The causes which combined to bring the old Celtic Church to an end may be classed under two heads—internal decay and external change. Under the first head the chief cause was the encroachment of the secular element upon the ecclesiastic, and the gradual absorption of the latter by the former. As long as the old monastic system remained intact there was a vitality in its ecclesiastical organisation which to a great extent preserved the essential character of these monasteries as great ecclesiastical foundations; but this was to some extent impaired by the assimilation of the church to that of Rome in the seventh and eighth centuries, which introduced a secular element among her clergy; and the Danish invasions, with all their devastating and destructive consequences, completed the total disorganisation of the Monastic Church. The monasteries were repeatedly laid waste and destroyed, and her clergy had either to fly or to take up arms in self-defence; her lands, with their ruined buildings and reduced establishment, fell into the hands of laymen, and became hereditary in their families; until at last nothing was left but the mere name of abbacy applied to the lands, and of abbot borne by the secular lord for the time. The external change produced in the church was the result of the policy adopted towards it by the kings of the race of Queen Margaret. It was in the main the same policy as that adopted towards Ireland by the Norman kings of England. It mainly consisted, first, in placing the church upon a territorial in place of a tribal basis, and substituting the parochial system and a diocesan episcopacy for the old tribal churches with their monastic jurisdiction and functional episcopacy; secondly, in introducing the religious orders of the Church of Rome, and founding great monasteries as centres of counter influence to the native church; and, thirdly, in absorbing the Culdees, now the only clerical element left in the Celtic Church, into the Roman system, by converting them from secular into regular canons, and merging them in the latter order.

During the war of succession which followed the death of Malcolm the Third and ended in the firm establishment of the sons of the Saxon Queen Margaret upon the throne of Scotland in the person of Edgar, her eldest son, no successor appears to have been appointed to Fothad, the last native bishop of St. Andrews, and no attempt appears to have been made to follow out the policy which had been inaugurated by that queen of assimilating the native church to that of Rome. During this interval Scotland north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde was left without a bishop, and the conflict between the Celtic and the Saxon element in the population of the country, which was to determine whether Scotland was to remain a Celtic or a Teutonic kingdom, probably threw the northern portion of it into too great a confusion to render any attempt to reorganise the church possible. The only ecclesiastical foundations made during this period were confined to the southern districts, where the sons of Malcolm, who owed to English assistance the vindication of their right to the throne, showed their gratitude by grants to the church of Durham. Duncan, the eldest son of Malcolm, made over to the monks of Durham Tiningeham, Aldeham, Scuchale, Cnolle, Hatherwich, and all right which Bishop Fodan had in Broccesmuthe.^[694] These lands are in East Lothian, and formed part of the possessions of St. Balthere’s monastery of Tyningham. The allusion to the rights of Bishop Fodan or Fothad shows that this part of Lothian at least had by this time come under the bishops of St. Andrews; and we find that these lands afterwards reverted to that see.^[695]

Edgar, the eldest son of Queen Margaret, had no sooner made good his right to the throne by English assistance, than we find him refounding the monastery of Coldingham, which had been destroyed by the Danes. In his charter he says that he had come to the dedication of the church of St. Mary at Coldingham, which dedication had been honourably completed to the praise of God and to his contentment, and that he had immolated on the altar to the same church, in endowment, and granted, the whole town of Swintun, to be held for ever free and quit from all claim, and to be disposed of at the will of the monks of St. Cuthbert. He adds that he had ordained to the men of Coldinghamshire, as they themselves have chosen and confirmed in his hand, that they every year pay to the monks half a mark of silver for each plough.^[696] The mention of Coldinghamshire, and the burden imposed upon the men of the district to contribute to the support of the church, indicate something like a parochial district attached to the church; and we find, in another charter, the establishment of a parish church clearly presented to us, as well as the process by which it was accomplished. In this document, Thor informs his lord, Earl David, that King Edgar had given him Ednaham, now Ednam, in Berwickshire, waste; that he had inhabited it, and built from the foundation the church which King Edgar caused to be dedicated to Saint Cuthbert, and had endowed it with one plough; and he prays his son to confirm the donation he had made of the church to St. Cuthbert and the monks of Durham.^[697] Here we have in fact a formation of a manor with its parish church, and in a subsequent document it is termed the mother church of Ednam.^[698]

