Pioneers of Scottish Christianity

Ninian, Columba and Mungo

Roderick Graham

• Publisher: Saint Andrew Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780715209653
• eBook ISBN: 9780861537778
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

How did Christianity come to Scotland? A sixteen-hundred-year-old fog of mystery separates us from the dawn of Christianity in Scotland – but there are some intriguing signposts. Whether in life or in legend, the achievements of Saints Ninian, Columba and Kentigern (Mungo) intertwine to form the deep roots of Scottish Christianity.

1. And There Was Darkness

It would be convenient to believe that, when the last Roman legionary departed and switched off the lights, Scotland was left in a state of heathen darkness until St Ninian switched them on again. It would be convenient – and it would also be complete nonsense since, inevitably, the truth is much more complicated, and much more fascinating.

The purpose of the Roman Empire was to enrich the life of Romans, whether by trade or by a steady supply of foodstuffs, luxury goods and slaves. The Romans had no interest in ethnic cleansing or in converting the locals to the worship of their own gods. Provided that the conquered inhabitants did not interrupt trade and dutifully paid their tributes, then, after the initial conquest was complete, the local cultures were largely tolerated.

This conquest more or less came to a halt in AD 84,1 when the Roman general Julius Agricola met the people whom they called the Caledonii in battle at Mons Graupius, now thought to be near Inverurie in the Grampian region of Scotland. The fierce but undisciplined Caledonians were totally defeated by the Roman legionaries, losing some 10,000 men to the Roman loss of only 360. The Caledonian survivors simply melted into the hills, and Agricola withdrew to the south, leaving a succession of forts to guard the Highlands. The land to the north provided nothing of value to Rome, and the locals were untrainable as slaves.

These ‘Caledonians’ have never been precisely defined. Either they were the last of the first people who colonized the British Isles in about 2000 BC, or they were some of the various remnants of later invasions from continental Europe. Certainly, they seem to have been ethnically different from the southern British – and legends of their origins abound.

One tale tells of Gaythelos, the son of a Greek king, going to Egypt to marry Scota, the pharaoh’s daughter. The pharaoh is drowned in the Red Sea, and Gaythelos goes to Britain, from where his son, named Hiber, travels to Ireland. Thus all of Scotland is descended from a Greek/Egyptian partnership.

There is another, equally fanciful, legend recounted in The Pictish Chronicle and in The Book of Ballimote. This is quoted by the Venerable Bede, a monk writing in Jarrow in the seventh century. According to this legend, the Picts originated in Scythia – which gave its name to Scotia – an area vaguely defined as being squeezed between Persia and Ukraine, sometimes spreading north to the Baltic coasts. Bede described how the Scythians were driven by adverse winds round the north coast of Scotland to land on the north coast of Ireland, where they were refused permission to settle but were redirected back to the north of Scotland. The Irish generously provided them with wives, on condition that in case of dispute the succession should be through the female line. Elsewhere, Bede qualified this assertion to say that female succession would only apply in times of crisis. Bede claimed that the descent of kingship could be matrilineal, but he qualified this by adding that such a practice was only the case when ubi res perveniret in dubium, or when the matter came into doubt.

Another legend has a group of Scythians, led by their king, Agrenor, fleeing to Albania. No reason is given for this migration of a warrior people. However, they then travelled variously across Europe before arriving in Orkney and settling in the north, naming their country Alban. Their leader, Cruithne, had seven sons, and with their followers they spread south as far as France where they built the city of Pictavia, or Poitiers, and founded the nation of the Pictones.

Some then returned to Ireland, where they were befriended by Cremthand, king of Leinster, provided that they helped him to fight the Tuath Figla, a savage tribe of Britons who fought naked except for poisoned swords. However, Trostan, the Irish druid, filled a pit with the milk of seven score hornless white cows, in which the survivors bathed – and all their wounds were instantly healed. They were then given wives by the king; and, under a new leader, Cathluan, they returned to Alban, where their wives taught them their language, an early form of today’s Irish, and they colonized the north of Scotland, their language developing into modern Scots Gaelic.

One completely bizarre variation of this already fantastic legend tells that the men cut out their own tongues so that their children would speak only the language of their mothers.

Another source has the Picts coming north through Thrace and across Germany to land on the east coast of Britain. This theory would coincide with the Roman historian Tacitus’s belief that the Picts had German roots. In his day, Scythia Europeae extended as far as Scandinavia. Those far-off countries were also known to have ‘painted people’. But Tacitus thought it was more credible that the Caledoniii came from Gaul.

Eugenius was a Roman administrator and teacher of rhetoric, writing in Autun in 297, and he was the first to refer to the ‘Picti’, ‘the painted ones’. He was unlikely ever to have met a Pict or even visited Britain, so we can assume that the word had been in circulation long before he used it.

