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From a selfish point of view the historian has reason to be grateful for war, for it has been a prodigious generator of record and stimulator of commentary and chronicle. This, I suppose, is merely another way of stating the adage ‘Happy is the country which has no history’. In modern times it seems to have become normal for the belligerent powers to produce massive official histories of the wars in which they were engaged. These will serve to demonstrate that the cause was just, that the population, troops and civilians alike, displayed exemplary courage and fortitude, that their leaders had an unerring grasp of strategy and could inspire love and devotion, and above all that the country concerned somehow acquired, under the strains and shock of war, a unity, even a personality, which transcended the pre-occupations, the ambitions, squabbles, triumphs, boredom and tribulations of the host of individual men and women who happened at the time to compose it. There seems, in contrast, to be much less enthusiasm for the idea of an official history of a country in peacetime, save (no doubt significantly) in the case of totalitarian, collectivist countries whose régimes are perpetually conscious of the need for self-advertisement and self-justification.

It has long been a commonplace of Scottish ecclesiastical history that the culdees at St. Andrews, who held a place in the cathedral church in the earlier part of the twelfth century, survived for a further two hundred years. The most authoritative statement of this belief is still to be found in the work of Dr. William Reeves (later Bishop of Down), whose paper on ‘The Culdees of the British Islands’ was read to the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin in 1860, and published there as a book in 1864. Reeves's paper discussed very fully the origins and later history of the culdees in the British Isles, especially in Ireland and Scotland; and it is of some interest to recall that since the author was a vicar-choral of Armagh cathedral he belonged to a corporation which could claim to have directly represented, since the seventeenth century, the older body of culdees attached to the mother church of St. Patrick.

A note by Marvin L. Colker published in this journal concerns a bishop named Angerius Brito, whom the author assigns to the see of Caithness in Scotland. The note gives the text of an epitaph composed in the bishop's honor, from a manuscript in the library of Trinity College Dublin. ‘Who was Angerius?’ asks Mr. Colker, and he continues Nothing is known about him apart from the above verses. His very name is unrecorded elsewhere. There is no trace of him in the source books for the history of Scotland, in the ecclesiastical histories of Scotland, in the histories of Caithness or in the lists of bishops for all medieval Christendom.