Monasticism

In the twelfth century a number of the largest monasteria were reorganized with the monks proper being segregated from the rest of the community. At Derry such segregation was achieved at the cost of eighty or more dwellings being demolished to make way for an exclusive monastery compound.39 Many of the segregated monastic communities adopted the rule of the Augustinian canons, as happened, for example, at Armagh, Clogher and Cork. These canons observed a flexible rule in which priests took monastic vows but were allowed to conduct a pastoral ministry, in addition to celebrating monastic offices in their abbeys, without the requirement of manual labour. It was this flexibility, which resembled the traditional customs of the Irish church, that resulted in the order of the Augustinian canons having the greatest number of houses in Ireland from the twelfth century onwards.40 The Ceile De, one of the strictest indigenous religious orders in Ireland before the twelfth-century reforms, survived at Armagh and Devenish, but seemingly not elsewhere.41

Benedictine houses were very rare in Ireland compared with England. The greatest Benedictine foundation was that of the English adventurer John de Courcey at Downpatrick.42 Yet there was an important Irish Benedictine community on mainland Europe in the twelfth century, the Schottenkloster, with nine houses in German lands and which, in 1177-80, took charge of a monastery in Kiev, then capital of Russia. The Cistercian order came to Ireland under the dual patronage of Malachy of Armagh, a leading Irish reformer, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The close relationship between these two reformers is reflected not only by Bernard’s Life of Malachy but by the striking fact that the skulls of those two saints share a reliquary at Troyes cathedral to this day. The first Cistercian house in Ireland was founded at Mellifont in 1142. Three decades later there were no fewer than fifteen Cistercian monasteries in Ireland, and of the twenty-five subsequent foundations fifteen were Irish and ten were English.43 These great abbeys were imposing in their scale and in their architecture and gave an impressive physical expression to the ecclesiastical reforms in progress.

Yet there remained considerable continuity, not only in the small buildings that continued in use as parish churches and chapels and the continuation of many older religious communities under an Augustinian guise, but even among the Cistercians.

Assimilation to Irish customs set in early among the new orders, with Irish monks erecting separate eremitical cells in the old manner and dependent cells for nuns being attached to monasteries.44

The records of the Cistercian order reveal how pervasive was the influence of Irish customs even within that most prescriptive of orders, despite repeated efforts to impose conformity to the strictures of Citeaux. The original community of French Cistercian monks sent to Ireland returned after two years as a result of tensions with their Irish confreres who, Bernard observed, were ‘little disciplined and. . . found it hard to obey observances that were strange to them’.45 Bernard’s successors were less understanding and complained that the discipline of the order was observed only in the wearing of the habit.46 When Stephen of Lexington, abbot of Stanley in Wiltshire, was sent to Ireland in 1228 to reform the Cistercian order, he found Mellifont and a number of other monasteries transformed into fortresses, with armed monks and lay brothers ready to bar his entrance. Stephen persisted, however, and through persuasion and the support of the ‘secular arm’ he imposed rigorous regulations upon the Irish Cistercians. More dramatically, he broke up Mellifont’s affiliation of monasteries, assigning its daughter houses to monasteries in England or Clairvaux. He forbade the appointment of Irishmen as abbots in most monasteries until such time as they had become ‘acclimatized’ to Cistercian observances. These draconian measures gradually brought the Cistercians in Ireland into closer conformity with the prescriptions of Citeaux.47

The twelfth-century development of monasticism in Ireland is symptomatic of the reform process as a whole. One finds impressive evidence of the adoption of broader European norms in ecclesiastical organization. Yet the novel institutional forms adopted overlay very strong elements of continuity in terms of outlook and practice. These raise doubts about the ability of the Irish reformers to transform Irish society, and its clergy, into model Christians by Roman standards without the coercive mechanisms of the English common law acting in conjunction with the church courts to impose the church’s canonical strictures upon them. None the less, the religious enthusiasm that inspired the twelfth-century reforms was real enough, even if the novel disciplines of the continental orders proved hard to observe. By 1230 there were about 200 religious houses for men in Ireland, compared with forty-six in Scotland and thirty-three in Wales.

From the second quarter of the thirteenth century the expansion of monasticism in Ireland came to an end as religious enthusiasm among the wealthy found a new and cheaper outlet in the form of investment in friaries for the new mendicant orders. The advent of the mendicants in Ireland was remarkably early, and their expansion across Ireland was strikingly swift. The first Dominican houses were founded (in Dublin and Drogheda) in 1224, and the first Franciscan foundations (in Youghal and Cork) in 1229-31. Within half a century these two orders had no fewer than forty-six friaries between them and the advent of the Carmelites in 1272 and the Augustinian friars in 1282 helped to increase the number of mendicant houses to eighty-five by 1340.48

Though the first friars to come to Ireland hailed from England and the first mendicant foundations were established in colonial towns, the orders attracted patronage and recruits from both nations in medieval Ireland. Through their expertise in preaching and evangelization they exerted great influence in the small colonial towns where they were based. However, through preaching tours the mendicants’ influence also pervaded much of the countryside. Friars were commonly called upon to deliver the obligatory quarterly sermons in parishes whose parish priests were incapable of preaching.49 To judge by the number of foundations financed by lay men and women, the bequests granted to them in wills and the common request of lay folk and clergy alike to be buried in mendicants’ habits in the friaries’ graveyards, it is clear that the friars were very effective in inspiring religious enthusiasm.