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| | THE ARRIVAL OF THE MONASTICISM | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (2:18 PM) | |
The Arrival of the Monasticism
The impact of monasticism on Scotland was profound and long lasting. The arrival of the monks brought a whole new conception of society to its pagan tribes - ideas of a Christian community, education and the responsibilities of leadership and government that still under-pin Scottish society today. Along with Scotland’s warrior kings, they shaped the very idea of the Scottish nation.
The Coming of the Word
Where imperial, pagan Rome had failed, Christian Rome triumphed. From the late fourth century Christianity slowly suffused across the frontier of the Roman Empire in the wake of soldiers, traders and unknown evangelisers. It was a slow process across Scotland, but the individual impact of conversion must have been quite dramatic - challenging people's most deep-rooted beliefs about the order of the world.
The Beginnings of Monasticism
Being a Monk was to be part of a new movement, Monasticism, literally ‘dwelling alone’. The monk was expected to seek seclusion from worldly life to study and contemplate the word of God. What started in the deserts of North Africa in the fourth century rapidly spread across the western world, but in attempting to escape the world, the Monks couldn't help but change it dramatically.
Through their commitment to spirituality they established new ideas on virtuous living, becoming renowned as holy men with quasi-magical powers. But it was the monastic commitment to learning that was especially useful to Dark Age rulers. Monastic libraries were huge reservoirs of knowledge. Through the medium of the written word monks held the power of transmitting and storing information.
Royal patronage was a crucial component of Christianity’s success. Scotland’s early saints were usually bishops or abbots who founded a monastery with the local king’s blessing. From these monasteries they consolidated Christian belief within their local communities and passed it onto others through missionaries. Check the 'Special Features' section above for links to St Ninian, St Columba, St Andrew, the Reformed Orders and David I's Monastic Revolution.
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| | ST COLUMBA | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (2:13 PM) | |
St Columba (Colum Cille)
Of all the Dark Age Scottish saints, Columba is the most spectacular star. In 563 AD Columba left Ireland and settled with the Gaels of Dál Riata, where he was granted the Island of Iona to found his monastery.
For the Gaelic warrior kings, Columba was a useful asset. His monastery provided education for their sons, he was a close advisor to the king, and he served as a diplomat to the king’s neighbours in Pictland and Ireland. Columba’s blessing was treasured by kings - a powerful symbol of their authority, and, in return for Columba’s support, the Gaels gave the monastery land and protection.
Columba died in 597, but his monastery’s influence continued to grow,
leading to the foundation of new monasteries in Ireland and as far away as
Lindisfarne in Northumbria. In Pictland, Columban monks began to spread the
word of Christianity in the seventh century.
Iona faced competition from other Irish monastic missions, however, and their religious power was not absolute. St Mael Rhuba at Applecross or St Donnan, who was martyred on the Isle of Eigg, were also contenders as early spiritual leaders of the Church.
Columba himself would have remained an enigmatic and little-known figure were it not for Adomnán, the ninth Abbot of Iona, and his book, the Vita Colum Cille
(Life of Columba), which ensured that the saint's reputation eclipsed that of the other Scottish saints and spread Iona’s fame across Christendom.
Pilgrimage to Iona increased: kings wished to be buried near to Columba, and
a network of Celtic high crosses and processional routes developed
around his shrine. At its zenith Iona produced The Book of Kells, a
masterpiece of Dark Age European art. Shortly after however, in 794 AD, the Vikings descended on Iona, and, within 50 years, they had extinguished the light which had been Iona. Columba’s relics were finally removed in 849 AD and divided between Alba and Ireland.
The Monymusk Reliquary, from around 750 AD, probably contained a relic of St Columba. It became a powerful symbol of nationhood, and was carried before the Scots army as it marched into war.
This reliquary is thought to be the Brechbennoch which was carried by the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.
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| | ST NINIAN AND ST KENTIGERN | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (2:11 PM) | |
St Ninian and St Kentigern
The earliest known Scottish saint is St Ninian, or Bishop Ninian, who
founded the first monastery in Scotland at Whithorn in the territory of the
Britons around AD 500. Ninian’s life remains a mystery: judging from his name
he was probably a Briton, and he seems to have been an exponent of the Roman Church, perhaps after receiving training in Rome, rather than the early Celtic Church with its strong ties to Ireland. He was concerned with the implementation of Christianity north of Hadrian's Wall at a time when most of the Caledonian Tribes were still pagan.
