagail, gifted was his career;’ and the gloss is, ‘that is, Riagail of Muicinish, in Loch Derg.’^[494] Regulus of St. Andrews, however, is commemorated in the Scottish Calendar on the 17th of the same month; and we find that there is usually a confusion in the celebrations on these two days, when the 16th day of the month is also the 17th day before the kalends of the next month.^[495] We also find that, while the name of the Irish Regulus’ foundation is Muicinis, or the isle of swine, the name of St. Andrews, before it received that of Chilrymont, is said in the second legend to have been Muicross, or the promontory of swine. It seems, therefore, to be a reasonable conclusion that the Regulus of Muicinis, commemorated on the 16th October, and the Regulus of Muicross, on the 17th of that month, were the same person, and that the historic Regulus belongs to a Columban church founded among those which Columba established among the southern Picts during the last years of his life, and at the same time when Cainnech of Achaboe had his hermitage there; and to those older foundations must be appropriated the churches dedicated to Regulus, or St. Rule.

The title of the older legend states that the abbacies or monasteries then founded ‘in the territory of the Picts, which is now called Scotia,’ that is, in the districts between the Firth of Forth and the river Spey, had to a great extent passed into the possession of laymen; and the legend seems to attribute this to the depredations of the occupiers of the land—the Picts, Scots, Danes, Norwegians and others who took possession of them as a safe refuge. The order in which these occupiers are enumerated is historically correct; and, though the expressions are somewhat obscure, they seem to indicate that the expulsion of the Columban monks, which terminated the Monastic Church in these districts, had been followed by the same process as we learn from Bede took place in Northumbria after the Scottish monks had withdrawn from thence. The assimilation of the church there to that of Rome, and the reaction towards a secular clergy, appear to have led there to a secularisation of the monasteries to a great extent. Bede gives us an account of this in a letter written in the last year of his life, that is, in 735, to Bishop Ecgberct; and the picture he draws shows a complete disorganisation of the monastic institution in the land, and its usurpation by the secular world. ‘As you yourself very well know,’ he says, ‘those who are utterly regardless of a monastic life have got into their power so many places under the name of monasteries, that there is no place at all which the sons of the nobility or of veteran soldiers may occupy.’ Again, ‘But there are others guilty of a still more grievous offence. For, though they are themselves laics, and neither habituated to nor actuated by the love of a regular life, yet, by pecuniary payments to the kings, and under pretext of founding monasteries, they purchase for themselves territories in which they may have freer scope for their lust; and, moreover, they cause these to be assigned to them by royal edicts for an hereditary possession;’ ‘and, though they themselves are laymen, yet they have monks under their rule,—or, rather, they are not monks when they assemble there, but such as, having been expelled from the true monasteries for the crime of disobedience, are found wandering up and down; or those whom they themselves have succeeded in alluring from these monasteries; or, at any rate, those among their own servants whom they have been able to induce to take the tonsure and make a promise of monastic obedience to them. With these motley bands they fill the cells which they have constructed.’ ‘Thus,’ says Bede further, ‘for about thirty years, that is, from the time when King Aldfrid was removed from the world, our province has been so demented by this mad error, that from that period scarcely has there been a single prefect who has not, during the course of his prefectship, founded for himself a monastery of this description. And, since this most wretched custom has become prevalent, the ministers also and servants of the king were content to do the same. And thus, contrary to the established order, numberless persons are found who style themselves indiscriminately abbots and prefects, or ministers or servants of the king; and, though laymen might have been instructed in something of the monastic life, not indeed by experience but by hearsay, yet these persons have nothing in common with the character or profession whose duty it is to give the instruction. And indeed such persons, at their own caprice, suddenly receive the tonsure, as you are aware; and by their own decision are made from laymen, not monks, but abbots.’^[496] This piteous wail of the true-hearted Bede seems to find an echo in the title of the older legend of St. Andrew. King Aldfrid died in 705, and the thirty years Bede refers to extend to the year in which he wrote this account, and which was indeed the last of his life. It was but twelve years after King Aldfrid’s death that King Nectan expelled the Columban monks from his dominions. The monasteries would naturally fall into the possession of the tribe of the land; and, if we substitute monasteries founded by the Columban church, from which their monks were expelled, for monasteries and cells directly founded by laymen, it is probable enough that the withdrawal of the Columban monks in the one country and their expulsion in the other, with the introduction of a secular clergy in both, was followed by similar results; and that the kingdom of the Picts may have exhibited the greater part of these monasteries in the hands of laymen, the semblance and the nomenclature of the monastic institution being thus kept up without the reality. Bede indicates that the motive for doing so was to preserve the privileges of such foundations, such as exemption from service and right of sanctuary, without the corresponding obligations; and such grounds of action would be equally powerful in the one country as in the other. Tighernac records in 747 the death of Tuathal, abbot of Cinnrighmonadh,^[497] or Kylrimont. He may have been one of those titular abbots; but as this is the only instance in which an abbot of Kilrymont is noticed in the Irish Annals, it is more probable that he was the expelled abbot of the old monastery, who had died in Ireland.

