It seems, therefore, to be a reasonable conclusion that the Regulus of Muicinis, commemorated on the 16th October, and the Regulus of Muicross, on the 17th of that month, were the same person, and that the historic Regulus belongs to a Columban church founded among those which Columba established among the southern Picts during the last years of his life, and at the same time when Cainnech of Achaboe had his hermitage there; and to those older foundations must be appropriated the churches dedicated to Regulus, or St. Rule. [Sidenote: The Columban monasteries among the Picts fell into the hands of laymen.] The title of the older legend states that the abbacies or monasteries then founded ‘in the territory of the Picts, which is now called Scotia,’ that is, in the districts between the Firth of Forth and the river Spey, had to a great extent passed into the possession of laymen; and the legend seems to attribute this to the depredations of the occupiers of the land—the Picts, Scots, Danes, Norwegians and others who took possession of them as a safe refuge. The order in which these occupiers are enumerated is historically correct; and, though the expressions are somewhat obscure, they seem to indicate that the expulsion of the Columban monks, which terminated the Monastic Church in these districts, had been followed by the same process as we learn from Bede took place in Northumbria after the Scottish monks had withdrawn from thence. The assimilation of the church there to that of Rome, and the reaction towards a secular clergy, appear to have led there to a secularisation of the monasteries to a great extent. Bede gives us an account of this in a letter written in the last year of his life, that is, in 735, to Bishop Ecgberct; and the picture he draws shows a complete disorganisation of the monastic institution in the land, and its usurpation by the secular world. ‘As you yourself very well know,’ he says, ‘those who are utterly regardless of a monastic life have got into their power so many places under the name of monasteries, that there is no place at all which the sons of the nobility or of veteran soldiers may occupy.’ Again, ‘But there are others guilty of a still more grievous offence. For, though they are themselves laics, and neither habituated to nor actuated by the love of a regular life, yet, by pecuniary payments to the kings, and under pretext of founding monasteries, they purchase for themselves territories in which they may have freer scope for their lust; and, moreover, they cause these to be assigned to them by royal edicts for an hereditary possession;’ ‘and, though they themselves are laymen, yet they have monks under their rule,—or, rather, they are not monks when they assemble there, but such as, having been expelled from the true monasteries for the crime of disobedience, are found wandering up and down; or those whom they themselves have succeeded in alluring from these monasteries; or, at any