BLACK ROOD OF SCOTLAND. When the Anglo-Saxon princess who became the wife of king Malcolm Ceimmolir landed in Scotland, about the year 1070, she brought with her what was regarded as a priceless relic—a cross of gold, elaborately wrought, in the form of a casket, about a span long, containing what was believed to be a piece of the true cross, set in an ebony figure of the Saviour, richly decorated with gold. Of its earlier history, nothing is known; but St. Margaret bequeathed it as an inheritance to her children, and as she herself was at the point of death, we are told by her confessor, that she had it brought ter her bedside, when she pressed it to her eyes and lips, and expired, clasping it with both her hands. The contemporary biographer of her son, king David I., relates that " the Black Rood of Scotland," as it was called, received the dying adoration of that saintly prince, and that it had then (in the middle of the 12th c.) come to be regarded by the whole nation of the Scots with mingled feelings of love and awe. It was kept as an heirloom of the kingdom, in the royal treasury in the castle of Edinburgh, and along with the other regalia and muniments of Scotland, was delivered up to king Edward I. In 1291. The irreverent scrutiny of the officers of the English king discovered that the outer case, which to the eyes of St. Aelred, in the previous century, seemed to be of the purest gold, was only silver gilt. But the relic itself was
not the less venerable on that account; and it was used by king Edward to give increased solemnity to the oaths of fealty which he exacted from the magnates of Scotland. Thus, when the bishops of St. Andrews and of Glasgow sided with Bruce, it was urged as a heinous aggravation of their guilt, that they had sworn "upon the body of Christ (i.e., the sacrament of the eucharist), and upon the holy gospels, and upon the cross of St. Neot, and upon the B. R. of S.," to be true and faithful to the English king and his heirs for ever. When the long struggle between England and Scotland was at last ended by the peace of Northampton in 1328, the Black Rood was restored to Scotland as one of the national treasures. But it was not destined to remain long in the north. When the hapless king David II. invaded England in 1346, he carried the black rood with him, in the belief (common in that age) that such a holy relic would insure safety to his person or victory to his arms. On his defeat and capture under the walls of Durham, the B. R. of S. became the prize of his conqueror, sir Ralph de Neville, lord of Raby, by whom, along with other spoils of the battle, it was offered up at the shrine of St. Cuthbert, in the cathedral of Durham. There it hung till the reformation, when all trace of it disappears.