Limerick and South-West Ireland

Medieval Art and Architecture

Roger Stalley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781907625077
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000161090
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book contains essays devoted to the medieval art and architecture of Limerick in the Munster province of South-West Ireland. It underpins the degree to which Irish craftsmen and builders engaged with the rest of Europe, and the nature of their relationship with English practice.

The Irish Cathedral in the 12th Century: The Dioceses of Limerick and Killaloe

RICHARD GEM

The concept of the ‘cathedral church’ as a special category of building distinguished from other important churches did not emerge in Ireland before the reforms of the Church promoted through a series of synods during the course of the 12th century. The first aim of such reforms was to establish a regular diocesan structure centred on clearly recognised see-churches. But the architectural implications of the revised institutional structures were worked through only slowly. Cathedrals designated at the beginning of the 12th century were for the most part existing old-established churches. With the introduction of Romanesque architectural ornament from the 1120s and 1130s onwards, these churches might be highly decorated but retained a modest scale, as at Roscrea. It was only after the establishment of the reformed religious orders in the 1140s, as at Monasteranenagh, that ideas about the scale of buildings started to be transformed. St Mary’s cathedral in Limerick, built, it is argued here, between the 1150s and 1170s, represents one of the earliest Irish cathedrals to be designed as a ‘great church’ and shows that this stage of development had been reached before, though on the eve of, the English invasion of Ireland in the late 12th century.

THE mainland of western Europe was heir to the late antique tradition of the cathedral, as the seat of the bishop at the centre of his diocese, being a great church reflecting its institutional centrality in its architectural scale and development. During the early Middle Ages the same situation generally did not pertain in the de-Romanised and un-Romanised islands of Britain and Ireland off the north-west corner of the European mainland. Even in Anglo-Saxon England, which made so much of its ecclesiastical links with Rome, bishops’ churches were of little architectural account except where they coincided with great monastic centres like Canterbury, Winchester and Worcester. It was only with the Norman conquest of England in the last third of the 11th century that a transformation was effected, with remarkable speed and thoroughness, when all the cathedral churches of the country were rebuilt on a grand scale — a phenomenon made possible not only by a change in ideology but also by the enormous financial resources that the English Church could command. In Ireland the situation was different again, and the process of transition to the continental model was more episodic and protracted through the course of the 12th century. This transformation can be well studied in the territory of the Uí Briain kings of Thomond, falling largely within the dioceses of Killaloe and Limerick. But the process can be understood only against the background of the institutional history of the Irish Church in this period, when attempts were being made to reform it along lines that would bring it more into accord with what the papacy and reform-minded bishops considered should be normative for the western Church as a whole.

THE TRADITIONAL BACKGROUND

THE status and jurisdiction of the bishop in the Irish Church before the reforms of the 12th century are extraordinarily complex issues, which it is not the place here to summarise.¹ However, some of the complexities may be noted in the region under consideration. Here, through the 10th and 11th centuries there is a succession of references to bishops of Thomond, but without their being clearly identified with a specific see-church, even though in practice such bishops must have functioned from a specific church or churches as their base. Alongside this, there are numerous references to the rulers of the great monastic churches, be they abbots, coarbs (successors of the founding saint) or erenaghs (administrators of the temporalities of the church); but there are only very occasional references to these persons being simultaneously in episcopal orders.

Among the great monasteries along the lower Shannon was Killaloe, which enjoyed an especial degree of political importance because of its close connections with the ruling Ua Briain dynasty, whose fortress of Kincora rose up above the church. But the church of Killaloe at this stage does not seem to have had an innate and uninterrupted episcopal status, any more than the other leading regional monasteries. In this situation, there was little role at Killaloe or elsewhere for ‘cathedral churches’ as such; there were simply the great monasteries with assemblages of buildings, including the main monastic church, which might as occasion demanded serve as the locus for episcopal functions. Even the main churches in these complexes, however, were traditionally built on a modest scale and on a simple single-cell plan.²

BISHOPRICS AND CATHEDRALS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE I2TH CENTURY

The admonitions of Lanfranc and Anselm

STIRRINGS towards ‘reform’ in the organisation of the Irish Church are first evidenced in the late 11th century, when lay and ecclesiastical rulers in Ireland, recognising the need for change, invited successive archbishops of Canterbury to consecrate bishops for the Hiberno-Norse towns: the archbishops, in responding, took the opportunity to urge that what they perceived as abuses should be addressed.³ Thus Lanfranc writing in 1074 to King Toirrdelbach Ua Briain (1063-86) brought charges including: ‘that bishops are consecrated by one bishop only; and that many bishops are ordained in villages rather than cities’, both of which he asserted were against canon law.⁴ Subsequently Anselm wrote two letters to King Muirchertach Ua Briain (1086-1118) referring to the same issues. The first letter, of c. 1095, repeated objections to the alleged Irish practice of new bishops being consecrated by a single bishop and ‘in places where they should not be ordained’.⁵ In the second letter, of c. 1096, Anselm clarifies the problem that he perceived:

