James Frederick Skinner Gordon

James Frederick Skinner Gordon (1821–1904) was a Scottish antiquary and a minister in the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Life James Frederick Skinner Gordon, born at Keith, Banffshire, in 1821, claimed descent from the Gordons of Glenbucket, in Strathdon. Educated at Keith School and then at Madras College, St Andrews, he gained, when fifteen years of age, the Grant bursary at St Andrews University, and graduated there with distinction in 1840, proceeding M.A. in 1842. Appointed organising master in the (Episcopal) national schools at Edinburgh, he was ordained deacon in the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1843 and priest the next year. After a first curacy to the Bishop of Moray, David Low, at Pittenweem, Fifeshire, he removed in 1843 to Forres as curate to Alexander Ewing, afterwards Bishop of Argyll and the Isles at Forres (1843–4). His experiences at Pittenweem are narrated in his Scotichronicon.

He was an enthusiastic Freemason, having been initiated as a student at St Andrews in 1841, and he was the oldest member of the craft at his death. After resigning the charge of St Andrew's-by-the-Green in 1890 he lived in retirement at Beith, Ayrshire, and died there on 23 January 1904. He was interred with masonic honours in Beith cemetery.

Works Gordon led at the same time a strenuous literary life, closely studying the history of the Catholic and the Episcopal churches in Scotland, and the antiquities of Glasgow. His chief publication was The Ecclesiastical Chronicle for Scotland (4 volumes, Glasgow, 1867), which Alexander Hastie Millar calls "an elaborate and erudite work, which displayed much research"; the first two volumes, entitled Scotichronicon, contain a sketch of the pre-Reformation church, and an extended version of Robert Keith's Catalogue of Scottish Bishops; the third and fourth volumes, entitled Monasticon, give the history of the Scottish monasteries, and biographies of the Roman Catholic bishops of the post-Reformation mission.