It is extremely likely that ‘Pict’ was a slang term of derision among the Roman legionaries rather as, in the 1939–45 war, the British Army derisorily called all the native populations of North Africa and the Middle East ‘wogs’. This vile term of abuse was used indiscriminately of Tunisians, Syrians, Persians, Egyptians and all non-Europeans alike, and it seems highly probable that the legions had a similar term of abuse for the local peoples, used equally indiscriminately.

The tales of Picts covering themselves in woad are, in all probability, also exaggerated, since woad, or glastum, is a particularly foul-smelling plant used in dyeing, although now replaced by indigo. Julius Caesar remarked on blue-painted warriors in 55 BC. Ancient Britons probably used a copper-based blue pigment as body paint; and the Roman propagandists described the use of stinking woad to emphasize the barbarity of the resisting inhabitants. It is also likely that the northern tribes indulged in elaborate facial tattoos or ‘fancy figures’, much as are popular with the contemporary Maori people of New Zealand. The Roman publicity machine was very efficient, and no effort was spared to vilify the Picts. Tacitus called them ‘the last men on earth’, and they were regarded as barbarians of no consequence and of doubtful use except as slaves and fair skinned although exotically dressed.

There is not much difference between a toga and the fully draped Highland plaid, except for pattern, so the imagination is left free to roam.

The Picts were opportunistic guerrilla fighters, excellent at ambushes, and avoided set-piece battles whenever they could. They had a reputation of going about naked and holding their women in common.

History is always written by the victors; and in time the Romans simply used the word ‘Pict’ to describe anyone who lived north of Hadrian’s Wall. The Picts were a constant thorn in the Roman side, as they were inveterate raiders and pirates looking for plunder and prisoners they could exchange for ransom; so, naturally, they are seen in a hostile and barbaric light.

The Picts have been continuously and erroneously referred to as ‘the mysterious Picts’, although, in fact, they have left considerable evidence of their culture. But, since the Picts left us no written records, we have to rely on the often unreliable reports by others for our knowledge of them, although there are a few highly decorated standing stones which give us some often puzzling clues as to their civilization. These stones were probably originally erected by a Bronze Age people many hundreds of years earlier and simply adopted and decorated by the Picts as having been erected in places associated with now long-forgotten gods.

With no written texts existing, academic speculation about the language of the Picts has been rife and continues to flourish. But it is certain that the British people encountered by Julius Caesar in 55 BC spoke a Celtic language which they shared with northern France. The invasion by the Roman legions and trade intercourse with Europe drove this proto-Celtic language in two directions, although, by and large, the people themselves remained where they had always been.

Over a surprisingly short period of time, one branch of this language developed in Cornwall, Brittany and Wales, where it became what was called Brythonic, the root of modern Welsh. A branch travelled across the Irish Sea, where it joined with the local language to become Goidelic, the root of modern Irish and Scots Gaelic. The people in the central spine of what would become Britain continued to speak variants of their original Celtic tongue, a form of modern Welsh.

Thus, on the edges of Roman Britain, there was, in the west, Welsh and its Cornish variant. Across the Irish Sea was Irish, and in the north there was the now lost, ancient Celtic tongue spoken by the people later called the Picts and deriving from the Cornish and Welsh variants of Celtic.

In the hope of clarifying the situation for today, the Celtic languages are now divided into two groups. In Welsh, the word for ‘head’ is penn and in Goidelic the word is quenn, or ceann in modern Gaelic, hence the two languages are referred to as P-Celtic and Q-Celtic. Scotland had variants of P-Celtic; and the arrival of Q-Celtic, which became modern Gaelic, came from Ireland much later. Columba, a Q-Celtic speaker, had to use an interpreter when dealing with the P-Celtic speakers in northern Scotland.

Since the Picts left no documents and few inscriptions, except carvings in ‘ogham’ script, we have tantalizingly few clues as to the organization of their society. Ogham is an ancient means of writing consisting of horizontal dashes intersecting with a vertical line, and gives no guide to pronunciation – and it seems likely that the Pictish language was a form of P-Celtic before it sank untraceably into the linguistic soup we now call English.

A historical linguist, Kenneth Jackson, claimed that Celtic and its variants were universally spoken from Penzance to Edinburgh, while another authority was more generous and asserted that the language of Britain was P-Celtic from the Isle of Wight to Muckle Flugga in the Shetland Islands.

