A Sketch of the History of Fife and Kinross. A study in Scottish history and character

Front matter

A S KETCH OF THE History of Fife and Kinross " Who will to Cupar maun to Cupar." — Old Fife Proverb. "All the country between the Forth and the Tay grows narrow like a wedge eastward, even to the sea, and it is called Fife, a district provided within its own bounds with all things necessary for the use of life." — George Buchanan, ' History of Scotland,' 1582. " The peninsula of Fife, a county so populous, that, excepting the environs of London, scarce one in South Britain can vie with it ; fertile in soil, abundant in cattle, happy in collieries, in ironstone, lime, and freestone — blest in manufactures ; the property remarkably well divided, none insultingly powerful to distress and often depopulate a county — the most of the fortunes of a useful mediocrity." -Thomas Pennant, ' Tour in Scotland,' 1772.

" Fife contains the concentrated essence of Scottish history and character." — ' Round Fife with a Golf Cleik,' 1890. A SKETCH OF THE History of Fife and Kinross A STUDY TN SCOTTISff HISTORY AND CHARACTER BY Æ. J. G. MACKAY * Aw SHERIFF OF THESE COUNTIES WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCXC Albyn Plcue, Edinburgh, Summer Vacation, 1890. DEAR MRS LO RIMER, Will you accept this sketch as a slight mark of my sense of your constant kindness, and a slighter tribute to tlte memory of one whose name you bear ? f hoped to have sent it to my old colleague and friend, zvhose interest in the history and the people, the future and the past, of Fife, was as keen as that of its natives. But this may not be. He regarded the History of Fife, as I have tried to do, not as a subject for the library of an anti quary, but as a Miniature of the History of Scotland.

The History of Scotland was in his eyes not a dead lan guage, but the expression of Scottish life and character. A happy opportunity enabled him to restore a bit of that history, without using the imperfect medium of words, in the better way of a thoughtful deed, by repairing the roof-tree and rekindling the hearths of one of the deserted castles of Fife. To make the past live in the present, and for the use of the future, is not this the aim which, in spite of some dark passages, renders history a hopeful study ? That you and yours, living on the land and amongst the people of the little ancient kingdom, no longer, as Drummond of Hawthornden called it, a demi-island, but a united part of a United Kingdom, may long enjoy the pleasures of the fireside, the garden, the old Castle, and tlte older Law of Ke/lie, is the wish of Yours sincerely, Æ. J. G. As AC KAY. PAGE I CONTENTS.

Chapter I

The Age of the Saints — The Celtic kingdom — Kenneth Macalpine to Malcolm Canmore — Abernethy — St Andrews — Dunfermline — Queen Margaret the last of the Saints, .

Chapter II

The feudal period in Church and State — David I. to Robert III. — Edward I. and Robert Bruce at Dunfermline — Death of Alexander III. at Kinghorn, and of the Duke of Rothesay at Falkland — Foundation of St Andrews University, ......... 19

Chapter III

The bishops and the kings before the Reformation — James I. to James V. — The Scottish navy in the Forth — Origin of the linen trade— The castles of the nobles and the kings in Fife — Early ballads of Fife, ...... 30

Chapter IV

The prelude to the Reformation — Sir David Lyndsay and Cardinal Beaton— The drama of "The Three Estates" at Cupar — The tragedy of "The Cardinal" at St Andrews, -39 CONTENTS.

Chapter V

John Knox and Mary Stuart in Fife— Mary and Chastellard at Burntisland — Mary and Darnley at Wemyss — Mary at Lochleven — Knox at St Andrews -5°

Chapter VI

James VI. and Andrew Melville at St Andrews — The Captains of the Armada at Anstruther — The murder of the Earl of Moray at Donibristle— Melville calls James "God's silly vassal" at Falkland— The Fife Adventurers in the Lewes, ......••■ IH

Chapter VII

Revolutionary period — The Covenant — Alexander Henderson of Leuchars — Samuel Rutherford, Principal of St Mary's — George Gillespie of Kirkcaldy and his brother Patrick — Cromwell in Fife — Scot of Scotstarvit and Scotch geography and statistics — Cunningham of Barns and the light on the May — Mr Sharp of Crail and that Ilk, Archbishop of St Andrews — His murder at Magus Muir — David Hackston of Rathillet — Richard Cameron of Falkland, 98

Chapter VIII

The Secessions from the Established Church in the eighteenth century in Fife and Kinross— The Erskines of Portmoak and Dunfermline and the Secession — Thomas Gillespie of Carnock and the Relies — Reunions of the present century — John Glas and Edward Irving — Their Churches did not succeed in Fife, . . . . . . 137

