HISTORICAL SKETCH.
The historical circumstances connected with the foundation of this monastic institution are remarkable. It was founded and endowed by William the Lion, King of Scots, in the year 1178, and dedicated to St. Thomas à Becket, the martyr of the principle of ecclesiastical supremacy, whose slaughter at the high altar of Canterbury Cathedral occurred in 1170, and who was canonized in 1173. This great establishment, richly endowed, was thus a magnificent piece of homage by the Scottish King to a principle which, especially under the bold and uncompromising guidance of its great advocate, had solely perplexed and baffled his royal neighbor on the English throne, and boded future trouble and humiliation to all thrones and temporal dignities. Much antiquarian speculation has been exerted, but without very obvious success, to fathom the motives for this act of munificence. William had invaded those parts of the north of England which were previously held in a species of feudality by the Kings of Scotland, and was disgracefully defeated at Alnwick, and committed to captivity, just at the time when the English monarch, whose forces accomplished the victory and capture, was enduring his humiliating penance at the tomb of the canonized archbishop. Lord Hailes, who says that “William was personally acquainted with Becket, when there was little probability of his ever becoming a confessor, martyr and saint,” endeavoring to discover a motive for the munificence of the Scottish King, continues to say: “Perhaps it was meant as a public declaration that he did not ascribe his disaster at Alnwick to the ill-will of his old friend. He may, perhaps, have been hurried by the torrent of popular prejudices into the belief that his disaster proceeded from the partiality of Becket towards the penitent Henry; and he might imagine that if equal honors were done in Scotland to the new saint as in England he might, on future occasions, observe a neutrality.”[4] It is remarkable that several of the early chroniclers allude to this friendship between the Scottish monarch, who was a resolute champion of temporal authority, and the representative of ecclesiastical supremacy....
Princes may be induced, by personal circumstances, to change their views, and in the times when they were not controlled by responsible ministers, they gave effect to their alterations of opinion. It is quite possible that at the time when he founded the Abbey, William was partial to Church ascendency, for his celebrated contest with the ecclesiastical power arose out of subsequent events. This King’s disputes with the Church have a somewhat complex shape. The clergy of his own dominions had a spiritual war against the English hierarchy, who asserted a claim to exercise metropolitan authority over them; and it might have been supposed that William, if he sought to humble his own clergy, would have found it politic to favor the pretensions of those of England. But the interests of the two clerical bodies became in the end united. Thus the war which had so long raged in England, passed towards the north, with this difference, that the King of Scots had to encounter not only his own native hierarchy, but the victorious Church of England, just elated by its triumph over Henry. The Chapter of St. Andrews had elected a person to be their bishop, not acceptable to William, who desired to give the chair to his own chaplain. The King seized the temporalities, and prevailed on the other bishops to countenance his favorite. The bishop-elect appealed to Rome. Pope Alexander III issued legatine powers over Scotland to the Archbishop of York, who, along with the Bishop of Durham, after an ineffectual war of minor threats and inflictions, excommunicated the King, and laid the kingdom under interdict. At this point Alexander III died, and the new pope thought it wise to make concessions to an uncompromising adversary in a rude and distant land, who had shown himself possessed of an extent of temporal power sufficient to counteract the power of Rome, even among the ecclesiastics themselves.
It was before this great feud commenced that the Abbey was founded; but during its continuance the institution received, from whatever motives, many tokens of royal favor, as well as precious gifts from the great barons. Among the list of benefactors we find many of those old Norman names, which cease to be associated with Scottish history after the War of Independence. It is a still more striking instance of the community of interest between the two kingdoms anterior to this war, that while we find a Scottish king devoting a great monastic establishment to the memory of an English prelate, we should find an English king conferring special privileges and immunities within his realm on the Scottish brotherhood....
The Abbey was founded for Tyronesian monks, and the parent stock whence it received its first inmates was the old Abbey of Kelso. In the year of the foundation, Reginald, elected “Abbot of the Church of St. Thomas,” was, with his convent, released of all subjection and obedience to the abbot and convent of Kelso. The church was completed and consecrated under the abbacy of Ralph de Lamley, in 1233. Aberbrothwick was one of those ecclesiastical institutions immediately connected with the spread of the Roman hierarchy, which gradually sucked up the curious pristine establishment of the Culdees; and the muniments of the Abbey thus afford some traces of the character and history of this religious body, at least towards the period of their extinction. Thus, while the Church of Abernethy, an ancient seat of the Culdees, is granted by King William to his new foundation, Orme of Abernethy, who is also styled Abbot of Abernethy, grants the half of the tithes of the property of himself and his heirs, the other half of which belongs to the Culdees of Abernethy, while some disposals of a strictly ecclesiastical character are made by the same document. Thus we find an abbot who makes disposal for his heirs—a counterpart to those references to the legitimate progeny of churchmen, which frequently puzzle the antiquary in his researches through early Scottish ecclesiastical history.
The Abbot of Aberbrothwick possessed a peculiar privilege, the origin of which is in some measure associated with the Culdees—the custody of the Brecbennach, or consecrated banner of St. Columba. The lands of Forglen, the church of which was dedicated to Adomnan the biographer of Columba, were gifted for the maintenance of the banner. The privilege was conferred on the Abbey by King William, but as it inferred the warlike service of following the banner to the King’s host, the actual custody was held by laymen, the Abbey enjoying the pecuniary advantages attached to the privilege, as religious houses drew the temporalities of churches served by vicars.
It will readily be believed that this, one of the richest and most magnificent monastic institutions in Scotland, numbered many eminent men among its abbots, who from time to time connect it with the early history of Scotland. It is even associated with a literature that has survived to the present day, in having been presided over by Gavin Douglas, the translator of Virgil. The two Beatons, Cardinal David and Archbishop James, also successively its abbots, give it a more ambiguous reputation. At the Reformation, the wealth of the Abbey was converted into a temporal lordship, in favor of Lord Claude Hamilton, third son of the Duke of Chatelherault, and the greater part of the temporalities came, in the seventeenth century, into the hands of the Panmure family.
In a tradition immortalized by a fine ballad of Southey’s, it is said that the abbots of Aberbrothwick, in their munificent humanity preserved a beacon on that dangerous reef of rock in the German Ocean, which is supposed to have received its name of the “Bell Rock” from the peculiar character of the warning machinery of which the abbot made use:
“The Abbot of Aberbrothwick
Had placed that bell on the Inchcape rock,
On a buoy in the storm it floated and swung,
And over the waves its warning rung.
“When the rock was hid by the surge’s swell,
The mariners heard the warning bell;
And then they knew the perilous rock,
And bless’d the Abbot of Aberbrothwick.”