medieval-atlas/the-church/347

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Parish churches about 1300 This series of maps presents an attempt to identify the sites of every parish church in Scotland, Orkney and Shetland in aboull300. This date has been chose mainly for the same reason given above for selecting it as the date to show the boundaries of ecclesiastical organisation. The existence of perhaps two-thirds of the total is demonstrated by the mention of these parishes as paying papal taxes in the decades just before 1300; but the relevant records (the most famous of which goes by the name of 'Bagimond's Roll') are incomplete. There are at least minor gaps for every diocese, and no records at all survive for the dioceses of Argyll, Sodor and Orkney, nor for the half of Glasgow diocese comprising the Archdeaconry of Glasgow. For Moray, Aberdeen, St Andrews and Brechin these financial records can be supplemented by parish valuation lists which survive in several monastic cartularies from a rather earlier thirteenth-century date. Where precise evidence of this contemporary kind does not exist, it is a question of reading back from late records. This usually demands some reasonable guesswork, and it is not pretended that the existence of every parish mapped here can definitely be proved. But in every case there is reasonable certainty. Parish boundaries are not attempted for reasons explained above; instead the attempt has been made to identify the oldest-known site of the parish church in each case. The boundaries which have been drawn are schematic rather than precise, indicating the limits ofeach diocese, o'fthe archdeaconries within St Andrews, Glasgow and Orkney dioceses, and of the subordinate deaneries (groups of parishes underthe authority ofone of the parish clergy as dean of Christianity) within the archdeaconries. There is certain contemporary evidence for these last ·administrative and jurisdictional units in the dioceses of Galloway, Glasgow, St Andrews, Aberdeen and Moray by this date, and it is usually clear which parishes belonged to each. Exceptionally we know that deaneries existed in Argyll diocese, but no allocation of parishes to deaneries is available. By 1300 it appears that the whole country had come to be divided in parishes. This had been a gradual process over the previous two centuries; now each defined area was the spiritual responsibility of the benefice-holder, who could be an individual parish priest as rector or parson, or alternatively a religious corporation such as a monastery or cathedral chapter (in which case the parish was said to have been appropriated to the use of such a corporation -as is shown in later maps). In either situation the liturgical and pastoral work might be performed by priests who were deputies of the official benefice-holder, whether with the status of vicar or ofchaplain. The parish was now the basic unit of ecclesiastical administration, finance and discipline. In large parishes subordinate chapels were often built for the convenience of parishioners; but everyone owed an over-riding duty to the parish church itself. Hence the interest in identifying the sites of these churches. Many lessons for local history can be learned from their geographical distribution; there must be a specific reason behind the siting ofeach one. It is not surprising that arrangement in the Norwegian dioceses of Orkney and Sodor were rather different. Parishes had been developed there over the same period as in Scotland, but there are indications that, in accordance with the practice ofthe Norwegian church to which both dioceses then belonged, the area ofa parochial cure was the 'priest's district' (prestegjeld)-rather than the 'parish' (sokn). While some such districts might contain no more than a single parish church, most comprised two or three and some as many as four 'head churches'; and these groupings could change from one period to another in Shetland at any rate. The system has been clearly identified in Orkney diocese (which was to remain part of Norway until 1468-9), and it has been suggested that a similar arrangement (albeit less convincingly) lies behind the distribution of churches in Sodor diocese, which had been part of Scotland only since 1266. In the lists ofchurches for these two dioceses therefore various definite or possible groupings are indicated by brackets. In all these lists a distinction is made between the names of unappropriated churches in roman type and the names of appropriated churches in italic type. In some cases the evidence about the situation in 1300 is inferential rather than certain, and caution has guided editorial practice. More churches may in fact have been appropriated by this date than is now indicated; but at least a conservative view of how far this process had gone by this date is now available. Place-names are given in modem forms whenever the 1300 form is clearly recognisable; they are left in some contemporary form within quotes where this is not possible; and where the name has been completely changed (often because the site of the church has been moved within the parish bounds) a modem equivalent form is also provided. 347

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