CHAPTER XXV

THE IRISH KINGDOM OF SCOTLAND

PROBABLY there is nothing in Irish history which has caused more confusion than the terms Scotia and Scot, which, at first applied to Ireland and Irishmen, came to be applied later to Ireland's northeastern neighbour, Alba, and its inhabitants. A statement of the cause of this change may aid to untangle a historical tangle which troubles the minds of many who are not students.

It will be remembered that our most ancient poets and seanachies claimed that an early name for Eirinn, Scotia, was derived from Scota, queen-mother of the Milesians. The derivation may, or may not, be imaginary. But, downward from the days of the Emperor Constantine the Great, when the poet Egesippus tells how "Scotia which links itself to no land, trembles at their (the Roman legions') name"-the term Scotia is, by Continental writers, applied to Ireland more often than any other name. And Scot is the term by these writers most constantly applied to a native of Eirinn. Orosius, the third century geographer, uses “Hibernia the nation of the Scoti."

As late as the end of the seventh century we find the Irishman Adamnan, when residing and writing in the country which is now Scotland, using the word Scotia to designate his own home country from which he is an exile. And down in the eleventh century we have an Irish exile on the Continent, the celebrated Marianus Scotus (Marian the Scot) referring to his countrymen as Scots. The foreigner, Hermann, in the same century, is calling them Scots likewise. And still farther on, in the thirteenth century, Cæsar of Heisterbach, talking of Purgatory, requests any one who doubts its existence to go to Scotia to St. Patrick's Purgatory there, and be convinced. The reference is to the then world-famous St. Patrick's Purgatory in Loch Dearg (Donegal) where penitents enclosed for many days in a cave, had vision of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory.

Isidore of Seville, writing in the seventh century, uses the phrase, "Scotia eadem et Hibernia." And Charlemagne's biog

rapher, the celebrated Notker le Begue of the ninth century who was intimate with the Irishmen of the school of St. Gall in Switzerland, and a pupil of the Irish teacher Mongan, there-uses the phrase "In the Island Hibernia, or Scotia," when talking of Colm Cille. And again in talking of St. Kilian, the martyred bishop of Wurzburg, he says: "He came from Hibernia, the Island of the Scots."

The modern name of Ireland seems to have originated with the Northmen, in about the seventh century-being probably formed from Eire, they called it Ir or Ire, and after that the English called it Ireland, and its natives Irish. For several centuries longer, however, these terms were not adopted by Continental writers, who still continued to speak of Scotia and the Scot, and designated the Irish scholars on the Continent by the term Scotus. The new name Ireland was on the Continent, first used only in the eleventh century (by Adam De Brème).

To Alba (the present Scotland) was transferred the term Scotia, and to its people the term Scot, because the Scoti of Hibernia, having again and again colonised there, built in it a strong kingdom, which gave the Scotic (Irish) people dominance there, and soon made the Scotic kings the kings of the whole country. The first account of Scotic colonising in Alba occurs in the very beginning of the third century when Conaire the Great, a son-in-law of Conn of the Hundred Battles, was King of Munster-to become later High King of Ireland. One of his three sons, the Carbris, Carbri Riada, namely, led a large body of his people from Kerry to the northeast of Antrim, where he settled some of them, and crossing Sruth-na-Moill to the adjacent coast of Scotland, settled a colony there also in those peninsulas and islands which are now part of Argyle.1

This first colony of Scots from Ireland to settle in Alba, from time to time received increase in numbers from the mother country-and military help also whenever they needed it against their neighbours, the Picts.

A hundred years later, namely, in the first part of the fourth century, Lugaid MacConn, another Munsterman and a descendant of Conn of the Hundred Battles, who had to flee from Ireland, brought some accessions of strength to them, when he came there

1 It is held by some that Carbri Riada settled his people entirely in Antrim, and that it was Fergus who first brought the people of Dal Riada over the water, and established the Scotic kingdom of Alba. The former, however, is the popular belief, and is attested by the Venerable Bede as well as others. O'Flaherty and Usher differ with Bede, though.

about two centuries later, and made himself a power in the Scotic colony. From his son, Fothaid Canan, whom he left in power there when he returned to Ireland, to wrest the High Kingship from Art the Lonely, sprang the ancestors of the lords of Argyle, variously named MacAllen, Campbell and MacCallum Mor.

About a hundred years after Carbri Riada had established the Scotic Dal Riada in Alba, as well as the Dal Riada in Antrim, there also came to the Scotic colony a considerable accession of strength -a body of their kinsmen from Kerry led by one of their chieftains, Fergus.

The Picts, naturally jealous of these usurpers on their soil, continued exerting the utmost pressure upon them, in the hope of crushing them out, till Niall of the Nine Hostages, going to their assistance with an army, overcame and drove back the Picts, established the Scotic kingdom in Alba on a solid foundation, and, it is said, got the submission of the Picts and the tribute of all Alba.