Edgar appears to have made no attempt to introduce a parochial church north of the Forth, or even to fill up the vacancy in the see of St. Andrews; but, on his death, when the territory which formed his kingdom, with its heterogeneous population, was divided between his two brothers—the districts north of the Forth and Clyde, with Lothian as far as the Lammermoors, falling, under his will, to Alexander as king, and the districts of the Cumbrian Britons, with the rest of Lothian, to David as earl—the policy which had been inaugurated by their Saxon mother, Queen Margaret, of assimilating the native church to that of England, was at once resumed by both. Alexander’s first step was to fill up the vacancy in the bishopric of St. Andrews, by the appointment, in the first year of his reign, of Turgot, prior of Durham, and at the same time to create two additional bishoprics for the more remote and Celtic portion of his kingdom. The first was that of Moray, to which he appointed a bishop named Gregorius; and the second was that of Dunkeld, which he revived in the person of Cormac.^[699]

The districts beyond the Spey were at this time so little under the influence of the Crown, and their connection with what formed the kingdom proper so slender, that the position of a bishop of Moray appointed by the king can have been little more than nominal. In fact, we know very little of the state of the church in that great Celtic district at this time, except what may be gathered from the dedications of the churches. The low-lying portion of its territory, extending along the south shore of the Moray Firth from the Spey westward, with its fertile soil and temperate air, must always have formed an attractive position for ecclesiastical establishments; and in that part of it which lies between the Spey and the Findhorn three churches come now rather prominently forward. These are the churches of Brennach, or Birnie, Spyny and Kenedor; and we learn something of this last church from the legend of Saint Gervadius or Gernadius, whose day is the 8th of November. He was a native of Ireland, and leaving his home to preach the Word of Life in Scotland, he came to the territory of Moravia or Moray, in which place he associated with himself many fellow-soldiers in Christ, and under angelic direction, as it is said, built an oratory or cell in a place called Kenedor. Here he had a stone bed, and led the life of an Anchorite.^[700] A cave near Elgin and a spring of water in the rock above bear his name. An allusion in his legend to a war by the king of the Angles against the Scots, which brought the Anglic soldiers to his neighbourhood, fixes his date to the year 934, when Athelstane, king of Northumbria, invaded Scotland both by sea and land; and his establishment has all the features of a Culdee church. There was no trace, however, of the name of Culdee in this district when Alexander founded his bishopric, and it was not till the time of Bricius, the sixth bishop of Moray, who filled that position from 1203 to 1222, that the bishops had any fixed residence in the diocese. They are said before his time to have had their episcopal seat in one or other of the three churches of Birnie, Spyny and Kenedor. When Bricius became bishop in 1203 he fixed his cathedral at Spyny, and founded a chapter of eight secular canons, giving to his cathedral a constitution founded on the usage of Lincoln, which he ascertained by a mission to England.^[701] After his death the seat of the bishopric was removed to Elgin.

