The Early Middle Ages
Christianity had reached Ireland by the beginning of the fifth century. We may infer from linguistic evidence that the missionaries of the new faith came mainly from the Romano-British Church, rather than Gaul (a notable quantity of Irish loanwords derive from a British dialect of Latin). By 431, the number of Christians in Ireland warranted episcopal oversight, and Pope Celestine I commissioned a deacon named Palladius to be first bishop "to the Irish believing in Christ." The other (and by the seventh century) more famous fifth-century apostle of the Irish, Patrick, came from Britain; he is a less shadowy figure than Palladius, having left us some of his own writings. Although he does not provide a very clear picture of the organization of the Irish Church, Patrick does tell us that, as an Irish bishop, he was responsible to a synod of British bishops. Therefore Ireland had no metropolitan bishop.
In the Gaul of Palladius’s time or the Britain of Patrick’s, a bishop presided over a ciuitas (or city), and a metropolitan bishop over a province; in Ireland, however, there were no such cities or provinces.
Because Ireland had not been part of the Empire, it lacked the imperial administrative framework upon which ecclesiastical organization in the Latin West was based. However, evidence for the earliest phase of ecclesiastical development suggests that the principles by which the Church was organized in the imperial provinces were nevertheless adapted to Ireland’s peculiar circumstances. Our most important source for the period after the conversion is a collection of early Irish canons called the Synod of the Bishops (Synodus epis-coporum) that may date from the late fifth century. This text shows a bishop had authority over a plebs or parochia, that the clergy were subject to him, and that no one could perform any function within the plebs without his permission. The word plebs here represents the Irish tuath (or small kingdom); the Latin and Irish words both mean "people." This, for ecclesiastical purposes, was the counterpart to the ciuitas in the Empire; the tuath was, therefore, the earliest and fundamental unit of episcopal government in Ireland, once the Church had become widely established.
In the middle of the sixth century, many of the great ecclesiastical centers of the Irish Church were founded: Bangor, Clonard, Clonmacnoise, and Iona are among the most famous. These principal houses had daughter foundations that remained attached to the mother church with varying degrees of closeness. The practice in Iona, and probably the other large communities, was for the abbot to appoint praepositi (or priors) to supervise the daughter houses; the abbot would also make visitations to the subordinate houses. In the first half of the seventh century, a papal letter on the paschal question shows that bishops were now at least sharing power with the heads of these greater foundations.
The principal ecclesiastical settlements in early medieval Ireland were known as ciuitates and were composed of more than monks. They included both those whose vocation was monastic prayer and those on behalf of whom the monks proper offered their prayers; a professional military element might also be included within the wider community. The largest of the ciuitates began to take on the appearance of urban centers, with dense populations, a variety of crafts, and a delimited boundary with special legal status. Thus, places such as Armagh, Clonmacnoise, Cork, and Kil-dare became towns under the jurisdiction of the head of the church, the erenagh/princeps, who was often not necessarily in even minor orders.
The concept of the erenagh (Old Irish airchinnech, meaning chief or head), who was the governor of temporalities, is an extraordinary feature of the Irish Church; we find him described either explicitly as erenagh/princeps, or sometimes as abbot, but performing the same function as the erenagh/princeps. The Irish ecclesiastical princeps is attested in the Synod of the Bishops and is, therefore, an early feature of Church organization rather than the result of degeneracy as lay ecclesiastical rulers were, say, in Carolingian churches. Many of the churches, with their estates that were ruled by an erenagh/princeps, were controlled by ecclesiastical dynasties that acted like secular magnates and, in some cases, were minor branches of the secular ruling dynasties.
The most important churches, however, were still defined by their episcopal status, and bishops remained at the center of ecclesiastical organization; bishops feature prominently in the Irish annals. In fact, from the seventh century to the tenth, the evidence seems to point to a large degree of continuity in Irish ecclesiastical organization. We see not a Church dominated by abbots, as was once thought, but the authority of bishops, abbots, and coarbs existing side by side in an apparently complicated ecclesiastical structure. We find that the three types of authority—that of bishop, abbot, and coarb—might be exercised by one person alone, by separate individuals, or be combined in different permutations. So, for example, we have Bishop Crunnmael, abbot of Cell Mor Enir (Annals of Ulster, 770.12). The coarb (Old Irish comarba; Latin heres), or heir/successor of the founding saint, is found as early as the seventh century in the Liber Angeli in relation to Patrick. Indeed, Irish churchmen sometimes described the pope as "coarb of Peter." Therefore, from the earliest period for which we can discern Irish Church organization in any detail, the coarbial aspect is part of the structure of authority, together with the episcopal and the abbatial. This coexistence and combination of offices seems to be the most distinctive feature of early Irish ecclesiastical authority.
