Summary

Reliquary, known as the Coigrich, or crosier shrine, of St Fillan of Glendochart, silver gilt, 15th-century, incorporating earlier work

Accession Number

H.KC 2

Other references

Original description

Silver gilt casing of similar form [to KC 1, The Quigrich or Crosier of St Fillan of Glandochart ... ornamented bands of niello]. N.B. Deed and corresp (MSS 88) in top safe (wooden cabinet). 230mm x 200mm. Caption note, February 1993: Reliquary, perhaps 15th century. D. Caldwell note, 2008-05: The Coigrich, or crosier shrine of St Fillan of Glendochart, 15th-century, incorporating earlier work.//T. Deniozou note, 2011-02-18, Information taken from Glenn, Virginia, Romanesque & Gothic: Decorative Metalwork and Ivory Carvings in the Museum of Scotland, NMSE Publishing, Edinburgh, 2003: [One of] B1, C42, 41-2 [Angels, Nobles and Unicorns reference] //This elaborate reliquary made for St Fillan’s Crozier [H5] reflects the altered form of the earlier crook and incorporates panels of filigree taken from it.//The main part is a round tube made in two vertical sections, descending from the straight-angled drop in a curve to the depressed spherical knop. The inner join is flanked by a flat band of metal with an engraved border of truncated lozenges against a finely cross-hatched ground, held by a moulded metal strap with a prominent central line of beading. The bands of metal framing the outer join are finely engraved with a border of rope twist and a frieze of pointed leaves against cross-hatching and are joined to the cresting by a vertical strap with a prominent line of beading.//Each side of the crook is covered by a single sheet of metal with triangular and trapezoid apertures, the resulting lattice slightly roughly engraved with stripes of cross-hatching and simple line borders. The apertures all contain panels of filigree, of several different types. The large trapezoid panels mostly contain patterns of spirals, some arranged symmetrically, some not. The wires are plain, flattened and of even thickness, the centres of the spirals marked by silver granules, also flattened. The same technique is used for some of the triangles of spiral filigree and for one with a triangular knot motif. Where the framing wires are extant, they are spirally beaded wire.//The other triangles, part of the bottom trapezoid on one side and the smaller panels nearest the drop contain scrolled filigree carried out in finer spirally beaded wire with plain silver granules. The scroll patterns are more wandering and informal than the larger panels.//Straps with central lines of prominent beading are used to outline panels with concave tops above the knop on each side, the knop itself, semicircular panels on its upper and lower halves and the collar below. All these areas have embossed ornament; the upper panels and collar of foliate scrolls, the knop of interlace and triangular knots. All the interlace and knot patterns differ subtly from one another.//The whole crook has a heavy cresting, perforated with a continuous band of quatrefoils against an engraved cross-hatched ground, between engraved bead borders. The outer edge is a plain flattened tube with a rounded end at the top and a decorative moulded double terminal, below two triangular notches at the bottom.//The drop has a flat rectangular outer face and a rounded inner surface. It is articulated by straps with central lines of prominent beading, larger than those on the knop and collar. The centre back has a vertical strap engraved with a line of tablet flowers. Filigree fills two squares and two trapezoids behind the front surface, which has a large oval rock crystal in a high crested setting, with faint punched outlines, surrounded by spiral filigree of twisted wire studded with silver granules.
A small cast bust-length figure of a tonsured monk in a simple habit, rising from formalised clouds conceals the join between the crest and the top of the drop. The shield-shaped bottom end has an engraving of Christ on the cross against a cross-hatched ground, between two five-pointed stars. A hole pierces this panel and the moulded beading behind, presumably to take a pendant cross.//St Fillan’s crozier and the ‘Quigrich’ come with a greater accretion of medieval and later documentation, tradition and folklore than any other object covered by this catalogue.//The spelling ‘Quigrich’ became established and familiar to scholars in 19th-century usage. Presumably it was a spontaneous attempt to render phonetically for an English readership what was heard when the St Fillan’s Crozier was acquired. Given that, strictly speaking, this is neither English nor Gaelic, it seems appropriate to reconsider this. The term attached to the crozier was almost certainly Coigreach or a dialect version of it, a familiar Gaelic word meaning approximatly ‘stranger’ or ‘traveller’. The use of a descriptive term or name of this sort reflects a pattern of naming well established in the Gaelic of Ireland and Scotland. For example, surviving Irish relics almost invariably have familiar names. An original name is evident for the crozier, for example as ‘coygerach’ in the 1428 Inquest, representing what we may assume the scribe heard and wrote down (fig 24). The only difference is the addition of the feature of a typical epenthetic vowel in the middle of the word which renders it in three rather than two syllables. In adopting therefore ‘Coigreach’, we have followed the spelling in Alexander Macbain’s Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (Inverness 1896) and the evolution of the term as indicated in the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of the Irish Language.