The following is an extract from Ecclesiastica Celtica by Sabine Baring-Gould, first published in the 1914 edition of his 16 volume Lives of the Saints and re-published by Imagier Publishing in 2014. It is a mine of information concerning the ancient British Church that challenges a great deal of our perceptions concerning the early Church in Britain.
"When Christianity appeared among the Celts, who did not live in towns,
and had not been citizenised and divested of their native character, it was
compelled to assume an attitude and to adopt methods consonant with the Celtic
constitution. The only possible mode in which it could make way was by winning
the consent of the chief of the clan. No tribesman could profess Christianity
without the permission of his chief, whom he was bound to obey in religious
matters as in military. Consequently the first missionaries at once applied
to the chiefs of the tribes, and if they did not convert them, they induced
them to surrender to them a patch of land on which to settle. The inducement
was fear. The chieftains feared the new medicine-men, and trembled
lest their curses should prove more efficacious than the blessings of the Druids. The princes
conciliated these new sorcerers with grants of land, in the hope that
their incantations, in consort with those of the Druids, would render
themselves invulnerable in a fray, and the tribe victorious in all its
aggressions.
When the missionary had obtained a plot of land, he threw up an
embankment enclosing a circular or oval space, and planted a stockade on top.
Within he erected huts: if among Brythons, of wood and wattle; if among Goidels, of stone, circular,
and these accommodated the population that accrued to him – slaves given by the chief, outlaws seeking refuge,
bastards who had no claim on the tribal inheritance. Thus originated the Tribe of the Saint, a
population subject to the missionary as chieftain, but also owing military
service to the head of the secular tribe.
By slow degrees the Druids fell into disrepute, and their land and serfs
were usurped by, or granted to, the saints. Thus it came about that side by
side with the Tribe of the Land was to be
found the Tribe of the Saint. Moreover,
the missionary settlements soon outgrew their bounds, and swarmed, as did the
members of the Tribe of the Land, when not repeatedly thinned by war.
Consequently we hear of the early saints wandering about in an apparently
aimless manner, but always seeking to found fresh colonies, usurp lands that had
been granted to the discredited medicine-man, found new churches, and extort
fresh grants
.
These saintly establishments were counterparts of such as were secular.
They consisted of households comprising men and women, and they multiplied
naturally. All the householders looked to the saint as their head, just as in
the secular tribe all the members looked to and obeyed the chief. But the
members of the ecclesiastical tribe were not
wholly independent of the head of the secular tribe; they still owed to him
military service, whether laymen or clergy. Even in Ireland the women were not
exempt. Doubtless the ecclesiastics were called out
to curse the enemies of the chief, and if their curses proved ineffectual, they
suffered deprivation
In Ireland it was not till 804 that monks and clergy were exempt
from bearing arms against the foe of the chief, and then they by no means
relished their release. Women were not relieved of their obligations to arm and
fight in the ranks till the Synod of Drumceatt (A. D.
500), and then only on the urgency of S. Columba. Moreover, just as one
secular tribe fought another, because of some quarrel between the chiefs, or
because one wanted the lands of the other, or out of mere wantonness, so was it
with the religious tribes. The monks regarded themselves as bound together into
one tribe under an abbot, and they envied other monastic
settlements. In 672 a battle was fought between the rival monasteries of Clonmacnois and Durrow, and Dermot Duff, leader of the men
of Durrow, fell before the monks of Clonmacnois, together
with two hundred of his followers. In 816 no less than four hundred men were
slain in a battle between rival monasteries. In 700 the clergy of Ireland attended their synods
sword in hand, and fought those who differed from them in opinion, leaving the
ground strewn with corpses. S. Columba stirred up a
fratricidal war between the men of the South and those of the north of the clan of Neill merely because
he was not allowed to retain a copy of a book he had made, and this cost the
Meath men no fewer that three thousand slain. If we may trust Gildas, British churchmen were
not much better. In time the chiefs themselves founded religious settlements
and placed over them sons, sometimes in orders, sometimes not, so that
ecclesiastical as well as political supremacy might be in their families.
