otherwise applied.' If the Scots of North Britain | ing from him, was Donald III., who reigned from were spoken of, they were so designated as being A.D. 743 to A.D. 763. It was in his time (A.D. considered to be a colony of Irish. 748) that the Danes or Northmen made their first descent upon Ireland. In 815, in the reign of | Aodhus V., these invaders obtained a fixed settlement in Armagh; and thirty years afterwards, their leader, Turgesius or Turges, a Norwegian, was proclaimed King of all Ireland. At length, a general massacre of the foreigners led to the restoration of the line of the native princes. But new bands speedily arrived from the north, to avenge their countrymen; and in a few years all the chief ports and towns throughout the south and along the east coast were again in their hands. The struggle between the two races for the dominion of the country continued, with little intermission and with various fortune, for more than a century and a half, although the Danes, too, had embraced Christianity about the year 948. The closing period of the long contest is illustrated by the heroic deeds of the renowned Brien Boroihme or Boru, the "Brien the Brave" of song, who was first King of Munster, and afterwards King of all Ireland. He occupied the national throne from 1003 to 1014, in which latter year he fell, sword in hand, at the age of eighty-eight, in the great battle of Clontarf, in which, however, the Danish power received a discomfiture from which it never recovered. Brien, however, though his merits and talents had raised The bardic account, however, carries back the arrival of the Scotic colony, under the conduct of Heber and Heremon, the sons of Milesius, to a much more ancient date; and the modern inquirers who have endeavoured to settle the chronology of that version of the story, have assigned the event, in the most moderate of their calculations, to the fifth or sixth century before the birth of Christ. Others place it nearly 1000 years earlier. It is related that the two brothers at first divided the island between them, Heber, the elder, taking to himself Leinster and Munster, and Heremon getting Ulster and Connaught; but, in imitation of Romulus and Remus (if we ought not rather to suppose the Irish to have been the prototype of the classic incident), they afterwards quarrelled, and, Heber having been slain, Heremon became sole sovereign. From him is deduced a regular succession of monarchs of all Ireland down to Kimbaoth, who is reckoned the fifty-seventh in the list, and is said to have reigned about 200 years before our era. Besides the supreme monarch, it is admitted that there were always four subordinate kings, reigning each over his province; and the history is made up in great part of the wars of these reguli, not only with one another, but frequently also with their common sovereign lord. Tacitus re-him to the supreme power, not being of the anlates that one of the reguli of Ireland, who had been driven from his country by some domestic revolution, came over to Britain, to Agricola, who kept him with him under the semblance of friendship, in the hope of some time or other having an opportunity of making use of him. It was the opinion of Agricola that Ireland might have been conquered and kept in subjection by a single legion and a few auxiliaries. Tacitus observes, however, that its ports and harbours were better known than those of Britain, through the merchants that resorted to them, and the extent of their foreign commerce.2 We need not further pursue the obscure, and in great part fabulous annals of the country before the introduction of Christianity. It is probable that some knowledge of the Christian religion had penetrated to Ireland before the mission of St. Patrick; but it was by the labours of that celebrated personage that the general conversion of the people was effected, in the early part of the fifth century. The first Christian King of Ireland was Leogaire or Laogaire Mac Neil, whose reign is stated to have extended from A.D. 428 to A.D. 463. The twenty-ninth king, count See this completely established, and all the authorities collerted, in Pinkerton's Inquiry, part v. ch. 17. Tacit. it. Agric. XXIT. cient royal house, is looked upon as little better "Let Erin remember the days of old, Which he won from her proud invader;" and on the death of Brien, Malachi was restored to the throne, which he occupied till 1022. He is reckoned the forty-second Christian King of Ireland. The interruption of the regular succession, however, by the elevation of Brien, now brought upon the country the new calamity of a contest among several competitors for the throne; and the death of Malachi was followed by a season of great confusion and national misery. The game was eventually reduced to a trial of strength between Donchad, the son of Brien, and Donchad's nephew, Turlogh; and in 1064 Turlogh 3 In these dates we have followed the authority of the Catalo gus Chronologicus Regum Christianorum Hibernia, in O'Connor's Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres, vol. i. pp. lxxv. &c. succeeded in overpowering his uncle, who, bidding farewell to arms and to ambition, retired across the sea, and ended his days as a monk at Rome. Turlogh, reckoned an usurper by the na tive annalists, but acknowledged to have ruled the country ably and well, occupied the Irish throne at the epoch of the Norman conquest of England. CHAPTER VI.