Again, it is alleged that far and wide in your country bishops are elected and established without a defined place of episcopate, and that they are ordained as bishop by a single bishop, as though they were any priest. This is undoubtedly entirely contrary to the sacred canons, and those who are so instituted or ordained, together with those ordaining them, should be admonished to be deposed from episcopal office. A bishop, unless he has a defined diocese and people whom he watches over, cannot be established in accordance with [the will of] God; for the one who does not have a flock whom he pastures is worthy of having neither the name nor office of pastor among the laity.⁶

King Muirchertach and his senior bishop, Máel Muire Ua Dúnáin, possibly in response to Anselm’s letters, carried forward the movement for reform with the convening of a synod of the southern half of Ireland at Cashel in 1101. This corrected various abuses; but it did not address the questions relating to the bishops and their diocesan structures.

Bishop Gille of Limerick (c. 1106-40)

A few years later, following the pattern established earlier at Dublin and recently at Waterford, it was decided to appoint a bishop of Limerick, the Hiberno-Norse town that had become the effective capital of the Ua Briain kingdom from the 11th century. The appointee was a young cleric named Gille, or in Latin Gislebertus.⁷ Bishop Gille is first recorded in a letter that he wrote to Archbishop Anselm in 1106 or 1107, probably shortly after his own consecration, in which he congratulates Anselm on the settlement of his dispute with King Henry I and refers to a gift of twenty-five pearls that he is sending him.⁸ Anselm’s reply to Gille refers to their friendship, dating from a time when they had come to know each other in Rouen; it then goes on to counsel him on his responsibilities now that he is a bishop and urges him in general terms to use his position to secure the agreement of King Muirchertach and his fellow bishops to correct abuses in the Church and to establish good practices.⁹ Apart from these hints, there is little that is known about Gille’s background, although he was probably Irish, if not Hiberno-Scandinavian, and possibly from Limerick. He continued to hold the see of Limerick for over thirty years thereafter, finally resigning it c. 1140 and dying in 1145.¹⁰

The synod of Ráith Breasail (1111)

RADICAL change in the nationwide structure of the episcopate was taken firmly in hand in 1111 when King Muirchertach, with his leading bishop, Máel Muiré, and with Bishop Cellach of Armagh, convened a great synod of the whole of Ireland at a place called Ráith Breasail in Munster. It appears that this synod was presided over by Gille, acting as the legate of Pope Paschal II.¹¹ The decrees of the synod established that Ireland, like England, was to be divided into two ecclesiastical provinces: that of Armagh for the northern half, and that of Cashel for the southern half. Each archbishop was to have under him eleven other bishops, while the archbishop of Armagh was to hold the primacy. In the part of the southern province that fell in Munster there were to be, in addition to the metropolitan see of Cashel, six other bishoprics, including Killaloe and Limerick.¹² The whole scheme was clearly an aprioristic one and corresponded poorly with realities on the ground, where the set number of new bishoprics meant that there were going to be old-established churches that gained in status, while others lost out: these anomalies were going to take the rest of the century to sort out. What was not faced up to in 1111, or later in the century, was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Colour Plates
• Introduction
• Lordship Beyond the Pale: Munster in the Later Middle Ages
• A Brief Introduction to Medieval Limerick
• Patterns of Patronage: Churches, Round Towers and the Dál Cais Kings of Munster (c. 950–1050)
• Mouthing Obscenities, Christological Typologies? Complexities of Meaning at Dysert O’Dea
• The Irish Cathedral in the 12th Century: The Dioceses of Limerick and Killaloe
• Perception and Meaning: Early Gothic Architecture in the Archdiocese of Cashel
• Mendicant Cloisters in Munster
• Holycross and the Language of Irish Late Gothic
• Piety and Politics: Funerary Sculpture in Cashel c. 1500–1640
• The Larger Castles of Later Medieval Co. Limerick
• The Tower Houses of Co. Limerick
• An Introduction to the History and Architecture of Bunratty Castle
• ‘It would be world famous if it was on an island in the Rhine’: The Stained Glass of Bunratty Castle, Co. Clare
• The Limerick Crosier and Mitre
• At the Uttermost Ends of the Earth
• The Misericords in St Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick: An Additional Note
• A Tale of Two Crosiers