Chapter XII

Other illustrations of Fife character in the professions — Fife soldiers — Kirkaldy of Grange and the two Leslies — Fife admirals — Alexander Selkirk — Fife doctors and judges — Architecture and art in Fife — Literature of Fife — Character of the natives, ........ 229 Index, NOTE. The figure on the cover is from the old seal of the Earls of Fife, as given by Sir George Mackenzie, and described by Nisbet, ' Heraldry,' Part ii., chap. iv. p. 282, as follows : — "Sir George Mackenzie, in his ' Science of Herauldry, ' gives us a copy of one of the seals of the M' Duffs, Earls of Fife ; being after an equestrian form, having the representation of a man in armour on horseback, with a capilon on his helmet, hanging down to the horse's tail, and on the top of the helmet a demi-lion for crest ; in his right hand a sword, and on his left arm a shield charged with a lion rampant ; and upon the caparisons of his horse are placed several little triangular shields, each charged with a lion rampant." 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 FIFE, EXCEPT COAST, UNKNOWN TO ROMANS. 2 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 in habitants 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. No 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. 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 naivete, some times 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.

LEGENDS OF THE SAINTS. 4 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 im mediate 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. 5 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 contempo rary 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 Loch leven 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.

ST SERF AND ADAMNAN ON INCHKEITH. Another legend calls him an Israelite, and a third, in a tract on ' The Mothers of the Saints,' gives him an Irish mother, which is probably due to its author having been himself an Irish Celt. His name of Serf, in Latin Servanus, may indicate no more than that he was a ser vant of God like the Culdees, whose name has a similar meaning. But while there is so much doubtful and uncertain about Serf, the places to which he brought the Gospel do not materially vary, and are confirmed by subsequent history. Most of them are connected with Fife, which was the centre of his ministry. He meets Adamnan at Inchkeith, and having asked Adamnan " How he should dispose of his followers," is told, " Let them inhabit the land of Fife from the hill of the Britons (Largo Law ?) to the hill called Okhel " (the Ochils).

He founds a church and cemetery at Culross, where for many cen turies his day was kept on ist July by a procession of the inhabitants carrying green boughs. He visits Port moak, on the banks of Lochleven, where an early church bore his name. The erection of the small monastery on the island called his Inch, in the same loch, may have been during his own life, or a later foundation in his honour. He preaches at Tillybothy, now Tullibody, and at Tillicoultry, at Alva — where a well still bears his name — and at Airthrie. He cannot have built the narrow bridge over the Devon which leads to the old road through the Ochils to Strathearn ; but its name of St Serf's bridge is probably a reminiscence that he passed that way in one of his missions. The farthest north point he reached was Dunning, in Strathearn, where tradition said he slew a dragon in the den still called the " Dragon's Den."

The mention of his name in other places in Perthshire and Aberdeenshire seems due to foundations after his death, but he is personally con- THE MONASTIC CHURCH. 7 nected with several places in the east and north of Fife, especially with Dysart and with Creich. At Dysart he had his famous argument with the " Devil," so quaintly told by Wyntoun, in which the Saint always has the better. He died and was buried at Culross. The Church during the time of Serf was monastic. He was a monk, not a bishop. The rule he followed was framed chiefly for hermits who passed their days in solitary cells, not in communities like the monks of St Augustine's or St Benedict's rule. Whether it was iden tical with the earliest form of the Culdee rule or not, the Culdees of Lochleven accepted St Serf as their patron.

It was a Pictish race that Serf converted, and it was a Pictish king who gave the island to the Culdees. No thing is more certain than the fact that the Picts in Fife as elsewhere became Christian. Nothing is more singular than the fact that having become Christian they have left so little record of their history, and such meagre vestiges even of their language. There were at least two other foundations of Culdees in Fife which became more famous than Lochleven — Abernethy and St Andrews. Their origin is very ob scure. If we could accept tradition they belonged even to an earlier date, but it is probable that in their case also true history has been lost in the attempt to claim a greater antiquity than the facts warrant. Aber nethy is said to have been founded by a Pictish King Nectan in honour of St Bridget, Abbess of Kildare, at the request of the next abbess of the same convent, Darlugdach, who was present and chanted the Halleluia Hymn when the king's offering was made.

St Bridget was a contemporary of St Patrick and died early in the sixth century, and Darlugdach was her immediate successor. But Nectan Morbet, called the son of THE CULDEES. Erip, is a very shadowy Pictish king. The Nectan best known to history did not reign till the seventh century ; so here again we are perplexed by dates. Fortunately chronology, though the best, is only one of the guides of history. It is probable that Abernethy was founded by a mission from the Irish Church, and dedicated to Bridget, the saint who has been called the Mary of Ireland. The Culdees must have been a later introduction in a foundation which was originally apparently one for religious women, for the introduction of women into the Culdees' monasteries was a corruption of their primitive rule. The Culdees did not belong to the first age of the saints, which, according to Irish hagi ology, included women as well as men.