The bishopric of Dunkeld was in a very different position, and its relations with the Crown were of the most intimate character. A church had been built there by Kenneth mac Alpin, the founder of the Scottish dynasty, and a part at least of the relics of St. Columba had been transferred to it by him. The abbot, in his time, was the first bishop of his Pictish kingdom. It had then, along with the great territory forming the lay abbacy of Dull, passed into the possession of a line of lay abbots, from whom the family on the throne were the male descendants; and it had now, probably by the death of Ethelred the young lay abbot, again reverted to the Crown, as we hear no more of him after the reign of Edgar. Mylne, who was a canon of Dunkeld in the fifteenth century, tells us in his Lives of the Bishops of Dunkeld ‘that, when it seemed good to the Supreme Controller of all Christian religion, and when devotion and piety had increased, St. David, the sovereign, who was the younger son of King Malcolm Canmor and the holy Queen Margaret, having changed the constitution of the monastery, erected it into a cathedral church, and, having superseded the Keledei, created, about the year 1127, a bishop and canons, and ordained that there should in future be a secular college. The first bishop on this foundation was for a time abbot of that monastery, and subsequently a counsellor of the king.’^[702] Mylne is, however, wrong both in the date and in the name of the founder; for, as we have seen, the bishopric was founded by Alexander, the predecessor of King David, as early as the year 1107. The possession of the ample territories belonging to the lay abbacy of Dunkeld would enable him at once to refound the bishopric with its cathedral and chapter in proper form. And here we find the remains of the old Columban Church brought into sharp contact with the Culdee foundations. The church which Kenneth had founded there certainly inherited, along with a part of the relics of the great founder of the Columban Church, to a certain extent also the primatial jurisdiction of the monastery of Iona over the Columban monasteries on the mainland. These monasteries had, with few exceptions, become lay abbacies, and Mylne appears so far to have given a correct representation of the revival of the episcopate, as we find that the rights of the original monastery of Dunkeld over the Columban foundations do appear to have been now exercised by the bishop. Besides the two great lay abbacies of Dull and Glendochart, founded respectively by St. Adamnan and St. Fillan in the seventh century, whose united territory comprised the entire western districts of Atholl, bounded by Drumalban on the west, and the districts beyond this range, which afterwards formed the diocese of Argyll, we find the new bishopric possessing within the limits of other dioceses disconnected parishes which represented old Columban foundations. In Stratherne it had the parishes of Madderty and Crieff, the former dedicated to St. Ethernanus, whose death is recorded by Tighernac in 669, and who therefore belonged to the Columban Church; and here we find the bishop dealing with the rights of Can and Conveth which the clerics of the church of Dunkeld had from ‘the lands of Madderty, which in Scotch are termed Abthen.’^[703] In charters to the monastery of Dunfermline the rights of Dunkeld in Fife and Fotherif are specially reserved;^[704] and here the bishopric possessed Incholm, dedicated to St. Columba, and adjacent lands on the mainland. In Angus it possessed the parishes of Fearn and Menmuir, dedicated to St. Aidan, the Columban bishop of Lindisfarne; and it even penetrated beyond the Firth of Forth on the south, where it possessed Cramond dedicated to St. Columba, and on the north beyond the Mounth, when we find in a charter granted by the Mormaer, or earl of Buchan, in the earlier years of the reign of King David, of the lands of Pet-mec-Cobrig ‘for the consecration of a church of Christ and Peter the apostle (at Deer) and to Columcille and to Drostan,’ that is, for the reconsecration of the church of Deer to St. Peter, which had previously been dedicated to St. Columba and St. Drostan, and the lands are granted ‘free from all exactions with their tie to Cormac, bishop of Dunkeld.’^[705] This monastery of Deer is one of the few Columban foundations which preserved its clerical character intact down to this period, and here we find no trace of the name of Culdee in connection with it.

