Scottish Benefices and the Commissary Court of Edinburgh: The Example of McGibbon v Struthers

The book chapter studies jurisdiction in respect of the Scottish benefices of the Catholic Church during the personal reign of Mary, Queen of Scots, at a time when the Catholic ascendancy in Scotland was collapsing and the Scottish Crown was subverting the old rights of presentation of the Scottish episcopate and the bishops of Rome. The specific case in question concerns the first known attempt by the Protestant Church of Scotland to unify a Protestant parish minister with the medieval ecclesiastical revenues arising from his parish following the institutional dislocation of the wealth of the Catholic Church and the new structures of the Church of Scotland. This case tested the viability of permitting the Church of Scotland apposite access to the benefice system of the Catholic Church and was in the event successful, although it very nearly fell foul of the mesh of complicated legal instruments which had accreted around so many Scottish benefices during the three decades preceding the Reformation