Scotland -- History -- James II, 1437-1460 -- Fiction
He placed the reliques in a box, and embarked in a small ship, taking
with him Damianus a priest, and Gelasius and Tubaculus, two deacons,
eight hermits, and three devoted virgins.
After great toil and suffering, and after encountering many storms,
they passed Melita, where, as the Scripture tells us, St. Paul had been
of old, thence between the Pillars of Hercules, along the coasts of
Gaul and Celt-iberia; and, after traversing the sea of Almainie, were
cast on a bleak and rocky promontary of Caledonia, near where now the
spires of the fair and stately city of St. Andrew form a landmark to
the mariner.
_Then_ the coast was wild and desolate, and was named by the painted
Picts, who dwelt there, Muick-rhos, or "peninsula of fierce boars."
Wild woods, pathless and dense, covered it, and a stormy sea beat
drearily on its rocky shore.
But these pilgrims having now reached, as they thought, "the
_uttermost_ part of the world," built their cells, and began to preach
and baptize, uniting their labours with those who had landed elsewhere
on Scottish ground, and so, in the fulness of time, that peninsula
became a bishopric.
In the beginning of the ninth century, Adrian, a holy man, became first
bishop of this see of St. Andrews, where in days, then long passed
away, St. Regulus and his kuldees had founded a cell dedicated to the
Holy Virgin, about a bowshot westward from the shore, upon a sea-weedy
rock named unto this day, Our Lady's Craig. But no vestige of the
edifice remains, and the wild waves of the German Sea sweep over it
with every rising tide.
There, in his own chapel, did St. Regulus serve God devoutly for
two-and-thirty years, and there also died Constantine III., King of
Scotland, after spending the last five years of his life as a kuldee of
Kirkrule, for so the place was also named.
In those, the days of Adrian, Hungus, the Pictish king, granted to
God and St. Andrew that the place where the bones of the latter lay
"should be the mother church of all the churches in his kingdom," which
comprehended the entire Lowlands of Scotland, and much of what is now
called England. He laid, in proof of his gift, a _turf_ of the ceded
territory upon the high altar, and it was the _first_ instance of the
symbolical transfer of land by enfoffment in Scotland.
Adrian, the bishop, was a man full of goodness and holiness; none
excelled him in devotion to St. Andrew, and when not preaching to the
people, he usually secluded himself on the little Isle of May, at the
mouth of the Forth, and there he always spent the forty days of Lent,
living on herbs, pure water, and fish, which he caught from the rocks
overhanging the sea.
There he said so many prayers daily, that when he had attained his
fortieth year without having committed a single sin, the devil
spitefully resolved to work him some mischief, if such were possible;
but the entire isle whereon he dwelt had become as it were so holy,
that all the powers of hell could not prevail against him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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