When the colony had added another hundred years to its ageat the beginning of the sixth century that is it got its greatest and strongest accession by the coming of a Niallan host, headed by the three grandsons of Erc, Lorne, Aongus and Fergus Mor their leader who gave new blood, strength and leadership to the Dal Riada of Alba, and made it an island power to be reckoned with. For before the century's end it was strong and plucky enough to demand its complete independence from the mother country—a claim which, in 576, King Aedh, accompanying Colm, carried to the Convention of Drimceatt-and which was settled to the young kingdom's complete satisfaction. While united to Ireland by the closest bonds of blood, friendship, education and military intercourse, it was now a separate and independent kingdom2-with the Antrim Dal Riada, some hold, as an appanage.

The Scots' kingdom of Argyle and the islands held its own and more, for a long time. But at the end of the eighth century, in the reign of Don Coirce, the Northmen pushed them eastward from their original seat, and they in turn pushed the Picts east and northeast, and against these Picts conducted a campaign of conquest which lasted half a century, till, in the year 850, their king, Cinead (Kenneth) MacAlpin, completely overthrew the Picts and was the first Gaelic king of (the chief part of) Scotland. Some claim that he got dominion over the Britons, who occupied the southwest of the country and the Anglo-Danish population of the

2 MacNeill holds that the Alban Dal Riada had got its independence from the mother-country before Drimceatt-and that Aedh's claim at Drimceatt was for sovereignty over his kinsmen of the Antrim Dal Riada.

southeast. Now that the Scotic people got complete dominion over all or the main part of the country, it began to be called Scotiaat first Scotia Minor, in contradistinction to Eire, which was Scotia Major-but gradually the title Scotia fell away from Eire, and solely came to signify Alba.

In the eleventh century, when all of the present country of Scotland-with exception of the Western Islands and headlands, and northern islands, which were held by the Danes-had been brought under Scotic sway, the dominant Gaelic power began to wane. A number of leading English families who fled or were driven from the south, in consequence of the Norman invasion, flocked into southeastern Scotland and came into favour at court (in Edinburgh). Then also Malcolm married Margaret, daughter of Edmund, King of the Saxon peoples (afterwards St. Margaret). The new influences began to affect king, court and government from this time forward. And the king began to find it easy to lean upon the newcomers, the southerners, as well as their kinsmen, the old Anglo-Danish colony of the southeast, in the differences that were constantly arising between him and the semi-independent (Gaelic) chieftains of the Highlands. When, at the end of the eleventh century, Malcolm's son, Edgar, English both by name and nature, was crowned king-the Gaelicism of royalty and of the court waned more rapidly, till in the thirteenth century it went out altogether; and the last of the Irish royal line became extinct with Alexander the Third, who died without heir in 1287. Then began the Wars of Succession among the Lowland old-English families, the Bruces and the Balliols.

So, though the greater portion of the country was, and still is, Gaelic-with Gaelic manners, customs, dress and language, still holding in the Highlands and the Islands-the end of the thirteenth century saw the end of Scotic (Irish) rule in Alba.

Keating's History of Ireland.

Joyce, P. W.: Social History of Ancient Ireland.

O'Curry, Eugene: Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish.

Manuscript Materials of Irish History..

MacNeill, Eoin: Some Phases of Irish History.

Skene, W. F.: Celtic Scotland.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CENTURIES OF THE SAINTS

THE new impetus and aim that Patrick gave to the Irish nation, turning it from war-love to ideals much higher, wrought in the island a phenomenal transformation. While foreign warring and raiding ceased, and internal warring became more rare, tens of thousands of every rank and class in the nation vied with one another, not, as formerly, for skill in handling war weapons, but for ease in conning the Scriptures; not for gaining fame in fighting, but for gathering favour in the sight of God. The religious development and spiritual revolution were extraordinary. A consuming thirst for knowledge, and burning ardour for spreading the Gospel, swept the eager land, as a Lammas fire would sweep the powder-dry mountainside. Old and young, men and women, teacher and fighter, king and kerne, all were caught up in the Christ-fire that glowed in every vale and leaped on every hill in Erin. The true history of several centuries succeeding Patrick's coming, consists not of the chronicle of Erin's wars, and the roll of her kings, but the record of the thousands of the saints,' and the tens of thousands of the teachers of Erin. And let us keep in mind that this period of the spiritual rejuvenation of the island on the verge of the world synchronised with that dark and fearful period in Europe when Christianity and culture were being mercilessly overwhelmed by the onward-rolling, irresistible wave of barbarism that left naught but wild desolation in its wake.

Fortunate for Europe and for the world it was that in this dread hour the Lord called the eager labourers of Eire to His island vineyard; and from it sent the saving vintage far and wide for the reviving of a perishing world.

"For once, at any rate, Ireland drew on herself the eyes of the whole world," says Kuno Meyer, in the Preface to his Ancient Irish Poetry . . "as the one haven of rest in a turbulent world overrun

1 All men who signally devoted themselves to the religious life then were termed saints.