A carved oak figure of a bishop found near Whithorn at Wigtownshire. The figure is thought to represent Saint Ninian, who was a bishop during the late fifth century, although the figure itself dates from the 14th century. One legend involving St Ninian tells of him planting seeds which grew to fruition
within a few hours, thus relieving his monastery's food shortages.
Following in Ninian’s footsteps was St Kentigern, or St Mungo, as he is more familiarly known. Tradition has it that Kentigern founded a monastery at Govan and another at the site of Glasgow Cathedral, although this cannot be proved historically.
Again little is securely known beyond the fact that he possibly founded a bishopric for the Kings of Dumbarton and that he died in AD 612. His second title, Mungo, means 'very dear one' in the language of the Britons and the myths and tales surrounding him reveal a popularity amongst the common people. In one such story a local king refuses to pay his taxes to the Church, whereupon Kentigern curses him - inducing the River Clyde to rise and sweep all the king's grain from his barns and carry it to the saint's feet
St Mungo plays a large part in the early culture of Glasgow. The city's cathedral (right) is named after him and held his tomb until his relics were removed during the Middle Ages.
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| | THE REFORMED ORDERS & KING DAVID I | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (2:08 PM) | |
The Reformed Orders and King David I
Saint Margaret
The Reformed Orders
At the end of the 11th century monastic fashions were rapidly changing. The new reformed orders, like the Augustinians and Benedictines, started to live in cloistered communities and a stronger chain of command to the authorities in Rome was being established. Reform gave the Church a renewed sense of
moral purpose and authority. With this wave of reform came growing concern over depth of belief and heresy, and also a strong desire for uniformity across Christendom.
Queen Margaret invited the Benedictines to found a community in Dunfermline before she died in 1093, but there was considerable resistance from Gaelic Scotland to what was seen as an outside force influencing the Scottish Church and kingship. It was Margaret’s son, David I, perhaps the most innovative of all the Scottish kings, who revolutionised the Scottish church, bringing it into the European main stream.
David I - The State-building King
David had been brought up in the excitement surrounding the First Crusade (1095-99), which offered a new ideal of Christian Knighthood. His mother, Margaret, had a strong and pious influence on him, and from his time at the Norman court of Henry I of England he had seen the Norman fashion of kingship at first hand. When he returned to Scotland in 1113 to claim his inheritance from his brother, King Alexander I, he brought with him these new ideas, along with a pack of Norman followers to aid enforcement.
His revolution, which would ultimately reshape the Scottish Kingdom, began in
the lands in the south of Scotland - the old ancestral homes of the Angles and Britons. The latest monastic orders were brought in: the Augustinians to Jedburgh; the Tironensians to Kelso; the Cistercians to Melrose; and a new bishopric, complete with a new cathedral, at Glasgow. After David became King of Scotland in 1124, the reformed orders went on to establish themselves in Scone, St Andrews, Cambuskenneth, Holyrood and the royal centre at Dunfermline.
Granted massive estates by the monarchy, these new institutions gave renewed impetus to the economy and increased trade with Europe. The churches, bishops and abbots formed the king’s closest advisors; the monks formed an educated
bureaucracy which looked after the king’s records and administered
Scotland’s first systematic, written and recorded government.
It was a revolution from above as far as the local populace were concerned,
but it had profound implications for everyday life. The Church extended its role, establishing Scotland’s parish system and bringing Christianity to the heart of every community through the local parish priest, who blessed the crops and tended to the spiritual needs and fears of the community. David’s revolution also brought the king’s law to the people; at Roxburgh he established Scotland’s first Sheriffdom for the administration of the king’s justice.
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| | THE REFORMED ORDERS & KING DAVID I | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (2:05 PM) | |
The Reformed Orders & King David I
The impact of David’s monastic revolution was felt mainly in the south of Scotland. His successors - Malcolm the Maiden, William the Lion, and Alexander II developed his work slowly, bringing Gaelic Scotland, north of Fife, into the fold. Scotland had been transformed, but not beyond recognition. As the revolution settled into everyday Scottish life, what emerged was a hybrid of Gaelic and Norman cultural influences on church and kingdom - yet a nation which was recognisably part of mainstream European Christian culture.
