| Bangor.
St. Maelrubha was of the Cineal Eoghain race, later to be the chief kindred of the Gaels
of Ulster. By this time Bangor, by far the largest monastery in Ireland, had become the
home of a kind of ecclesiastical tribe in the land of the Irish Picts. The monastery of
scholars had become an economic sub-unit as well, serving the needs of thousands of
people, body and soul. This type of arrangement was to find its parallel in Scotland among
the "Culdees" of St. Andrews, Abernethy, Brechin, Lochleven, Monifieth,
Monymusk, Muthill, etc., all Pictish foundations. The Culdees were religious communities
serving the local church, but without a rule, whose members apparently originated as
solitaries.
By the historical period the Irish Picts show
no evidence of matrilineal descent among their kings. Yet as St. Maelrubha, himself of the
Cineal Eoghan, was connected on his mother’s side with St. Comgall, it would appear
that the abbacy had passed to him in the Pictish mode, by female line descent. This may
indicate a kind of matrilineality in the church of the Irish Picts at this time, itself
perhaps indicating a dearth of male heirs among ecclesiastics. In 673 at the age of 29,
St. Maelrubha went to the Picts of Alba and founded the monastery of Abercrossan or
Applecross, on the coast of western Ross, just opposite Skye. It was here that the
patronage of St. Andrew was to be chiefly fostered in a tribal sense.
St. Maelrubha died in 724. In 763, almost one
hundred years after the founding of Applecross, a church was erected in Fife to house the
relics of St. Andrew, which had been brought to that site, the present St. Andrews in
Fife, in 761 by the Irish ecclesiastic St. Regulus (formerly Abbot of Lough Derg on the
Clare-Tipperary border). St. Regulus died at St. Andrews in 788, but the cult of St.
Andrew flourished, and St. Andrew himself officially became the Patron Saint of Scotland
well before the advent of the national flag, the Cross of St. Andrew, in the High Middle
Ages.
Tradition has it that the relics of St.
Andrew had first been brought to pagan Scotland from Greece in the fourth century. This
tradition reflects the early missionary work done in Scotland by St. Ninian in the fourth
century, work which was largely forfeit after Ninian’s death. It remained to the
contemporaries of St. Columba and St. Comgall to establish Pictish Christianity in any
strength. Tradition also has it that Angus (Oengus), King of the Picts, attributed a great
victory over the Angles of Northumbria in 735 to the intervention of St. Andrew, whose
saltire cross appeared in the blue sky. Angus was the king who dedicated St. Andrew’s
church in Fife, and the story of Angus’s vision obviously accounts for the adoption
of the cross of St. Andrew, silver saltire on blue, as the national flag. Yet this story
is strongly reminiscent of another: The fourth century Roman emperor Constantine is said
to have attributed his great victory at Milvan Bridge in 312 to the intervention of
Christ. After seeing a cross in the sky, the Emperor determined that the cross should be
borne on the shields of his men, in Christ’s honor, and this action |
