Early Developments
Early Irish monasteries were largely unaffected by Benedictine monasticism, although Irish foundations on the continent played a key role in transmitting the Benedictine rule. In the ninth century the liturgical practices of the Cele De movement showed some slight Benedictine influences, and the appointment of a number of Irish Benedictine monks from English monasteries as bishops of the Norse-Irish sees of Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick in the eleventh and twelfth centuries brought Ireland into contact with monastic reformers in England. A Benedictine priory at Dublin existed from approximately 1085 to 1096.
In 1076, Muiredach Mac Robartaig (d. 1088), an Irish pilgrim and anchorite, settled in Regensburg in Germany and in 1090 his disciples established the Benedictine monastery of St. James. This became the mother house of an Irish Benedictine congregation (Schottenkloster) in German-speaking lands that numbered ten monasteries at its peak. The congregation established two priories in approximately 1134 at Cashel and Roscarbery for recruitment and fundraising purposes. The congregation went into decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in 1515 the house at Regensburg was taken over by Scottish monks.
Fore Abbey, Co. Westmeath.
The increasing number of Irish pilgrims to Rome in the eleventh century led to the establishment of a Benedictine monastery, Holy Trinity of the Scots, on the Celian Hill.
New Orders and the Twelfth Century Reform
The orders most favored by the twelfth-century reformers of the Irish church were the Augustinian canons and Canonesses and the Cistercian monks. The Canons combined monastic observance with pastoral work and over 120 foundations were established by the mid-thirteenth century. Houses belonging to the congregations of Arrouaise and St. Victor were the most numerous, but contacts between the Irish houses and the Orders’ central authorities were poor. The Pre-monstratensian canons founded approximately six abbeys and five smaller houses in Ireland between 1182 and 1260.
The early progress of the Cistercian monks in Ireland can be traced in great detail from the writings of St. Bernard and Irish references in the order’s general statutes. In 1139, while en route to Rome, St. Malachy (Mael Maedoic) visited the Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux, then at the height of its influence. Leaving a number of his entourage to be trained as monks he procured a site near Drogheda for the first Irish foundation, Mellifont, which was colonized in 1142 by French and Irish monks. Differences over observance soon led to the return of the French brethren to Clairvaux. Despite this, the monastery flourished, eventually numbering twenty daughter houses in its filiation.
The Anglo-Norman invasion in 1169 had a profound effect on monastic and ecclesiastical life. Although initially welcomed by Irish churchmen as promoters of church reform, racial tension soon emerged and the issue of the "two nations" in the Irish church became a dominant and divisive one for the rest of the Middle Ages. The colonists’ establishment of new Cistercian houses created rival filiations to Mellifont. These foundations were staffed by English or French personnel and generally maintained a higher standard of monastic discipline so that racial animosity became fused with issues of religious observance. This contributed to a breakdown in relations between the order’s general topic and the Gaelic houses between 1217 and 1230. Known as the "Mellifont conspiracy" the dispute was largely resolved by the visitation of Abbot Stephen of Lexington in 1228. He disbanded the Mellifont filiation, imposed French and English abbots on a number of houses, dismissed nuns from the vicinity of the monasteries, and insisted that all monks be able to confess in either Latin or French. The Mellifont filiation was restored in 1274.
The Anglo-Normans also introduced the Hospitaller and military orders to Ireland. Of these, the Knights Templar with their principal preceptory at Clontarf and the Knights Hospitaller at Kilmainham were the most important. They were granted extensive lands and recruited their members almost exclusively from the ranks of the colonists. A monastery for the Trinitarians, a group dedicated to the redemption of Christian slaves, was established at Adare in Limerickin approximately 1226 and the Order of the Holy Cross (Crutched Friars) had established seventeen priory hospitals by the early thirteenth century.
The twelfth century also saw the emergence of anchorites or religious recluses attached to parochial and monastic churches in many of the towns and cities of the colony. The 1306 will of John de Wynchedon, a wealthy Cork merchant, lists four such recluses at various churches in the city, and there is contemporary evidence for their presence at sites in Dublin, Water-ford, Fore, and Cashel.
The small number of early nunneries that survived into the later Middle Ages generally adopted the Augustinian rule during the twelfth century. A number of new houses for Augustinian Canonesses were also made, of which Clonard in Meath (c. 1144) was initially the most important. In 1195, it was listed as having thirteen daughter houses. The Ua Conchobair foundation at Kilcreevanty, County Galway, although originally Benedictine, had become Augustinian by 1223 when it was recognized as the mother house of the Canonesses in Connacht. Other important Augustinian nunneries were Killone, County Clare, St. Mary de Hogges (c. 1146), and Grace Dieu (c. 1190) in Dublin city and county, respectively. There are also references to Cistercian nuns at Derry and Ballymore, County Westmeath.
The Mendicant Friars
The mendicant friars experienced rapid growth in Ireland in the thirteenth century. The Dominicans arrived in 1224, and an independent Irish Franciscan province was erected in 1230. The Carmelites are first mentioned in 1271, and the Augustinians made their first foundation in 1282. All these Orders were founded from England, and the Irish Dominicans, Carmelites, and Augustinians formed part of the English provinces for most of the pre-Reformation period. The friars initially gravitated to the towns and boroughs of the colony, although a number of important early Gaelic foundations were also made: Franciscan and Dominican houses were established at Ennis, Armagh, and Roscommon while the Dominican foundation at Athenry, through a de Bermingham foundation, enjoyed the patronage of local native Irish lords.
