Celtic Rite - Scottish Sources

Scottish Sources

In Scotland there is very little information. Intercourse with Ireland was considerable and the few details that can be gathered from such sources as Adamnan's Life of St. Columba and the various relics of the Scoto-Northumbrian Church point to a general similarity with Ireland in the earlier period. Of the rite of the monastic order of the Culdees (Céli Dé or Goillidhe-Dé, servants of God, or possibly Cultores Dei) very little is known, but they certainly had a rite of their own, which may have been similar to the Irish.

The Roman Easter and tonsure were adopted by the Picts in 710, and at Iona in 716-18, and much later, in about 1080, St. Margaret of Scotland, wife of King Malcolm III, wishing to reform the Scottish church in a Roman direction, discovered and abolished certain peculiar customs of which Theodoric, her chaplain and biographer, tells us less than we could wish.

It seems that the Scots did not begin Lent on Ash Wednesday but on the Monday following, as is still the Ambrosian practice. They refused to communicate on Easter Day and arguments on the subject make it seem as if the laity never communicated at all. In some places they celebrated Mass "contra totius Ecclesiae consuetudinem, nescio quo ritu barbaro" ("contrary to the customs of the whole Church, with I know not what barbaric rite"). The last statement may be read in connection with that in the Register of St. Andrew's (drawn up 1144-53), "Keledei in angulo quodam ecclesiae, quae modica nimis est, suum officum more suo celebrant".

How much difference there may have been cannot be judged from these expressions. Scotland may have retained a primitive Celtic Rite, or it may have used the greatly Romanized Stowe or Bobbio Mass. The one fragment of a Scottish Rite, the Office of the Communion of the Sick, in the Book of Deer, probably 11th century, is certainly non-Roman in type, and agrees with those in the extant Irish books.

The Book of Deer is a 10th century gospel book from Old Deer, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, with early 12th-century additions in Latin, Old Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Now in the Cambridge University Library. It contains part of an order for the communion of the sick, with a Gaelic rubric. The origin of the book is uncertain.