Within that framework the Church went on to become a recognisably Scottish institution. From David I onwards, the Scottish kings promoted its independence: petitioning the Pope for recognition of the primacy of St. Andrews over the Scottish Church against the claims from York and Canterbury in England. In 1189 the campaign succeeded when the Scottish Church was recognised as ‘Rome’s special daughter’, its bishops answerable to the Pope alone.
A distinctive Scottish identity was promoted through the cults of Scottish saints, like Andrew, Columba and David I’s mother, Margaret (canonised in 1249). From the late 13th century monastic chroniclers began to write histories of Scotland. Built on the work of Adomnán and other anonymous monastic annalists, the chronicling tradition culminated in the mid-15th century with Abbot Walter Bower’s masterpiece, The Scotichronicon.
However, Scottish identity didn’t simply arise through the work of a few monastic chroniclers, but more through the role the Church played in society. In early 12th century charters, David I was entitled Rex Scotorum (King of Scots), who ruled over a diverse kingdom of Gaels, Angles, Normans and Gallowegians. Over the next century, the Church was one of the principle unifying factors in bringing this diverse mix of peoples together. With promotion by the Scottish kings, it brought a sense of shared identity and loyalty throughout the kingdoms, with a practical notion of society, order and mutual obligation. By the 13th century something new was being born: the Scottish nation.
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| | SAINT ANDREW | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (2:00 PM) | | Scotland's Premier Saint
After the Kingdom of Alba was created, Columba was surpassed as Scotland’s premier saint. St Andrew was in a different league from Columba: not only did he appear in the Bible, but he was an apostle of Jesus.
His relics appeared in Scotland under mysterious circumstances, and were placed in a Pictish monastery at Kinrymont (the church of the King’s Muir) probably founded by the Pictish warrior-king, Unust, in the mid eighth century.
In the 11th century, as the Kingdom of Alba expanded across Scotland, St Andrew’s popularity with royal patrons increased. St Andrew was a useful unifying symbol for a kingdom of diverse devotions to different saints and was free of any taint of unorthodoxy. Kings like Malcolm Canmore and his queen, Margaret, actively promoted the town of St Andrews, as Kilrymont is now known, as a major centre for pilgrimage and the home of the Scottish Church.
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| | AN INTRODUCTION TO ANCIENT SCOTLAND | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (1:57 PM) | |
An Introduction to Ancient Scotland
From about 8,000 BC the first people came to Scotland from Europe in what archaeologists call the Mesolithic period. These were the hunter-gatherers: nomads who lived in temporary camps, hunted animals like deer and fish, and lived off the plentiful supplies of fruits and berries found in the forests
Around 4,000 BC a great change took place in the lifestyle of Scotland’s early peoples. In what is called the Neolithic period they settled down and started to farm the land, clearing the forests to plant crops and tend animals like cattle and sheep.
Mostly they settled where many Scots live today: in fertile river valleys, building farmsteads or small village communities. Surrounding their settlements was a ritual landscape of chambered tombs holding the bones of their ancestors and great stone circles like Callanish on Lewis or The Ring of Brodgar on Orkney.
The Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis: between 4.5-5 thousand years old, with alignments to the moon and the points of the compass.
The discovery around 2,500 BC of how to turn rock into metals revolutionised society as the Bronze Age began. At first gold jewellery or bronze axes were imported, but within 500 years metal was being worked here. Scotland lay on the main trade route from gold-rich Ireland to northern Europe. Along its path new power centres emerged like Kilmartin in Argyll, while places like Orkney lost out.
Those who controlled the trade in metal gathered wealth and flaunted new symbols of power: finely crafted bronze swords, intricately patterned shields and large spear heads for flamboyant display. People began to be buried individually with grave goods for their afterlife, and made rich offerings to gods and goddesses, like the Ballahulish figurine, for good fortune.
The climate was warmer than it is today; agriculture flourished and the population expanded, even high upland pastures were farmed for crops. But in the late Bronze Age the climate rapidly cooled, increasing the competition for resources.
Around 700 BC metal workers figured out how to smelt iron, heralding the start of the Iron Age. Stronger and more abundant than bronze, iron was far superior for making weapons and armour - further accelerating social change. Prosperous farmers built defensive houses like brochs and crannogs against raiding warbands or looked to powerful warlords or chieftains in hill forts to protect their rich farmlands.
