People & lives

He drew income from five Scottish parishes he never visited

Walter de Coventre was a Scottish clergyman of the 1300s whose life survives only in scraps of legal and church paperwork, yet those fragments trace a familiar career path for ambitious men of his class: university study abroad paid for by Scottish church income, followed by a late return home and a bishopric as the eventual payoff. He first shows up as a student in Paris in the 1330s, then moved to Orléans, where he stayed for decades, progressing from student to lecturer and collecting degrees in arts, civil law and canon law, including two doctorates. All the while he held a string of Scottish benefices, often several at once, that he never personally served, their income simply funding his studies and leaving poorly paid substitutes to do the actual parish work. He may have been connected to two other men named de Coventre active in the same period, possibly his brothers, and some historians think his family had ties to the hereditary lords of Abernethy.

He did not return to Scotland until the late 1350s, after more than twenty-five years away, and quickly rose to become Dean of Aberdeen Cathedral. Around 1361 the cathedral chapter of Dunblane elected him bishop, though the pope grumbled that the election ignored an earlier papal reservation before confirming him anyway. As bishop he presided over a consistorial court that settled a land dispute involving Inchaffray Abbey, reduced the number of canons at Abernethy's collegiate church from ten to five because of financial strain, and issued a dispensation allowing the future king Robert III to marry Annabella Drummond despite a canonical irregularity. He also sat on parliamentary committees dealing with justice and church business.

In his later years Walter became active in national affairs, attending at least five parliaments and serving on committees concerned with royal revenue, law and order in the Highlands, and judicial review. He was part of a Scottish embassy sent to London to negotiate a renewed truce with England as an earlier five-year peace was about to expire, and he witnessed its ratification back in Edinburgh. His last recorded appearance was swearing loyalty to the newly crowned Robert II in 1371, and he died shortly afterward, with a successor named to Dunblane by April 1372. Because so little was written about him at the time, modern accounts of his life amount to little more than a few pages pieced together from scattered records.

Nothing is known of his birth or parentage, and even his death is pinned only to 1371 or 1372 "" yet he accumulated two doctorates and a bishopric.

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