The other bishopric, however, which had been formed by King David from the old Pictish bishopric of Abernethy, and to which that church was more immediately attached—the bishopric of Dunblane—was undoubtedly connected with an old Columban foundation. The church of Dunblane dates back to the seventh century, and seems to have been an offshoot of the church of Kingarth in Bute, for its founder was St. Blane. He was of the race of the Irish Picts, and nephew of that Bishop Cathan who founded Kingarth; and was himself bishop of that church, and his mother was a daughter of King Aidan of Dalriada.^[759] The church of Dunblane was situated in the vale of the river Allan, not far from its junction with the Forth, and is mentioned in the Pictish Chronicle under the reign of Kenneth mac Alpin, when it was burnt by the neighbouring Britons of Strathclyde. We hear no more of this church till the foundation of the bishopric by King David. The catalogue of religious houses places Keledei as the religious community of the church, but the only Keledei we have any record of appear as located at Muthill, situated farther north, and not far from the river Earn; while a later record shows us that the Columban monastery, like many others, had fallen into lay hands, and the clerical element then was limited to a single cleric, who performed the service. In a document containing the judgment of the pope’s delegates in a question between the bishop of Dunblane and the earl of Menteith, in the year 1238, we read that the bishop had gone in person to Rome and represented to the pope ‘that the church of Dunblane had formerly been vacant for a hundred years and more, and almost all its possessions had been seized by secular persons; and, although in process of time several bishops had been appointed to her, yet by their weakness and indifference the possessions thus appropriated had not only not been recovered, but even what remained to them had been almost entirely alienated; in consequence of which no one could be induced to take upon himself the burden of the episcopate, and the church had thus remained without a chief pastor for nearly ten years; that the present bishop, when appointed, had found the church so desolate that he had not a cathedral church wherein to place his head; that there was no collegiate establishment; and that in this unroofed church the divine offices were celebrated by a certain rural chaplain, while the bishop’s revenues were so slender that they scarce afforded fitting maintenance for half the year.’^[760] This picture of clerical desolation does not differ from what we have found in other churches the possessions of which had fallen into the hands of lay families, and it is quite inconsistent with the statement that there was a body of Keledei in the church of Dunblane. The Keledei referred to must have been those at Muthill, which at this time was one of the principal seats of the earls of Stratherne. We unfortunately know little of the early history of this church. It adjoins the old parish of Strageath, which has been united to it from beyond the memory of man; and, as we have seen, after the expulsion of the Columban monks in the beginning of the eighth century, St. Fergus or Fergusanius, a bishop of the Roman party who came from Ireland, is said to have founded three churches in the confines of Strageath. The church of Strageath was dedicated to St. Patrick, and the other two churches were probably those of Blackford, also dedicated to St. Patrick, and of Muthill, within the bounds of which parish were St. Patrick’s well and a chapel dedicated to him; but whether we are to place the introduction of the Keledei at this period or in the reign of Constantine, the son of Kenneth mac Alpin, when the Keledei were re-established under the canonical rule in Scotland, and when St. Cadroë was reviving religion in Stratherne under the auspices of his uncle St. Bean of Foulis and Kinkell, neighbouring parishes, there is nothing now to show. We find the Keledei with their prior at Muthill from 1178 to 1214,^[761] when they disappear from the records, and Muthill becomes the seat of the dean of Dunblane, who had already taken precedence of the prior of the Keledei. It is probable that under the growing importance of Dunblane as a cathedral establishment, the possessions of the Keledei had fallen into secular hands. In the meantime the earls of Stratherne had introduced the canons-regular from Scone into the diocese by the foundation of the priory of Inchaffray, separated from the parishes of Muthill and Strageath only by the river Earn. This took place some time before the year 1198. The founders were Earl Gilbert and his countess, and it was dedicated to St. Mary and St. John the apostle, to whom they give ‘Incheaffren, which is called in Latin Insula Missarum,’ placing it under the care of Malise, the parson and hermit, for canons under the rule of St. Augustine, and bestowing upon it the ancient Columban foundations of St. Cattan of Aberruthven and St. Ethernan of Madderdy, and the more modern churches of St. Patrick of Strageath, St. Makessog of Auchterarder and St. Bean of Kinkell.