Bishops, Priests, Monks and Their Patrons the Lords of the Isles and the Church

CHAPTER 5 Bishops, Priests, Monks and Their Patrons The Lords of the Isles and the Church

Sarah Thomas

Whilst the MacDonald contribution to the Church, and in particular to Iona, has been discussed, their involvement in the patronage of parish churches and secular clergy has up until now been neglected.1 This is an area of immense potential, given the surviving source material in the papal archives; through the study of clerical identities, building on the work of John Bannerman, we are able to identify connections between the clergy and the Lords of the Isles.2 The Lordship of the Isles incorporated two bishoprics, four monastic houses and approximately 64 parish churches of which the Lords had patronage of 41.3 In an age where the appropriation of parish churches to monastic and ecclesiastical authorities was widespread, the Lordship’s patronage of so many parish churches meant that they had considerable influence over clerical careers and had significant scope to reward kindreds. However, that amount of control over ecclesiastical benefices might strain relations between lord and bishop. Relations with the monastic institutions were not always smooth either; a particular issue was the admission of MacKinnons into the monastery of Iona. The Lordship lands lay within two dioceses; their lands in the Hebrides in the diocese of Sodor and their lands in Kintyre, Knapdale, Lochaber, Moidart,

1 Steer and Bannerman, Late Medieval Monumental Sculpture; Bannerman, ‘Lordship of the Isles’; M. MacGregor, ‘Church and Culture in the late medieval Highlands’ in J. Kirk (ed), The Church in the Highlands (Edinburgh, 1998); R.D. Oram, ‘The Lordship of the Isles: 1336– 1545’, in D. Omand (ed), The Argyll Book (Edinburgh, 2006) 123–139. 2 Steer and Bannerman, Late Medieval Monumental Sculpture; Bannerman, ‘Lordship of the Isles’; Bannerman, The Beatons. 3 A.I. Dunlop, ‘Notes on the Church in the Dioceses of Sodor and Argyll’, rschs 16 (1968) 179– 184; I.B. Cowan, ‘The Medieval Church in Argyll and the Isles’, rschs 20 (1978–80) 15–29; A.D.M. Barrell, ‘The church in the West Highlands in the late middle ages’, ir 54 (2003) 23–46. The most recent contributions to this area are Iain MacDonald’s PhD thesis on the secular church in Argyll, I.G. MacDonald, The Secular Church and Clergy in the Diocese of Argyll from circa 1189 to 1560 (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2008) now published as I.G. MacDonald, Clerics and Clansmen: The Diocese of Argyll between the Twelfth and Sixteenth Centuries (Leiden, 2013), and the author’s thesis on the church in the Hebrides, S.E. Thomas, ‘“From Rome to the ends of the habitable world”: the provision of clergy and church buildings in the Hebrides, circa 1266 to circa 1472’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009.

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