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.
^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.
^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
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)