As John Watt observed, historians have believed that there was ‘an overall degree of disorder in the late medieval Irish Church not far short of the total breakdown of organised religion in that war-torn country’.69 However, recent work has challenged this consensus, at least for parts of Ireland.70 Jefferies’s work on Armagh has revealed compelling evidence of a revival in the fortunes of the church in that diocese from the mid-fifteenth century. Annual diocesan synods were used to good effect to exhort the parish clergy to maintain high standards, and as opportunities for what we might call ‘in-service training’. Visitations were conducted regularly and Armagh’s consistory court seems to have processed the same kind of suits as its counterparts in southern England and to have dealt with them to some effect. Anthony Lynch has characterized the fifteenth-century archbishops of Armagh as ‘extremely conscientious and hardworking’.71
In the part of Armagh diocese that lay in the Pale, there was a dense network of parish churches and chapels with resident priests in place to cater for the pastoral needs of the population. From c.1450 onwards there was considerable investment in the extension and ornamentation of parish churches and chapels, and many were completely rebuilt. While similar research is needed for other dioceses, there is evidence that this pattern of increased spending on the fabric of the church was replicated across the Pale and in the outlying English urban settlements in Ireland.72 It seems that a general economic recovery in the English lordship in Ireland allowed the devotion of greater resources to the church than had been possible since the calamitous years of the fourteenth century when Ireland was beset by famine, plague and political turmoil. It is likely that the greater spending on religion also reflected some increase in piety.
As well as improving the fabric of their local churches and chapels, there was a remarkable increase in the numbers of chantries founded by lay folk on the eve of the Tudor reformations, replicating a pattern found also in northern England. Colm Lennon has revealed the existence of a very rich religious culture in late medieval Dublin with many religious and craft guilds which employed priests to celebrate mass for the souls of their members and relatives.73 Mary Ann Lyons has highlighted the intense lay piety among the gentry of Kildare, another part of the Pale, who invested in chantries, elaborate funerary monuments and various benefactions to the church.74 Generally, late medieval wills (although these survive in relatively small numbers and chiefly for middling to wealthy townspeople) reflect a strong concern for the welfare of their souls after death.75 The wills invariably include bequests for the celebration of intercessory masses, as well as gifts of cash or clothing to the local parish clergy, some money for the fabric of the local church or for the purchase of sacred ornaments, offerings for the maintenance of perpetual lights before hallowed statues, together with a bequest to one or more of the local mendicant communities.
In general, the evidence suggests that in the most anglicized parts of Ireland the diocesan church was in relatively good order by English standards and the laity engaged in forms of piety that would have been readily recognizable to their fellows in England. Brendan Bradshaw found evidence of significant contemporaneous investment in monasteries across much of colonial Ireland, though he has queried whether it was matched by any upsurge in monastic spirituality.76
Studying the church inter Hibernicos is more difficult than that in the Pale because of the relative dearth of documentation, and progress has been piecemeal and slow since Canice Mooney’s pioneering survey.77 His work on education, preaching and devotional literature revealed very strong continental and English influences in the piety disseminated in manuscripts and propounded from pulpits in the later middle ages. Yet Fr Mooney concluded, wrongly I feel, that the ‘rot had gone deep’ in the church and that the one ‘gleam of hope’ lay with the mendicant friars.
Between 1400 and 1508 no fewer than ninety new friaries were founded in Ireland, chiefly in Gaelic and gaelicized districts.78 Half of those were Franciscan Third Order foundations with small communities who supported the ministry of the local diocesan clergy and offered education to children. This remarkable expansion among the mendicants may safely be taken as a reflection of a contemporary religious revival among the Irish. Nor was this simply a matter of numbers; many of the new communities of friars were ‘Observant’, committed to a stricter observance of their rules.79 Observantism won over most of the existing communities, and thoroughly penetrated friaries in the Pale and in outlying towns. William Neely and Brendan Bradshaw have posited a late medieval religious revival inspired by the friars in
Kilkenny and in the cities of the south and west respectively. The work of the friars has long been seen as a factor in the survival of Catholicism across Ireland in the face of the Tudor reformations.
Recent work by Jefferies on the diocesan church across much of Ulster has shown that the greatest problem for the institution was not clerical concubinage and the tendency of the sons of churchmen to seek preferment in the church, but the poverty of the institution. The prevalence of subsistence agriculture among the Irish and the frequency of petty wars depressed clerical incomes from land and tithes. The beneficed clergy and erenaghs had considerable difficulty in maintaining the parish churches from their own resources alone. Yet, though church buildings were often in a poor state, there were resident clergy in place to meet the pastoral needs of the laity, except in those districts wasted by war. Indeed, it is the resilience of the diocesan church in conditions of widespread lawlessness and sporadic warfare that was its most striking feature.
World History