According to Fordoun, Abernethy became the see of the Bishop of the Celtic Church of Scotland after Dunkeld, and in its church three elections were made while as yet there was only one bishop in Scotland. The other Culdee monastery was at Kilrigmonaigh or Kilrymont, near St Andrews. The first preaching of Christianity in this part of Fife was attributed to Cain nech (or Kenneth) of Kilkenny in the end of the sixth century ; but his fame was eclipsed by that of St Regulus or St Rule, who is credited by tbe legend with having brought the relics of St Andrew from Patras in Achaia to St Andrews, where he received a gift of a district called the Boar's Chase — a name still preserved in Boar's Hill — from Hungus or Angus, a Pictish king. A confusion not yet dispelled is found in the body of this legend, which makes Constantius — an emperor of the fourth century, in whose reign the relics are said to have been removed from Patras — the contemporary of Angus, a Pictish king of the eighth century, who is said to have defeated Athelstan, the Saxon king of the end of the ninth century, through the aid of St Andrew.

It is impossi- ST ANDREW, THE PATRON SAINT. 9 ble not to suspect the hand of a patriotic but ignorant Scottish monk of the later time, when Scotland was fighting for its existence against the monarchs of Eng land, in this manipulation of the legend. Yet there was a legend to manipulate — and a legend is not an invention, but a distortion of facts. That Scotland at a very early date accepted St Andrew as its patron is beyond doubt. He is the only Saint whose day has survived all ecclesiastical change and is observed by Protestants as well as Romanists. The Culdees had a settlement at St Andrews, and there were twelve Celtic bishops be longing to their Order, from Cellach in the reign of Constantine, son of Aedh, down to the election of the Anglian Turgot in the reign of Malcolm Canmore. Of the other saints connected with Fife, the most memorable was Adrian, called in his legend a Hun garian, who settled in the Isle of May, where he was martyred by the Danes about the middle of the ninth century.

The ruins of a little church called after him, which was a favourite place of pilgrimage, may still be seen. The haven where the pilgrims, one of the most constant of whom was James IV., landed, is still called Pilgrim's Haven, and the Lady's, the Pilgrim's, St John's, and St Andrew's wells are still pointed out, though their brackish waters have lost the magic virtue they were credited with in early Christian, possibly in pagan times. To Adrian the churches of Lindores and Flisk were dedicated under the name of St Magridin, which per haps appeared on the inscription of Macduff 's Cross. St Monan, in whose honour the church of Abercromby was named St Monans, was one of the companions of Adrian, and his relics were supposed to rest at Invery, until transferred by David II. to the church which afterwards bore his name ; though Mr Skene prefers to identify him with Moinen, an Irish bishop of Clonfert.

St Fillan, KENNETH MACALPINE AT SCONE, 844. 10 an Irish saint of the eighth century, whose name is chiefly associated with the parish on Lochearnside, his crosier and his bell, also left traces of his footsteps in the cave at Pittenweem which bears his name ; and the parish of Forgan was originally dedicated to St Fillan, though afterwards to St Andrew. Such figures flit past us like shades in the dark back ground of history. But some of the buildings associated with their names, though not founded in their time, keep alive their memory and attest the belief in their existence. We still gaze with wonder and admiration on the round tower of Abernethy, whose form demonstrates its Irish origin ; on the square tower of St Regulus, which recalls the Byzantine architecture of Ravenna ; and the pointed spire of St Monans of comparatively recent date, replacing the earlier edifice which contained his shrine.

Impossible as it is to fix dates with any approach to precision, it may be safely concluded that most of these saints flourished while most of the population of Fife was still Pictish. A common Christianity facilitated the union of the two branches of the Celtic race in the north and east of Scotland. Had the one been heathen and the other Christian, there would have been records of a much longer and more desperate conflict. It is not im probable that the ecclesiastics may have been the main agents in effecting the union, although the Churches of the Picts and Scots at first stood out for their peculiar privileges and special customs. In the middle of the ninth century, the Scots of the West Highlands and Isles, and the Picts of the north and centre of Scotland, were united in one monarchy by Kenneth Macalpine.

