ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS 3 



instance of his traditional visits to Coldingham ; 

 and we have only a vague, general record of the process, 

 which must surely have had some exciting and romantic 

 episodes, whereby the old inhabitants of the district 

 were led to i-enounce their Paganism, and enter the 

 pale of the Church. Nor can it be said that the sub- 

 sequent history of the region, until we approach the 

 time of the Conquest, has anything distinctive from 

 that of the Northumbrian kingdom and earldom of which 

 it formed a part, and whose vicissitudes it shared, until the 

 victory of Malcolm II. at Carham, in 1018, finally severed 

 its English connection, and annexed it to the ancient 

 Laudonia or Lothian, at first an appanage of the Scottish 

 Crown, but ultimately merged, as an integral part, in 

 the Northern kingdom. 



The Conquest of England by William and his Normans 

 was followed by results which were not confined to 

 that country. Scotland was speedily flooded Math 

 Saxon refugees ; and one of these, the Princess Margaret, 

 when she became the Queen of Malcolm Canmore, soon 

 made her influence felt in the land of her adoption. An 

 ardent devotee of Rome, she made it the main object 

 of her life to bring the Scottish Church, which had, 

 up till then, retained many local peculiarities of rite 

 and doctrine, into absolute conformity with, and subjec- 

 tion to, the great Latin communion, and she saw her efforts 

 crowned with a large measure of success. Under her 

 sons, Edgar, Alexander I., and David I., aided by the 

 southern or Norman influence, which, following the 

 Saxon, was now felt as far north as the Grampians, 

 the Romanising of Scotland was completed ; and thence- 

 forward, until the middle of the sixteenth century, the 

 Church of Scotland was only a provincial section of 

 the vast ecclesiastical system which, before the Reforma- 

 tion, held the whole of Western Europe in its grasp. 



With the events which immediately succeeded the Con- 

 quest in the closing j^ears of the eleventh century, our 

 knowledge of the local history of Berwickshire may 



