Celtic Scotland : $b A history of ancient Alban. Volume 2 (of 3), Church and cultureSkene, W. F. (William Forbes)
History
Celtic Scotland : $b A history of ancient Alban. Volume 2 (of 3), Church and culture
Skene, W. F. (William Forbes)
Celts -- Scotland; Civilization, Celtic; Scotland -- Antiquities, Celtic; Scotland -- History -- To 1603
Northumbria—when he is met in Inchkeith by Adamnan, may be perfectly
true.
[Sidenote: _Keledei_ of Glasgow, who were solitary clerics.]
Jocelyn of Furness, in his Life of Kentigern, tells us that he ‘joined
to himself a great many disciples whom he trained in the sacred
literature of the Divine law, and educated to sanctity of life by his
word and example. They all with a godly jealousy imitated his life and
doctrines, accustomed to fastings and sacred vigils at certain seasons,
intent on psalms and prayers and meditation on the Divine Word, content
with sparing diet and dress, occupied every day and hour in manual
labour. For, after the fashion of the primitive church under the
Apostles and their successors, possessing nothing of their own, and
living soberly, righteously, godly and continently, they dwelt, as did
Kentigern himself, in single cottages, from the time when they had
become mature in age and doctrine. Therefore these solitary clerics were
called in common speech _Calledei_.’[490] In assigning the _Calledei_,
or _Keledei_ of Glasgow to the time of Kentigern, Jocelyn is no doubt
guilty of as great an anachronism as when he assigned to him Servanus as
a teacher; and the statement belongs to the same period in Kentigern’s
supposed history, when he first became bishop of Glasgow; but this part
of his life is very problematical, ‘and the historical part of his
legend probably begins only when he returned from Wales after the battle
of Ardderyd. Here, however, he appears connected with the Monastic
Church of Wales, he is followed by six hundred and sixty-six of his
monks of Llanelwy, and Jocelyn tells us that these monks all rest, as
the inhabitants and countrymen assert, in the cemetery of the church of
the city of Glasgow.’ Jocelyn, however, wrote while there existed bodies
of _Keledei_ in Scotland, and he is no doubt reporting a genuine
tradition as to the original characteristics of the Culdean clergy
before they became canons. What he here describes is simply a community
of anchorites, or hermits. Servanus was contemporary with that Scottish
Sedulius, bishop of the Britons, who had conformed to Rome, and whom we
find bishop of the Strathclyde Britons after they had acquired their
independence and became freed from the yoke of the Angles. It is to this
period that these _Calledei_ of Glasgow properly belong; and this
connection with the real Servanus may have led to the history of this
period having been drawn back, and both _Calledei_ and Servanus
associated with the great apostle of Glasgow in popular tradition.
[Sidenote: Legends connected with the foundation of St. Andrews.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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