Giric

Giric mac Dúngail (Modern Gaelic: Griogair mac Dhunghail (born c. 832, Scotland), known in English simply as Giric, and nicknamed Mac Rath, ("Son of Fortune"); fl. c. 878–889) was a king of the Picts or the king of Alba. The Irish annals record nothing of Giric's reign, nor do Anglo-Saxon writings add anything, and the meagre information which survives is contradictory. Modern historians disagree as to whether Giric was sole king or ruled jointly with Eochaid, on his ancestry, and if he should be considered a Pictish king or the first king of Alba.

Although little is now known of Giric, he appears to have been regarded as an important figure in Scotland in the High Middle Ages and the Late Middle Ages. Scots chroniclers such as John of Fordun, Andrew of Wyntoun, Hector Boece and the humanist scholar George Buchanan wrote of Giric as "King Gregory the Great" and told how he had conquered half of England and Ireland too.

Background

The sources for the succession in what later became the Kingdom of Alba are meagre and confused following the peak of Viking devastation in 875-6. The descendants of Kenneth MacAlpin (Cináed mac Ailpín) in the male line lost the kingship between 878 and 889. Two names of possible kings in this period are Eochaid and Giric. Giric is very obscure; he may have been Eochaid's guardian; and he may have lost power following a solar eclipse.

Giric (bishop of the Scots)

Giric, if he is the Gregorius of Walter Bower, is the eleventh alleged Bishop of St Andrews. This Gregorius is mentioned in the bishop-list of Walter Bower as the successor of Bishop Fothad II. Bower's most recent editors commented that "there is no evidence to prove that any bishop of St Andrews was consecrated between 1093 and 1109". In the late 1990s, the University of Glasgow historian Dauvit Broun, by looking through the manuscripts afresh, recovered the previously unknown last 20% of Version-A of the St. Andrews Foundation Legend, a text composed at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. In it, a few of the contemporary church's leading men are named, and one of these is "Archbishop Giric".

It is known that Turgot of Durham was elected to the bishopric in 1107, and so Giric may have been in office anytime between 1093, the death-date of his predecessor, and 1107. Bower's list has Giric as one of four bishops who died as "bishops-elect" between the episcopates of Fothad II and Turgot. The other "bishops-elect" were men called Cathróe, Eadmer and Godric.