//The saint himself, according to the Aberdeen Breviary, was the grandson of a prince of Leinster, who came as a missionary to Scotland with his mother St Kentigerna and his uncle St Comgan in the early 8th century. After a period in the community of St Mund on the Holy Loch, Fillan joined Comgan in upper Glendochart, where he founded the monastery and church in which he was subsequently buried.4 There are dedications to St Fillan (Fáelán of Cluain Moesena) in Loch Alsh, Galloway, Kintyre and Renfrewshire, but he was particularly venerated in west Perthshire, from Strathfillan, through Glendochart, to Killin.5//By the reign of William the Lion the abbot of Glendochart, probably a secular figure, represented the community, about which little else is known.6 A century later, Robert Bruce appears to have had a personal devotion to Fillan. Whether or not Boece invented the story of the mirac­ulous appearance of the saint’s armbone on the eve of Bannockburn, the king certainly granted land forfeited to the crown to the monastery or chapel of St Fillan and in 1318 donated the patronage of Killin to Inchaffray Abbey on condition the abbot and convent provided a canon for the church in Strathfillan in perpetuity.7 This devotion on the part of Bruce possibly dates back to his hard-won victory at the battle of Dail Righ near St Fillan’s Church in 1306.8 That it continued to the end of his life is demonstrated by a donation of £20 to the fabric of the church in 1329.9//Like most Irish and West Highland religious communities of its period, Glendochart seems to have been run by a secular and ecclesiastical partnership, where the relics were commonly held by one family who passed them from generation to generation.10 The Gaelic term for the keepers of such relics was deòradh which, anglicized as ‘Dewar’, evolved into the surname of the guardians of the Quigrich during the 14th century.11 The privileges and obligations of the office were specified in an inquest of 1428 which stated that an annual levy of grain was to be paid to the bearer of the Quigrich; that the keepership was given to an ancestor of Finlay Dewar the present holder by the ecclesiastical successor of St Fillan and that all this had been recognised since the time of Bruce (fig 24, page 109). In return, with the aid of the miraculous powers of the relic, for a small fee the Dewars were to retrieve stolen goods or cattle within the kingdom of Scotland.12//These provisions were confirmed in a letter of James III in 1487, particularly emphasising the legitimate possession of the Quigrich by the Dewar family, their liberty from all interference except from the king and his heirs, and their right to pass through the country with it without impediment.13 James IV confirmed it again in a charter of 1498, preceded by an account of his own devotion to St Fillan. Indeed, he paid eighteen shillings to a man who brought St Fillan’s Bell, another relic held in Glendochart, to his coronation in Stirling in June 1488.14//After the Reformation, the belief that water in which the Quigrich had been dipped would cure fever, scrofula and ailing cattle, plus the conviction that an oath sworn upon it was dangerously binding, became part of local superstition and probably accounted for its careful preservation by the Dewars. During the reign of Charles II the keepers, who had become Presbyterians, relinquished the relic to a Catholic branch of the family but subsequently suffered such bad luck that they managed to get it back again.15//However, they still did not prosper and when William Thomson, an Oxford student of mineralogy travelling the Highlands, saw it and made his drawing in 1782 (fig 25), the owner Malice Doire was a mere day labourer with a son and heir dying of consumption. Thomson was so concerned about the fate of the Quigrich that having become a corresponding member of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, he wrote in 1784 to the earl of Buchan, its president, urging that they should try to acquire it before its impoverished owner sold it to ‘find a ready passage to the melting pot’.16//Dewar fortunes did not recuperate and they emigrated to Canada after the Napoleonic Wars on an assisted government scheme taking the Quigrich with them. In Ontario, other Highland settlers continued to come to their clearing for water blessed by the crozier to treat their cattle.17 When Daniel Wilson became Professor of History and Literature at University College, Toronto, in 1852 he tracked it down and managed to negotiate its return to Scotland, concerned about its fate as family links with their native country faded.//Alexander Dewar and his sons Malcolm and Alexander valued it at $700, but asked the Society for only $500. A descendant, Mrs Nilo Wilson of Toronto, handsomely repaid appreciably more than this sum to the Museum of Scotland in 1992 feeling that it was a part of the national heritage which was beyond price.