At Iona, out of eleven immediate successors to
S. Columba, there was but one who
certainly did not belong to his family, and one other, of whose parentage we
have no information. Phelim was bishop and chief of Cashel in the middle of the
ninth century. In 850 he fell upon Armagh, slaying priests and
bishops wherever he caught them. The kingdom of Munster was held by chiefs who
combined the ecclesiastical with the secular power, and were bishops as well as
princes. Armagh was hereditary bishopric for eight generations to 1129. It is
often asserted that these archbishops were lay intruders, but this is
disputable. To hold the saintship and bequeath it to a son was quite in order,
according to Celtic ideas. In Wales the same principle prevailed; bishoprics,
canonries, and parochial benefices passed
from father to son, or were retained in one family for generations. Where an
ecclesiastic had, say, four sons, he divided the ecclesiastical inheritance
among them, for each had a right to his share if born after his father had
become bishop or priest, but if he had been born earlier, then he had no claim
on the ecclesiastical inheritance. Giraldus Cambrensis mentions
one benefice that was held by two brothers, one a layman, the other in orders.
Benefices in Wales and in parts of England with more than one
rector, as, for instance, Tiverton, which had five till quite recently, owe
their origin to this custom.
How splendid and influential the position of the saint or head of an
ecclesiastical settlement was, may be judged from the Life of S. Cadoc. The author
thus describes his power at Llancarvan. “He daily fed a
hundred clergy and a hundred soldiers, and a hundred workmen and a hundred poor
men, with the same number of widows. This was the number of his household,
besides servants in attendance, and esquires and guests, whose number also was
uncertain. Nor is it strange that he was a rich man and supported many, for he
was abbot and prince.”
When the chieftain of the land did not absorb also the chieftainship of
the ecclesiastical tribe, then
continual frictions existed between the head of the land and the head of the
Church; the former not only exacted military service from the members of the
ecclesiastical establishment, but also an annual tax and contributions in kind.
If the tax were not paid, he distrained and carried off the cattle of the
saint, who had no other means of redress than to curse, and this he did freely.
If any disaster followed, this was at once attributed to the virtue of the
curse; and on the whole, the spiritual heads got their own way. S. Beuno cursed a chief, and he
dissolved into a puddle; S. Cadoc cursed his servant because he was clumsy in
lighting a fire, and the flame leaped forth and consumed the man; some men who
offended him had their beards and half the hair of their heads removed, and the
ears of their horses sliced off. Men on whom the curses of the saints fell were
drowned, smothered in bogs, turned into stone, melted into lumps of wax,
stricken with lightning. Even after S. Cadoc was dead, the corpse roared like a
bull because the coffin was jostled.
The first stage in Ireland, Wales, and perhaps Scotland, was that indicated
above, where the ecclesiastical tribe contained
the professional believers, that is to say, the saint and those who owed to him
tribal allegiance, that allegiance extending to the profession of his religion. In this stage the
stockaded settlement contained men and women, households of those dependent on
the saint; all working for him and for themselves, and paying a tribute in kind
and service to the chief of the clan of the land. But when the faith spread and
was universally professed, then the condition of affairs altered. All the
members of the clan could not pass into the saintly tribe, nor would the
chieftain of the land tolerate the saintly tribe becoming too populous and
powerful. A readjustment of arrangements took place. Either, as in Armagh, the chieftain
constituted himself ecclesiastical head, and so resolved the double tribe into
one under one head, temporal and spiritual at once, or else, and that more
commonly, he withdrew from the tribe of the saint all its lay retainers, and
the establishment resolved itself, or was compulsorily resolved into, a monastic society, comprising
only clerics and monks, into which no women were admitted; or the
saintship was given to a daughter of the ruling house, with sisters and monks
and bishops under her. When we read of the great monasteries of Bangor Iscoed, Bangor in
Ireland, Llancarvan, Llantwit, Clonmacnois, &c., with
their thousands of monks, we hear of them in their second stage. Nevertheless,
the hereditary principle remained in force, and the superior, the abbot, or saint was almost
always of the family of the founder.