But if the historic Regulus belongs to the older Columban foundation at Muicross, and if the expulsion of the Columban monks was followed by such results, it is equally certain that King Hungus and the reception of the relics of St. Andrew, which is inseparably connected with him in the legend, must be brought down to a later period, to which also the fictitious Regulus belongs. The lists of the Pictish kings show no Angus or Hungus, son of Fergus, till we come to the powerful king of that name who reigned from 731 to 761; and the events ascribed to him in the legend correspond with those of his reign. He was engaged in war in the Merse, and he had penetrated into those parts of Argathelia which formed the Scottish kingdom of Dalriada, on an expedition which had for its object the entire conquest of that kingdom, and might well lead his sons to fear for his safety. The narrative which Bede gives us of the circumstances which led King Nectan to place his kingdom under the patronage of St. Peter in 710 entirely excludes the possibility of the national veneration of St. Andrew having been introduced before that date; and, while it is obvious, from an analysis of the legends, that a fictitious and artificial antiquity has been given to it, yet the knowledge of its true date seems not to have been entirely extinguished by the fabulous one: for we find a record of it in one chronicle, though not a very early one, when it is said, ‘The zeire of God sevynn hundir lxi ye relikis of Sanct Androw ye Apostle com in Scotland;’^[498] and this year synchronises with the last year of the reign of Angus mac Fergus, who was one of the most powerful kings of the Picts. If, then, the relics of St. Andrew were brought into Scotland in the reign of this Angus, king of the Picts, the question at once arises, Where did they come from?—and here the mind naturally reverts to the church of Hexham. It too was dedicated to St. Andrew. It too possessed relics of St. Andrew. But in both it preceded in date the foundation of St. Andrews in Scotland; for Hexham was founded in 674 by Wilfrid, who dedicated it to the apostle, and the relics were brought there by his successor, Bishop Acca, whose episcopate lasted from 709 to 732. In one remarkable respect, too, one church was a reflection of the other; for Wilfrid dedicated his church to St. Andrew in consequence of his belief that he had received the gift of persuasive eloquence through the intercession of the apostle, in answer to his prayers offered up in the church of St. Andrew in Rome; and he afterwards erected two chapels at Hexham, dedicated to St. Mary and St. Michael, owing to his belief that he had recovered from a mortal sickness through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, announced to him in a vision by Michael the Archangel. This peculiar combination, therefore, at Hexham, of a principal dedication to St. Andrew with chapels to St. Mary and St. Michael, arose out of incidents in Wilfrid’s life. And yet we find the same combination at St. Andrews in Scotland, for the second legend tells us, after narrating the foundation of St. Andrews, ‘Afterwards in Chilrymont the holy men erected seven churches—one in honour of St. Regulus, the second in honour of St. Aneglas the Deacon, the third in honour of St. Michael the Archangel, the fourth in honour of St. Mary the Virgin, the fifth in honour of St. Damian, the sixth in honour of St. Brigida the virgin, and the seventh in honour of a certain virgin Muren.’ The first of these churches belongs, of course, to the older foundation; but here we find that the third and fourth are chapels dedicated to St. Michael and St. Mary. There seems, too, to have been a tradition that about this time the foundation of an episcopal see among the Picts proceeded from Hexham. When Bede wrote his history in 731, Acca was still living at Hexham, and exercising his episcopal functions there apparently without disturbance; but Simeon of Durham tells us that in 732—that is, in the following year—Acca was expelled from his see;^[499] and Prior Richard of Hexham adds to this statement, ‘By what urgent necessity he was driven forth, or whither he directed his steps, I do not find recorded. But there are some who say that at that time he commenced and prepared the episcopal see at Candida.’^[500] or Whithern. He certainly founded no see at Whithern, for we have the contemporary authority of Bede for the fact that it had been founded some years before, and that Pecthelm was its first bishop; but, at the time Prior Richard wrote, the memory of the great Pictish kingdom had passed away, the Picts of Galloway alone retained the name, and writers of that period transferred to Galloway events that truly belonged to the northern portion of the race. Thus Florence of Worcester placed Trumuini as bishop of Candida, though it is clearly stated by Bede that the Picts he presided over were those north of the Firth of Forth; and Prior Richard, in quoting the passage from Bede, where he says that Wilfrid’s bishopric extended over the Picts as far as Osuiu’s dominion extended, over whom Trumuini was afterwards placed, adds the expression, ‘because Whithern had not yet its own bishop,’^[501] thus transferring what was intended by Bede to apply to the Picts north of the Forth to those of Galloway. The Hexham tradition was probably no more than that it was believed Acca had gone to the nation of the Picts and founded a bishopric among them. It is certainly a remarkable coincidence that Acca, the venerator of St. Andrew, and the importer of his relics into Hexham, should have fled in 732, and that a report should have sprung up that he had founded a bishop’s see among the Picts; and that St. Andrews should have been actually founded by a Pictish king between the years 736 and 761, and part of the relics of St. Andrew brought to it at that time. Indeed, the correspondence between the church history of the Northumbrian and Pictish kingdoms in this respect is at this time very striking:—the Northumbrians expelling the Columban clergy, introducing secular clergy with dedications to St. Peter, and then dedicating Hexham to St. Andrew, and receiving the relics of the apostle brought there by one of its bishops; and, sixty years later, the Picts expelling the Columban monks, introducing the secular clergy, placing the kingdom under the patronage of St. Peter, and then receiving from some unknown quarter the relics of St. Andrew, and founding a church in honour of that apostle, who becomes the national patron saint. The second legend concludes with this statement:—‘These are the names of those holy men who brought the sacred relics of St. Andrew the apostle into Scotia—St. Regulus himself; Gelasius the deacon; Maltheus the hermit; St. Damian, presbyter, and his brother Merinach; Nervius and Crisenius from the island Nola; Mirenus, and Thuluculus the deacon; Nathabeus and Silvius his brother; Seven hermits from the island of the Tiber—Felix, Juranus, Mauritius, Madianus, Philippus, Eugenius, Lunus; and three virgins from Collossia, viz., Triduana, Potentia, Cineria. These virgins are buried at the church of St. Aneglas. Thana, son of Dudabrach, wrote this document for King Pherath son of Bergeth, in the town of Migdele.’ The king here meant is probably the last king but one of the Picts, called in the Pictish Chronicle Wrad son of Bargoit, who reigned from 840 to 843; and Migdele is Meigle in Perthshire.