The great churches—the cult centers of saints— might have had both a paruchia and a familia. By the middle of the twentieth century, scholarship had come to understand the paruchia as a group of daughter monasteries controlled by the abbot of the mother house in an ecclesiastical structure dominated by monastic government. The links between the mother house and subordinate churches might extend beyond the boundaries of any one tuath, and the authority of the abbots of the greater monasteries could thus overshadow that of the local bishops. However, the earlier sense of paruchia (or parochia as it was written in Britain and Gaul) as the territory subject to, but distinct from, the episcopal church is closer to the sense that seems to be understood in Irish canon law. Thus, scholarship is now tending to view the paruchia as a bishop’s zone of pastoral jurisdiction, in principle territorially cohesive. However, the person who presided over the paruchia need not always have been a bishop and may have been a nonclerical princeps/erenagh, assisted by clerical ministers. The term paruchia can be used to mean both a basic sphere of jurisdiction (the paruchia of a particular church) and an extended one, comprising smaller units, some of which might be contiguous and others not (such as the paruchia of Armagh).
The familia of a saint comprised not only the people who belonged to his principal church but also those of the dependent churches and dependent kindreds. In this respect, the term corresponds to the restricted and extended senses in which paruchia is used. The occurrence in the sources of the terminology of plebs and tuath, in connection with ecclesiastical jurisdiction, also emphasizes that the fundamental aspects of ecclesiastical jurisdiction were territory and community.
Latin and vernacular prescriptive texts—the vernacular laws, the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis, and the Rfagail Phatraic (Rule of Patrick) —and hagiography all bear witness to an ecclesiastical hierarchy in the early eighth and ninth centuries, which is in principle episcopal with a parallel between superior episcopal jurisdiction and over kingship. The concept of hierarchy is adapted to that of nonclerical church rulers, with the rank of an archbishop or metropolitan credited to the nonclerical governor of a church of great eminence.
Entries in the Irish annals seem to refer to bishops who enjoyed superior jurisdiction over spheres greater than a basic episcopal diocese (e.g., Oengus of the Ulstermen, who died in 665), and an eighth-century legal tract (Uraicecht Becc) refers to "a supreme noble bishop" who is equal in status to the king of a whole province such as Munster. Thus, territorial bishoprics and an episcopal hierarchy were realities in the early medieval period, but spheres of jurisdiction were unstable and probably altered in response to ecclesiastical and political change.
The Nature of Irish Monasticism
The appearance of the monastic life among Patrick’s converts was the culmination of his mission: Patrick considered celibacy to be the highest form of religious life. As well as the usual male and female celibates, there were also widows and married people who had taken a vow of sexual abstinence; he was particularly concerned with the monastic vocation of women. Patrick’s ambitions for the celibate life might make the emergence of great monasteries in sixth-century Ireland easier to understand. Palladius, too, had monastic connections.
Patrick perceived the monastic vocation to be one that may be lived in the world, outside a monastic enclosure, and this unorganized approach to monasticism may explain some of the odd features of the Irish Church, such as the wide extension of monastic vocabulary, which makes it difficult to distinguish religious houses from secular churches or the head of a monastery from the head of any other independent church. In the seventh century, Tfrechan talks frequently of "monks of Patrick," many of whom were female. The smaller churches to which they belonged were often nunneries combined with a male pastoral clergy. In some cases, these nunneries could be episcopal churches, too, so Patrick’s nuns could provide the bases from which bishops worked. The cenobitic type of monasticism, which formed the heart of all these communities, is something that is attested throughout the early Middle Ages.
The other type of monasticism, that of the hermit, took two forms. There was the unregulated or solitary holy man, usually poorly educated, who tended to be viewed with disapproval; his counterpart was the authorized anchorite, a well-educated person, conven-tually trained, who was highly regarded. This second variety usually lived with others who were devoted to high levels of mortification, within or near an ecclesiastical community. Their dwelling was known as a dfsert (literally, a desert); by the ninth century, this term was being applied to enclosures of female religious as well as to some prominent churches. There was often interchange between the two communities; the cenobitic monks might spend temporary periods in the eremitic life, and the anchorite was sometimes called to take on ecclesiastical office.
