This Collegiate Church, previously a Benedictine nunnery, was erected only on 7 May 1389, after a petition of Archibald Douglas ("the Grim"), Lord of Galloway, to Avignon Pope Clement VII.
[3] Papal authorisation came in a letter to the Bishop of Glasgow, inside whose diocese Lincluden lay, which stated:...as is contained in the petition of Archibald, Lord of Galloway, his predecessors founded and built the monastery of Lincluden, O.
CLUN., ... and endowed it for the maintenance of eight or nine nuns, to be ruled by a prioress, while right of patronage remained with the lords of Galloway ...[4]The letter goes into the details of the monastery's problems and decline, details provided to the papacy by the Lord of Galloway, and asks Bishop Walter Wardlaw:to ascertain that these facts be true and having transferred the nuns to a house of the Cluniac or Benedictine order, to erect the collegiate church and hospice ...[4] He still held both Lincluden and Kirkmahoe on 17 May 1391, when the Pope wrote to him providing him to a canonry and prebend of Glasgow Cathedral.
[6] This election was ascribed by historian Michael Brown to the influence of the Lord of Galloway, now Archibald Douglas II.
[7] In a lost MacDowall charter, witnessed by Robert Keith and datable to 1412, he was said to have been in his seventh year of consecration.