There can be no debate, however, that the official language of the invaders was Latin, although spoken in its classical form only by the legionary officers and imperial administrators, as well as being used for all written communications. The legionary garrisons were made up of all the nationalities of the empire – there were Syrian archers as well as Spanish and German foot-soldiers in the legions in Britain, and they spoke what can best be called ‘Roman’, a sort of pidgin Latin mixed with local words, much like ‘Hobson-Jobson’, the mixture of English, Hindi and Urdu spoken by the soldiers of the British in India. It is easy to understand why Syrian archers, Spanish squaddies or Roman officers made little or no attempt to communicate in the native languages. It was much simpler to teach everybody Latin.

Bringing these people within the organization of the empire would stretch Roman lines of communication – and, since Scotland could provide so little of what was wanted by Rome and was at such a distance from the capital, it was felt that the cost of intensive colonization would be prohibitive. Thus, one by one, the legionary forts were abandoned. At Inchtuthill, on the River Tay, the retiring garrison even removed their nails from the timbers before dismantling the structure. They buried the nails carefully in case of a need for re-use. Iron nails had to be specially made, and sophisticated forts were expensive to maintain. The Romans were nothing if not efficient.

It was better to build a wall to protect what profit there was in the south from raids by northern savages – and so, in 120, the Emperor Hadrian did just that. About ten years later, his successor, Antoninus Pius, built another about 150 km further north; but that proved to be a wall too far, and the Antonine Wall was soon more or less abandoned.

These tribes north of Hadrian’s Wall were the earth into which the first seeds of Scottish Christianity would fall. They were by no means unified as a nation; and, in the second century AD, Ptolemy, a Greek, listed 12 tribes, but some of these may well be fanciful. Only a few were worthy of the name of ‘kingdom’, although these kingdoms lasted for over 1,000 years in the territory of the Caledonii before being subsumed into Alba in the eleventh century.

To attempt a reconstruction of Pictish life, we have to rely on the archaeological evidence. Many Pictish carvings show battles, with horsemen as well as infantry, although none seems to record battles with the Romans. Picts possessed military skills: they fought with lances, bows, arrows and swords, and, at the battle of Mons Graupius, the Caledonian leader had the Pictish name of Calgacus, or ‘swordsman’. Their personal valour was never in doubt, but they lacked the rigorous organization of the legions.

There are also carvings showing hunting scenes, some with women mounted side-saddle. Among the Picts, women obviously had a more independent position than in most pagan societies, and thus there is a strong possibility that there were women chieftains.

There were, as yet, no recognizable towns, and the Picts lived in small communities where farming plots coincided – similar to the small villages found in today’s Scottish Highlands where existence by crofting, or smallholding, is prevalent. As with today’s crofts, there would be sheep, goats, chickens and pigs, although cattle were still the prerogative of the wealthy. Arable farming produced wheat, barley, oats and rye. Green vegetables would have been cabbages and kale, although nettles and watercress may have been gathered in the wild, supplemented with onions, leeks, pulses and root crops, including the now extinct skirret, a relative of the sweet potato. Rivers and the sea provided fish, seals, whales and molluscs. Augmented with milk, a healthy diet could be achieved with some hardship, although meat was still reserved for the elite, who would also have been able to hunt deer and wild birds. On their carved stones, Picts are often shown hawking.

Remains of buildings are few and far between, but by far the commonest are the stone and timber round-houses. Stones were used to delineate the edges of the circle, with a conical wooden structure rising to a smoke-hole in the centre of the roof. Stone slabs would have marked out a fireplace in the centre, and recesses for sleeping would have been made with wattle divisions. There were, of course, as many variations on this design as there were families; and one house has been found at Gurness on Orkney where a stone floor was divided into several bays like the leaves of a shamrock. The divisions of houses by aisles make it easier to understand that a multitude of crafts could be carried on in one dwelling. Weaving and leather-working, metal-working and pottery could all be a part of domestic life.

Particular to settlements of this period are the construction of souterrains. These were underground chambers about two metres high and equally wide but often extending for several metres. They were lined with stone slabs or wattle screens and often had a single entrance inside a round-house. Souterrains are widespread in Britain, especially in Ireland, although they are called ‘fogous’ in Cornwall; and we can only guess at their purpose. They would certainly have been used for the storage of grain and root vegetables, but some authorities have suggested that they might have been used as shelters from warlike incursions. However, since the first place a slave-seeking marauder would look would be the cellar, this seems unlikely.

Stone slab-lined earthworks were also used as cist-graves. A shallow ditch would be lined with stone slabs, a...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Timeline
• 1. And There Was Darkness
• 2. The Lamp Is Lit
• 3. An Irish Exile
• 4. From Exile to Eternal Fame
• 5. Saint Kentigern (Mungo)
• 6. One Church?
• Envoi
• Notes on Sources