His chief seat was Scone. All traces of the early fort and abbey, and even of the Moot hill, are obliterated by Lord Mansfield's modern palace and BISHOP OF THE SCOTS AT ABERNETHY. 1 1 policies. It requires a strong effort of imagination to recall the fact that this low-lying ground, guarded only by the swift-flowing Tay, was the central seat of the Scottish monarchy for many centuries. But a ford in the days before bridges was often one of the best natural defences. The site of Dublin was also due to a ford, from which it took its older name Athcliath. A town often outlives the cause which determined its site. Scone is not a far cry from Abernethy, nor even from Dunfermline or St Andrews. There seems no doubt that Fife was included at an early date in this kingdom, though on what terms its Pictish kings, of whom Brude, son of Dergard, is said to have been the last, submitted to the growing Scottish monarchy, we do not know.

The submission of the Picts was probably connected with the new organisation of the Celtic Church in the plan of Diocesan Episcopacy which took the place of the purely monastic system. In the reign of Kenneth Macalpine, some relics of Columba were transferred from Iona to Dunkeld ; and Tuathal, son of Artgusa, Abbot of Dunkeld, is called in the middle of the ninth century, chief Bishop of Fortreun, a district whose bounds in cluded the Picts of Forfar and Perth. After Tuathal's death in the reign of Constantine M'Kenneth, there were three bishops who belonged, not to Dunkeld, but to Abernethy, while there was, says the chronicler, only one bishop in Scotland. Abernethy, he adds, was then the ecclesiastical seat of the whole realm of the Picts. The names of the bishops of Abernethy are lost ; their suc cessor was Cellach, who lived half a century later in the reign of Constantine MacAedh.

This king, along with his bishop, swore at a conference on the little hill at Scone, to preserve the laws and discipline of the faith, and the rights of the churches and the gospels, on an equality with the Scots. Such is the brief fragment of THE DIOCESAN CHURCH. the Pictish chronicle which excites and baffles our curiosity. The Celtic bishop, who is called Bishop of the Scots, was the overseer or ecclesiastical superintendent of a district, and his district or diocese was the whole Scottish Pictish monarchy. The earlier Celtic Church, both in Ireland and Scot land, had also bishops. The theory that there was a primitive Church with only presbyters has no place in history. But these early bishops differed greatly from the lordly prelates of the medieval Church. In Ireland, if we could accept implicitly the annalists' num bers, bishops were so numerous, sometimes hundreds connected with a single monastery, that they could not have held a distinct territorial office.

In Scotland there is no trace of such a multiplicity of bishops, and there is reason to suppose that its earliest Church was neither Episcopal nor Presbyterian, but monastic. The exact position of the earliest Scottish bishops is obscure, but they seem to have exercised the power of ordination, and to have been held in special honour, although not in such high honour as the abbots of the monasteries, the successors of St Columba or St Serf. The creation of a chief bishop for the whole kingdom was a step from the monastic to the Episcopal Diocesan Church. Scotland was no longer pagan, with merely points of Gospel light shining from monastic cloisters, chiefly in islands, and her mit cells chiefly in unfrequented places called deserts, of which Dysart may have been one (though some prefer the Gaelic etymology of the Point of God, in remem brance of St Serf's landing), or in caves like those at Wemyss or Kincraig.

Such places retained long their old sanctity, but the Church had now gone out to leaven the heathen world. The diocese of the bishop with the chapter of his cathedral, originally taken from the Culdee monks, was divided into parishes with separate ST ANDREWS, METROPOLIS OF THE CHURCH. 1 3 churches and priests, who permeated the whole country, and educated the whole people in a way the solitary her mit or the cloistered monk could not have done. The ministers of religion were no longer saints or hermits, virgins or martyrs ; they became mitred bishops, abbots, priors, the councillors, sometimes the rulers, of the king and of the nation. Why was it that the chief pastor of this reorganised Church migrated from Iona to Dunkeld, from Dunkeld to Abernethy, from Abernethy to St Andrews? It was due to the political causes which directed the course of Scottish history from the close of the tenth to the middle of the eleventh century.

The Celtic monarchy, after its amalgamation, pressed forward from the west and north to the east and south. The dreaded attacks of Danish and Norse Vikings, whose long dragon boats preyed on the coasts and sailed up the firths or fiords, forced the consolidation of the kingdom. Scone, an inland place, was now a safer po litical, and Dunkeld or Abernethy a safer ecclesiastical centre. The reason why St Andrews obtained and retained the primacy of the Church in preference to Dunkeld is not so clear. It never was the royal seat of the united monarchy, though the names of Kilrymont (the Church of the King's Mount) and Kingsbarns confirm the tradition which made it one of the residences of the district Pictish king. It was situated at the corner of the king dom ; it had no rich lands such as those which attracted later monks to Cupar, Pittenweem, Balmerino, Lindores, and Culross.