The term “saint” was applied at first very much as is the later term
“religious” now. It signified no more than that the saint was the head of the
religious tribe, and it may be, and probably was, applied indiscriminately to
these heads, irrespective of their moral fitness for their position, or their
position, or their conduct as ecclesiastical chiefs.
But the Bollandist writer did not understand the case. It was not one of
canonisation at all, but of alteration in the signification of a word. The
Apostle spoke of the saints at Corinth and Ephesus, but some of these
were exceedingly immoral persons. A “religious,” as a Latin would term him,
would by a Celt in those days be designated a “saint”. In the second stage the
term came to be limited to founders of settlements and churches. It may be
remarked that only noble and princely families produced saints, for indeed none
not well born could become head of an ecclesiastical tribe. At the
same time, it is observable that a very discreditable origin is given to a good
many Celtic saints; that was due to
the fact of the headship of a religious settlement being given as a means of
provision for the princely bastard.
If a woman of one tribe went astray with a member of another tribe, her
child had no rights in her tribe, none in that of the father. But if that woman
was, as in the case of the mothers of S.
David and S. Kentigern, of a princely
house, then their fathers or brothers found a means of providing for these
illegitimates by making them saints. It has caused perplexity to account for
the number of children attributed to some of the founders of saintly families. Brychan is given twenty-four
sons and twenty-five daughters, in all forty-nine children, and of these half
were saints. The explanation is that these saints were of the kin of Brychan,
and so were appointed to monasteries or ecclesiastical settlements that fell to
his share by right of conquest. When a prince looked about him to settle his
family he brought up as many to be warriors and the rest to be saints.
It has provoked some comment that nearly all the saints of the Welsh
Church were foreigners, i.e., members of invading and conquering families. The
three saintly families of Wales were respectively those of the Irish Brychan, conqueror of
Bresknock, the Pict Cunedda, who invaded Wales from the north, and the
Northern Caw, who came from Albany. The fact was that these invaders turned out
the native chieftains from their headship in the land and in the Church, and
gave all places of authority to their children and clansmen.
To return once more to the separation that prevailed in the Celtic Church between jurisdiction and the Episcopal
office. A territorial distribution and jurisdiction over a see was given to
bishops because the Roman civil organisation showed the way, but where, as in
the Celtic world, there was a different sort of organisation, that which was
tribal, with now shrinking then expanding confines, the Church had to
accommodate herself to those conditions with that elasticity which belongs to
her. In the Celtic world the tribe was the only constituted entity, and the
land changed hands as the tribes fought and wrested soil from one another; not
for ages were the boundaries fixed. But in the Roman world the districts were
mapped out, and the people subjected to rulers over these districts, to
whatever race or clan they might belong.
The ecclesiastical jurisdiction was first of all in the hands of the
founder, a missionary saint, but then it passed by the principle of heredity to
whoever represented him in blood, or to the nearest kin to the chief of the
land. At Kildare, S. Bridget had bishops under her
direction and orders. So had S. Ninnoch in Brittany. In Iona, S. Columba in priest’s orders
ruled over Bishop Etchen. There was no parochial system; there could
be none when the land was parcelled up and distributed among different members
of the tribe every few years. The ecclesiastical foci were settlements of the saints.
These were permanent, for the land about them was in the permanent possession
of the saint for the time being. When a member of a religious establishment
became restless or restive he went off, taking with him some likeminded saints,
and established a new settlement.
When the Saxon, Angles, and Jutes first invaded Britain they almost exterminated the British people; those whom they did not enslave they drove back to North and West. Apparently the Church of the Romano-British had been hitherto fully occupied with the conversion of the people of the same race elsewhere. If we hold that S. Patrick came from Strathclyde, then the conversion of Ireland was due to it; certainly so also was that of the Goidelic people in the North and West. After Ireland was brought to the faith by Patrick it relapsed, and its reconversion was due to Welsh missions. Hosts of saintly evangelists, moreover, sallied forth from Ireland a little later and overran Western Europe, England, Scotland, Brittany, France, Alsatia, Lorraine, and penetrating into Bavaria, Rhhætia, Helvetia, Germany, and even Italy, founded settlements after the native type.
