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Scotia, My Scotia,
or bringing back the real
Scotland!!
Last
updated June 7, 2002
Far
westward lies an isle of ancient fame,
By nature blessed and Scotia is
her name.
An island rich; exhaustless is her store
Of veiny silver and of golden ore.
Her fruitful soil forever teems with wealth,
With gems her water and her air with health.
Her verdant fields with milk and honey flow,
Her woolly fleeces vie with virgin snow;
Her waving furrows float with bearded corn,
And arms and arts her envied sons adorn.
No savage bear with ruthless fury roves.
Nor ravening lion through her sacred groves;
No poison there infects, no scaly snake
Creeps through the grass, nor frog annoys the lake;
An island worthy of its pious race,
In war triumphant, and unmatched in peace.
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Sounds a lot like
Heaven . . . and it was....This poem is by a saint and scholar from
Hibernia named Donatus, (Dunchad) bishop of Fiesole in Tuscany (829-875).
Such was his love for Christ that he left such an enchanted land
to preach the Gospel to the pagans in Italy.
In his magnum opus,
History of the Scottish Nation,
Dr. J. A. Wylie brought to our attention the fact that Hibernia alone
was called Scotia or Scotland. Most of the ancient
historical documents were destroyed by the plundering Vikings, Normans,
etc., etc. but many can still be found in museums in Europe.
We found a gold mine
of information in a 2 volume set entitled Ireland and the Making
of Britain and Ireland and the Foundations of Europe by
a writer named Benedict
Fitzpatrick.
Mr. Fitzpatrick verifies
everything Dr. Wylie says . . . and he was a Roman Catholic historian.
As he was writing his books he tried to find something good to say about
his "church" and the Roman monks . . . but he admits complete
failure. The Benedictines (the only competitors to the Scotch)
were not even allowed to own a book!! Their most famous monastery Monte
Casino in Italy is at the top of a mountain It may as well have been
on another planet for all the good they did.!
Origin of the Scots
Around the year 600
B.C., a vast irruption of Celtic people occurred in Europe. The Cimmerii
or Celts are descended from Gomer, grandson of Noah through his son
Japheth. They came from the area of the landing of the Ark, Armenia
or Scythia . . . they are not descended from African apes
as Rome's evolutionist's claim!!
They ruled most
of Europe and were the dominant power when Rome was still a heap of
shacks on the banks of the Tiber. The Scyts or Scots
were part of this great Gaelic family. These Milesian Gaels, led
by their king Milo, invaded Hibernia about the time of Alexander
the Great (332 B.C.) and give the island its name which existed
for 2000 years. King Milo named the island after his youngest son, Hiberus
or Hibernia.
Pagan Rome hated the
freedom loving Celts. They were big and strong compared to the Romans,
but they lacked unity. Rome used her typical divide and conquer
tactics to defeat the Celts. Julius Caesar killed over 1 million Celts
in his conquest of Gaul. His invasion of Britain killed thousands more.
Because Hibernia was
not part of the Roman Empire, the Romans did not like to admit that
it even existed. It was considered the end of the world - the wilderness.
It was the ministry
of the Blessed St. Patrick that really brought
Hibernia out of its isolation and established it as the center of an
Empire - but unlike pagan Rome - an Empire of brains and not
of brawn.
One hundred years after
St. Patrick, St. Columba (around 563 A.D.) established the Christian
Institute of Iona and he also established the colony of Scotia
Minor in Caledonia which today exclusively bears the name of
Scotland.
After the Fall of Rome,
fierce savage Anglo-Saxon pirates invaded Britain and slaughtered the
inhabitants. That country reverted to its pagan primitive state. Gregory
I, Bishop of Rome, sent Augustine (597 A.D.) to try and convert them
to Romanism. He was so terrified of the Anglo-Saxons that he first refused
to go. Finally he went as far as Canterbury and stopped there. His monks
waited until the Hibernians Christianized and civilized them before
venturing out of their hiding places.
All the schools and
colleges established in Britain at that time were Scottish Foundations
and the British youth reverted to Hibernia for an education!!
