ain based on that of Lincoln. But the Bishop was to
be _Primus_ and above all other dignitaries of the Cathedral. For
it was ordained that instead of the one priest who had previously
officiated, there should be ten Canons with the Bishop as their head,
five of them holding the dignities of Dean, Precentor, Chancellor,
Treasurer, and Archdeacon, each of them during residence to minister
there daily, as well as the Abbot of Scone, who was a Canon, but had a
Vicar to perform his duties in his absence. The teinds (or tithes)
of certain parishes were allocated to each member of the Chapter; and
lands, residences, and prebends were assigned to them, provision also
being made from the teinds of other parishes for the lighting and
services of the Church. Bishop Gilbert built and completed the
Cathedral, making, it is said, the glass for its windows at Sidera,
from sand taken from near the howe of the first Jarl Sigurd, a
worshipper of Odin.[6]

Bishop Gilbert had also translated the Psalms into Gaelic; and,
having set his diocese of Caithness, comprising the modern counties of
Sutherland and Caithness, in good working order, and having re-buried
his predecessor Adam, with a stately funeral, at Dornoch in 1239, had
made his will in 1242, and died in the episcopal palace at Scrabster,
near Thurso, in 1245. It was probably during his episcopate that
King Alexander II gave his open letter,[7] directed to the sheriffs,
bailies, and other good men of Moray and Caithness, and enjoining them
to protect the ship of the Abbot and Convent of Scone and their men
and goods from injury, molestation or damage in their journeys to
the north. Bishop Gilbert was buried at Dornoch, and was succeeded by
Bishop William,[8] and he in his turn, in 1261, by Bishop Walter de
Baltroddi, who doubtless suffered from King Hakon's fines levied in
Caithness in 1263, and whose daughter the Chief of the Mackays is said
to have married after that date.

In 1261 the Hebrides had been harried by William, MacFerchar, Earl of
Ross and uncle of Freskin de Moravia the younger, with great cruelty
and barbarity, and King Hakon in 1263 began to collect and equip a
fleet with a view to revenging the injury done to his subjects in the
west.[9] In the preparation for this in the spring of 1263, we find
Jon Langlifson, whose mother Langlif was Harold Maddadson's youngest
daughter, and who was thus himself a nephew of Earl John, sent over
with Henry Skot to Shetland to ob