The Culdees and the Celtic Church: Myth and History

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Sources for the Culdees are scattered and fragmentary. Historians now generally avoid the term "Celtic Church", because it implies a unified organisation separate from the wider Western church, which did not exist.

The Céli Dé

established The Céli Dé movement arose in Ireland in the eighth century, associated with monasteries such as Tallaght. Its members followed strict rules of prayer, fasting and discipline. The movement spread to Scotland, where communities of Céli Dé, often attached to churches as groups of clergy, are recorded at St Andrews, Dunkeld, Loch Leven, Brechin, Abernethy and elsewhere.

Absorbed by new orders

established In the twelfth century, David I and his successors, along with reforming bishops, introduced continental orders such as Augustinian canons, Benedictines and Cistercians. Culdee communities were gradually merged with them or replaced. At St Andrews, the Culdees continued as a separate body, with disputes with the Augustinian priory, into the later Middle Ages.

Easter and tonsure

established The early Irish and Scottish churches followed some customs that differed from those of Rome, notably in calculating the date of Easter and the style of the monastic tonsure. At the Synod of Whitby in 664, Northumbria adopted the Roman practice, and Iona followed in 716. These were differences of custom, not doctrine; the Irish and Scottish churches recognised the authority of the Pope.

The Culdee myth

shared From the late sixteenth century, Scottish Protestant writers, seeking historical precedent for their own church, presented the Culdees as members of a pure, non-Roman "Celtic Church" governed by presbyters rather than bishops. The seed was planted by George Buchanan, whose History (1582) described an early Scottish church where "the churches were governed by monks, without bishops, with less splendour… but with much greater simplicity and holiness". Roger Mason shows that Andrew Melville's own annotated copy of Buchanan approves this picture of a primitive presbyterian discipline. The medieval chroniclers Fordun and Bower had done the opposite. Anxious to prove the Scottish church's Roman orthodoxy against the claims of York and Canterbury, they made Palladius, supposedly sent by Pope Celestine in 430, the "first bishop of Scotland", passed over the Synod of Whitby, and gave the Culdees almost no attention. This view, popular into the twentieth century, is rejected by historians, who see the Culdees as part of the medieval Catholic church.

• Before the Reformation, Scotland's chroniclers celebrated Palladius, a 5th-century missionary to the Irish, as "the apostle of the Scots" and first bishop of Scotland, to prove the church had always been Roman. The Reformers' Culdee myth inverted that story (Roger Mason, 2002).
• "Culdee" comes from the Irish Céli Dé, "clients of God".
• There were Culdees at St Andrews and Loch Leven.
• Iona accepted the Roman date of Easter in 716.
• Protestant writers turned the Culdees into proto-Presbyterians.
• Historians now avoid the term "Celtic Church".

• The Culdee myth is older than the 17th century. Its foundations were laid in George Buchanan's History (1582) and taken up at once by Andrew Melville (Mason, 2002).

• Do not describe the Culdees as proto-Protestants.

• Do not present the "Celtic Church" as an independent institution.