On the other hand, and in contrast to these rights of Dunkeld, Turgot was no sooner elected bishop of St. Andrews than the fate and fortunes of the Culdee establishments were committed into his hands; for we are told that ‘in his days the whole rights of the Keledei over the whole kingdom of Scotland passed to the bishopric of St. Andrews.’^[706] The appointment of Turgot, the prior of Durham, to the bishopric of St. Andrews, in conformity with the policy adopted towards the native church by the sons of Queen Margaret, had one result which probably King Alexander did not anticipate when he made it. It brought upon him the claim of the archbishop of York to supremacy over the Scottish Church, whose bishops he regarded as his suffragans. It is not necessary for our purpose to enter at length on this intricate subject. His claim was, no doubt, founded upon the original commission by Pope Gregory to Augustine in the end of the sixth century, by which he placed all the churches north of the Humber under the bishop of York, and to the convention between the archbishops of Canterbury and York in 1072, by which it was attempted to revive this arrangement, and to place all the churches of the northern province, as far as the extreme limits of Scotland, under the latter;^[707] but such a right had never been either recognised or exercised, and the only substantial ground upon which it could be based was one very similar to that on which the supremacy claimed by the king of England over Scotland could be founded. It is certain that the province of York extended ecclesiastically, as the kingdom of Northumbria did civilly, to the Firth of Forth; and so far as concerned the churches of Lothian and Teviotdale, the former of which were now under the rule of the bishop of St. Andrews, while the latter were claimed by Glasgow, there may have been some ground for the assertion of such a right, similar to that which the annexation of Lothian to the kingdom of Scotland gave for the civil claim; but beyond the Firths of Forth and Clyde the claims of both were shadowy in the extreme, and Alexander, in his jealousy for the independence of his kingdom, saw the necessity of resisting the threatened encroachment of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of York. In the end Turgot was consecrated at York on 1st August 1109, with reservation of the rights of either see. He died on 31st August 1115, and during his tenure of office, owing mainly to these disputes, he appears to have done nothing to affect the rights of the Culdees. In order to avoid a recurrence of this question, Alexander applied to the archbishop of Canterbury to recommend him an English cleric as bishop, stating that the bishops of St. Andrews had hitherto been consecrated either by the Pope or by the archbishop of Canterbury. The former assertion was probably true in so far as regards the later bishops; but the incautious admission of the latter, which was totally inconsistent with fact, led the king into a new and unprofitable dispute, which had an equally awkward bearing upon the more important question of the independence of the kingdom. Eadmer, a monk of Canterbury, was sent, but was not elected till 1120; and in the following year he returned to Canterbury,^[708] and the bishopric remained unfilled up for three years.

During this time, however, while St. Andrews was, practically speaking, without a bishop, Alexander commenced to carry out another part of this policy, by introducing the canons-regular of St. Augustine, or the black canons, as they were called, into Scotland; and for this purpose he selected the most central and important position in his kingdom, that of Scone, which was peculiarly associated with the very heart of the monarchy, and had been the scene of previous legislation regarding the church. Here he brought a colony of canons regular from the church of St. Oswald at Nastlay, near Pontefract, in Yorkshire, and founded a priory in the year 1115, which was confirmed by the seven earls of his kingdom, and by Gregory and Cormac, the bishops of the two additional bishoprics he had created, who here term themselves bishops by the authority of God, and of the holy apostles Peter and Paul and of Saint Andrew the apostle. The church, which was previously dedicated to the Trinity, was placed under the patronage of the Virgin, St. Michael, St. John, St. Lawrence and St. Augustine.^[709] Some years later Alexander introduced the regular canons into the diocese of Dunkeld. In the year 1122 he founded a priory of canons on an island near the east end of Loch Tay, which became a cell of Scone, and here his queen, Sibylla, died and was buried; and in 1123 he founded a monastery for the same canons in the island of Inchcolm in the Firth of Forth.^[710] In the following year Alexander heard of the death of Eadmer, and filled up the bishopric of St. Andrews by appointing Robert, the English prior of Scone; but, four months after this appointment, and before Robert was consecrated, he died in the April of that year. Probably the last act of his life was the right which he conferred upon the church of the Holy Trinity of Scone, to hold a court, in a charter which is addressed to the bishops and earls of Scotland, and is witnessed by Robert, bishop-elect of St. Andrews, Cormac the bishop, and Gregory, bishop of Moray.^[711]

