Celtic Monasteries Lindisfarne, Iona, Bangor, Mailros, Coldingham. and many places beginning with LAN in Cornwall.

Celtic- During the "Dark Ages" of Europe some remarkable men and women, fired by their new experience of Christianity, travelled from Ireland through Scotland and Northern England, Wales and Cornwall, sharing the light of Christ with all whom they met. Celtic " saints" revered by the church for holiness and wisdom, took Christianity and literacy south through Brittany to southern Italy, east to the Ukraine, and north to the Faros and Iceland. Monasteries and Churches were founded wherever these Christian men and women travelled, teaching those they met of the love of God. The Celtic Church of the 5th and 6th centuries was not an identifiable organisation with a central leadership. Led by monastic abbots rather than Diocesan bishops, it was marked out as the ethos, a philosophy markedly different from the church of Rome.

No other Christian community has lived so closely with the Jewish Law. Each day and at every service passages of the Bible were read, the Psalms recited and the scriptures meditated upon. Those showing particular promise were entrusted with the careful copying of the Bible. Against the austerity and simplicity of their way of life, the elaborate and rich illuminations of their manuscripts show the central place the scriptures held. The Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, were condensed for ease of use, and found great popularity among those who sought to explain the Bible to the illiterate.

The roots of Celtic monasticism are found in the lives of Desert Fathers and desert Mothers. During the 3rd century AD, Christians in Egypt fled the distractions and temptations of the cities to lives solitary lives of prayer, meditation and fasting in the desert.

Legends about St Anthony 251-356 his duels with the forces of evil, and years of solitude in the most inhospitable areas of the desert became the heroic model for others. However some found the rigours of solitary life too hard, and chose to live in close proximity to their brethren, meeting on Saturdays and Sundays for services, but living apart through the week. Celtic Christians called from the world to live as monks and nuns followed their forebears into their own "Deserts" desiring separate and radical lives of prayer.

Celtic monastic settlements were usually established without there being any intention of founding a large community. A hermit would build a cell in a place of solitude, a "desert", and cleared an area of land on which to grow food. gradually others would be drawn to join him, clearing more land and establishing their own cells nearby. Each monastery had a hut set aside for travellers and the sick, for the principle of hospitality was important to the Celtic tradition. Finally a wooden chapel or oratory was constructed in which the community could meet and exercise the discipline of regular prayer.

Some of these communities consisted of fewer than ten people while others might consist of hundreds or even thousands. The leader or abbot of the monastery was regarded as the spiritual director rather than a strict disciplinarian, although any bishops living within a monastery came under his authority. The larger monasteries attracted pupils, often the children of royal households and landowners who learnt to read write, to sing and to appreciate the arts. They lived the full rigours of religious life, taking part in manual labour as well as in daily pray and study.

Monks and nuns enjoyed a life of freedom compared with their continental roman brethren, usually meeting together only once a day for worship and Eucharist, and establishing their own patterns of prayer, work and study in their cells. perseverance through recitation of the Psalms was at the centre of Celtic monastic prayer. All 150 Psalms were learnt by heart and it was usual to recite as many as 50 at a time. Fasting, silence and abstinence from sleep were practised regularly. Penitential positions of prayer were common - for example standing for long periods in cold water with arms outstretched. By subjecting their bodies, some Celtic Christians believed that their souls would be released and rise to God.

Women held a significant place in the Celtic Church, for the Celtic Christians had been influenced by the Druid religion that had gone before, and both men and women held authority in Celtic monasteries. Many communities were mixed, with monks and nuns living within conjoined enclosures, and some of those involved in monastic life were married; a female abbot was always called to oversee these double monasteries.

When we try to picture a Celtic Monastery we must not think of the splendid churches, cloisters and chapter houses of medieval times, but of a number of simple huts or cells built about a little church, like St Pirans according to no regular plan. The remains of one of these early communities can be seen on the headland at Tintagel, a series of tiny rooms with earthen floors and walls of turf except for the lower courses of stone. Life was hard; beds were of hide or straw food was simple and meagre, while long hours of labour in the fields alternated with periods of study and the celebration of services in the chapel. Then like the medieval friar the Celtic monk travelled about the neighbouring countryside teaching and preaching to the barely civilised peasants. He must of looked a strange sight in his bulky cloak of skins or un-dyed wool, his long back hair falling over his shoulders the front of his head jaggedly shaved from ear to ear to represent the crown of thorns.

The Celtic Church was not afraid to assimilate with the culture in which it found itself, and art thrived and was refined in the monastic setting. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells reveal in their margins and painted pages small animals and mythical doodles, designs from pagan art now sanctified to the Glory of God.

To the early Celtic Christians we owe a great debt not only to their sturdy testament to the independent origin and status of the ancient British Christianity. As the author of "St Paul in Britain" (the Rev.R.W. Morgan) writes "It is certain that the primitive Cornish, Irish, Scottish and Gaelic Churches formed one church, one communion, and that on the assumption of the Papacy, AD. 606, by Rome, the great Celtic Church, which had been previously in full communion with primitive Rome, refused the most peremptory terms to acknowledge her novel "prententions."

In visiting many Cornish and in fact churches in the Celtic fringe reminds us of the interesting and important fact, sometimes overlooked, that there was a strong Church in the British Isles long before Augustine and his monks came from Rome and landed in Kent.

When the Saxons invaded the abandoned Roman province of Britain they drove the Christian Celts into the western parts of the island, into Wales, Cornwall and across the sea to Brittany where their descendants still live. The Christian history of Cornwall thus goes back far beyond St Augustine to the second century when, as the Roman Christian Tertullian, about 208 AD. wrote, "The haunts of Britons inaccessible to the Romans are yet subject to Christ".