rate, those among their own servants whom they have been able to induce to take the tonsure and make a promise of monastic obedience to them. With these motley bands they fill the cells which they have constructed.’ ‘Thus,’ says Bede further, ‘for about thirty years, that is, from the time when King Aldfrid was removed from the world, our province has been so demented by this mad error, that from that period scarcely has there been a single prefect who has not, during the course of his prefectship, founded for himself a monastery of this description. And, since this most wretched custom has become prevalent, the ministers also and servants of the king were content to do the same. And thus, contrary to the established order, numberless persons are found who style themselves indiscriminately abbots and prefects, or ministers or servants of the king; and, though laymen might have been instructed in something of the monastic life, not indeed by experience but by hearsay, yet these persons have nothing in common with the character or profession whose duty it is to give the instruction. And indeed such persons, at their own caprice, suddenly receive the tonsure, as you are aware; and by their own decision are made from laymen, not monks, but abbots.’[496] This piteous wail of the true-hearted Bede seems to find an echo in the title of the older legend of St. Andrew. King Aldfrid died in 705, and the thirty years Bede refers to extend to the year in which he wrote this account, and which was indeed the last of his life. It was but twelve years after King Aldfrid’s death that King Nectan expelled the Columban monks from his dominions. The monasteries would naturally fall into the possession of the tribe of the land; and, if we substitute monasteries founded by the Columban church, from which their monks were expelled, for monasteries and cells directly founded by laymen, it is probable enough that the withdrawal of the Columban monks in the one country and their expulsion in the other, with the introduction of a secular clergy in both, was followed by similar results; and that the kingdom of the Picts may have exhibited the greater part of these monasteries in the hands of laymen, the semblance and the nomenclature of the monastic institution being thus kept up without the reality. Bede indicates that the motive for doing so was to preserve the privileges of such foundations, such as exemption from service and right of sanctuary, without the corresponding obligations; and such grounds of action would be equally powerful in the one country as in the other. Tighernac records in 747 the death of Tuathal, abbot of _Cinnrighmonadh_,[497] or Kylrimont. He may have been one of those titular abbots; but as this is the only instance in which an abbot of Kilrymont is noticed in the Irish Annals, it is more probable that he was the expelled abbot of the old monastery, who had died in Ireland.