‘It appears to have been a wonderful dispensation of the Divine goodness, that the same nation which had wittingly and without envy communicated to the people of the Angles the knowledge of the true Deity, should afterwards, by means of the nation of the Angles, be brought, in those points on which they were defective, to the rule of life;’ such is the reflection of the Venerable Bede when contemplating the change which had taken place in the Columban Church in the beginning of the eighth century, which he thus expresses: ‘The monks of _Hii_, or Iona, by the instruction of Ecgberct, adopted the Catholic rites under Abbot Dunchad, about eighty years after they had sent Bishop Aidan to preach to the nation of the Angles.’[505] He had previously stated that, not long after the year 710, ‘those monks also of the Scottish nation who lived in the island of Hii, with the other monasteries that were subject to them, were, by the procurement of our Lord, brought to the canonical observance of Easter and the right mode of tonsure;[506] and this had been effected by the most reverend and holy father and priest Ecgberct, of the nation of the Angles, who had long lived in banishment in Ireland for the sake of Christ, and was most learned in the Scriptures and distinguished for the perfection of a long life, and who came among them, corrected their error, and changed them to the true and canonical day of Easter.’[507] Bede implies that this took place in the year 716; but the change was not so general or so instantaneous as might be inferred from this statement. The monks of Iona, or a part of them at least, had certainly in that year adopted the Catholic Easter;[508] but it is not till two years after that date, and a year after the death of Abbot Dunchad, that they adopted the coronal tonsure. The expression of the Irish annalist who records the event rather implies that it had been forced upon an unwilling community;[509] and, so far from the other monasteries that were subject to them having generally submitted to the change in 716, the resistance of those within the territories of the Pictish king to the royal edict commanding the adoption of the Catholic Easter and the coronal tonsure throughout all the provinces of the Picts led to the expulsion of ‘the family of Iona’—by which expression the Columban monks are meant—from the Pictish kingdom in 717. This conflict then appears to have led to two results. In the first place, it separated the churches of the eastern districts from Iona, broke up the unity of the Columban Church, and terminated the supremacy of the parent monastery of Iona over the churches in the Pictish kingdom, which had been subject to them; and, in the second place, it seems undoubtedly to have caused a schism in the community on the island, as such innovations usually do when the attempt to force upon an entire body the views of a majority is sure to be met by a resisting minority. [Sidenote: Two parties with rival abbots.]