Clement of Dunblane

Clement was a 13th-century Dominican friar who was the first member of the Dominican Order in Britain and Ireland to become a bishop. He was selected to lead the ailing diocese of Dunblane in Scotland. He helped to elevate Edmund of Abingdon and Queen Margaret to sainthood.

About Clement of Dunblane in brief

Clement was a 13th-century Dominican friar who was the first member of the Dominican Order in Britain and Ireland to become a bishop. He was selected to lead the ailing diocese of Dunblane in Scotland, and faced a struggle to bring the bishopric to financial viability. He helped to elevate Edmund of Abingdon and Queen Margaret to sainthood. After his death, he received veneration as a saint himself, although he was never formally canonised. The Analecta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum claims that he was “a Scot by birth”, but this is often highly unreliable and cannot be fully trusted. The historian Archie Duncan was cautious about a date as firm and early as 1221, and wrote that Clement entered the Dominican order by the later 1220s. If this had been a consideration in Clement’s later appointment, then this would strongly suggest that Clement was in fact a Scot. It is worth adding that Clement received his university education at either the University of Oxford or the Universityof Paris, perhaps at both of these institutions. These details form the context for Clement’s appearance in Scotland and his selection as the new Bishop ofDunblane. There can only be informed speculation regarding the choice of Clement, but perhaps King Alexander noted for his concern for the building of churches for the Friars Preacher. His choice prompted the historian to comment that ‘the choice of the Dominicans was at the cutting edge of religious reform.

At any rate, Clement was consecrated as bishop at Wedale on 4 September 1233, and was later the first Dominican in the British Isles to obtain a bishopric’ He died in 1250 and was one of the Guardians appointed to govern Scotland during the minority of King Alexander III. The earliest certain date for the foundation of a Dominican house in Scotland is 1234. Later tradition had it that theDominican Order entered Scotland in 1230, encouraged by King Alexander II and William de Malveisin, Bishop of St Andrews. By 1230 the Order was poised to enter Scotland. There was no electoral process to find a suitable replacement for Osbert, so Pope Gregory IX charged the bishops of Dunkechin and St Andrews to find and nominate a suitable successor. There were five houses in England by 1230 and five in Scotland by 1234, by which time the Order had established itself in Scotland. The order had its origins in the reformist ideology of Dominic de Guzmán, later Saint Dominic. At his death in 1221 there were 21 houses as far apart as Paris, Bologna, Madrid and Segovia, and there were five in England as well as Oxford and London. In the 1240s Clement was given the job of restoring the viability of the diocese and installing a new bishop in Argyll. This involved forming a close relationship with King Alexander Two of Scotland. In this era it was often frowned upon for a bishop to be ignorant of the language of his diocese.

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