190 Ancient Celtic Ecclesiastical Bell. By J. A. Smith. 



we find him refounding the monastery of Coldingham, which had 

 been destroyed by the Danes." "We find in another charter 

 the establishment of a parish church clearly presented to us, as 

 well as the process by which it was accomplished. In this docu- 

 ment Thor informs his lord, Earl David, that King Edgar had 

 given him Ednaham, now Ednam, in Berwickshire, waste ; that 

 he had inhabited it, and built from the foundation the church 

 which Ejng Edgar caused to be dedicated to St. Outhbert, and 

 had endowed it with one plough, and he prays his son to confirm 

 the donation he had made of the church to St. Outhbert and the 

 monks of Durham.f Here we have, in fact, the formation of a 

 manor with its parish church, and in a subsequent document it 

 is termed the mother church of Ednam. Edgar appears to have 

 made no attempt to introduce a parochial church north of the 

 Forth, or even to fill up the vacancy in the see of St. Andrews ; 

 but on his death, when the territory which formed his kingdom, 

 with its heterogeneous population, was divided between his two 

 brothers, — the districts north of the Forth and Clyde, with 

 Lothian as far as the Lammermoors, falling under his will, to 

 Alexander, as king, and the districts of the Cumbrian Britons, 

 with the rest of Lothian, to David, as earl, — the policy which 

 had been inaugurated by their Saxon mother, Queen Margaret, 

 of assimilating the native church to that of England, was at once 

 resumed by both" (p. 368); 



These extracts will help to show us how tendency to change 

 originated in the old Scottish church, and this characteristic, 

 square-sided, Celtic bell, would seem, therefore, in the absence 

 of old ecclesiastical remains of any other kind in the immediate 

 district round Ednam, to be the only relic now existing, to take 

 us back, not only to the days of Thor the Long, but to the older 

 time, when an early Celtic church existed there, founded long 

 before, it may have been, by St. Cuthbert himself, in this his 

 own missionary district of the Tweed and its tributary streams. 



This Celtic bell is also especially interesting as being appar- 

 ently the only example of its kind and class now known to exist 

 in all the southern districts of Scotland, and therefore all that 

 now-a-days seems to remain of any of these ancient ecclesiastical 

 establishments. 



t National MS., part i. p. 8. 