The Irish friars promoted pastoral renewal through preaching and hearing confessions. Each order developed a network of studia or schools in which young friars were instructed. More promising students were sent for higher studies to the respective orders’ studia at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Strasbourg, Bologna, Milan, and Padua. The mendicants also provided the teaching staff for the short-lived University of Dublin in the 1320s.
The friars’ success brought them into conflict with the Anglo-Irish secular clergy, and Archbishop Richard Fitz Ralph of Armagh (d. 1360) proved a formidable and influential opponent.
Despite their initial fervor the mendicants were also divided by racial tension. The most frequently cited example was the death of sixteen friars as a result of a dispute between Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Franciscans in Cork in 1291. The campaign of Edward Bruce in Ireland between 1315 and 1317 further polarized the friars, and the pope strongly condemned the native Irish friars for supporting Bruce. Irish grievances found expression in theapproximately 1317 Remonstrance of Domnall Ua Neill to Pope John XXII, who denounced the Cistercian monks of Granard and other
Anglo-Irish religious for hunting and killing the Gaelic population without compunction. Separatist tendencies on the part of the Anglo-Irish Augustinians, Dominicans, and Knights Hospitaller were the cause of tension with their English confreres. In 1380, the attempts of an English Dominican, Friar John of Leicester, to assert his authority as head of the Irish Dominican vicariate occasioned an armed riot in Dublin during which the friars on both sides were found to be wearing chain mail under their habits.
The general decline in the fortunes of the colony from the end of the thirteenth century in the face of war, famine, and Gaelic revival also affected the religious life. No new houses of Cistercian or Augustinian Canons were founded after 1272, and by 1300 the first wave of mendicant expansion had peaked, with only a small number of foundations made after that date. The Black Death (1348-1349) had a devastating effect on religious and monastic life in Ireland as elsewhere in Europe. The Kilkenny chronicler, Friar John Clyn, records the death of twenty-five Franciscans in Drogheda and twenty-three in Dublin before Christmas 1348. As well as devastating the monasteries numerically the plague exacerbated the decline in recruitment and morale that characterized fourteenth-century Irish monasticism. Conventual life all but collapsed in many Cistercian and Canons’ monasteries. The disappearance of the lay brother from Cistercian houses deprived them of their labor force and meant that the land was rented out, while speculation on the wool trade led some monasteries into financial difficulties.
The Observant Reform and the Dissolution of the Monasteries
The emergence of the Observant movement among the mendicant friars at the end of the fourteenth century brought the Irish friars into contact with one of the most vibrant reform currents in the late medieval church. Within each Order the Observants promoted rigorous discipline and strict adherence to the rule and constitutions as antidotes to the lax observance known as "Conventualism." To facilitate this, the continental Observants received papal and conciliar permission to elect their own superiors thus, forming a hierarchical structure within each order, nominally subordinate to the Conventual or unreformed authorities. In the Irish context this mechanism proved politically attractive to Gaelic friars who, by becoming Observants, could withdraw from the jurisdiction of the Anglo-Irish and English friars who had dominated each order since the thirteenth century. Although this may have contributed to the initial success of the reform in Gaelic areas, the genuine religious zeal of the reformers was recognized and many of the older foundations also adopted the reform. The movement first emerged in Ireland in 1390 among the Dominicans of Drogheda and increased in influence throughout the fifteenth century, with a distinct Observant congregation emerging by 1503. Franciscan reformers were active by 1417, establishing an Irish Observant vicariate in 1460. The Augustinian Observants made their first foundation at Banada, County Sligo, in 1423 and by 1517 numbered eight houses.
The Observants were highly regarded as confessors, preachers, and moral authorities and attracted widespread and influential patronage. The Franciscans in particular were keen promoters of the "Third Order" among their lay followers. Initially intended for zealous lay people who continued in their normal secular occupations, the Third Order or Tertiary Rule also provided the canonical basis for communities of professed religious and between 1426 and 1540 forty-nine communities of Franciscan tertiaries and one of Dominicans were founded. These Third Order houses were concentrated in the Gaelic areas of Connacht and Ulster, and their members engaged in educational and pastoral work.
Only the Franciscan movement had any impact on women’s religious life, with six houses of the Order of St. Clare being listed in 1316. A later list gives three foundations tentatively identified as Carrick-on-Suir (County Tipperary), Youghal (County Cork), and Fooran (County Westmeath). The Franciscan nunnery recorded in Galway in 1511 was probably a Third Order house.
The late fifteenth century saw the establishment of colleges of secular priests at Youghal (1464), Athenry (1484), Galway (1484), and Kildare (1494) and the re-emergence of the anchoritic vocation in parts of Gaelic Ireland. Attempts at reform on the part of the Cistercians in the same period met with little success: in approximately 1497 Abbot John Troy of Mellifont asked to be excused from acting as visitator of the Irish houses because of the difficulties this entailed. Another report asserted that in only two of the monasteries, Mellifont and Dublin, was the religious habit worn or the Divine Office celebrated.
Owing to the incomplete nature of the Tudor conquest, the dissolution policy was administered unevenly in Ireland. In areas under crown control most religious houses were officially suppressed between 1536 and 1543. The earls of Thomond and Desmond were allowed to run the suppression campaigns in their own territories and their connivance ensured that some monastic houses and many friaries remained unmolested. In Gaelic Ireland the policy had little effect, allowing the friars in particular to regroup and, through their well-established Continental links, ally themselves with the forces of Counter Reformation Catholicism.
