Giric, if he is the Gregorius of Walter Bower,[1] is the eleventh alleged Bishop of St Andrews. This Gregorius is mentioned in the bishop-list of Walter Bower as the successor of Bishop Fothad II.[2] Bower's most recent editors commented that "there is no evidence to prove that any bishop of St Andrews was consecrated between 1093 and 1109".[3] In the late 1990s, the University of Glasgow historian Dauvit Broun, by looking through the manuscripts afresh, recovered the previously unknown last 20% of Version-A of the St. Andrews Foundation Legend, a text composed at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries.[4] In it, a few of the contemporary church's leading men are named, and one of these is "Archbishop Giric".[5]

It is known that Turgot of Durham was elected to the bishopric in 1107, and so Giric may have been in office anytime between 1093, the death-date of his predecessor, and 1107. Bower's list has Giric as one of four bishops who died as "bishops-elect" between the episcopates of Fothad II and Turgot. The other "bishops-elect" were men called Cathróe, Eadmer and Godric.

Notes

  1. ^ Gregorius is the form used for King Giric of Scotland.
  2. ^ John Macqueen, Winifred MacQueen, & D.E.R. Watt, (eds.), Scottichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, Vol. 3, (Aberdeen, 1995), pp. 344-5, 463.
  3. ^ ibid., p. 463, n. 28.
  4. ^ Dauvit Broun, "Recovering the Full Text of Version A of the Foundation Legend", in Simon Taylor (ed.) Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland, 500–1297, (Dublin, 2000), pp. 108-14
  5. ^ ibid., pp. 111-113

References

Religious titles Preceded byFothad II Bishop of St Andrews (elect?) bp. 1093x1107 Succeeded byCathróe? /Turgot of Durham?
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