Crown and papacy

It was a fairly new breed of university-educated churchmen who were the moving forces in defining and refining the relationship between and within Church and state in thirteenth-century Scotland. A succession of talented churchmen-Robert Kenleith, Abbot of Dunfermline, Bishop Gamelin ofSt Andrews (1255-71) and his successor, William Wishart (1273-9) - were chancellors of the realm in the second half of the century and the royal clerks who issued a growing stream of official documents and charters emphasising the notion of a regnum Scotiae (kingdom of Scotland) were benefice holders, sustained by the Church rather than the crown. The Church not only provided a long tradition of loyal service to the crown, it did so without payment. It was hardly surprising that the ideas of a territorial kingdom and an ecclesia Scoticana reached maturity together, in the reign of Alexander III.

The Wars of Independence tested many loyalties, but the Scottish bishops for the most part held to a common and fairly consistent view which was unusual amongst other groups in Scottish society. It may seem surprising that churchmen proved to be those most willing to turn a blind eye to the sacrilegious murder of John Comyn by Robert Bruce in the Greyfriars' Kirk in Dumfries in February 1306, but they had more to lose than most from English hegemony. It was the cause which they backed rather than the man, who until at least 1314 was as much on trial amongst the clergy as in other sections of the political community. Their nationalism was both informed and self-interested; it stemmed from two centuries and more of intermittent claims of various parts of the English Church to jurisdiction over them. The close-knit ties of kin and clientage which bound together the middle ranks of most dioceses meant that few broke ranks. Not many, however, were as outspoken as the bishops of Glasgow and Moray who likened resistance against Edward I to a Crusade against the infidel.