The advent of the English began a process of radical transformation of the personnel of the church across much of Ireland. The conquerors imposed candidates of their own nation upon Irish sees, at first in a piecemeal fashion but more systematically from 1217. In that year William Marshal, lord of Leinster and a key figure in the regency council which governed England during the minority of Henry III, promulgated a veto against the promotion of Irishmen as bishops or as members of cathedral chapters.50 Irish churchmen complained directly to Pope Honorius III, who unreservedly condemned such blatant discrimination though he was unable to prevent it completely. Under the infamous Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) Irishmen were prohibited from holding any benefice or other office in the church in colonial Ireland.51 This discrimination persisted into the sixteenth century, though it was vitiated in practice by the contraction of the English colony in Ireland from the early fourteenth century which rendered the prohibition increasingly inoperable beyond the Pale around late medieval Dublin, and also by the readiness of many Irish clergymen to purchase a grant of denizenship.
Henry III extended to Ireland the procedure already agreed between King John and Pope Innocent III for the appointment of bishops in England.52 This allowed cathedral chapters to elect a bishop, but only after they had secured permission from the crown to hold an election and had accepted that the crown’s assent was required for their election to take effect. Meanwhile the crown held the temporalities of the see for the duration of the vacancy. The system gave the crown very considerable influence over the election of bishops in Ireland. By 1254 eleven Irish sees were held by foreigners, almost a third of the total, while the crown was involved in some measure in the appointment of at least sixteen of the remaining twenty-three bishops.53 The anglicization of the hierarchy of the Irish church led in turn to Englishmen, often close relations and clients of English bishops or abbots, being promoted to the more remunerative benefices. Colonial lords also preferred to have English clerics appointed to benefices in their gift. Consequently, across much of colonial Ireland the Irish church took on a distinctly English character.
The large-scale colonization of Ireland and the displacement of considerable numbers of Irish people onto marginal lands, and the exclusion of Irish churchmen from benefices over much of Ireland, were not consequences anticipated by the Irish bishops who had greeted Henry II in 1171-2. Inevitably there arose profound alienation and hostility on the part of the Irish towards the English colonists. From early in the thirteenth century English crown officials complained that Irish clergymen were very hostile towards the colonial community.54 Donal O’Neill, king of the Irish in Ulster, complained to the papacy that colonial clergymen declared that it was no sin to kill an Irishman.55 Divisions ran deep between churchmen of the two nations within the diocesan church, and within monasteries. In 1291 a clash between Irish and colonial friars at a meeting of the provincial council of the Franciscans at Cork left several clergymen dead!56
Against this stark evidence of antagonisms between the two nations within the medieval Irish church, one must also point to evidence of churchmen attempting to maintain peace between the two communities and of churchmen appealing to the English crown to promote reconciliation in Ireland.57 One cannot altogether discount the influence of such efforts. None the less, it was the contraction of the English lordship in Ireland, combined with a significant degree of acculturation between the two nations, that was eventually to lead to the easing of tensions.
Even within the Pale, where English influences remained strong, modi vivendi were achieved in time. In Armagh, for instance, the (usually non-Irish) archbishops directly administered only that part of their diocese inter Anglicos, where their consistory court and administrative procedures operated within the parameters of the English common law, whereas in the northern parishes inter Hibernicos the archbishops worked in partnership with the predominantly Irish cathedral chapter at Armagh and other local Irish subordinates in carrying out much of the routine administration. This formalized division of the diocese of Armagh, which even involved convening separate synods for the clergy inter Anglicos and those inter Hibernicos, appears, however, to have been unique.58 Perhaps more common was the situation in Kildare diocese where distinct benefices were customarily held by priests of a particular nation and all were supposed to work together for the well-being of the church and their parishioners.59 Nevertheless, problems remained, as in Dublin, where colonial antagonisms against Irish churchmen seem still to have run deep into the sixteenth century.60
Despite the twelfth-century reforms, the priesthood among the Irish beyond the English colony retained something of a hereditary character throughout the middle ages. Wherever erenaghs survived as tenants on episcopal lands it was quite common for a member of the erenagh’s sept or clan (and sometimes even the erenagh himself) to be the rector or vicar of the local, or another, parish.61 A significant number of erenaghs supported schools that offered varied curricula, some of which, like their southern counterparts, included courses specifically designed for young men aspiring to the priesthood.62 Doubtless the quality of these schools reflected the varying abilities of their masters, but the best of them produced students who proceeded to study at university in Oxford or, more rarely, further afield, and then returned to Ireland as graduates qualified to work in administrative offices in the church or as teachers in their own right.
In Irish society there was little or no stigma attached to clerical marriage or concubinage. The obituary of Cathal mac Manus Maguire (d. 1498), a canon of Clogher and Armagh, famously eulogized him as a ‘turtle-dove of chastity’ though he and his wife had no fewer than twelve children that we know of.63 In Co. Kilkenny, an area which was much colonized though it became gaelicized to a considerable degree by the late middle ages, the rector of Knocktopher in 1553 explained to a newly arrived Protestant bishop, John Bale, that it was considered an honour for a clergyman to have a bishop, or an abbot or a prior, as his father!64 Irish historians, however, have long disapproved of intimate relationships between medieval clergymen and women, seeing them as evidence of immorality. Clerical dynasties have been identified and it is easy to find references to the sons of bishops, abbots and parish clergy who followed their fathers into the church. Yet a key point is that these clergymen’s sons were often well educated and, having acquired a dispensation for being the fruit of their parents’ sin, were often better qualified for the offices they secured than was the average priest. In any event, the hereditary character of the priesthood over much of Ireland was simply part of a broader pattern wherein the professions among the Irish (including law, medicine and poetry) were generally associated with specific families.65 At a time when most priests were trained through a form of ‘apprenticeship’ with an older priest, the ‘professionalization’ of the priesthood within certain families could actually have served to maintain standards.
The lesser clergy in colonial parts of Ireland have not been much studied, though work on the end of the middle ages suggests that the poverty of parochial benefices in Ireland discouraged men from gentry families from pursuing a career in the church. Those few men from wealthy backgrounds who did enter the church enjoyed the advantage of a good education (financed by their parents, doubtless), and were reasonably assured of promotion to senior positions in the church.66 A similar pattern prevailed in Gaelic regions where the native aristocracy provided very few priests for the very poorly remunerated parochial benefices, though a number of them rose to become bishops or heads of monasteries or priories.67 At the very lowest levels of the church across colonial Ireland, including the Pale, the holders of the least remunerative benefices and the very numerous unbeneficed curates with cures of souls were predominantly Irishmen.68
Overall, the existence of two nations created tremendous rifts within the Irish church. However, the animosities between the two nations were ameliorated over time and, even within the Pale, the most anglicized enclave in Ireland, the church learned to encompass clergymen of the two nations with a reasonable degree of harmony.
World History
