WILLIAM (III.) was the eighth bishop. He was consecrated in 1310. At the
Provincial Council held at Bergen, in 1320, there were several
complaints made by the archbishop against William, Bishop of
Orkney.[132] Kormak, an archdeacon of the Sudreys, and Grim Ormson,
prebendary of Nidaros, had been sent by the archbishop on a visitation
of the diocese of Orkney, and had reported that William had squandered
the property of the see, that he had bestowed the offices of the church
on foreigners and apostates, that he had compromised his dignity as a
prelate of the church by participation in the boisterous pastime of
hunting and other unseemly diversions, that he had been careless and
lukewarm in the exercise of his spiritual office, and had not sought out
those who practised idolatry and witchcraft, or who were heretics or
followed ungodly ways. Moreover, he had imprisoned Ingilbert Lyning, a
canon of Orkney, whom the archbishop had sent to make inquiry into the
collection of the Peter’s pence, and had deprived him of his prebendary
and all his property. He had also clandestinely appropriated to himself
during fifteen years a portion of the church dues, amounting to the
value of 53 marks sterling, and he had refused to permit the removal of
the corpse of a woman from Orkney, although her will had been that she
should be interred in the cathedral of Trondheim. He was suspended in
the following year (1321) by the archbishop, but in 1324 we find him
assisting at the consecration of Laurentius, Bishop of Hole.[133] By a
deed,[134] dated at Bergen, 9th September 1327, he mortgages his dues of
Shetland to his metropolitan, Eilif, Archbishop of Nidaros, for the
payment of 186 marks sterling, which he should have paid the archbishop
for six years’ teinds. By another document of the same year,[135] Bishop
Audfinn of Bergen requests Bishop William of Orkney to assist his priest
Ivar in the collection of the _Sunnive-miel_—a contribution which the
inhabitants of Shetland had paid from old time to the shrine of St.
Sunniva at Bergen. The date of this bishop’s death has not been
ascertained.
WILLIAM (IV.), ninth bishop, succeeded him, sometime after the year
1328. There is extant an agreement between him and Hakon Jonsson, dated
at Kirkwall, 25th May 1369.[136] The next mention we have of him is the
entry in the Annals, under the date 1382—“Then was heard the mournful
tidings that Bishop William was slain in the Orkneys.”
WILLIAM (V.), tenth bishop, appears only in a record of the time of King
Robert III. of Scotland. Munch supposes that he may have been the
William Johnson who appears as Archdeacon of Zetland, in a Norse deed
dated at Sandwick in Shetland, March 4, 1360.
HENRY (II.), eleventh bishop, according to Torfæus, appears in a record
of 1394.
JOHN, twelfth bishop, appears in the Union Treaty of Calmar in 1397.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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