Giric of Cennrígmonaid

Giric of Cennrígmonaid, if he is the "Gregorius" of Walter Bower, [Gregorius is the form used for King Giric of Scotland.] is the eleventh alleged Bishop of Cennrígmonaid, equivalent to later day St. Andrews. This "Gregorius" is mentioned in the bishop-list of the 15th century historian Walter Bower as the successor of Bishop Fothad II. [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.] 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". ["ibid.", p. 463, n. 28.] However, there is actually no such evidence that any pre-Norman bishop of St. Andrews was consecrated, except Cellach II, and so the point is rather worthless. Actually, since these editors were writing new evidence has emerged proving that Giric was a fully fledged bishop. 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. [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] In it, a few of the contemporary church's leading men are named, and one of these is "Archbishop Giric". ["ibid.", pp. 111-113]

It is known that Thurgot 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 Thurgot. The other "bishops-elect" were men called Cathróe, Eadmer and Godric. The text is admittedly highly confused at this point, the Eadmer here being "bishop-elect" not until 1120. However, the next name on Bower's list is a man called Cathróe, a genuine Scoto-Pictish name that Bower could not have made up.

Notes

References

*Broun, Dauvit, "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
*Dumville, David N., "St Cathróe of Metz and the Hagiography of Exoticism," in "Irish Hagiography: Saints and Scholars", ed. John Carey et al. (Dublin, 2001), pp. 172–188
*MacQueen, John, MacQueen, Winifred & Watt, D.E.R. (eds.), "Scottichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English", Vol. 3, (Aberdeen, 1995)