Auchenshuggle Bugle 2

  Scotland - Our Scotland.  A.D. 80—410. (in many parts) Part 1 It is with the year 80 a.d., when Agricola entered the region of North Britain, that the history of Scotland as a traceable sequence of cause and effect may be said to begin. When the Romans first came in contact with them, the inhabitants of that region had long passed the stage of mere barbarism. Various remains that have been found prove that they had attained considerable knowledge of many of the arts of life ; and from something like direct evidence we know that they possessed an organized society with civil and religious institutions of some complexity. Yet with the knowledge we possess we are unable to trace such causal relations in that earlier time as would bring it within the domain of history in the ordinary acceptation of the word. On the other hand, from the invasion of Agricola onward, materials, however scanty and intermittent, are never wholly wanting to mark the action of the internal an...

 Paisley part 3 When Walter Fitz Alan settled in Scotland, the condition of the country was very different from what it had been during the lifetime of St. Mirin. Five centuries had passed, and, notwithstanding their periods of anarchy, they had been on the whole centuries of progress. The political aspect of the country was entirely changed. Tribal and racial conflicts had practically ceased, the feudal system had been introduced into the Lowlands, and all political power was centred in the hands of a single ruler. Great changes had also been wrought in the Church. The forms and institutions of the old Celtic faith the faith of Saints Columba and Mirin had passed away.  The country had been divided into sees and parishes; the old communities had been suppressed, and in place of monasteries after the type of Bangor and lona, monasteries similar to those which were then rapidly covering the face of western Europe, were springing up. David the First's activity in this direction ...