The privilege of electing the abbot, the bishop, and every member of the community, was vested in the Culdees, who exercised, within the walls of their monastery, the same rights that belonged in secular affairs to the district and provincial chieftains. The right of blood was as predominant amongst the ecclesiastics as it was all prevalent amongst the laity of the Gaelic people; and as the abbot represented the original Founder of the monastery, and came in time to be chosen from the leading family of the district, so the Culdees appear to have been selected from amongst the members of the same race who could claim the privilege of Founder’s kin. Latterly, the abbots of the greater monasteries in Scotland became altogether lay functionaries, proprietors of the abbey lands, out of which the remainder of the community were supported.[364] They seem to have resembled the Herenach rather than the abbot of the Irish Gael; whilst those ecclesiastical duties and prerogatives, which were very generally exercised by the Irish abbots until the arrival of the English prelates in that country, appear to have been divided in Scotland between the bishop and the prior.[365] After the establishment and endowment of the Regular Priory of St. Andrews by David in 1144, nearly all the privileges originally belonging to the Culdees of Kilrimont were transferred to the Canons Regular. The Culdees themselves were permitted to retain their possessions for their own lives, or to embrace the Regular life and become Canons of the newly-founded Priory;[366] but the members of smaller Culdee establishments, like that of St. Servans on Loch Leven, were treated with far less ceremony; and when their possessions were disposed of in other quarters, they were peremptorily ordered to conform to the Regular discipline, on pain of summary ejectment from their monastery.[367] Whilst the lesser religious houses were thus converted into small dependant priories, filled with Regular monks, the more important communities seem frequently to have retained one part of their ancient establishment, and to have become “Hospitallers;” so much so, that in the succeeding century, the name of “_Kildey_” is used as an equivalent for a Hospital.[368]