During the whole period of Alexander’s reign, his younger brother David was carrying out the same policy in the southern districts of Scotland, over which he ruled as earl. In the year 1113 he founded a monastery at Selkirk, in which he placed Benedictine monks of the order of Tyron; but his great work there was the reconstitution of the bishopric of Glasgow. This diocese he restored about the year 1115, and caused an inquisition to be made by the elders and wise men of Cumbria into the lands and churches which formerly belonged to the see of Glasgow. In this document, which has been preserved, and which may be placed in the year 1120 or 1121, its framers relate the foundation of the church of Glasgow by St. Kentigern, and that he was succeeded by several bishops in the see; but that the confusion and revolutions of the country at length destroyed all traces of the church, and almost of Christianity, till the restoration of the bishopric by Earl David, and the election and consecration of John, who had been his tutor, and is commonly called the first bishop of Glasgow. The bishopric, as reconstituted after the information derived from this inquisition, extended from the Clyde on the north to the Solway Firth and the march with England on the south, and from the western boundary of Lothian on the east to the river Urr on the west; and it included Teviotdale, which had remained a part of the diocese of Durham while the Lothian churches north of the Tweed were transferred to St. Andrews, and which was now reclaimed as properly belonging to Glasgow. Here we find no traces of the Keledei, who had formerly formed the chapter of Glasgow; but in the reign of Malcolm the Fourth the pope confirmed a constitution of the dean and chapter, which had been introduced after the model of Sarum by Herbert, elected bishop in 1147.^[712] Here, too, the foundation of the new bishopric of Glasgow brought upon him the claims of the archbishop of York, which were equally resisted, and the non-dependence of the diocese on any metropolitan bishop established. The rights of York were, however, recognised in the case of the bishopric of Candida Casa, likewise restored some years later, when Gilda Aldan was appointed its first bishop, as this see had been first established by the Anglic king of Northumbria in the eighth century. Galloway, though civilly united to Scotland, was considered ecclesiastically to belong to England, and its bishop owed obedience as one of his suffragans to the archbishop of York, by whom Gilda Aldan was consecrated soon after David’s accession to the throne of Scotland.^[713]

Ailred of Rivaux, who was King David’s contemporary, tells us of him that ‘he seemed not undeservedly loved both by God and men. He was plainly beloved by God, for at the very outset of his reign he diligently practised the things which belong to God in erecting churches and founding monasteries, which he endowed with possessions and covered with honours. For whereas he had found in the whole kingdom of Scotland three or four bishops only, the other churches, without a shepherd or bishop, going to wrack and ruin in respect both of morals and substance; what with ancient ones which he restored and new ones which he founded, he left nine at his death. He left also monasteries of the Cluniac, Cistercian, Tyronian orders (who were Benedictines), and the Arovensian, Præmonstratensian, and Belvacensian (who were canons-regular from Aroise, Prémontré, and Beauvais), not few in number or small in size, but full of brethren.’^[714] There is a catalogue of religious houses at the end of Henry of Silgrave’s Chronicle, written about A.D. 1272, which belongs however to an earlier period, and does not come down later than the reign of William the Lion; and from it alone do we obtain any information as to the Keledean character of these foundations.^[715] The bishoprics which he found at his accession were those of St. Andrews, Moray, and Dunkeld, to which Ailred, probably with some hesitation, adds Glasgow. Galloway was not included, as it properly belonged to England. We find no trace of Keledei in either Glasgow or Moray; and the catalogue mentions only secular canons, that is, the chapters established after their restoration. The greater part of the new bishoprics which he added were founded in the first few years of his reign; and he appears to have commenced his proceedings by having Robert, bishop-elect of St. Andrews, consecrated in 1128 by the archbishop of York, in the same manner as Turgot had been consecrated, that is, reserving the rights of both sees; and by completing the division of Scotland north of the great range of the Mounth into separate sees.

