HENRY (I.) was the fifth bishop. A papal dispensation for the defect of his birth, by Pope Innocent IV., is dated 9th December 1247.[130] He was then a canon in the Orkneys. He was with King Hakon’s expedition in 1263, and died in 1269.
PETER, the sixth bishop, was consecrated in 1270. A brief of his,[131] dated at Tunsberg, 3d September 1278, grants forty days’ indulgence to those in his diocese who contribute in aid of the restoration of St. Swithin’s cathedral at Stavanger, which had been destroyed by fire. He died in 1284.
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.