Two thousand years ago Scotland was covered with a patchwork of different tribes that spoke languages akin to Gaelic and Welsh. It wasn’t a dark forested land inhabited by savages but a complex and sophisticated civilisation that had successfully shaped its environment in order to survive. In AD 79 our mysterious ancestors faced their greatest challenge, a Roman invasion.
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| | SKARA BRAE | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (1:54 PM) | |
Skara Brae - Neolithic
One of the most remarkable discoveries in modern archaeology: in 1850 a violent storm ravaged the Bay of Skaill in the Orkney Isles to the north-east of mainland Scotland, revealing the Neolithic village of Skara Brae buried beneath the sand dunes. It is the best preserved Neolithic village in northern Europe and it offers us a unique window into the lives of the farmers who lived there between 3,100 and 2,450 BC.
Skara Brae’s remarkable survival through the ages is thanks to the design of the original builders who buried the stone-slab walls up to roof level in clay soil and waste material in order to provide insulation and protection from the elements.
Such a tightly knit and communal village life was unusual in these early farming communities, individual farmsteads being preferred, but Skara Brae seems to have been a very close community with little room for non-conformists. Every house has the same layout for roughly a family-sized living space.
Upon entry to any of the houses, one has to crouch through a small doorway which would have been blocked by a slab of stone and possibly barred as well. This shows that security was important to the dwellers, but that privacy for the family unit was also very important. The layout of Skara Brae, whilst being very much geared towards a community settlement, makes this type of privacy possible.
Inside, each house has a large floor space with a central hearth where no doubt the fire was always burning. Since the main source of timber on Orkney was driftwood from the forests of North America, most of the furniture was made of stone and has survived well leaving many clues to these people’s lifestyles. Opposite the doors, large, stone dressers are still intact, where objects of importance could be displayed, but secret spaces have also been found under the stone dresser for those objects the families were less keen to display. On either side of the living space were stone beds, which would have been filled with bracken and heather, and covered with animal skins.
The villagers were farmers, raising large cattle and sheep and growing a little barley. Their diet contained many foods which would be regarded as luxuries today. Venison from deer imported to Orkney. Meat and eggs from seabirds like the Great Auk. Oysters, crabs, cockles and mussels, as well as giant cod and saithe from the sea. Strangely, no fishing equipment was discovered when the village was excavated, but water-tight tanks in the floor of each house were probably designed to hold limpets for fish bait.
Just outside the complex of houses, a workshop stands on its own where chert - a local flint substitute - was made into stone tools. Also, volcanic pumice, washed up on Orkney’s beaches from Iceland, was used to shape bone tools. In good years, they lived well with some leisure time; and they made works of art like bone necklaces and the mysterious stone balls carved from hard volcanic rock.
Very few other signs of settlement from the late Neolithic Age remain to us, probably due to their timber construction, but the inhabitants of Orkney, being dependent on stone for construction, have left us a valuable door into their world.
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| | STONE CIRCLES | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (1:51 PM) | |
Stone Circles
The great, ceremonial stone circles are the most enigmatic of all the Neolithic farmers’ creations. They were built between 3,000 - 2,000 BC by a wide variety of Neolithic communities. Today only the stones remain, but in their time they were part of a wider landscape of ritual sites built of timber and stone, and set in prominent positions in the heart of vibrant farming communities.
Those communities seem to have had a shared interest in the movements of the sun and moon, which may have had a religious significance to them, but used their stone circles in differing ways across time.
How were they built?
The stone circles were built with locally available stone, quarried from natural rock outcrops like the Orkney flagstones. Natural cracks in the outcrops were exploited and wooden wedges used to split the stones. It needed complex and ordered societies to move the stones to the site of the circles. A five-metre-long stone weighs about five metric tons, requiring about a hundred people to move it or less if they used ropes, levers, rollers and ramps to move it into position.
Why were they built?
It’s possible the stones were erected to commemorate the dead or to highlight the prestige of the organiser. Whatever they were for, they show a commitment to long-term planning. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort to construct these monuments and may have taken several generations to complete them.
A circle, built of timber or stone, sometimes with surrounding earthwork ditches, seems to involve ideas on defining special, ritual spaces and of excluding some people from the ceremonies within.
How do they differ?
The earliest of stone circles date to around 3,000 BC: like the Stones of Stenness on Orkney, where twelve stones were built inside a massive earthwork, probably by the same people who built the nearby tomb at Maes Howe. The tomb’s passageway points towards the rising midwinter sun, showing these people had a religious interest in the sun’s movements, but that is not reflected in the stones themselves, which have no significant alignment.