-HISTORY OF RELIGION. A.D. 449-1060. Religion of the Saxon invaders of England-Its deities-Its doctrines of a future state-Its sanguinary ritesState of Christianity in North and South Britain at the Saxon invasion-Missionaries sent to England by Gregory the Great-Progress of the missionaries among the kingdoms of the Heptarchy-Conversion of Northumbria-Controversies about the form of the tonsure and period for the celebration of Easter-Corruptions among the clergy through wealthy donations-Multiplication of monasteries and nunneries-Havoc wrought among them by the Danish invaders-Life of St. Dunstan-His miracles and adventures-He becomes Primate of England-His strange expedients to reform the church-Its condition after his death till the Norman conquest. HEN Hengist and Horsa, and their followers arrived in Britain, they certainly found Christianity professed by a large part of the island; but the religion of the South Britons had become mixed with many corruptions of doctrine. The Saxons, one and all, were pagans, but of a paganism which differed essentially from the old Druidism. Woden or Odin was the head of their mythology. The source from whence their religion issued, the period of its first promulgation, and the agents by whom it was planted in the several countries where it flourished, are historical difficulties, which yet remain to be settled. Long before the fourth century of the Christian era, it prevailed throughout Scandinavia, and in other countries besides those which we now call Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.' It was a grim and terrible theology. Woden or Odin was "the terrible and severe god; the father of slaughter; the god that carries desolation and fire; the active and roaring deity; he who gives victory, and who names those that are to be slain." The worship of such a divinity kept up the ferocity and warlike habits of these iron men of the North. Under him figured Frea, his wife, as the goddess of love, pleasure, and sensuality; the god Thor, who controlled the tempests; Balder, who was the god of light; Kiord, the god of the waters; Tyr, the god of champions; Brage, the god of orators and poets; and Heimdal, the janitor of heaven, and the guardian of the rainbow. Eleven gods, and as many goddesses, all the chil Mallet, Northern Antiquities. dren of Odin and Frea, assisted their parents, and were objects of worship. But in addition to all these there were very many inferior divinities. There were three Fates, by whom the career of men was predestined; and every individual was supposed, besides, to have a Fate attending him, by whom his life was controlled and his death determined. There were also the Valkeries, a species of inferior goddesses, who acted as celestial attendants, and who were also employed by Odin to determine victory, and select the warriors that were to perish in battle. There were genii and spirits, who mingled in every mortal event. Infernal agents there were in abundance; and Lok, the personification of the evil principle, was the head of them all. Lok is described as beautiful in form, but depraved in mind; the calumniator of the gods, the grand contriver of deceit and fraud, the reproach of gods and men, whom the deities, in consequence of his malig nity, had been constrained to shut up in a cavern. The goddess Hela, the wolf Fenris, the great dragon, and giants of measureless size and strength, completed the dark array. On the subject of a future state, this religion of the North was particularly explicit; and a heaven was formed, congenial to a people whose chief employment and greatest pleasure was war. Those who had led a life of heroism, or perished bravely in battle, ascended to Valhalla. In that blessed region the day was spent in war and furious conflict; but at evening-tide the battle ceased, all wounds were suddenly healed, and the contending warriors sat down to the banquet, and feasted on the exhaustless flesh of the boar Serimner, and drank huge draughts of mead from the skulls of their enemies. Such was the para dise, the hope of which wakened to rapture the imagination of the Saxon and the Dane. There was a hell for the wicked; but by the word wicked was merely understood the cowardly and the slothful. This hell was called Niflheim. Here Hela dwelt, and exercised her terrible supremacy. Her palace was Anguish, her table Famine, her waiters were Expectation and Delay, the threshold of her door was Precipice, her bed was Leanness, and her looks struck terror into every beholder. But nothing of all this was to be strictly eternal. After the revolution of countless ages, the malignant powers, so long restrained, are to burst forth again; the gods are to perish, and even Odin himself expire; while a conflagration bursts forth, in which Valhalla, their heaven, and the world, and Niflheim or hell, with all their divine and human inhabitants, are consumed, and pass away. But from this second chaos a new world is to emerge, fresh and full of beauty and grandeur, with a heaven more glorious than Valhalla, and a hell more fearful than Niflheim; while over all a God appears pre-eminent and alone, possessed of incomparably greater might and nobler attributes than Odin. Then, too, the human race are finally to be tried, and higher virtues than bravery, and heavier guilt than cowardice and sloth, are to form the standard of good and evil. The righteous shall then be received into Gimle, and the wicked shall be sent to the unutterable punishments of Nastrande; and this heaven and this hell shall continue through all eternity under the reign of Him who is eternal. But among the fierce worshippers of Odin we can discover no practical results of this better faith that lay immediately beneath the surface of their own system. They thought more of the temporal, but immediate, than of the eternal-more of