A SKETCH

OF THE

HISTORY OF FIFE AND KINROSS.

CHAPTER I.

THE

EARLIEST HISTORY OF FIFE THE AGE OF THE SAINTS THE CELTIC KINGDOM-KENNETH MACALPINE TO MALCOLM CANMORE -ABERNETHY-ST ANDREWS — DUNFERMLINE-QUEEN MARGARET THE LAST OF THE SAINTS.

THE history of Fife, which formerly included and in this sketch includes Kinross, begins with the Legends of the Saints. If we wish to know anything of Fife before the seventh century, we must have recourse to archæology, which pursues different methods and arrives at a different kind of result from history. The Roman historians, and their inferior successors, the Byzantine and Latin writers of the early middle ages, enable us to catch glimpses of the rest of Scotland. Fife is a dark and unknown land.

The fleet of Agricola must have sailed round its coast on the way to Orkney, the Ultima Thule or North Pole

А

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FIFE, EXCEPT COAST, UNKNOWN TO ROMANS.

of the Roman world. The Roman legions probably more than once crossed the Forth and passed the Ochils. But there is no record that they conquered the district between Kinross and Muckross, as its Celtic natives called, in their apt way of naming places, the head and snout of the well-defined promontory of Scotland, south of the Caledonian forest, between the Tay and the Forth. Supposed remains of Roman roads and camps in the neighbourhood of Dunfermline and at Loch Or are doubtful, and similar discoveries farther east are imaginary antiquities. The halting lines of the old Fife poet are true history—

"But thou didst scorn Rome's captive for to be,

And kept thyself from Roman legions free."

Before the Romans came in the first, and after they left in the fifth century, this district was a part of the country then perhaps called Alban, and now Scotland. Probably it was a separate kingdom. To no other period can the name of kingdom, so familiar to its natives, and preserved by it alone of the counties of Scotland, be reasonably ascribed. Its first known inhabitants belonged to the branch of Celts named Picts, perhaps the painted race, though some think it a tribal name. They were called in their own tongue Cruithne. Fibh (pronounced Fife) was, according to an early mythical genealogy, one of the seven sons of Cruithne, the father of the race from whom it took its name. satisfactory etymology has been found either for Cruithne or Fibh. Neither name represented real persons. They are only the figures in a myth which contains some crushed and buried fragments of history.

No

It was after the earliest Celtic annals had faded into poetic myths, and the Roman historians had passed away with the Roman Empire, that the narratives of

LEGENDS OF SAINTS ITS EARLIEST HISTORY. 3

the lives of the first Christian missionaries shed a dim historic light on the shores and a few places in the interior of Fife.

The Legends of the Saints tell the stories of those who converted pagan races to Christianity, or who reformed the corruptions of the Christianity of their age. Written in general long after the events, the legends were read in the churches, especially in those dedicated to the saint where his relics rested, or were supposed to rest. They embrace fictitious as well as historical matter. Miracles and prophecies-sometimes childish in naïveté, sometimes childlike in simplicity-mingle with the natural acts of the guides who led barbarians along the first steps of civilisation, and taught heathens the elements of Christian doctrine and morals. The earlier Saints are born, and live, and die, contrary to the ordinary course of nature. They subsist without food, walk the waves, lay the storms, kill the living, and cure the dying, by a sign or a word. They have not so much visions, as actual conflicts with Satan and his devils, and actual converse with good angels, with Christ and God. But they also kill wild beasts, reclaim waste lands, plant fruit-trees, find and hallow wells, erect crosses, enclose cemeteries, and found churches. Whatever may be real and whatever invented, they were the preachers of the virtue of purity, the gospel of peace, the hope of eternal life.

Our ancestors in the middle ages believed the whole Legend. They testified to their belief by endowing churches and putting up crosses and images in honour of the Saints. They venerated what had been blessed by holy hands, the bells and books, the banners and crosiers. They celebrated the Saints' days by festivals, fairs, and pilgrimages. They called their children and their homes after the names of the Saints.

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LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS.

Our nearer kin of the Reformation denounced almost the whole Legend as superstitious. They demolished the churches, broke the images, destroyed the books which recorded the lives of the Saints, cast their relics to the winds, altered or forgot their days, and corrupted the names their own forefathers deemed the holiest of the holy. It is the hard but needful task of history to sift the true from the false-so far as possible to realise by what men, and by what means, the country we live in became Christian. The task requires a firm hand and an earnest heart. As an artist would lovingly preserve the half-faded, half-repainted canvas of an old master, or a reverent architect the ruins of an abbey or cathedral, so should the historian interpret the Legends. They enshrine, mingled with the dust of antiquity, the true relics of noble lives.

Piecing together what we find in the lives of the Saints, and rejecting what is incredible, the probable story of the conversion of Fife may be briefly told.

The absence-with three exceptions, probably of a later date-of any dedication to St Ninian in Fife, is strong negative evidence that its natives were not amongst the southern Picts, whom the British apostle of Galloway converted in the beginning of the fifth century. The isolated dedication to St Columba at Inchcolm, where a solitary hermit monk may have come from Iona at an earlier date, but whose monastery dates from Alexander I., is a similar proof that neither that saint, nor his immediate successors as Abbots of Iona, planted churches on the shores or islands of the Forth. But Adamnan, his biographer, the ninth Abbot of Iona, who lived in the end of the seventh century, and died in 704, may, as he certainly visited Northumbria, have landed at Inchkeith, where there was once a church or a cell dedicated to him.

ST SERF CONVERTS PICTISH CELTS.

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It was to another saint of the early Celtic Church-St Serf-that the conversion of Fife was due. There is difficulty in fixing his exact date, but no reasonable doubt as to his existence. The Legends vary by several centuries. According to one, Serf was the companion and suffragan of Palladius, long believed to have been sent on a mission to the Scots by Pope Celestine early in the fifth century. But there were few, if any, Scots in Scotland at this date, and none in Fife, which was still peopled by Picts, and ruled by Pictish kings for three centuries later. So this legend, in which Palladius is perhaps confused with St Patrick, who converted the Scots of Ireland, must be dismissed. In another story, Serf was the adoptive father of Kentigern, the contemporary of Columba, the apostle of Cumbria and first Bishop of Glasgow, who, according to this legend, was born at Culross, where Serf then lived, and Kentigern's mother, Thenew, had been driven by a storm.

Yet a third-probably the truest-form of the legend makes Serf contemporary with Adamnan, by whose advice he undertook the conversion of Fife. This would correspond with the date of Brude, the son of Derili, one of many Pictish kings of that name; and a Brude, the son of Dergart, is said to have given the isle of Lochleven to St Serf and the Culdees, as an earlier Brude had given Iona to St Columba. It was the tendency of medieval legend to antedate itself, through the natural fondness most men have for antiquity, and the desire to prove that the country to which the legend relates had a more ancient Christianity than other districts.

The parentage of Serf is not known. One legend makes him son of a Canaanite king and Arab princess, and relates that before he came to Scotland he was Pope for seven years, at a date in the sixth century when we know there was no such Pope.