monastery and a bishop long before it became the 

 episcopal seat of the Bishop of Moray. The whole of the 

 Scots and Pictish kingdom was under the sway of the 

 Abbot of lona, who was a simple presbyter.* From about 

 the reign of Nectan, onwards to the establishment of the 

 Bishoprics, there is what Hill Burton calls an " enormous 

 blank " in our Church history. This blank is in some sort 

 occupied by the slender notices which survive of the 

 Culdees, a religious body about whose origin, office, and 

 doctrine a wide field of controversy still lies open, but who 

 may be broadly taken as the successors of the Columbite 

 clergy. St. Margaret, the wife of Malcolm Canrnore, did 

 much towards fostering the religious institutions of the 

 country, and under her sons Alexander and David the 

 ecclesiastical revival took definite form. It was probably 

 in the reign of Alexander, about the end of what, in civil 

 history, we have called the Third Period, that the Bishopric 

 of Moray was founded, but of the precise date or circum- 

 stances of that event no record survives. 



Keith, following older authorities, in the Preface to his 

 " Catalogue," puts the foundation as far back as the reign 

 of Malcolm Canrnore, but the first actual evidence of the 

 existence of a Bishop of Moray is in the Foundation Charter 

 granted by Alexander I. to the canons of Scone, in 1115, 

 to which Gregory, Bishop of Moray, is a witness. His 

 name occurs in a similar manner in 1124. In one of these 

 charters the name of his see is omitted, but there can be 

 little doubt as to his identity. Duukeld and St. Andrews 

 were the only other dioceses then in Scotland.*!" 



* See Dr. Grub's " Ecclesiastical History of Scotland." 



t Shaw's statement that Moray was the fourth see, in point of erection, is 

 scarcely correct. Murthlac was not a regular diocese, and Glasgow was, as 

 Dr. Grub says, " vacant almost for a whole generation before the commence- 

 ment of David's rule.'' 