Church Reform
Until the twelfth century, the Irish Church was so organized that it lacked the jurisdiction of a metropolitan archbishop; moreover, it had failed to embrace developments that in the rest of Europe had seen a separation between pastoral and monastic churches two centuries earlier. In the ninth and tenth centuries, major churches, as repositories of wealth and property, were the natural targets for Viking attacks but suffered no permanent damage. The establishment of Viking settlements, especially Dublin, provided an opportunity for change. In the eleventh century, the Scandinavian settlers became Christian, and their churches sought links with the English Church. This drew Ireland to the attention of the reforming archbishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc and Anselm. The first bishoprics to follow the Roman model—a compact territorial diocese ruled from an episcopal see—appeared in the Scandinavian kingdoms on the coast: Dublin first, in 1074; Waterford in 1096; and Limerick sometime later. The influence of Canterbury on the reform of the Irish Church was marked. Lanfranc certainly considered the Irish Church to be subordinate to the English; Goscelin of Canterbury presented St. Augustine as the primate of England, Scotland, and Ireland in his hagiographical works; and four successive bishops of Dublin were consecrated by archbishops of Canterbury, as was Malchus (a monk of Gloucester Abbey) as bishop of Waterford.
The main problems for the reformers were that the ecclesiastical rulers—the erenaghs—had too much power, bishops too little, and the Church was not organized into territorial dioceses along the Roman model. Three national synods were held, at Cashel (1101), Raith Bressail (1111), and Kells-Mellifont (1152), which established diocesan organization and absorbed Dublin, the first of the reformed territorial bishoprics, into a national Church under the primacy of Armagh.
The eventual consequence of Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169, and the subsequent colonization of eastern Ireland, was the division of the Church into English and Irish factions. This division was effected by the Second Synod of Cashel (1172), the first ecclesiastical council to be controlled by the English. Not only did it promulgate reforming decrees concerning such matters as the payment of tithes, freedom of the Church from lay control, and clerical privileges but it also resolved that the Church in Ireland should adopt the practices of the English Church in all matters. From now on the system of ecclesiastical appointments, ecclesiastical courts, clerical privilege, and so on, would obtain in Ireland as they did in England. The diocesan structure that was created in the twelfth century survived largely unaltered through the Middle Ages. In the cathedrals, the old monastic chapters became canonical chapters and, in general, the Irish Church more closely resembled the Church in England and continental Europe. Many of the older churches, however, came to lose their status, and though most adopted the rule of St. Augustine, the thirteenth century saw a rapid decline, as hereditary coarbs and erenaghs now lived off estates that had once supported great churches. The new dioceses, inadequately endowed with assets taken from churches, did little better, and the once-great institutions of Clonmacnoise and Glendalough were too poor to survive as episcopal sees. The reformers’ moral program, the imposition of clerical celibacy, and the enforcement of canonical marriage also largely failed.
During the thirteenth century, the dioceses were subdivided into parishes; this process occurred more extensively in the English colony, where arrangements for the support of parish clergy differed from those that continued to exist in Gaelic Ireland. Factional considerations influenced episcopal nominations, so that the bishops of Ireland were divided along lines of nationality. There were attempts in the thirteenth century, which were opposed by the papacy, to exclude Irishmen from the episcopate. The provinces of Armagh and Tuam were governed almost exclusively by Irish bishops, while Dublin was the preserve of Englishmen, and Cashel had a mixture of Irish and Englishmen. Another divisive issue concerned the primacy of Armagh; Dublin was ultimately successful in withholding its recognition of Armagh’s primacy, while Cashel unsuccessfully attempted a similar policy.
An accompanying feature of Church reform was enthusiasm for the new religious orders, and the Cistercians flourished in the twelfth century under the guidance of St. Malachy, who is the most important figure in the reorganization of Irish monasticism. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, the Cistercian order was largely decadent in Ireland. In contrast, the mendicant orders came to thrive and the Augustinians remained active. Such religious communities were unaffected by the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and this circumstance provided an environment in which Roman Catholicism was able to survive the Reformation in the West of Ireland.