//It is with all these vicissitudes in mind that the present state of H5 and H6 has to be examined.//The most recently recorded interference with the Quigrich was the removal in 1876 of the earlier crook, which it then still encased.18 John Stuart does not say how this was accomplished, but a slit has been cut through the silver from top to bottom at the base of the cresting at one side in the angle where its border spreads out over the tube of the crozier. This side of the Quigrich must then have been bent back to release its contents, leaving it with uneven bulges. Clearly it proved impossible to get this panel back exactly into place. At the central inner border, particularly the lower section, there is now an irregular gap between the edges of the filigree panels and the silver strip which is intended to cover them. Comparison with the other side of H6 shows that this originally fitted neatly and smoothly together. Finally, the sides of the empty Quigrich were secured together again by filling the cavity with resin, some of which has seeped out of the incision along the cresting. Further damage between cresting and knop probably also dates to this operation.//The intervention previous to that appears to have been the addition of the present knop and the collars above and below, which replace earlier features. On the undamaged side of the cresting, the quatrefoil piercing and engraved decoration stops short above the knop, presumably to accommodate a larger, more spherical, predecessor. When the panels of scrollwork above were fitted, this necessitated the removal of a vertical section of the framing of the cresting on both sides.//One writer has suggested that the interlaced ornament was copied from an earlier knop removed from H5.19 However, it is just as likely that it is part of the same late survival and revival of Insular motifs in the West Highlands as numerous sculptured crosses, grave slabs and ivory caskets (for example L9 and L10, pages 186-191). Two panels on the lid of the Eglinton casket [L9], are particularly close in their combination of arcs, points and straight lines. The scrolls above and below the knop can be paralleled in stone carving from Kintyre and Iona.20 Together, these comparisons suggest a 15th-century date, perhaps as late as 1488, when St Fillan’s Bell was taken to the coronation and the crozier may well have gone too. Apart from the shape of the whole, this is the only section with a distinctively Celtic character.//The cresting, by contrast, with its quatrefoil apertures is a motif which was established in Northern French and Flemish metalwork design by the 1270s when the shrine of Sainte Gertrude of Nivelles was commissioned and it was used for the parapet of the châsse.21 It remained a favourite device for the edges of chalice feet and reliquary bases in France until the mid-14th century.22 English goldsmiths also used it at the same period for large and small objects.23 These stylistic considerations imply that this cresting may have been added during or soon after the period of enthusiasm for St Fillan at the end of Robert I’s reign.//A fitment which sits rather uneasily on the Quigrich is the half-figure at the top of the drop (page 108). It is curiously flat and has an unfinished vertical area in the middle of the back, clearly not meant to be seen. It has been rather roughly attached and quantities of solder have been used to cover traces of alteration just behind it. Again, the decoration of the cresting stops distinctly short.//Whether this means that the figure represents yet another un-related refurbishment or whether it is simply a clumsy piece of design by a craftsman unfamiliar with this type of object is difficult to say. Perhaps the latter, in view of the figure’s probable date. Anderson pointed out the similarity of the formalised cloud formation under the bust to the privy seal of David II, who succeeded in 1329.24 Although schematised clouds had been shown in manuscript painting for centuries, they took this particular frilly form in the first half of the 14th century. There is a strong resemblance to those on the Ascension page of the East Anglian Psalter of Robert de Lisle, datable to before 1339;25 on the donor page of the early 14th-century Taymouth Hours, ascribed on purely circumstantial evidence to the patronage of Joanna, wife of David II, which is also East Anglian26 and in the scene of St Peter in his boat on folio 37 of the Parisian Belleville Breviary painted in the 1320s.27 The small engraved crucifix scene on the end of the drop (page 108) is also consistent in style with this period.28//The fine precise engraving on the cresting and the strips covering the vertical inner join is in such marked contrast to the fairly rough cross-hatching on the sheets of metal framing the filigree panels that it is difficult to believe they came from the same workshop. If the cresting was added in the first half of the 14th century, the Quigrich before that may have looked very much like the crozier reliquary depicted on the Dunkeld Chapter seal (fig 26, page 112) – a simple crook with decoration in diaper lattice patterns.