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center and college of St. Andrews in Fife. It is further reflected in the use, at least
from the 1200s, of the cross of St. Andrew on the royal seal, with its ancient Pictish
significance. Thus we see reflected in modern Scotland evidence of the success of the
early Pictish mission initiated by St. Comgall and St. Maelrubha.
Though the Columban church dominated royal
circles in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the cult of St. Andrew, alive and well among
the Culdees of the east coast, was revived in the national sense early in the twelfth, and
the Columban clerics left Dunkeld (Perthshire), to which they had come under Kenneth
MacAlpin, and went back to Iona. The Columban church had been banished from Pictland or
Alba once before, in A.D. 711, by the Pictish king Nechtan, in connection with the
original rise of the "Cult of St. Andrew." (This earlier banishment reflects the
development of episcopal sees in Pictland after the synod of Whitby and under Northumbrian
influence; the territorial, bishop-oriented Northumbrian church clashed with the abbey
system of the Celtic tribal church). Some of the twelfth-century Columban monks even
returned to Ireland, taking with them some of the saint’s relics. Why all this
happened is probably best explained by several factors. Previous to 1100, the kings of
Albany were high-kings in the Picto-Gaelic sense, and held little local power outside
their own tribal area; they were at best overlords, and war leaders of the united tribal
armies of northern Scotland (Alba) against the Viking sea-kings. Their careers mirrored
that of Brian Boru in Ireland (d. 1014) in this regard. Their secular ecclesiastics were
powerful and princely, and were drawn chiefly from the Kindred of St. Columba, mentioned
above. These ecclesiastics were frankly aristocratic, and though sincere, never
represented a grass-roots religious movement, and can hardly be said to represent the old
Pictish church, whose true successors were the "Culdees" of especially Fife,
Perth-shire and Aberdeenshire (the heartland of the old Pictish kingdom).
The Kindred of St. Columba was tied to the
Gaelic tribal dynasties. This would come to have ramifications for the church in the
twelfth century, for under the reforming influence of the Saxon princess St. Margaret, who
became the second wife of Malcolm III (ca. 1090) the church was revived from the grass
roots level by the east-coast Culdees of the original Pictish church. This revival was
facilitated by the fact the bulk of the population was still largely Pictish in origin,
especially outside the West Highland mountain areas (the Pictish kingdom had always been
centered in the coastal lowlands to the east).
The incorporation of the Cineal nGabrain into
the Pictish royal house, with its continued tradition of Pictish nuclear family
succession, effectively disenfranchised the Cineal Loairn, who had previously enjoyed the
right to alternate the kingship of Dal Riada with the Cineal nGabrain. This proves that
the ninth-century union of the royal houses was not an exclusively Dalriadic one,- at
least not from the perspective of the Cineal Loairn. The differences between the old
Gaelic and new Picto-Gaelic systems of royal |
