PANEL 18    Constantine Climbs the Hill of Faith

The unrelenting pressure exerted by Viking sea lords in the Hebrides and along the Atlantic shore helped push the focus of an emerging Scottish kingship eastwards. Scone became important and, when Constantine succeeded to the throne, he and his Bishop of St Andrews, Cellach, made an important public declaration:

[They] pledged themselves upon the Hill of Faith near the royal city of Scone, that the laws and disciplines of the Faith, and the rights in churches and gospels, should be kept in conformity with [the customs of] the Scots.

Constantine may have been the first to call himself King of Alba, still the Gaelic name for Scotland. This choice and the clear will to mould a national church after a Scottish/Gaelic model can be seen as an explicit rejection of Pictishness – Alba not Pictavia – but it can also be interpreted as a declaration of unity, a conscious and public attempt to weld together disparate parts into a new kingdom. In the 10th century, Scotland spoke the dialects of at least six languages – Norse, Gaelic, Pictish, Old Welsh, Scots and, for the cultured, Latin. The name of Scotia for the lands north of the Forth was current in the 11th century but it was not until the late Middle Ages that Scotland began to be widely used for the whole nation. But it may be said that the idea of Scotland was much in Constantine’s mind as he and Cellach climbed the Hill of Faith at Scone.

 

Panel stitched by:

Constant Stitchers

Katie Antonio

Helen Huxley

Dorothy Maingot

Stitched in:

Perth, Glencarse