_Kelso Abbey (Roxburghshire)._--In 1113 David, Earl of Huntingdon, and heir-presumptive to the Scottish throne, introduced a colony of thirteen Reformed Benedictine monks from the newly founded abbey of Tiron in Picardy, and planted it near his forest castle of Selkirk. He endowed it with large possessions in Scotland, and a valuable territory in his southern earldom of Huntingdon, but the French monks were dissatisfied with their position on the banks of the Ettrick, and on David's accession to the throne of his brother he removed them from Selkirk--"a place unsuitable for an abbey"--and established the monastery "at the Church of the Blessed Virgin on the bank of the Tweed, beside Roxburgh, in the place called Calkow."[411] The abbey was dedicated to the Virgin and St. John the Baptist. Its first abbot was Ralph, one of the French monks, and the Scotch chronicles state that he succeeded St. Bernard, the reformer of the order, in his abbacy at Tiron, on his death in 1116, but Dr. Cosmo Innes thinks this can scarcely be reconciled with the succession of abbots as given by the French writers.[412] The monastery soon became the richest and most powerful in Scotland, and in 1165 the Pope granted permission to the abbot to wear the mitre, and the abbot claimed precedence of all the superiors of monasteries in Scotland. In 1420 this precedence was decided by James I. in favour of the prior of St. Andrews.[413] Many of the abbots were distinguished men, who were employed in the affairs of the kingdom, and several were promoted to bishoprics.[414] Foremost in rank and power, the monks of Kelso also vindicated their place by the practice of the monastic virtues, and a copy of Wyntoun's _Chronicle_ is supposed to have been written at Kelso.[415] They seem to have recalled the saying, claustrum sine literatura vivi hominis est sepultura ("the cloister without literature is the grave of a living man"), and Dr. Cosmo Innes remarks