Kinloss Abbey, 1229
The Cistercians arrived in Scotland in 1136 when a colony of monks from Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire settled at Melrose under the patronage of David I. By the end of the thirteenth century they had become the richest religious order in the kingdom with eleven abbeys and extensive estates stretching from Galloway to Buchan. Their success in Scotland, as elsewhere in Europe, was founded on a constitution that not only encouraged a pioneering approach to estate management, but also ensured that the success of an abbey did not depend solely on the competence of its abbot. The heads of Cistercian houses were expected to attend an annual general chapter at Citeaux at which policy was discussed, legislation passed and discipline enforced. They were also obliged to make yearly visits to daughter houses, partly to reaffirm filial bonds and partly to confirm that the rule was being observed. To the early Cistercian fathers, this system of affiliation meant that ‘the abbeys in different parts of the world would be indissolubly united in soul, even though parted in body’. In practice it created ‘the first truly effective international organization in Europe’, the authority of which transcended political borders. This is evident in the early development of the order in Scotland: in 1148, for example, the abbot of Rievaulx deposed the first abbot of Melrose; while in 1235 the abbots of Dundrennan and Glenluce were deposed after the general chapter ordered an investigation by the abbots of Rievaulx, Roche and Sawley. The Cistercian quest for administrative and spiritual unity also opened up channels of communication along which information and personnel flowed freely from abbey to abbey. Its influence on the Cistercians in Scotland is evident in the Chronicle of Melrose, which records events from throughout Christendom, news of which appears to
The Scottish Chronicle
The beginning of the Scottish kingdom, popularly attributed to Kenneth I (Cinaed mac Alpin), and its development under the rule of his descendants, took place during that obscure period in medieval British history encompassing the ninth and tenth centuries. Few records have survived from this era; indeed it was not until the end of the eleventh century, during the reign of Malcolm III (Mael Coluim
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.