Deer, OLD

Deer, OLD, a village of Buchan, Aberdeenshire, 36 miles N. of Aberdeen. Here, about 580 A.D., St Columba (q.v.) and Drostan, his nephew, established a monastery, which William Comyn, Earl of Buchan, refounded about 1219 for Cistercian monks. Little remains of the monastic buildings; but in 1715 a Latin MS., a small octavo of 86 pages, which had belonged to the monks of Deer, found its way to the Cambridge University Library, though not until 1860 was the attention of scholars directed to its great importance by Mr Bradshaw, the librarian. It contains St John's and parts of the other three gospels (in mainly the Vulgate version of St Jerome), the Apostles' Creed, and a fragment of an office for the visitation of the sick, with a Gaelic rubric. On the blank leaves of the MS., in the handwriting of the early part of the 12th century, are several Gaelic entries relating to the endowments of the Columban monastery. These notes are of the highest interest as the oldest specimens of Scottish Gaelic, and only less interesting is the Gaelic ornamentation enriching the MS. See Dr John Stuart's edition of the Book of Deer (Spalding Club, 1869), and Dr Joseph Anderson's Scotland in Early Christian Times (1881).