Community in Columba’s Day
An individual was closely tied to where s/he was born and who s/he was. A patronage/clientship system operated within groups and between them to some extent; but beyond that, a person had few rights, with no status, no kinship support or personal patronage. Slavery was endemic. Women had no right to hold property, to give evidence, and were always under male patriarchal authority – father, husband, son.
Columba’s Iona, with the developing network of daughter monasteries, in effect functioned as a tribe – but a tribe with a difference. Columba’s ambassadorial travels - to baptise a high status Pictish warrior on Skye, or to visit the Pictish king, Bruide – created a network of ‘tribal’ connections and political influence throughout Scotland.
The Footprint of Fealty, Dunadd Hillfort, where kings of Dál Riata,by tradition, placed their foot at their consecration Photo: Otter, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
But in two respects the connections are even more significant. Columba is portrayed as king maker. He ordains Áedeán as king of Dál Riata; he guarantees victory and kingship to Oswald of Northumbria in a vision. Kingship is no longer about being the head of a warrior band; this is a new concept where the anointing of kings sets the king within an Christian ethical, moral and theological framework, and gives a sacral value to kingship.
From the Book of Kells (Courtesy of The Board of Trinity College Dublin)
Secondly, Dallán’s Amra Choluimb Chille, the elegy on Columba written within a year or so of his death, places him in an even wider thought world of Christian writers, of the Desert Fathers, and as heir to the literature, culture and traditions of Rome. Iona and Columba’s tribe created an overlay to the fragmented secular society, offering different, wider and deeper perspectives, values and allegiances. Links to this tribe gave status, rights, protection and identity on a scale and of a nature which the secular kindred groupings could and did not.
From the Book of Kells possibly representing Columba's Abbey (Courtesy of The Board of Trinity College Dublin)
Exploring Further
Adomnán of Iona, Life of St. Columba, trs. R. Sharpe (Penguin Classics 1995)
Bede, The ecclesiastical history of the English People, trs. B. Colgrave et al. (Oxford World Classics, 2008)
T.O. Clancy and G. Márkus, Iona: the earliest poetry of a Celtic Monastery (Edinburgh University Press 1995)
S.M. Foster, Picts, Gaels and Scots: early historic Scotland (Batsford 2014)
J. E. Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795 (Edinburgh University Press 2009)
G. Márkus, Conceiving a nation: Scotland to AD900 (Edinburgh University Press 2017)