Later stone circles, like at Callanish on Lewis (2,900-2,600 BC), do have significant alignments. Set in a landscape of Neolithic fields and houses, its central ring of stones is built around a small chambered cairn and has four avenues of standing stones leading off roughly to the points of the compass. The northern avenue points to a burial cairn, and from the southern avenue the moon can be seen to skim along the top of the hills every 18.6 years. A thousand years later a similar interest in the heavens can be found at Balnuaran of Clava near Inverness (2,000-1,700 BC), where a chambered cairn enclosed in the stone circle is orientated to the mid-winter sun.
The Aberdeenshire stone circles, such as Easter Aquhorithies, have a massive horizontal stone between two vertical stones which dramatise the setting of the moon and sun. Archaeologists have discovered that the cremated remains of the dead were placed within the circle. All these stone circles reveal the diversity of uses and the differing interests of the communities who built them.
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| | BROCHS, CRANNOGS AND HILLFORTS | | | | Sunday, November 23, 2008 (1:47 PM) | |
Crannogs
The remains of crannogs are found in many Scottish lochs, particularly in the Highlands. They were artificial islands linked to the shore by a stone causeway or timber gangway.
In Loch Tay, for example, many crannogs now lie submerged, which has helped archaeologists: as the water-logged conditions have preserved many perishable items such as wooden bowls and cups that would have been destroyed on land.
Crannogs were probably the centres of prosperous Iron Age farms, where people lived in an easily-defended location to protect themselves and their livestock from passing raiders. The settlement would have consisted of a farm house, with cattle and crops being tended in nearby fields, and sheep on hill pastures. Local woodlands would have serviced the home with fruit, hazelnuts, wild cabbage and medicines, as well as with wild boar and other woodland animals suitable for hunting.
At Loch Tay the crannog-dwellers were skilled weavers, and could make woollen and leather items which could be transported by boat and traded for luxuries like jewellery.
The reconstruction of a crannog on Loch Tay (see picture above) near Kenmore is based on nearby underwater, archaeological excavations of the Oakbank crannog, which dates from 500 BC. Its circular, timber platform, with its large, timber roundhouse, is built on oak piles driven deep into the loch bed. The walls are made of hazel rods, woven together, and the thatched roof is steeply pitched enough to allow rain to drain off. Inside, the floor is covered with bracken and ferns, with a flat, stone fireplace in the centre which would have been kept burning continuously and would have been the focus of family life.
Brochs
To the north and west of Scotland, stone was a more available building material than timber for construction purposes. Here we find the brochs: one of the finest achievements of Iron Age Scotland, and predominant on Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. They are the pinnacle of drystone wall building. Huge towers, so ingeniously engineered to avoid collapse that some of them are still standing 2,000 years later!
The earliest Brochs are traced back to 500-200 BC. They are formed by two concentric, dry-stone walls, producing a hollow-walled tower. Between the walls were galleries and stairways which led to the upper levels. Within the tower there would have been several wooden floors, providing the main living space, with the ground floor possibly used as a secure store for cattle or sheep when the broch was under siege. The whole structure may have been topped with a conical, thatched roof.
Brochs were meant to impress and were probably houses for tribal chiefs or important farmers. At places like Gurness in Orkney, villages grew up around the broch and fragments of pottery found there show the owners sometimes enjoyed a lifestyle of imported wines and olives from the Mediterranean - before the Romans invaded. About AD 100 the fashion for broch building declined, however, the communities and settlements around them continued to flourish.
Hillforts
The most impressive Iron Age settlements are hillforts, like Traprain Law in East Lothian. They are powerful fortresses surrounded by earthen ditches with wooden palisades or stone walls, and are set on hill tops or on coastal promontories.
After the introduction of the horse and iron weaponry, tribes could hold down larger territories and strike at enemies more swiftly. Hillforts were designed to defend against these raiding parties, but they also served as
impressive statements of a chieftain's power. From their hillforts these chieftains could survey the surrounding farmlands under their sway, lands that no doubt provided them with food. The people who farmed the land were also warriors when required and looked to both fort and chieftain for protection. They became centres for trade and metal working, bringing wealth, power and status to those who controlled that trade.
The appearance of all of these settlements on the landscape seems to suggest the development of a more structured and hierarchical society, where the power of chieftains increased along with the need for protection.
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