//The lattice has been copied directly from H5, including the irregular shapes produced by the alteration. This could have been achieved fairly easily by hammering the thin silver sheet on to the copper alloy to produce the resulting pattern. The filigree panels from the earlier crook were then transferred with a small amount of trimming. As the filigree is still in the same sequence of distribution as on H5, which can be established by tracing the panels and matching them, this reveals a little about the history of the earlier crook. As shown in the figures above, a type of filigree different from the majority fills the area above the drop on both sides and down most of the inner border and part of the upper border on the other side. This indicates that not only did H5 have a wedge-shaped section removed and patched over (see the drawing on page 106), but very possibly it too was opened, damaging the edges and making replacements necessary. What its appearance was before these events can only be guessed at by analogy with Irish croziers of the late 11th and early 12th centuries,29 for example those from Dysert O’Dea and Lismore. Both types of filigree relate in design to work on the Cross of Cong datable to about 112330 and the shrine of St Lachtin’s arm made between 1118 and 1121,31 but the scale is much larger and the execution coarser. In this respect, the filigree on H6 resembles the mask on the tip of a brooch found in an early 12th-century context in Waterford (fig 27).32//NOTES:1 Hugh Cheape provided the paragraph (pages 108-109) on the naming of this object.// Wilson 1877, 126: ‘The only fact worthy of note is, that in the zeal of the late custodiers to make it look its best, it appears to have been rubbed or rather scoured, till traces of gilding which I remember to have noted when I first saw it 18 years ago, are now very slightly traceable.’//Ibid 122-131.//Breviarum Aberdonense pars. hyem. f. xxvi.//Watson 1926, 164, 171, 193, 264, 265, 284, 429. //Anderson 1881, 231.// Stuart 1877, 141.//Gillies 1938, 78-80.//Barrow 1988, 317-19.// Anderson 1881, 235-9.// Stuart 1877, 160; a letter of 1336 is addressed to ‘Donald M’Sobrell dewar Cogerach’ but by 1428 the bearer of the Quigrich is called simply ‘Jore’ another form of ‘Dewar’; Anderson 1889, 112-13.// The original charter was presented to NMS by Hilary Kirkland in 1999. Anderson 1881, 229-30 gives full text and English summary of the document. //3 Ibid. // Stuart 1877, 147// Wilson 1877, 122-3.// The drawing is bound in with ‘Communications to the Society of Antiquaries’, vol II, 1785-1799 (unpaginated). Unpublished papers of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, National Museums of Scotland Library. Thomson writes ‘I intreat the Society to excuse the rudeness of the representation annexed, it being the hasty sketch of a Traveller ….’ A rather poor engraving and the full text of his letter finally appeared in 1862, Archaeologia Scotica, vol III, 289-90.// Lockwood 1989, 40-41.// Stuart 1877, ‘Since the Coygerach came into the possession of the Society, a discovery has been made, which greatly enhances its interest. The great weight of the crozier led to a careful examination of the structure and internal fitting, the result of which was that an earlier crozier of bronze (see plate VI) was found enclosed within the present one.’ There are two otherwise inexplicable holes bored in the covering of the inner join of the Quigrich, which may have been an exploratory part of the ‘careful examination’.// Michelli 1986, 385// Steer and Bannerman 1977, pls 8C, 11//aris 1996, 220-21, figs 12-13.// Ibid 330, cat no 27; 334, cat no 29; Paris 1998, 193-7, cat nos 120-21; 204-5, cat nos 128-9.// London 1987, 458-9, cat no 581.// Anderson 1881, 222.// Rickert 1965, pl 134 (A).// Harthan 1977, 48-9; Backhouse 1985, 56, pl 48; for further examples see Sandler 1986, I, illus 161, 163, 240, 241, 243, 248, 249.// Avril 1978, 63, pl 12.// The suggestion (Edinburgh 1982, cat no D12, 55, 56, 58) that the stars either side of the Crucifixion represent the mullets of the Murray arms and date this section of the Quigrich to around 1500, when John Murray was prior of Strathfillan, is improbable. To make armorial sense there should be three stars, a heraldic device which the Murrays acquired through their Douglas connections (see C2, page 35). Although a crescent moon and a sun are the usual symbols shown flanking the Crucifixion, the stars are likely to have had a religious significance to an artist possibly not entirely familiar with the normal iconography.// Mahr and Raftery 1976, 59, 158, 159f , pls 92 and 94.//Stalley 1977, 214-15.// Ó Floinn 1987, 181-7// Whitfield 1997, fig 15: 18A, 5, 492, pls 37 and 43, 490-4, 507.

Associated person/people (e.g. excavator/former collection)

Saint Fillan of Glendochart

Discovery / field collection

Date of discovery

Not recorded

Method (e.g. excavation)

Not recorded

Place (i.e. location of discovery)

Grid reference

Not recorded

Acquisition

Acquisition date

1887

Acquisition source (i.e. name of donor)

Alexander Dewar and Archibald Dewar, per Sir Daniel Wilson

Acquisition source role (e.g. donor)

Donor

Image