The great difficulty in discussing a Scottish type of sanctity is the exiguous character of the evidence. In the period of the Celtic Church saints are as thick as blackberries. But at this distance of time one cannot distinguish the incoming Irish Gaels from the native Piets and Britons. We cannot show that the communities deriving from SS Ninian, Drostan and Mungo fostered a type of holiness in any way different from that of Iona. The general impression is of similarity.

And when the great age of the Celts is over, how few names remain even for consideration! Saint Margaret, half-Hungarian, half-Saxon, belong to Scotland only by the geographical accident of her marriage and the warmth with which the people took her to their hearts. Then come two names from the Scottish calendar, unrecognised elsewhere. The first is King David I., Margaret’s son, founder of Holyrood and other abbeys, cannily strung along the Border in the hopes that an invader might respect church property; he was also a defender of the poor. The other, Blessed Gilbert of Moray, was a Bishop of Caithness (d. 1245) who did a valuable piece of civilising work in the North. The people were in a panic before ill-understood royal efforts to unify and consolidate the kingdom. Both his predecessors had been assassinated, and Blessed Gilbert led off by pleading for the lives of the last set of assassins. He won such confidence that he was allowed, io die in his bed after twenty years of devoted work—no mean feat on the outer confines of Christendom at that time.