^[762] Bower, whose authority in matters of church history at this period must not be underrated, tells us that, when Earl Gilbert founded this monastery, he divided his earldom into three equal portions, one of which he gave to the church and bishop of Dunblane, another to the canons of Inchaffray, and the third he reserved for himself and his heirs;^[763] but this is inconsistent with the account which the bishop of Dunblane gives of the state of the church five years after the death of that earl, and probably its only foundation was the arrangement proposed by the adjudicators, by which a fourth of the tithes of all the parish churches in the diocese was to be assigned to the bishop, in order that he might, after receiving a sufficient part for his own maintenance, appropriate the rest to the establishment of a dean and chapter; otherwise the episcopal see was to be transferred to the monastery of Inchaffray, whose canons were to form the chapter, and the bishop was to receive the fourth part of the tithes of those churches which had been appropriated by secular persons. This alternative plan did not take effect; and what Bower reports of the lands of the earldom may have been true in so far as regards the tithes of the secularised churches.

The bishopric of Dunkeld prior to the thirteenth century was not confined to the district of Atholl alone, with the isolated churches which belonged to it within the limits of other dioceses, but extended as far as the Western Sea, and included the districts stretching along its shores, from the Firth of Clyde to Lochbroom, and forming the great province of Arregaidhel, or Argyll. It possessed this extensive jurisdiction as representing the primatial supremacy of Iona over the Columban churches, though the monastery of Iona itself, being within the bounds of the Norwegian kingdom of the Isles, came to belong to the metropolitan diocese of Trontheim. It is within the bounds of this diocese that, if popular notions regarding the Culdees are correct, we ought to find the most abundant traces of them; but, except in the church of Iona itself, they have left no record of their presence, and we do not find their name connected with any of the old Columban foundations. The great abbacy of Dull, founded in the seventh century by St. Adamnan, had, with its extensive territory, long been in lay hands. The church of Dull had been granted to the priory of St. Andrews by Malcolm, earl of Atholl, in the reign of King William the Lion, ‘after the decease of his own cleric,’ and the grant was confirmed by his son Henry and by the bishop and chapter of Dunkeld; and, in a memorandum of the proceedings of a court held at Dull by the prior in 1264, we find mention of a vicar of Dull and of a cleric of Dull. The names of William of Chester and John of Carham, canons, indicate a foreign infusion, and the name of a solitary clerauch witnesses for the Celtic element, but there is no appearance of any Keledei.^[764] Another great Columban abbacy—that founded by St. Fillan in the same century in the vale of Glendochart—appears also to have passed into the hands of a lay abbot. In one of the laws of King William, ‘called Claremathane,’ we find the abbot of Glendochart ranking as a great lord with the earls of Atholl and Menteith, and sharing with the former the jurisdiction over the dwellers of the adjacent part of Argyll.^[765] And, in 1296, among the barons holding of the crown who do homage to Edward the First are Malcolm of Glendochart and Patrick of Glendochart,^[766] of the county of Perth, who are obviously simple laymen taking their name from the abbacy. But while the lands of the monastery thus passed into the possession of a secular family, the monastery seems, like many others, to have had connected with it a Deoradh, or anchorite, to whose descendants as coärb, or heir, of St. Fillan, the ecclesiastic jurisdiction, with the custody of his pastoral staff, called the Coygerach, seems to have fallen, as we find from an inquest held at Kandrochid, or Killin, on the 22d April 1428, that ‘the office of bearing the said relique belonged hereditarily to the progenitor of Finlay Jore, who appeared before the jury as the successor of Saint Felan with that office, and that these privileges had been preserved in the