Valhalla than of Gimle. Their tempest-breathing god, and his paradise of battles, and drinking and feasting, though these were finally to be consumed and to pass away, were more attractive than the excellences of a more spiritual Deity, and the eternity of a purer heaven. The Scandinavian temples, in which Odin was represented by a gigantic image, armed and crowned, and brandishing a naked sword, were rude and colossal; and rugged were the rites performed therein. Animals were offered up as sacrifices, and their blood was sprinkled upon the worshippers. The rough altar was frequently drenched with the blood of human victims. Crowds of captives and slaves were immolated for the welfare of the people at large; and princes often sacrificed their own children, to avert a mortal sickness or to secure an important vic tory.' Believing that the exclusion from Valhalla, which a natural death entailed, could be avoided by the sacrifice of a substitute, every warrior who could procure a captive to put to death with this object had a motive peculiarly powerful for so horrid a practice. Mixed with all this ferocity, the Scandinavian tribes had a more delicate and romantic feeling about women than any other ancient people. As females among them were regarded with a veneration elsewhere unknown, and were supposed to be chosen receptacles of Divine inspiration, they were therefore considered as being well fitted to preside over the worship of the gods. The daughters of Scandinavian princes officiated as priestesses of the national faith, were consulted as the oracles of heaven, and were frequently dreaded as the ministers of its vengeance; while other women who cultivated the favour of the malignant divinities were held to be witches. Of the authority of the priests little is known. Among the Saxons, they were not permitted to mount a horse or handle a warlike weapon. Tacitus represents them in Germany as being invested with magisterial authority. He says that they settled controversies, attended the armies in their expeditions, and not only awarded punishments, but inflicted them with their own hands, the fierce warriors submitting to their stripes as to inflictions from the hand of Heaven. The grim Scandinavian faith was, however, subject to great modifications, according to the situation and circumstances of the several tribes who professed it. It was of a more sanguinary complexion among the reckless followers of the sea-kings than among those who dwelt on shore. Perhaps the Saxon invaders of Britain might be classed with those among whom the religion assumed its least revolting shape; while the Danes, who afterwards followed in their track, exhibited the worship of Odin in its fiercest and most pernicious aspect. With the latter the primitive superstition was amplified by the principles and tales of the Scalds, who clothed it in their songs with horrors, of which its first founders had probably no conception. Although both Saxons and Danes worshipped the same gods, and believed alike in Valhalla, yet the Saxons, even while they continued heathens, became peaceful cultivators of the soil which their swords had won; while the Danes did not subside into the same social condition until they had abandoned their original creed and embraced Christianity. On the first coming of the Saxons into Britain there was visible, not only in Wales, but in other parts of the island, a strange intermixture of 1 Mallet, Northern Antiquities: Dithmar, Chronicles of Merselung: Wormius in Monument. Dan. Saco Grammatic. 2 Bede. Christianity and Druidism; and it is thought stitutions. The small and barren Island of Iona that throughout the protracted struggle which soon became illustrious in the labours and triensued for the dominion of the country, it was in umphs of the Christian church; and the Culthe spirit and in the ritual of this Neo-Druidism, dees, or priests, animated with the zeal of their and not of Christianity, that the national feeling founder, not only devoted their efforts to enwas chiefly appealed to, and the resistance to the lighten their own country, but became adveninvaders sustained and directed. turous missionaries to remote and dangerous fields. Of the care with which they were trained to be the guardians of learning and instruetors of the people, some idea may be formed from the fact, that eighteen years of study were frequently required of them before they were ordained." About a quarter of a century before the Saxons began their conquest, Ninian is said to have converted the Picts that lived southward of the Grampian Hills. Nearly at the same time that illustrious missionary, St. Patrick, had appeared in Ireland, and, after sweeping away much of the old heathenism, had established Christianity as the national religion. About the year 550, Kentigern, or St. Mungo, is supposed to have founded the see of Glasgow. But the most distinguished of the missionaries to Caledonia was St. Columba, venerated as the patron saint of Scotland until that honour was conferred upon St. Andrew. Columba was born at Garten, a village now included in the county of Donegal, in Ireland. He was illustrious by his birth, being connected with the royal families of the Irish and of the Scots. He landed in Scotland with twelve companions, in the year 563, and undertook the task of converting the heathen Picts that occupied the country north of the Grampians. He soon converted and baptized the Pictish king, whose subjects immediately followed the royal example. Columba then settled in Tona, where he In the south of Britain, in the first fury of the Saxon invasion, if Christianity was not completely