All that part of the British Isles now called Scotland owed its
Christianity to the mission of Columba from Ireland; so did
the great Northumbrian Church, where the
invaders of German blood were brought to the worship of Christ through the missions
from Iona. Wales and Cornwall, were Christian long
before Augustine was born. “By armies of monastic missionaries,” says Mr. Haddan, “and next by
learned teachers – first attracting pupils to Irish schools from all Christian
Europe north of the Alps and the Pyrenees, and next, by sending forth
men to become the founders of schools, or monasteries, or churches abroard –
the churches of St. Patrick and S. Columba stand out, from the
sixth century forward, as the most energetic centres of religious life and
knowledge in Europe; the main restorers of Christianity in
paganised England and Roman Germany; the reformers and
main founders of monastic life in Northern France; the opponents of Arianism, even in Italy itself; the originators
in the West of the well-meant, however mistaken, system of the Penitentials; the leading
preservers in the eighth and ninth centuries of theological and classic
culture, Greek as well as Latin; the scribes, both at home and abroad, of many
a Bible text; the teachers of psalmody; the schoolmasters of the great monastic
schools; the parents, in great part, as well as
the forerunners, of Anglo-Saxon learning and missionary zeal; the senders forth
of not the least bright stars among the galaxy of talent gathered by Charlemagne from all quarters
to instruct his degenerate Franks, . . . down to the very
Normanising of the Celtic Churches in the entire British Isles in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries.”
Maccald, a native of Down, became Bishop of Man in the fifth century, S. Donan was the apostle of Uig, S. Maelrubb, of Skye. In fact, the
Christianising of the whole of the north-west of Scotland and the adjacent
isles was due to S. Columba. Irish monks pushed as far as the Faröe Isles and Iceland. S. Brendan thrust his vessel
towards the setting sun, seeking lands to conquer for Christ. S. Aidan, the apostle of Northumbria, whose diocese
extended from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, was an
Irishman from Iona. Diuma, the first bishop of the
Mercians, and his successor, Ceallach, where both Irishmen.
S. Fursey, another, preached the
Gospel in Suffolk. Mailduff established a mission
centre among the West Saxons. S. Bega laboured in Cumberland. From the beginning
of the sixth century they overspread Europe, and Irishmen for their
distinguished piety were elected to fill sees even in Italy.
Nothing could exceed the indignation and disgust of Augustine and his followers
when they ascertained that the British Church observed Easter
on a different day from themselves. Instead of inquiring into the cause, and
dealing gently by argument with the bishops and abbots of Britain, they heaped
on them epithets expressive of loathing, termed the Quartodecimans, which they
were not – but an ugly name answered their purpose – and denounced them as schismatics and heretics. This unhappy
miscalculation about Easter proved a grievous cause of weakness in the
Celtic Church, for those of
her saints who travelled to Gaul or Italy were forced to admit
that their native Church was in error, and returning home formed a party which
laboured for the abandonment of the old computation. Another peculiarity was
the tonsure assumed by the clergy. Cutting the locks
in a certain fashion was a symbol of belonging to a tribe, just as puncturing
the ear marks a horse turned loose on downs as the property of certain owners.
An illustration occurs in the life of S. David. His missionary work was
bitterly opposed by the Irish settler Boia, the remains of whose
castle are still traceable half a mile below S. David’s, on the Allun. But more
hostile to the saint than the chief was his wife. In order to propitiate the
gods and induce them to destroy the saint, this woman resolved on a sacrifice.
The best and most efficacious that could be offered would be a child of her
womb, but she had none. Therefore she called to her a daughter-in-law named
Dunawel, retired with her into a hazel grove, placed the girl’s head on the lap
that she might cut and braid her hair, such an act betokening adoption into the
family. Then the woman with a sharp knife cut her throat, and offered the
expiring life to the gods.