time of King Robert Bruce, and in the time of the subsequent kings to the present day,’ in virtue of which the family possessed a certain jurisdiction which bears an obvious relation to that possessed in the reign of King William by the abbot of Glendochart; and in the year 1487 there is a letter by King James, in which the king states that his ‘servitour Malice Doïre and his forebearis has had ane relik of Sanct Fulane, called the quegrith, in keping of us and of our progenitors’ since the time of ‘King Robert the Bruys and of before, and made nane obedience nor answer to na persone spirituale nor temporale in ony thing concerning the said haly relik,’ and charging all and sundry to ‘mak him nane impediment, letting, or distroublance in the passing with the said relik throch the contre as he and his forebearis wes wount to do.’^[767]

The districts, belonging to the bishopric of Dunkeld, which lay to the west of the great range of Drumalban were, about the year 1200, separated from it and formed into a new bishopric termed first that of Argyll and afterwards that of Lismore. Canon Mylne of Dunkeld tells us, in his Lives of the Bishops,^[768] that John, called the Scot, but an Englishman by birth, who had been archdeacon of St. Andrews, was elected bishop in the year 1167, and that he divided the diocese of Dunkeld, and obtained letters from the pope constituting his chaplain Eraldus bishop of Argyll. This name is no doubt the Norwegian Harald, which had become naturalised among the Gael in the form of Arailt or Erailt. The seat of the bishopric appears to have been fixed first in the district of Mucarn, or Muckairn, on the south side of Loch Etive, which belonged in property to the bishop of Dunkeld, and here his church bore the name of Killespeckerrill, or the church of bishop Erailt. The catalogue of religious houses states the community of the bishopric of ‘Argiul’ to have been Keledei, but we find no trace of this name in connection with any church in the diocese. It is possible, however, that some of the Keledei from Dunkeld may have accompanied the new bishop, and been established here. In 1230 or 1231 the priory of Ardchattan was founded, on the opposite shore, for monks of the order of Vallis Caulium by Dunkan mak Dougall, the head of the great family of lords of Lorn, and like most of these foundations, had many of the older churches bestowed upon it. The dependencies upon this priory were the churches of Balivedan, within which parish it was situated, and which was dedicated to St. Modan; of Kilninvir in Lorn, Kilbrandan in Seil, Kirkapol in Tiree, Kilmanivaig in Lochaber, and Kilmarow in Kintyre.^[769] A few years later it was resolved to remove the seat of the bishopric, probably for greater security, to the island of Lismore. In this island a Columban monastery had been founded by St. Lughadh, or Moluoc, but like many others, it had become secularised, and the possessions of the monastery, including the territory on the mainland which had formed part of the Abthania, or abbey lands—a name corrupted into Appin—had now passed into the hands of the great lords of Lorn. Like the abbacy of Glendochart, the only vestige of its former character was the existence of a family of hereditary custodiers of the old bishop’s crozier, called bachuill more; and we find ‘in‘in 1544 Archibald Campbell, fiar of the lands of Argyll, Campbell and Lorn, in honour of the blessed Virgin, and of his patron saint Moloc, mortifying to John mac Molmore vic Kevir and his heirs-male half the lands of Peynabachalla and Peynchallen, extending to a half-merk land in the island of Lismore, with the keeping of the great Staff of St. Moloc, as freely as his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and other predecessors held the same.’^[770] In order to carry this resolution into effect, the bishop of the Isles, within whose diocese the island of Lismore was, prays the pope to relieve him from the care of this episcopal church, which, he says, from the perverseness of the times, had been brought into a state of extreme destitution; and the pope addresses a mandate to the bishop of Moray, in the year 1236, directing him to dissever the church of Lismore from the bishopric of the Isles, in order that another bishop might be placed there.^[771] Lismore now became the seat of the bishop, and the designation became changed from that of Argyll to that of Lismore. On the death of Bishop William, who was drowned in the year 1241, the bishopric remained vacant for some years, and we find Pope Innocent the Fourth directing the bishops of Glasgow and Dunblane in 1249 to take steps for supplying the church of Argyll, which had been deprived of a chief pastor for more than seven years, with a canonically elected bishop; and in another mandate he directs the same bishops, as the seat of the bishopric was now situated in a certain island in the sea, and almost inaccessible from the stormy channel, across which the people could not pass without danger, to transfer it to a more convenient site.