Dolgfinn, the seventh bishop, was consecrated in 1286. Nothing is known of him but the name. He died, according to the Annals, in 1309.
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.
Patrick, thirteenth bishop, appears in an Attestation by the Lawman of Orkney, two canons of the church of St. Magnus, and four burgesses of Kirkwall, of the descent and good name of James of Cragy, laird of Hupe.[[137]] He is otherwise unnoticed, but as he is there referred to by his canonical title, and the many losses, injuries, and disquietudes which he endured at the hands of his adversaries, are specially alluded to, there seems to be no doubt that he held the bishopric between the death of John and the incumbency of Thomas de Tulloch.
Thomas de Tulloch, fourteenth bishop, first appears in existing records in 1418. He seems to have been previously Bishop of Ross.[[138]] On 17th June 1420, at the church of Vestenskov in Laland, he gives his pledge to King Eirik and his successors, and undertakes that he will hold the crown lands of Orkney committed to him, for the Kings of Norway, promising at the same time to give law and justice to the people of Orkney according to the Norsk law-book and the ancient usages.[[139]] In 1422 he receives the palace and pertinents of Kirkwall—“thet slot oc faeste Kirkqwaw liggende j Orknoy j Norghe meth landet Orknoy,” etc.—as a fief from King Eirik. A record of the set of the threepenny lands of Stanbuster, in the parish of St. Andrews, executed by him on 12th July 1455, and confirmed by his successor in 1465, is preserved at Kirkwall. His death took place before 28th June 1461, when we find his successor in office.[[140]]
William (VI.) de Tulloch, the last bishop during the dominion of Norway in the Orkneys, was bishop in June 1461, and tendered his oath of allegiance in 1462.
A bull of Pope Sixtus IV., dated at the Vatican, 17th August 1472, placed the see of the Orkneys under the metropolitan Bishop of St. Andrews.