The same thing can
be said of the Continent of Europe. The Fall of Rome brought an inundation
of savages from the forests of Germany. Again, it was the Scottish Christians
who brought them out of their pagan darkness, barbarism, and savagery
to the light of Christianity. As Dr. Wylie so aptly said:
"If it wasn't
for the Scottish Christians, Luther would still have been worshipping
Thor at the time of the Reformation."
Map of Hibernicized
Medieval Europe.
View
expanded map . . . Meet the Competition!!
Dotted all over the
landscape of Northern Europe as far as Russia and Iceland were Scottish
schools and colleges. These Foundations became the universities and
cities of modern Europe. Their brightest luminaries were men like Columbanus,
John Scotus Eriugena, Duns Scotus, Marianus Scotus, St. Gall, Peter
Hibernicus, and others just too numerous to mention. They were the terror
of Rome. When Columbanus showed up in Italy, there was consternation
at the Vatican!!
When was the name
changed from Scotland to Ireland?
A question that has
always perplexed us is when did Scotia Major became known as Ireland?
Benedict Fitzpatrick supplies the answer in his masterpiece. The changed
was first officially recognized by . . . Pope Leo X....Yes, the same
Leo X, who excommunicated the Hibernians
in 1515, and Martin Luther in 1520....Leo said that the Irish were
lying when they described their country as Scotia Major!!
Leo X. (1513 -
1521).
We quote from Benedict's Fitzpatrick's
Ireland and the Foundations of Europe, pp. 376-379:
| "3.
SCOTCH LAY CLAIM TO IRISH FOUNDATIONS
A singular fate befell these
foundations of Marianus Scotus and his compatriots. By the
beginning of the sixteenth century the process of Gallicization
through the Norman French and the subsequent process of
Anglicization through the English in the southern and lowland
parts of Scotland had greatly weaned the Scotch inhabitants
from their older Gaelic ideals and from their attachment
to Ireland, which before that time an almost universal common
language and common civilization had continued to hold up
in their memory as the motherland of them all. The transference
also of the Latin names of "Scotia" and "Scot"
from Ireland and the Irish to North Britain or Caledonia
and its inhabitants, who from the eleventh and twelfth centuries
began to be known as Scotland and the Scots - names before
that time applied exclusively to Ireland and the Irish -
resulted also in a condition whereby the older meaning of
the terms came to be forgotten. The confusion arising from
the transference of the terms gave rise to warm controversies
which reached a climax following the publication of the
Menologium of Dempster, which claimed for the new Scotland
the hosts of Ireland's missionary saints.
"For a long period
Scottish historians refused to admit that the terms Scot
and Scotland belonged to Ireland and Irishmen, and they
arrogated everything that could be attributed to the Scots
as referring to the natives of North Britain," writes
a modern historian of Scotland. Walter Goodall, a vehement
vindicator of everything popularly considered typical
of Scots nationality, was so angry at the proposal to
shift old Scotia to Ireland that, not content with struggling
against the transference, he threatened to prove that
the other ancient name of Ireland, Ierne, belonged
to Scotland. He found the "glacialis Ierne,"
which, according to Claudian, wept for her slain Scots,
in Stratheam, and that by a process much more simple than
Pinkerton's guidance of the Picts out of Peuke. The considerable
celebrity which the Irish had acquired all over Europe
was thus transferred with the name to Scotland."6
"Thus with the
name, the Scots of the new Scotia or Scotland acquired the
fame along with many other possessions of the medieval Scots
of Ireland, and among these possessions went the Irish monasteries
of Ratisbon and some other German cities. Had the Scots
of North Britain based their equal claim on the former homogeneity
of Ireland and Scotland as a single country and nation,
they would have stood on firm ground. But their demand was
for exclusive possession, and the success of their appeal
ought not to appear singular in view of the ignorance prevalent
on similar subjects even in this enlightened age.
"The Scots of North
Britain asserted that the foundations of Marianus and his
compatriots, being themselves called "Scoti,"
had belonged to their nation, and that the Irish, to whom
the name "Hiberni" was now given, had thrust themselves
in. And, marvelous to say, their plea was admitted at Rome.
