HIS name is famous in the ancient Scottish and Irish Calendars. The
example and instructions of his pious parents, Feriach and St.
Kentigerna, inspired him from the cradle with the most ardent love of
virtue. In his youth, despising the flattering worldly advantages to
which high birth and a great fortune entitled him, he received the
monastic habit from a holy abbot named Mundus, and passed many years in
a cell at some distance from the monastery, not far from St. Andrew's.
He was by compulsion drawn from this close solitude, being chosen abbot.
His sanctity in this public station shone forth with a bright light.
After some years he resigned this charge, and retired to his uncle
Congan, brother to his mother, in a place called Siracht, a mountainous
part of Glendarchy, now in Fifeshire, where, with the assistance of
seven others, he built a church, near which he served for several years.
God glorified him by a wonderful gift of miracles; and called him to the
reward of his labors on the 9th of January, in the seventh century.
{118} He was buried in Straphilline, and his relics were long preserved
there with honor. This account is given us of him in the lessons of the
Aberdeen Breviary.[1] The Scottish historians[2] attribute to the
intercession of St. Felan a memorable victory obtained by king Robert
Bruce, in 1314, over a numerous army of English, at Bannocburn, not far
from Sterling, in the reign of Edward II. of England, who narrowly
escaped, being obliged to pass the Tweed in a boat, with only one
companion. See Lesley, l. 17; Boetius, l. 14. Chatelain certainly
mistakes in confounding this saint with St. Finan, bishop of
Lindisfarne.[3]
Footnotes:
1. T. 1, part 2, fol. 28.
2. Hector Boetius, l. 14, &c.
3. St. Felan flourished in the county of Fife, and probably in the
monastery of Pettinuime, where his memory was famous, as is
testified by the author of MS. memoirs on the Scottish saints,
preserved in the college of the Scots at Paris, who declares himself
to have been a missionary priest in Scotland to 1609. The county of
Fife was famous for the rich and most ancient monasteries of
Dumferling, Lindore, St. Andrew's, or Colrosse, or Courose,
Pettinuime, Balmure, and Petmoace; and two stately nunneries:
Aberdaure and Elcho. All these noble buildings they levelled to the
ground with incredible fury, crying, "Pull down, pull down: the
crows' nest must be utterly exterminated, lest they should return
and attempt again to renew their settlement." Ib. MS. fol. 7.