overthrown, the Christian church and every trace of it were destroyed. Without a clergy, or any apparatus for the administration of the ordinances of religion, it is not easy to conceive that such of the native Britons as were Christians would very long retain their knowledge and profession of the truth. But meanwhile the Saxon conquerors themselves, becoming settled and peaceful, gradually acquired habits and a disposition favourable for their conversion to a religion of love and peace. When things were in this state, a simple incident led to great results. Gregory, afterwards pope, and surnamed the Great, passing one day through the streets of Rome, was arrested at the market-place by the sight of young slaves from Britain, who were pub THE CATHEDRAL AND ST. ORAN'S CHAPEL, IONA. Mull in the distance. founded his celebrated monastery, and established a system of religious discipline, which became the model of many other monastic in1 The remains of religious establishments on this little island of the Hebrides, though popularly attributed to Columba, are of a much more recent date than the time of that venerated saint, whose structures were of very slight materials. The prin cipal ruins are those of the cathedral church of St. Mary, of a nunnery, five chapels, and a building called the Bishop's House. Numerous Kings of Scotland, Ireland, and Norway were buried in the island. licly exposed for sale. Struck with the brightness of their complexions, their fair long hair, and the remarkable beauty of their forms, he eagerly inquired to what country they belonged; and being told that they were Angles, he said, "They would not be Angles, but angels, if they were but Christians." Gregory resolved, at every hazard, to carry the gospel to their shores, and he actually set off upon the dangerous pilgrimage; but the pope was prevailed upon to command his return. When, some years after, Gregory succeeded to the popedom, he appointed Augustine, prior of the convent of St. Andrew's at Rome, with forty monks, to proceed on a mission to England. There were many delays and misgivings upon the road, Augustine and his companions being alarmed by the reports they heard of the Anglo-Saxon ferocity; but Pope Gregory passionately urged them on, and procured them all the assistance he could in France; and in the year 597 they landed in the Isle of Thanet, and forthwith announced the object of their coming to Ethel 2 Adomnani, Vit. Sti. Columbæ. bert, the King of Kent, who also held the rank of Bretwalda, while his authority extended to the right bank of the Humber.' His queen, Bertha, was a Christian princess, and having stipulated at her marriage for the liberty of professing her own religion, she had some French priests in her household, and a bishop named Liudhard, by whom the rites of the Christian faith were performed in a little church outside the walls of Canterbury. The conversion of the king was easily brought about, and the opposition of the pagan priesthood was but feeble and momentary. When Ethelbert had been baptized, 10,000 of his people soon followed his example. The joy of Pope Gregory was so great that he conferred the primacy of the whole island upon Canterbury, the capital of Kent, and sent the pall to Augustine, who had already been consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury by the prelate of Arles. From the facility with which he had established his faith in Kent, Augustine hoped for a similar conversion in the whole island; but, although Pope Gregory sent him additional aid, the work proved long and difficult, and was not completed until many years after Augustine had been laid in his grave, in the church-yard of the monastery in Canterbury which goes by his name. Among the mountains of Wales, where the Saxon conquerors could not penetrate, there existed many Christians, and a regular clergy; but when Augustine applied for the assistance of the Welsh ecclesiastics, and demanded their submission to the universal supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, he found that the Welsh clergy would not cooperate with him. They disagreed on very many points, and notably as to the proper period for the celebration of Easter, a question which divided many churches, and which was once disputed with a most fierce and uncompromising spirit. Yet, without the aid of the Welsh ecclesiastics, the progress of the Christian faith was rapid. In the year 604 Sebert, King of Essex, NORTH WALLS OF RICHBOROUGH CASTLE, AND FOUNDATIONS OF ST. AUGUSTINE'S CHURCH.1-From a drawing on the spot, by J. W. Archer. and nephew to Ethelbert, the converted King of Kent, and Bretwalda, received the rite of baptism. As usual, great numbers of the people forthwith followed the example of their king; and a Christian church was erected in London, Sebert's capital, upon the rising ground which had formerly been the site of the Roman temple of Diana. This London church was dedicated to St. Paul, 1 Bede. 2 See vol. i. p. 73. 3 Bede. Richborough Castle, near Sandwich, is the Ritupa or Ad Portum Ritupis of the Romans. It exhibits one of the most noble vestiges of the Romans in Britain. The walls have formed a parallelogram, but the east wall has disappeared. It stands upon a slight eminence, at the base of which flows the Stour. The walls are constructed in blocks of chalk and stone, and faced with square blocks of grit stone. The northern wall, which is perfect, measures 560 ft. in length; it contains seven courses, each course 4 ft. thick, banded at intervals with layers of large tiles. Rising 6 ft., the thickness of the walls is 11 ft. and each successive building upon the same site |