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> From: JULIA BARROW [SMTP:[log in to unmask]] > > I don't think Kentigern was, technically speaking, exiled. > Accounts of his birth place it at Dysart (I think), in Fife, where > he was brought up by St Serf (if I remember rightly). > Kentigern is rather a special case, actually. From the beginning he's an outsider, someone who, with his mother, was cast out from his birth family. > Admittedly, the story of his birth and youth is pretty mythical, > Definitely. The casting out to sea was the legal penalty reserved for incest, not being born out of wedlock. In early Irish and Scottish law, there were a variety of categories of marriage, some of them covering irregular and fleeting relationships, such as a one-night stand or dallying with a foreign soldier. But even in those cases, the responsibility for raising the child was assigned to the family of the mother or father. > apparently linked with the Danae myth (indeed, his mother's name, Taneu, > is a > bit like Danae). > I'm not sure I'd go that far for a connection. There are many Irish and Welsh stories of unwanted children being cast out to sea: Lugh and Taliesin are two of the more prominent. > His diocese was in Strathclyde, so not terribly far > away from Fife - just the other side of the Forth-Clyde isthmus. > It's not so much a question of distance as tribal association. If the people across the river belonged to his tribe, it would be home territory. Otherwise it would be foreign territory and he would have no legal identity. Of course, I'm not sure this is relevant in the case of Kentigern since, as I said, his case seems to be extraordinary, if it were historical (which I doubt). Francine Nicholson %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%