2 ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 



by long study and experience, is a privilege I shall ever 

 look back upon with gratitude. 



I have thought that I might, not unprofitablj, occupy 

 the few minutes at my disposal before we proceed to 

 the general business of this meeting, by supplementing 

 my paper on the mediaeval churches of Berwickshire 

 with a brief general survey of the ecclesiastical arrange- 

 ments of the county, from the time when these were 

 finally settled under our Celto-Saxon Kings in the 

 twelfth and thirteenth centuries, until the Keformation. 

 That settlement was the outcome of an important re- 

 ligious movement which reached its culmination in the 

 thirteenth centur3^ when Christianity, as it was under- 

 stood by the men of the Middle Ages, may be said to 

 have blossomed into full maturity, and its inner spirit 

 of devotion found expression in a religious art, perhaps 

 the purest and noblest the world has yet seen. There 

 was an earlier movement, as we know, which had its 

 origin in lona, and its centre in Lindisfarne, and which 

 embraced the Merse and Lammermuir, as part of the 

 ancient Northumbria, in its sweep. We would give 

 much to possess a circumstantial account of this first 

 movement as it affected the district between Lammer- 

 muir and Tweed, but all we know of it is derived 

 from the scanty notices to be gleaned from the pages 

 of Bede, and later and less trustworthy chroniclers, 

 and from some place-names, lingering to this late day 

 in remote parts of the district, which point back un- 

 mistakeably to that i-emarkable outburst of Celtic 

 missionary fervour from which nearly all that was best 

 in the subsequent centuries was derived, and in which 

 the roots of our social and religious history are em- 

 bedded. It is true we are familiar, to some extent, 

 with the figures of the main actors, especially with 

 that of the greatest of them all — St. Cuthbert, whose 

 boyhood was spent on the western confines of the county. 

 Even of his labours, however, within its limits, we 

 possess almost no details, except, perhaps, in the solitary 