At the bottom of all the differences lay the independence of the Celtic
Churches, which owed no allegiance to the Papal chair, had organised
themselves, expanded, and evangelised, had manifested extraordinary vigour, and
produced great sanctity in their independence. There was a robustness and
healthiness about their churches that the Latin missionaries did not relish. In
Episcopal constitution, derivation of orders from the Apostolic fountain-head,
in unity of doctrine, in liturgical forms, the Celtic Churches were one with
the Catholic Church throughout the world, whether Eastern or Western. They were
ready to acknowledge a certain primacy in the Roman see, as S. Columbanus said, later, “next
to Jerusalem,” but such a half admission would not
satisfy those who were, before all things, missionaries to extend the
Papal authority. Every sort of false accusation, malignant insinuation, and
open outrage was offered to the ancient British Church. Its orders
were ignored, its ministration flouted, the orthodoxy of its prelates disputed.
Those British Christians who visited Rome, or were for a while in Gaul, returned intensely
Romanised, and threw in their lot with the anti-national party, much as some
young clergy of the present day after a visit to the Continent return enamoured
with some fantastic ceremony they have witnessed abroad and endeavour to thrust
it on their reluctant congregations at home, and who maintain that what is done
in Latin churches must be right. The temper of mind in which the Celtic bishops
and abbots regarded the Popes may be judged from the letters of S. Columbanus. The position
assumed by him towards the Pope substantially amounted to this: an
acknowledgment of the Bishop of Rome as a true bishop of the Church of Christ, but as one having no jurisdiction over himself; and
a claim to criticise freely, and from the independent standpoint of an equal,
the character and conduct of the Roman pontiff.
The language which he addressed to Boniface IV is not that of a
subordinate to a sovereign in the Church, but is couched in terms of great
freedom. He laments over the infamy that attaches itself to the chair of S.
Peter in consequence of the miserable squabbles that rage in Rome. He warns the
prelate not to forfeit his dignity by perversity, for his power depends, says
he, on his maintaining right judgement in all things, for that only such a one
can be regarded as a holder of the keys of heaven who opens the doors to the
good and shuts to the bad. He exhorts the Pope to cleanse his see from error,
for it would be a lamentable thing for the Apostolic See to lapse from the
Catholic faith. He upbraids the Roman Church for making exaggerated claims to
authority and power other than what was possessed by other Churches, and he
allows to the see of Rome a high position of honour, second only to
that of Jerusalem.
If it were the general relation in which the British Churches stood to
the Papal See, no wonder that Pope Vitalian, in 667, wrote to King Oswy to
choose an arch-bishop for Canterbury who should root out
the tares from the whole island, alluding thereby to the clergy of the National
Church. The peculiarity in the observance of Easter was abandoned by the
Church in the south of Ireland in 634, by the Northumbrian Church in 664;
the Britons of Strathclyde submitted in 668,
the northern Scots in Ireland in 697; in 704 a Roman party was
formed in Iona itself. The British of the eastern portion
of the West Welsh in Devon and Cornwall accepted the Roman
computation in 710. The change took place in Wales between 768 and 777. Llandewennec, in Brittany, retained the Celtic tonsure till 817.
There exists at Canterbury a copy of a letter written by Kenstec, or Kenstet,
bishop-elect of the Cornish Britons, in which he professes his obedience to the
see of Canterbury, then ruled by Ceolnoth, who was archbishop
between 833 and 870. In 884 a Saxon see was constituted at Exeter, with jurisdiction given by
Canterbury over Cornwall. In 905 the Pope having complained to King Edward the Elder and to Plegmund, Archbishop of
Canterbury, that the great see of Wessex had been vacant for
seven years, Edward and Plegmund together divided the see into five: Winchester, Framsbury, Sherborne, Wells, and Crediton, and to Crediton were
assigned three estates in Wales, i.e. Cornwall, to be under the authority
of the Bishop of Devon, because hitherto the Cornish had been without awe of
the West Saxons. The bishop was of
course a Saxon, Eadulf. Moreover, an order was
made that the bishop should pay an annual visit to Cornwall “to extirpate their
errors, for formerly they resisted the truth, and did not obey the apostolical
decrees,” that is to say, they clung to their traditional observances and to
the independence of their Church, all which was hateful in the eyes of such men
as Plegmund.