Pope Leo X issued a Bull "restoring" the foundations
to their "proper owners," the inhabitants of Scotland,
and the Irish were expelled after
being charged among other things with having made a fraudulent
entry in the records in that Ireland had been described
as "Major Scotia." 7Such
was the ignorance already in the sixteenth century regarding
Ireland's ancient nomenclature.
"In 1515 one John
Thomson, apparently a Northumbrian Englishman by descent,
but claiming the name of "Scot," who had been
visiting Rome, where he had been a daily guest of the Pope,
entered the Irish St. James's at Ratisbon as superior with
a company of Scotch monks from Dunfermline. The Scots of
Scotland also came into possession of the Irish monasteries
of Constance and Erfurt. Down to their suppression in 1847
these Irish foundations were looked upon as belonging exclusively
to the natives of Scotland, 8 who in the eighteenth
century, when Ireland lay chained under the Penal Laws,
had also, through the mouth of James Macpherson, laid claim
to the authorship of the old Gaelic of Ireland, as previously,
through the mouth of Innes, they had laid claim to the superior
antiquity and long conceded maternity of Ireland as the
older and greater Scotia. The pretensions
are probably unique in the history of civilization.9"
Notes
6. Hill Burton, History of Scotland, I, p. 201.
7. Collection in the Scots College Abroad, by James Dennistoun,
in Advocates Library, Edinburgh.
8. The controversy to
which Dempster, Innes, and Macpherson were the major contributors
had its uses on the Irish side. "The greatest boon
that was ever conferred upon Irish literature was the publication
of Dempster's Menologium Sanctorum Scotorum. The book, taking
as an axiom that Scotis, wherever the name occurred meant
Scotland, transferred to Caledonia the greater part of the
noble army of confessors who were known in history as Scots
and whose memory was as fresh in the Isle of Saints as if
they had been but just dead; for the author of it acquired
the title of Haglokleptes or Saint Stealer, and it
set the Irish upon the recovery of their historical property;
it excited Hugh Ward to put in motion the intellectual machinery
which was represented by Patrick Fleming, the O'Clerys,
and Colgan; and it produced the undying memorials of Irish
Industry, the Annals of the Four Masters, the Collectanea,
and the Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae" (Reeves,
Ulster Jour. of Arch., 1. p. 296).
9. See Ossianic Society,
Transactions vol. V. (1857), p 171, seq.; Kirchenlexicon,
vol. X, Schottenkloster. |
References
Ireland and the
Making Of Britain, Benedict Fitzpatrick, Funk & Wagnalls Company,
NY & London, 1921.
Ireland and the
Foundations of Europe, Benedict Fitzpatrick, Funk & Wagnalls
Company, NY & London, 1927.
Editor's Notes
". . . By
which it may almost be infallibly gathered together, with other
circumstances, that the Irish are very Scots or Scythes
originally . . . "
Quoted from
A View of the State of Ireland by Edmund Spencer, London, 1598,
p.62.
Edmund Spencer was
an English poet who wrote The Faerie Queen.
Description of Hibernia
by the Venerable Bede:--
"Ireland, in breadth,
and for wholesomeness and serene air, surpasses Britain; for
the snow scarcely ever lies there above three days; no man makes
hay in the summer for winter's provision, or builds stables for
his beasts of burden. No reptiles are found there; for, though often
carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship comes near the
shore, and the scent of the air reaches them, they die. On the contrary,
almost all things in the island are good against poison. In short,
we have known that when some persons have been bitten by serpents,
the scrapings of leaves of books that were brought out of Ireland,
being put into water, and given them to drink, have immediately
expelled the spreading poison, and assuaged the swelling. The island
abounds in milk and honey, nor is there any want of vines, fish,
or fowl; and it is remarkable for deer and goats.
It is properly the country of the Scots,
who, migrating from thence, as has been said, added a third nation
in Britain to the Britons and the Picts."
Bede, " Eccl. Hist.," translated by Stevens, ed. J. B. Giles,
1859, P. 49.
