Elisabeth Austin PhD Thesis - University of St Andrews

the letter which the archbishop himself sent to me. I advise
you to keep both that and the letter I send you now in the
archives of your churches as a record for your successors.271
They need not have bothered. In his customary fashion, Thomas had
crafted his words carefully. As he had promised, he never used the
consecration ceremony as a precedent. But he used every other
preceden t he could lay his hands on.
Thomas consecrated Ralph, or Rodulph, as bishop of Orkney on
3 March 1073. Later sources would claim that Thomas received a
profession of obedience from Ralph, and given the circumstances of
his own consecration, it indeed seems likely that Thomas would have
required a formal promise. The Digby chronicler cites only the first
line of Ralph's profession, so we do not know the form on which
Thomas insisted. Z72 It was likely to have been stringent. Thomas
badly needed to secure Orkney as a permanent suffragan of York. 273
Aside from Orkney, York maintained historical connections
with other Scottish sees.274 Tradition recorded that Cynesige had
consecrated two bishops of Glasgow. Thomas may have attempted to
27IBL Cotton Nero A. vii, ff. 15v-16r: Et ne forte solliciti sitis putantes quod uel
ipse uel successores eius hac oc/casione super aecc1esias uestras ius
prelationis quandoque conentur ampere, litteras quas ipse michi transmisit
fratermtati uestrae sollicitudinem de futuro gerens euraui transmittere; Quas
et has quas uobis transmitto in archiuis aecciesiarum uestrarum ob memoriam
futurorum seruatum iri praecipio.
27ZDigby, p. 363. Brooke notes (Hugh, p. xlvii, n.) that "a text with the same
opening, but addressed by a Bishop Richard to an Archbishop Richard.
survives in Harleian Manuscript 433, iii. 84. No conjunction of a bishop and
archbishop both called Richard occurred in the medieval period, and it seems
likely that the text is a bungled version of Rodulf's profession to Thomas I." If
this is indeed the case, Thomas extracted a profession "even more emphatic
than the common run of such documents in its undertakings towards the
mother church." Brooke's conjecture is seductive, but cannot be taken as
secure.
2731n this, he was reasonably successful. Brooke summarizes the
developments of the next pontificates in Hugh, pp. xlvii-xlvii
274See HCYiii, #18/ Acta #6.
130