The method adopted by the Saxon kings, partly in their own interest,
partly in that of Rome, was to quell all religious as well as
political independence in the Cornish, and this policy was pursued also by the Danish
and Norman kings. The process followed was this: First,
the British bishops and clergy were subjected to a torrent of abuse as heretics and schismatics, till they yielded
their peculiarities and adopted the correct Easter computation, the Latin tonsure, and territorial in
place of tribal organisation in the Church. Secondly, Saxon bishops were intruded in
place of native Cornish rulers. Then, thirdly, the Episcopal throne was withdrawn
from Cornwall wholly, and placed, first in Crediton, then in Exeter, away from all
association with Celts; for, be it recalled, Athelstan had expelled the
British from Exeter. And this was done with Papal approval, for it was the
stifling of ecclesiastical independent life in the Celtic race in the Domnonian
peninsula. This will be more apparent when we give the list of bishops as far
as is known:-
KENSTEC, Bishop at Dinnurrin, in Cornwall, submitted to Canterbury, 833-870; a Briton
EADULF, Bishop (Saxon) at Crediton, was
given three manors in Wales beyond the Tamar – a foothold among the
pure Britons, 905.
CONAN, Bishop at S. Petrocks (Bodmin),
931-940; a Briton, but retained much about the court of Athelstan, and
apparently more there than in Cornwall.
DANIEL, Bishop of S. Germans, 945-955; probably a Briton.
ATHELSTAN, an intruded Saxon, 955-959.
COMOERE, Bishop at S. Germans, 959-966;
probably a Briton.
WULFSIGE, an intruded Saxon, 966-988.
EALDRED, an intruded Saxon, 993-997.
BURHWOLD, an intruded Saxon, 1002-1020.
LYVING, Saxon Bishop of Crediton, having already three
manors in Cornwall, now obtained the abolition of an
independent Cornish bishopric, and the subjection of the whole of Cornwall to
the see of Crediton, 1026-1038.
LEOFRIC, 1046-1071, had the see of
Crediton, together with jurisdiction over Cornwall,
removed to Exeter.
Not till 1877 was a bishop’s stool restored to the West Welsh, with Truro as the
cathedral, and not yet has a Cornishman been given the pastoral staff to hold
spiritual rule over his brother Cornishmen. In Wales a somewhat similar
process was pursued. Elbod, or Elfod, Bishop of Bangor, in 768 induced North
Wales, and in 777 South Wales, to adopt the Roman Easter; and the process of
transforming the organisation of the Church from one tribal into one that was
in conformity with the Latin usage, proceeded gradually.
It was possibly due to Armorican
influence that the Welsh Church abandoned it peculiarities. As Mr. Borlase
happily puts it, “We can readily imagine that the native would adopt changes
from their brethren in Armorica, while the Saxons might strive in vain to
force them upon them. The Briton was stubborn and unbending, and he is so to
this day. He might be led, but he would never be driven. His errors, if they
were errors (and this we may be quite sure he did not admit), would be dearer
to him than an orthodoxy enforced by the conquerors, and thereafter to be worn
by him as one of the badges of his vanquished race.”
In 871, on the death of Einion, Bishop of Menevia, Hubert, a Saxon, was
intruded upon the throne of S. David, and again a Lambert,
consecrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 874, unless, as
Haddan and Stubbs suppose,
Lambert and Hubert are identical, in which case the delay in consecration was
probably due to the resistance of the clergy to having an alien forced on them.
At the same time another Welsh see was filled with bishops consecrated at
Canterbury, Llandaff, to which first Cymelliauc and then Lliliau were ordained.
According to the Book of Llandaff, some
bishops of that see and also some of S. David’s were consecrated by
the Archbishop of Canterbury at the close of the tenth century; but the
statements are in a condition of such hopeless inconsistency, that it is
advisable to reject them.
In its struggle for independence the arch-episcopal
see of S. David’s claimed it rights as derived from Jerusalem, and the story was
invented that S. David had been consecrated and given supremacy over the British Church by the
Patriarch and successor of S. James of Jerusalem. By this assumption the see of
S. David pitted S. James against S. Peter. But although it is possible that S.
David may have visited Jerusalem, it is not probable that he was there
consecrated. It was not till the Norman conquest of Wales that the independence of
the Welsh Church came to an end"
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