^[772] The first mandate was carried into effect by the election, in 1250, of Bishop Alan, but no attempt was made to carry out the second; and the position of the bishop in Lismore was improved by grants of land and the institution of a cathedral chapter, for we find in 1249 Alexander the Second granted to the episcopal see of Argyll, for the episcopal table, the parish church of St. Brigid the Virgin in Lorn, that is, Kilbride; and two years after, in 1251, Eugenius the knight, the son of Duncan of Erregeithill, or Argyll, grants to William, bishop of Argyll, fourteen penny lands in Lismore, free of all secular exactions; and this charter is witnessed by Gillemeluoc, dean of Lismore, and the whole chapter.^[773]

Of the Columban foundations in this great western district, we find traces of only two which throw light upon the condition of the church. In the southern division of the district, which was usually termed ‘Argyll pertaining to Scotia,’^[774] on the north shore of the Holy Loch, was the church of Kilmun, which had been founded by St. Fintan Munnu of Teach Munnu in Ireland, whom St. Adamnan notices as having wished to become a monk under St. Columba, but having arrived in Iona only after his death.^[775] We find this church in lay hands in the thirteenth century, as, between 1230 and 1246, Duncan, son of Fercher, and his nephew Lauman, son of Malcolm, grant to the monks of Paisley lands which they and their ancestors had at Kilmun, with the whole right of patronage in the church of Kilmun; and in 1294 a charter to the monks of Paisley is witnessed by Humfred of Kylmon;^[776] and here, too, we have traces of certain lands on the west side of Loch Long being held with the hereditary custody of the staff of St. Mund, to which the name of ‘Deowray’ was attached.^[777]

We have also traces of the condition to which a much more important monastery in the northern part of the district had been brought. This was the monastery of Apurcrosan, now Applecross, founded by St. Maelrubha, in the year 673, in that part of the province which was termed Ergadia Borealis, or North Argyll. Of the abbots of this monastery the Irish Annals, as we have seen, notice three—Maelrubha, who died in 822; Failbe, son of Guaire, termed his heir, or coärb, who was drowned with twenty-two of his crew, who were probably brethren of the monastery, on his passage to Ireland in 736; and Macoigi of Apuorchrosan, who became abbot of the monastery of Bangor in Ireland, the monastery from which Maelrubha had proceeded on his mission to Britain, and died there in 801. The possessions of this monastery were very extensive, and comprehended the entire district extending along the shores of the Western Sea from Loch Carron on the south to Loch Broom on the north. They appear to have fallen into the hands of a family of hereditary sagarts or priests, who, according to tradition, bore the name of O’Beollan. The name of one of these priests is connected with an upright slab in the churchyard, bearing the figure of a collared cross, which is known as the stone of Ruairidh mor mac Caoigan, who was said to have been proprietor of Applecross, and to have been slain by the Danes. His name undoubtedly connects him with abbot Macoigi; but we find ourselves on surer ground in the reign of Alexander the Second, when Ferchar, called Macintsagart, that is, the son of the sagart, or priest, gave such powerful support to the king in suppressing insurrections both in the north and in Galloway, that he was created earl of Ross as his reward. His position as hereditary lord of the extensive possessions of the monastery made him, in fact, a very powerful chief; and from him the later earls of Ross were descended. From him, too, descended, according to Mac Vurich, ‘Gillapatrick the Red, the son of Ruairidh, the son of the green abbot,’ who is known in tradition as the ‘red priest,’ and whose daughter brought the possessions of the monastery into the family of the Macdonalds, Lords of the Isles. Besides other churches dedicated to St. Maelrubha, there was one in the parish of Muckairn, on a small island in a lake called Kilvarie Loch; and here was the usual relic of the crozier kept by the possessors of a small portion of land; for, in 1518, Sir John Campbell of Calder receives the services of some of the small clans, ‘who were sworn upon the mess buik and the relic callit the Arwachyll, at the isl of Kilmolrue;’ and there is a township near it called Ballindore, that is, Baile-an-deoradh, the town of the Deoradh, or Dewar, as he came to be called.^[778]

