It may be as well to add that a movement was about this time being made, evidently by the abbot and convent of Dunfermline, to have Queen Margaret canonised, in order, in all probability, to bring pilgrims to her shrine, especially on her festival day, June 10th, and thereby enrich the monastery, although, no doubt, higher motives were put forth at the time. To accomplish this, a formal process had to be instituted, by which the merits or demerits of the person had to be investigated. Then the beatification is pronounced by the Pope, and canonisation follows upon production of evidence that miracles have been performed at the tomb of the deceased person. All this was gone through in the case of Margaret—and she, who during her life was one of the most pious and exemplary of Scottish queens, was by the Church of that day solemnly placed in the roll of saints. (See Regist. de Dunf., pp. xii, xiii, and 181, 183, 185, 186.)

CHAPTER X.

On the Origin of Ecclesiastical Legislation
in Scotland.

ECCLESIASTICAL legislation in Scotland, and

the record of it, did not, properly speaking, come into existence until towards the middle of the thirteenth century. Laws, indeed, had at rare intervals been enacted before this time by Pictish and Scottish kings and chiefs in conjunction with bishops and clergy, and by synods or conventions of Irish, Welsh, and north of England ecclesiastics, or by conferences of the clergy called at the instance of Papal legates; but these are so few and fragmentary, and of so doubtful a character, as to make them of no importance whatever in considering the legislation of the Scottish Church. It was not until the days of David de Bernham that the Scottish clergy, in presence of the sovereign and nobles of the kingdom, sat in council and began to legislate

for themselves, and to put on record those laws or canons, many of which continued in force until the Reformation.

When the Church of Christ was one in the world, or at least more united than it is now, important matters of doctrine, discipline, and worship were determined by ECUMENICAL or GENERAL COUNCILS. The most celebrated of these assemblies were those of Nice, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, not only because their decisions have been recognised by the Greek, Roman, and Protestant Churches, but because of the important matters that were determined by them. Before these famous councils met, there had been occasional gatherings of the clergy, both in the Eastern and Western Churches, to settle matters in dispute, and to regulate the affairs of the Church of Christ, but they were nothing more than mere provincial synods; and it was not until the conversion of Constantine-the Roman emperor to the faith of Christ, and the external unity thereby given to the Church, that General Councils came into existence.

In order that the decrees of these and other councils might be carried out, and authority otherwise maintained in the different Churches of Christendom, PROVINCIAL or NATIONAL COUN

CILS, as well as DIOCESAN SYNODS, ultimately came into being. In Scotland, indeed, there had probably, as has already been indicated, always been, from the very commencement of Christianity in that country, gatherings of ecclesiastics to confer about matters common to all; but in the year 1225 a remarkable departure was made in this respect from former methods, both in the character and proceedings of these ecclesiastical courts, and it is from this time that Church law in Scotland properly dates. The circumstances which gave rise to this new state of things it may be proper to relate.

For many years in the middle ages, as is well

1 In a letter to Dr Archdeacon Wilkins, author of the 'Concilia Magnæ Britanniæ et Hiberniæ,' on the ancient manner of holding councils in Scotland, the late Thomas Innes, vice-principal of the Scots College in Paris, makes the following division of periods as regards these councils-viz. :

Etas prima (first age), A.D. 203 to 843, about 640 years. Etas secunda (second age), A.D. 843 to 1124, about 281 years. Etas tertia (third age), A.D. 1124 to 1225, about 100 years. Etas quarta (fourth age), A.D. 1225 to 1470, about 246 years. Etas quinta (fifth age), A.D. 1470 to 1560, about 90 years. Thomas Innes was born at Drumgask, in the parish of Aboyne in Aberdeenshire, in the year 1662; his father, James Innes, being a wadsetter at Drumgask, and his mother, Jane Robertson, daughter of a person of that name in the town of Aberdeen. Innes was a scholar of a genuine stamp, painstaking and accurate—always full of zeal for the honour of his country, and for the glory of the ancient Church of his native land; and although by his researches in bringing to light the canons of the medieval Church of Scotland he jus

known, attempts were made by certain ecclesiastics in England to gain a spiritual ascendancy over their brethren in the north. Not only did they use their influence to prevent the pallium being sent from Rome to the Bishop of St Andrews in Scotland, but they sought to obtain for themselves those metropolitan rights and privileges which in all justice should have been conferred upon the northern bishop. Just as the monarchs of England in this century, and at other times, attempted to subjugate Scotland, rob it of its liberties, and destroy its independence, so the Church of England asserted for many years a kind of ascendancy over the Scottish Church, and attempted again and again to give effect to

tified many of the charges brought against that Church by Protestants, yet from his love of truth, and from the fine historical turn of mind which characterised him, he concealed nothing. He was the first to lift the veil and throw light, upon the ancient Church laws of Scotland. In 1729 he published his Essay on the Ancient Inhabitants of Scotland, in which there was a list given of Scottish provincial councils, made up from manuscripts in libraries in France, England, and Scotland. Bishop Keith, author of the 'History of the Affairs of Church and State in Scotland' (published in 1735), and Wilkins, author of the 'Concilia' above mentioned (published in 1737), were both indebted to Innes for what they published of the councils of the Scottish Church; and it was at his suggestion that the manuscripts were discovered in the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, and transcribed for Wilkins by Thomas Ruddiman, the then keeper of that famous library (Concilia Scotia, Introd., and Spalding Club Misc.)