The church of St. Andrews, then, is represented in this legend as consisting of three groups—First, one of secular clergy, viz., Bishop Regulus himself, with two priests and two deacons, and three others, whose quality is not given; secondly, a group of hermits, viz., Maltheus, with two from the island of Nola, and seven from the island of Tiber—in all, a community of ten; and, thirdly, three virgins. The second group is that of the hermits, representing a community of Keledei similar to those established by Servanus in Lochleven. The legend of Triduana, which is preserved in the Aberdeen Breviary, tells us that she led a heremitical life, with her virgins Potentia and Emeria, in a desert place at Roscoby (Rescobie in Forfarshire). The tyrant Nectanevus, prince of the neighbourhood, pursued her, whereupon she fled to Dunfallad (Dunfallandy) in Athol. There his ministers coming to her and telling her that the beauty of her eyes had attracted the prince, she plucked them out and gave them to them. Triduana then devoting herself to prayer and fasting in Lestalryk, now Restalrig, in Laudonia, passed into heaven.^[502] Here, as usual, the legend is supported by the dedications. At Rescobie is St. Triduan’s fair. Restalrig is also dedicated to her; and here too a connection with Northumbria, to which it then belonged, seems to peep out.

The canonical rule appears to have been adopted in Scotland not long after it had been introduced into Ireland; for, as we learn from the Chronicles, two hundred and twenty-five years and eleven months after the church of Abernethy had been founded by Gartnach, son of Domelch, who reigned from 584 to 599, the church of Dunkeld was founded by Constantin, son of Fergus king of the Picts, who reigned from 790 to 820. This places the foundation of Dunkeld some time between the years 810 and 820, and the tradition of Dunkeld, as reported by Alexander Mylne, a canon of that church in 1575, is that he placed there ‘religious men who are popularly called Keledei, otherwise Colidei, that is God-worshippers, who, according to the rite of the Oriental Church, had wives, from whom, however, they withdrew while ministering, as was afterwards the custom in the church of St. Regulus, now St. Andrew;’^[503] while Wyntoun, the prior of Lochleven, tells us that

The date assigned by Wyntoun to the foundation of Dunkeld is probably correct, and those religious men who Mylne says were popularly called Keledei, Wyntoun here calls ‘chanownys seculare.’

The result, then, that we have arrived at is that the Culdees originally sprang from that ascetic order who adopted a solitary service of God in an isolated cell as the highest form of religious life, and who were termed Deicolæ; that they then became associated in communities of anchorites, or hermits; that they were clerics, and might be called monks, but only in the sense in which anchorites were monks; that they made their appearance in the eastern districts of Scotland at the same time as the secular clergy were introduced, and succeeded the Columban monks who had been driven across the great mountain range of Drumalban, the western frontier of the Pictish kingdom; and that they were finally brought under the canonical rule along with the secular clergy, retaining, however, to some extent the nomenclature of the monastery, until at length the name of Keledeus, or Culdee, became almost synonymous with that of secular canon.