Crown and papacy

The shift of the papal court from Rome to Avignon after 1309 encouraged a trend which had already begun with the Anglo-Scottish wars: in the thirteenth century many Scottish students had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but in the fourteenth they preferred the universities of Paris, Orleans, Louvain or Cologne. A new cosmopolitan nationalism affected the leading Scottish clergy as a result. The increasing control exerted by the Avignon papacy over appointments to bishoprics and to other benefices had a number of important consequences: it fuelled contests over benefices, encouraged ambitious young Scots to court patrons at Avignon, raised costs and reduced the income enjoyed by new benefice-holders. The results reverberated through the clerical system: the increased costs were passed on; more parish kirks had their revenues appropriated; the vicar with a 'perpetual vicarage', enjoying some share in the teinds, might find himself a vicar-pensioner, with a fixed stipend in a period of rising prices and a falling pound, forced to resort to other devices to scrape a living. The combined effect of a country struggling to recover from the impact of a century of intermittent warfare, the slump in trade after a brief recovery in the 1370s and the new costs of papal provision to benefices did not impoverish the whole Scottish Church, but it did drastically accentuate the gap between appropriators and appropriated.

The Great Schism (1378-1417) which followed, with rival popes in Avignon and Rome, initially increased the links between Scotland and France. The support of the English Church for the Italian Urban VI resulted in a number of attempts to provide Englishmen to Scottish bishoprics and a renewed animus between the two churches: the Avignon candidate for the see of Galloway, the Scottish Franciscan Thomas Rossy, even challenged an outspoken schismatic, the Bishop of Norwich, to single armed combat - he declined. The steadfast loyalty of the Scottish Church to the Avignon popes had a number of important consequences. Clement VII (1378-94) appointed Bishop Walter Wardlaw of Glasgow, who had invested several years at Avignon, a cardinal in 1383 - the first Scot to be given the red hat. From being a promoter of Scottish interests at Avignon, Wardlaw for the last few years of his life became patronage-broker and party whip of the Avignon interest in Scotland. The see of Galloway finally broke its long but increasingly fragile link with York and became a full member of the ecclesia Scoticana. A long, complex dispute over the bishopric of Orkney, extending over the islands of Orkney and Shetland which were still under the control of kings of Norway, produced the first appointment, in 1384, of a Scot to the see; Robert Sinclair was the first in an unbroken line of Scots bishops. In the west, the diocese of Sodor, which extended from the Isle of Man to the northernmost of the Western Isles, was split in two during the Schism; the Roman loyalist Bishop of Sodor retained control only of the part of the diocese under English control and the Avignon candidate provided in 1382 became, in effect, the first Bishop of the Isles.