The first of these appears to have been the diocese of Rosemarky, or Ross. A charter granted by King David to the monks of Dunfermline, between the years 1128 and 1130, is witnessed by Robert bishop of St. Andrews, who had now been consecrated, John bishop of Glasgow, Cormac bishop of Dunkeld, and Gregory bishop of Moray—these are the four bishoprics alluded to by Ailred—and there now appears as a witness an additional bishop—Makbeth, bishop of Rosmarkyn, or Rosemarky.^[716] This church, as appears by its dedication, was originally founded as a Columban monastery by Lugadius, or Moluoc, abbot and bishop of Lismore, whose death is recorded in 577; but, as we have seen, Bonifacius refounded it in the eighth century, and dedicated the church to St. Peter. Here he placed, according to Wyntoun, secular canons, and we now find the canons designated as Keledei in the catalogue of religious houses. The chapter, however, was reconstituted early in the succeeding century, when the term Keledei disappears, and instead there is a regular cathedral body of canons under a dean.^[717]

The next bishopric established appears to have been that of Aberdeen, embracing the extensive districts between the Dee and the Spey, and including the earldom of Mar and Buchan. The memorandum of the charter by the Mormaer, or Earl, of Buchan, refounding the church of Deer, which has been already referred to, in which Cormac, bishop of Dunkeld, is mentioned, is witnessed by Nectan, bishop of Aberdeen; and this is the earliest notice of that see. According to Fordun, it succeeded an earlier see founded at Mortlach, on the banks of the river Fiddich, which falls into the Spey, and therefore not far from the western boundary of the diocese. Fordun gives the following account of its foundation. After narrating a victory by King Malcolm the Second over the Norwegian army in the north, he proceeds:—‘In the seventh year of his reign Malcolm, thinking over the manifold blessings continually bestowed upon him by God, pondered anxiously in his mind what he should give Him in return. At length, the grace of the Holy Ghost working within him, he set his heart upon increasing the worship of God; so he established a new episcopal see at Murthillach, not far from the spot where he had overcome the Norwegians and gained the victory, and endowed it with churches and the rents of many estates. He desired to extend the territory of the diocese, so as to make it reach from the stream or river called the Dee to the river Spey. To this see a holy man and one worthy the office of bishop, named Beyn, was at the instance of the king appointed, as first bishop, by our lord the Pope Benedict.’^[718] The church of Aberdeen appears, however, somewhat earlier to have had a tradition that the see was originally founded at Mortlach, and was transferred to Aberdeen by King David in the thirteenth year of his reign; but the foundation of the church at Mortlach is ascribed to Malcolm Canmore in the sixth year of his reign. This tradition is contained in five charters, or memoranda of charters, prefixed to the Chartulary of Aberdeen, and the interval between Beyn, the supposed first bishop, and Nectan is filled up by Donercius, the second bishop, and Cormauch, the third bishop.^[719] That a bishopric was founded there by Malcolm the Second is clearly at variance with the undoubted fact that there was at that time but one bishop in Scotland, whose seat was at St. Andrews, and who was termed the Epscop Albain, or Episcopus Scottorum; and the five documents which contain the Aberdeen tradition have been shown by the learned editor of the Chartulary to be unquestionably spurious.^[720] The first authentic writ in that Chartulary is a bull by Pope Adrian IV. in 1157, confirming to Edward, bishop of Aberdeen, the church of Aberdeen, the church of St. Machar, with the town of Old Aberdeen and other lands, in which are included the monastery of Cloveth and the town and monastery of Murthillach, with five churches and the lands belonging to them.^[721] There is here no allusion to Murthillach having been an episcopal see, the seat of which had been transferred to Aberdeen. The designation of monastery points unequivocally to these churches having been old Columban monasteries; and accordingly we find that Murthillach was dedicated to St. Moluoc, the founder of the churches of Lismore and Rosemarky in the sixth century. Of the three bishops who are said to have preceded Nectan, Beyn probably belongs to the Columban period,^[722] Donercius has all the appearance of a fictitious name, and Cormauch is probably Cormac, bishop of Dunkeld, who, as we have seen, appears in the charter in which Nectan is first mentioned as having rights connected with the church of Deer, and who may have possessed similar claims upon the monasteries of Cloveth and Murthillach, as old Columban foundations, from which probably any clerical element had by this time disappeared.