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continued well into Christian times: Diarmait mac Cerbaill celebrated the feis in A.D.
560. The feis itself involved the ritual marriage of the king with Tara, the sovereignty
of the land of Ireland.
Tradition has it that a century before St.
Columba brought the word of God to the pagan court of the Northern Picts in 564, a
previous high king, Nechtan Morbit, this time of the Southern Picts, had spent part of his
exile as a youth with St. Brigid at Kildare. He later gave her Abernethy, the sacred site
of the Southern Picts, for her church. Thus dedicated to St. Brigid, the Picts seem to
have adopted her name for their kings, many of whom are named Bridei (as in St. Bride). Of
course, since the pagan king ministered to by St. Columba was himself named Bridei, an
association with the pagan Brigid seems likely to have been the true antecedent, and thus
we have another case of classic syncretism between the pagan and the Christian. The
tradition of St. Brigid of Abernethy may also reflect the fact that St. Boite of
Monasterboise near Kildare was at work among the southern Picts "with 60 holy men and
virgins" before the princely Columba took his largely diplomatic mission to
Inverness. Any "virgins" with St. Boite are likely to have been associated in
some way with Kildare.
The pre-union Pictish kingdom had been made
up of seven sub-kingdoms, and was generally divided north and south by the Grampian
Mountains. While the Kindred of St. Columba ministered to the royalty of the north from
the original Columban foundation at Iona (an island off the coast of Argyll granted to
Columba by the Pictish king), other Irish churchmen, and some Picts, did the bulk of the
missionary work in both the far north, and all along the eastern coast of Pictland. Apart
from the Kindred of St. Columba at Iona, the foundation of the Pictish church also saw
tribal (secular) kindreds established by St. Maelrubha at Applecross in Ross and by St.
Fillan in Glendochart (Perthshire). Other saints include St. Machar, St. Fergus and St.
Nathalan of Aberdeen, St. Drostan of Deer, and St. Blane, founder of Dunblane
(Perthshire), a kinsman of St. Cattan of the Cineal Loairn.
The story of the Pictish church starts with
St. Comgall in Northern Ireland. St. Comgall was the founding abbot of the biggest
monastery in ireland, Bangor, which he founded in 558 in the territory of the Irish
"Picts" (Cruithne) in the Ards of Ulster (east coast of County Down). Along with
St. Cainech of Aghaboe, St. Comgall had accompanied St. Columba to the Court of King
Bridei at Inverness in 564 in order to translate between the two princes. St. Comgall
himself was the son of Sedna, son of the cruel Trian, the disciple of St. Patrick who was
later cursed by the same saint. They were a princely ecclesiastical family of the
Erainnian Dal bhFiatach race, kinsmen of Dichuo, the Ulidian king who first opposed St.
Patrick’s landing in Ireland, and then was converted by that saint.
Bangor’s mission among the Picts of
Alba, begun under St. Comgall, continued under St. Maelrubha, a successor of St. Comgall
in the abbacy of |
