A hundred years passed away after the mission of St. Patrick before a diversity of Rules crept into the Gaelic church, and a different mode of celebrating the service was introduced, amongst some of the Irish monasteries, from Britain.[353] In another century arose the question about Easter and the Tonsure, causing a temporary breach between the churches of the South of Ireland--which conformed to the practice of the Western Church towards the middle of the seventh century--and the churches of the North which, together with those of the Picts and Scots, and their Anglo-Saxon followers, clung to their ancient usage till the close of the same century, or the beginning of the next, when the Britons alone remained consistent in their attachment to the Eastern tonsure, and to the erroneous cycle.[354] Long before the death of Beda flagrant abuses had crept into the English Church, and the venerable historian laments the condition into which most of the monasteries had fallen throughout the dominions of Northumbria.[355] Very similar causes to those which brought about such results in England, were rife both in Ireland and in Scotland; and the Gaelic Church had varied widely from its original form and spirit, when it presented to the astonished eyes of the dignified prelates of the Roman Church in the twelfth century a picture, in which the abuses of encroachment and neglect had left but the shadow of a long forgotten system of church government. The greater abbacies had become the hereditary appanages of powerful families, where they were not still the objects of bloody contention; and the leading members of the septs, who filled the office of abbot, had sometimes ceased even to be in holy orders.[356] The Termon lands were leased out as the hereditary property of Herenachs, members generally of the same families that possessed the abbacies; whilst the vast communities of monks, that Eastern peculiarity which formed so prominent a feature of the Gaelic Church in her best days, had dwindled into small bodies of Culdees, the representatives of the clerical portion of the brotherhood--the _twelve_ companions so invariably attending the abbots of the early period--who were frequently as remarkable for the amount of their private wealth, as their predecessors, in the times of Columba and Aidan, had been renowned for their disinterested reluctance to acquire property of any description.[357]