him his admirers invariably used it. This Latin habit led to the term "Saint" being used when speaking of persons who were or who claimed to be Saints, although for reasons entirely different.

In dealing with Celtic Saints the first thing that is noticeable is their enormous numbers. When the editors of the Lives of the Saints came to consider the Celtic Saints they at once felt this difficulty. If they admitted all into their list their labours would have been worse than the

labours of Sisyphus. For instance-in that remarkable document, the Litany of Engus the Culdee, in speaking of St. Finn Barr, in his monastery of Loch Irchi,1 it says:— "As many as the leaves of the trees

Are the saints who are therein."

The Bollandists shrank from such wholesale biography. So to avoid it they hit on the very ingenious expedient of not admitting the Celtic Saints into their list, as they did not come within the definition they laid down of a Saint. "Those are", they say, "those are to be separately enrolled in the number of Saints who are entitled to be invoked, either in obedience to a Pontifical decree or by the public consent of a Christian people convinced of the sanctity of anyone by open and repeated miracles."2 It follows that in the opinion of the Bollandists the title to Saintship depends on one of two things-canonisation or miraclesto the Welsh Saints the first of these tests is inapplicable. Wales had ceased to produce Saints as such before canonisation, as it is now understood, came into use. and one only, of the Welsh Saints-David-is said to have had the benefit of this process. With the exception of some five all the Welsh Saints date from before A.D. 700. The earliest record of canonisation is said to be St. Ulric of

1 Book of Leinster, 373b.

2 Act. SS. (Bolland.), March 10th, vol. ii, p. 293a.

One,

Augsberg, in A.D. 993,1 although, without citing any authority for it, Mackenzie Walcott gave an earlier instance-St. Swibert of Verda, in A.D. 804.

,

The present rules of the Latin Church as to canonisation date from the pontificate of Benedict XIV. Consequently in so far as the Latin Church was concerned, the right of Welsh Saints to that title depended on their power to work miracles. So the eleventh and twelfth century writers, mostly Latin monks, whose versions of the lives of the Welsh Saints are our great authorities on the subject, pile up the miracles that they say the Welsh Saints wrought. As far as we can tell the Welsh records do not appear to have attached the same importance to miracles the Latin writers did; and it is to the Latins that we owe most of the childish and grotesque stories we find making up the lives of Welsh Saints. But it must not be supposed that the Welsh did not attach great importance to the power of dealing with the supernatural-as will be shown; the power to deal in signs and wonders was a necessary qualification for a Saint in the Celtic as well as in the Latin Church.

The later Welsh position may be stated in the words of a well-known antiquary :-" No formal process-certainly no reference to Rome was required to put a Departed Worthy on the roll of the Saints; the proofs of holiness, in the technical sense, in addition to piety and blamelessness of life were miracles; and these proofs were estimated apparently by the voice of the people. A good man died-signs were believed to be wrought at his tomb or by his intercessionthe multitude flocked to the place and the claim to sanctity was carried by acclamation." The Celts were most liberal in granting the title of Saint; the Latins were very chary, 1 Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., xiii, 233.

2 Mr. Peacock, Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., xiii, 234.

and required something more than reputed holiness, usually the reputation for working miracles, before doing so.

The Celtic liberality arose mainly from an adherence to the original meaning of the term Saint as denoting all Christians-that is all the members of the tribe of the Saint. A missionary often, either in fact or in name a relation of the chief of the tribe, appeared. The chief desired to secure the support of so powerful an ally-so mighty a Druid; to induce him to remain, he gave him a grant of land on which a monastery was built. This monastery and its possessions were considered as the property of the missionary and his followers--the Saint and his tribe. So an ecclesiastical tribe was formed, all the members of which were called Saints. From this starting-point the tribe developed and the Saints increased. Hard as it is for us to realise that tribes of Saints existed, it is the fact; and this tribal idea furnishes the key to the history of the Saints and many other matters connected with the organization of the Celtic Church. Once the tribe was established the rules as to its chieftainship had to be laid down. This was done by an adaptation of the rules in force among the lay tribes. As was to be expected, there were modifications of those rules; but, in the main, the same regulations were applicable to the tribe of the land and to the tribe of the Saint. As converts increased the term Saint ceased to be applied to all Christians, as nominally all the lay tribe were such, and so would be nominally Saints.

The term then became limited to those belonging to the monastery or religious establishment of the tribe; it is difficult to say when this limitation arose. It had not been made in the time of Patrick, as is shewn from his letter to Caroticus; it is traceable in the Senchus Mor, and was in full force in the tenth century, as appears from the Litany of Engus the Culdee, for in it various settlements of Saints

are spoken of. Whenever it took place it was probably at a comparatively early period in Celtic Church history.

The result of establishing a tribe, or a family of Saints in connection with the different tribes, had a most important influence on subsequent Church history. The earliest

and one of the most important results was importing into ecclesiastical relationships the connection between the tribesmen and the rules of legal relationship in force in the lay tribe. Thus, both in ecclesiastical and lay organisations, the family became the basis of the whole system. The different families belonging to each tribe had, as a part of their hereditary possessions, the exclusive knowledge of some trade or custom. 'In societies of an archaic type", says Sir Henry Maine, " a particular craft or kind of knowledge becomes in time an hereditary possession of families almost as a matter of course."1

The family attached to the monastery, the tribe or family of the Saint, became or professed to become the exclusive hereditary possessors of the religious knowledge and customs of the tribe--that is, they became poets, or Brehons, or Druids, and afterwards Saints; the term Saint, as used in the Celtic Church, merely designating the priestly family attached to the tribe. From the Senchus Mor, we learn how the conversion of Ireland to Christianity was brought about. Patrick and a Brehon went through the then existing Irish Law and accepted all that did not clash with "the word of God in the written law and in the New Testament and with the conscience of believers, was confirmed in the laws of the Brehons by Patrick and by the ecclesiastics and chieftains of Erin",2

From this it is clear that many of the old Celtic Pagan customs, part of the hereditary knowledge that had been the property of the families of the Brehons,

1 Early Institutions, 245. 2 Ancient Laws of Ireland, Rolls ed., i, 17.

became the property of the families of the Saints. This must have tended to modify and mould the Christianity of the Celts, and a knowledge of these customs must give us important light on the Celtic Church. The solution of many of its peculiarities is most likely to be found in the lives of the Saints-the history of the chiefs of those families. Viewed from this point, those lives at once become of the highest importance as being, in a sense, the sacred books of Wales. From the life of each individual Saint something may be learnt of the customs and usages of his time, which customs and usages may be either those of the early Celtic Church or of some Pagan survival not contrary, in the opinion of the early Celtic Christians, “to the word of God and the conscience of believers".

Unfortunately for us the lives of the Welsh Saints as we have them are not in the condition to give us all the information they might. They have been edited, if not rewritten, by Latin ecclesiastics, in order to edify monks at their meals or the devout at their devotions. Those portions that would have been of the greatest interest, and which might have given us some light on either early Celtic Christianity or on Celtic Pagan superstitions and observances, are the parts a Latin ecclesiastic would deem it his duty to omit or to modify.

The Latin writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries considered it incumbent on them to keep two great principles in mind when engaged on the biographies of Saints. (1) To make out a sufficient supply of miracles to entitle the subject of their biography to a place on the Roll of Saints; (2) To represent all the incidents of the life as proving he was a loyal and dutiful follower of the Latin Church and derived all his authority from Rome. In this they were not worse than most modern editors or historians who write history from one point of view. But in some cases there was