We are Scots . .
. not Gauls . . . we don't build stone churches!!
Malachy O' Morgair
was the first Papal Nuncio to Hibernia. He was born at Armagh in the
year 1095 and died in France Nov. 2, 1148. His biography was written
by his close friend Bernard of Clairvaux. He traveled to Rome (1139)
and was made Archbishop and Papal Legate of the whole of Hibernia by
the Pope. In keeping with his new status he started to build a Cathedral
like the ones he had seen on the Continent and at Rome. Here is the
reaction of the local Christians as recorded by his biographer:
"It seemed
good to Malachy that a stone oratory should be erected at Bangor like
those which he had seen constructed in other regions. And when he
began to lay the foundations the natives wondered, because in that
land no such buildings were yet to be found. But that worthless fellow,
presumptuous and arrogant as he was, not only wondered but was indignant.
And from that indignation he conceived grief and brought forth iniquity.
And he became a talebearer among the people, now disparaging secretly,
now speaking evil openly; drawing attention to Malachy's frivolity,
shuddering at the novelty, exaggerating the expense. With such poisonous
words as these he was urging and inducing many to put a stop to it:
"Follow me, and what ought not to be done by any but ourselves let
us not permit to be done against our will." Then with many
whom he was able to persuade - himself the first leader in speech
as well as the origin of the evil he went down to the
place, and finding the man of God accosted him: "Good sir, why have
you thought good to introduce this novelty into our regions ?
We are Scots, not Gauls.
What is this frivolity ? What need was there for a work so superfluous,
so proud ? Where will you, a poor and needy man, find the means to
finish it? What sort of presumption is this, to begin, I say
not what you cannot finish, but what you cannot even see finished
? Though indeed it is the act of a maniac rather than of a presumptuous
man to attempt what is beyond his measure, what exceeds his strength,
what baffles his abilities. Cease, cease, desist from this madness.
If not, we shall not permit it, we shall not tolerate it...."
Bernard has terrible
things to say about the Gaelic church. Here is a small sample:
"A tyrannous
race laid claim to the metropolitan see of Patrick, the great Apostle
of the Hibernians, creating archbishops in regular succession and
possessing the sanctuary of God by hereditary right"
Hereditary means passed
down from father to son.
Finally, in a sermon
preached at the funeral of Malachy, Bernard did tell the truth about
his nationality . . . not like most people today!!
"From further
Scotland he ran hither to death
. . . "
Life of Malachy by Bernard
of Clairvaux is available from
Abebooks.com.
Other ancient nations
were blotted out by Rome through her Spanish Conquistadors. Mexico,
Argentina, Peru, Brazil, the Philippines etc., etc, didn't exist before
the Reformation but the case of Hibernia is unique in the history
of the world. There is only ONE France, one Italy, one Germany,
etc., etc., likewise there can be only ONE Scotland!
A
Real Old-Fashioned Education
Education today
is such a "cheat." Here is a description of a real
education. This was before the invention of printing and books were
very difficult to produce. Back then if you didn't know the "Three
- Fifties" - as the Book of Psalms was called you were considered
very ignorant....How many people in the world today know the Book of
Psalms by memory?
"The first reader
of the seventh-century schoolboy was not a picture book about cat
and dog and bird, but the Psalter, or Book of Psalms. The one hundred
and fifty glorious songs of David and the other Hebrew lyrists had
to be learnt by heart. Bible stories replaced the nursery tale, and
the Psalms and the Alleluia supplanted the pagan nursery rhyme. Such
had been the practice of the Church since the days of Basil, Chrysostom,
and Jerome." Quoted from:
Metlake, George, Life
and Writings of Saint Columban, Philadelphia, 1914, p. 93.
"The child must
be made acquainted with the Sacred Scriptures as early as possible.
The teachings of the Bible are a wholesome antidote against the evil
inclinations that manifest themselves even at this tender age; they
are the fountain that water the soul." Quoted from:
St. Chrysostom, 60 Hom. in Matthew.
Download
the 3-50's - the Book of Psalms from the King James Bible.
Hibernian
History Resources
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