It only remains for us now to terminate this inquiry into the decadence of the old Celtic Church with the island of Iona, whence it originally took its rise; and here too we shall find that the efforts made to preserve the old Celtic establishment failed, and that it had to give way before the invasion of one of the religious orders of the Roman Church. The last of the old abbots, of whom we have any notice, died in the last year of the eleventh century; and for upwards of fifty years there is an unbroken silence regarding Iona. During this period the whole of the Western Islands were under the rule of the Norwegian kings of the Isles, and the connection between the church in the Isles and the mainland of Scotland, on the one side, and Ireland, on the other, must have been to a great extent cut off. The abbots of the Irish monastery of Kells were at this time the coärbs of Columcille there; but they do not appear to have had anything to do with Iona, and there is no trace of the bishop of Dunkeld having at this time exercised any jurisdiction over the island. The Norwegian kings of the Isles, though professing Christianity, showed no desire to foster the church; and the whole establishment in Iona was probably in a state of decay. The Norwegian king of the Isles was at this time Godred, who succeeded his father, Olaf Bitling, in the year 1154; but his rule becoming too tyrannical and oppressive to be borne, a powerful Norwegian chief, Thorfinn, went to Somerled, the Celtic kinglet of Argyll, who had already almost entirely expelled the Norwegians from that mainland district, and requested to have his son Dubgal, whose mother was the daughter of Olaf Bitling, that he might set him on the throne of the Isles. To this Somerled gladly consented, and Thorfinn took the young prince, and, conducting him through all the Isles, forced the chiefs to acknowledge him for their king. This led to a war between Godred and Somerled, and in 1156 a naval battle was fought between them during the night of the Epiphany, with great slaughter on both sides. Next morning, however, at daybreak, they came to a compromise, and divided between them the sovereignty of the Isles, ‘so that,’ says the Chronicle, ‘from that period they have formed two distinct kingdoms to the present day.’^[779] The part assigned to Somerled consisted of the islands which lay to the south of the point of Ardnamurchan; and among them was the island of Iona. Somerled appears, some years after, to have endeavoured to restore the abbacy of Iona to its original state by placing it under the care of the abbot of Derry, Flaithbertach O’Brolchan, who had been raised in 1158 to the dignity of a bishop, and had the coärbship of Columcille conferred upon him; and we find in 1164 that the chiefs of the family of Iona went to him and invited him to accept the abbacy of Iona by the advice of Somerled and the men of Argyll and the Isles, but the abbot of Armagh, the king of Ireland and the chiefs of Cinel Eoghan prevented it. The chiefs of the family of Iona, who thus represented the community at this time, were the Sacart mor, or great priest, the Ferleighinn, or lector, the Disertach, or head of the Disert for the reception of pilgrims, and the head of the Cele De or Culdees;^[780] and the ground of the opposition of the civil and ecclesiastical heads of the state in Ireland is not told us. Somerled was slain two years afterwards, and, in the division of his extensive territories among his sons, the Isles and Kintyre fell to the share of his second son Reginald or Ranald. Macvurich, the sennachy of the clan, says of him that he was ‘the most distinguished of the Galls (that is, the Norwegians) and of the Gaels for prosperity, sway of generosity, and feats of arms;’ and undoubtedly the church benefited largely by these qualities. He appears to have rebuilt the ruined monastery of Iona on a larger scale. The Catalogue of religious houses places Keledei in the ‘abbatia in insula,’ or abbacy of Iona, at this time; and apparently it was at this time under the charge of Donald O’Brolchan, whose name is inscribed on one of the pillars of the abbey church as having built it, and whose death as prior is recorded in the year 1202 as having taken place on the 26th of April;^[781] but the annalist who records it does not tell us of what place he was prior. His name, however, connects him with Derry; and, though the heads of the Irish Church and State may have objected to the bishop of Derry being also abbot of Iona, they may have consented to Iona being placed under the prior.

The Lord of the Isles seems, however, to have resolved to adopt the policy of the Scottish kings, and to introduce into his territories the religious order of the Roman Church; and Macvurich tells us that ‘three monasteries were formed by him—a monastery of black monks in I, or Iona, in honour of God and Saint Columchille; a monastery of black nuns in the same place; and a monastery of grey friars at Sagadul or Saddle, in Kintyre.’ We learn from other sources that Reginald did found a religious house at Saddle for Cistercian, or white, monks;^[782] and he appears to have established the Benedictines, or black monks, in Iona in the year 1203, after the death of the prior Donald O’Brolchan, and to have founded in connection with it a nunnery for Benedictine, or black, nuns, of which Beatrice or Bethok, the sister of Reginald, was the first prioress. It is of this Benedictine monastery and nunnery that the present ruins are the remains; and they were formerly connected by a causeway which extended in a straight line from the nunnery to the monastery. On the west side of it, next the nunnery, was the church called Teampul Ronain, which became the parish church; and on both sides of the causeway were the houses which formed the town traditionally called Baile Mor, in the middle of which stood the cross called Maclean’s Cross, and between it and the abbey was, on the west side of the causeway, Relic Odhrain, with its chapel termed Teampul Odhrain. The deed of confirmation of the Benedictine monastery still exists in the Vatican. It is dated on the 9th December 1203, and is addressed to Celestinus, abbot of St. Columba, of the island of Hy, and his brethren professing a religious life; and the pope takes the monastery of St. Columba under the protection of St. Peter and the Pope, in order that the monastic order which has been instituted in that place according to the rule of St. Benedict may be preserved inviolate in all time to come; and he confirms to them the place itself in which the said monastery is situated, with its pertinents, consisting of churches, islands and lands in the Western Isles.^[783] King William at the same time grants to the abbey of Holyrood four churches in Galloway which had belonged to the abbacy of Hy Columcille.^[784] These churches are not included in the pope’s confirmation of the possessions of the new monastery, and must have belonged to the prior abbacy. This Benedictine monastery was no sooner established than its abbot, Celestine, appears to have attempted to thrust out the prior Celtic community and place them in a separate building nearer the town; for we are told in the Ulster Annals that in 1203 ‘a monastery was erected by Cellach’—no doubt the Celestinus of the Benedictine monastery—‘in the middle of the Cro of Iona (Croi Ia), without any legal right, and in despite of the family of Iona, so that he did considerable damage to the town (Baile). A hosting by the clergy of the north (of Ireland), viz., by Florence O’Carolan, the bishop of Tyrone, Maelisa O’Deery, bishop of Tyrconnell, and abbot of the abbey church of Saints Paul and Peter at Armagh, and by Aulay O’Ferghail, abbot of Derry, with a great number of the family of Derry and of the northern clergy beside; and, in obedience to the law of the church, they pulled down the monastery.’^[785] Although the right of the old Celtic community to remain in the monastery which had been rebuilt by Reginald was thus vindicated by the assistance of their Irish brethren, we hear no more of the Keledei at Iona. They probably adopted the Benedictine rule and became amalgamated with the monks; while the functionary formerly known as the Head of the Culdees was represented by the prior of Iona, whom we afterwards find in the monastery.

And thus the old Celtic Church came to an end, leaving no vestiges behind it, save here and there the roofless walls of what had once been a church, and the numerous old burying-grounds to the use of which the people still cling with tenacity, and where occasionally an ancient Celtic cross tells of its former state. All else has disappeared; and the only records we have of their history are the names of the saints by whom they were founded preserved in old calendars, the fountains near the old churches bearing their name, the village fairs of immemorial antiquity held on their day, and here and there a few lay families holding a small portion of land, as hereditary custodiers of the pastoral staff or other relic of the reputed founder of the church, with some small remains of its jurisdiction.