In recent historiography a rather unlikely alliance has emerged which is concerned to normalize Early Irish Christianity by emphasizing its links with the religious culture of Western Europe. One wing of the alliance represents a historiographical tradition that originated in the debates of the Reformation with the introduction of a formidable Aunt Sally by the erudite ecclesiastical historian Archbishop Ussher, who purported to discover in the Early Irish Church a form of Christianity in conformity with the Pure Word of God, uncorrupted by papal accretions. Ussher’s A Discourse of the Religion anciently professed by the Scottish and Irish initiated a debate that has reverberated down the centuries around the issue of which of the two major post-Reformation Christian traditions may claim Early Irish Christianity for its heritage. The debate continues to echo, even in these ecumenical times, in a Roman Catholic tradition of writing about the history of the Early Irish Church which emphasizes its links with Roman Orthodoxy—which were, in reality, tenuous and tension-ridden—and glosses over its highly characteristic idiosyncrasies. More recently that tradition has received unlikely and, indeed, unwitting support in consequence of the development of a revisionist trend in Celtic historical studies against a perception of Celtic Ireland that originated in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century and that was taken over holus-bolus by the cultural nationalists. This romantic-nationalist interpretation pivots upon an ethnographic antithesis between the Celt and the other races of Western Europe which endows the former with singular qualities of spirit and of heart and interprets Early Irish Christianity accordingly. By way of antidote modern scholarship has taken to emphasizing external influences and the European context as the key to an understanding of the historical development of Christianity in Ireland, playing up its debt to the Latin West and playing down the claims made on its behalf as the light of Dark Age Europe.

This paper is concerned with the establishment of a monastic house in a recently colonized area by the lord responsible for the settlement of the land. The importance of the priory to the local economy will be examined in the forty years after its foundation, when settlement in the area was stabilizing and the initial flow of settlers appears to have stopped. The role of the monastery in the process of colonization will be studied and the priory considered as an instrument of colonization. The paper will also attempt to establish the nature of the relationship between the founder of the house and the priory in the latter’s early years of existence.

Perhaps I can best introduce my paper, explain its nature and state my objective in writing it, by describing it as another step towards completing the second part of a study of which my book The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland was the first part.’ The study which concluded with the Statute of Kilkenny of 1366 needs extending chronologically by at least a century. More importantly, the nature of the analysis itself needs to be deepened. The ‘Two Nations’ book began with asking a fairly simple and limited question: what was the relationship of the ecclesiastical and civil powers within the English-settled parts of Ireland—in short, English law and the Irish Church. But it ended raising a more complex and more fundamental question about the overall effects on the Church of the establishment in Ireland of an English colony which was not coterminous with the country as a whole and whose strength and influence declined in the later middle ages. There may have been a more or less satisfactory answer in the book to the restricted question. There was, at best, no more than a tentative beginning to an answer to the more fundamental one.

It is rewarding, if usually fairly difficult, to discover to what extent the views of medieval bishops on matters of devotion and church discipline impinged upon the spiritual lives of ordinary lay people. In the case of Ireland, provincial legislation probably provides the best available means by which to attempt this. Although the most important pastoral relationship within the Church was always that of priest and people in the parish, both parties were under the guiding hand and oversight of the bishop. It is to this ancient episcopal role as overseer, in die pastoral context, that the surviving sources direct us most.

In a lengthy and favourable review of Pádraig A. Breathnach’s edition and analysis of the legendary account of the foundation of the Irish monastery at Regensburg, Libellus defundacione ecclesie consecrati Petri, Daniel Binchy remarked of the history of the Schottenklöster that, whatever interest it might have for German medievalists, it ‘is a mere footnote—or perhaps rather a postscript—to the remarkable story of the early Irish missions to Europe’. However, Binchy greatly over-estimated the interest of German-speaking medievalists in the case of that particular Schottenkloster which is central to the present paper, namely that in Vienna. Since the well-documented but overtly apologetic study by Patrick Barry, which appeared in 1927, the Viennese Schottenklster has been studied mainly by members of its own monastic community, and by scholars pursuing the sort of questions with which local and economic historians generally turn to the archives of formerly rich and powerful monastic landlords. The raison d’être, aspirations and fears, triumphs and failures of adherents to a particular monastic tradition are of marginal interest to students of land tenure and administration.

Everyone has some acquaintance with the Irish missionaries and scholars who from the sixth until the ninth century abandoned their homeland to go on a peregrinata pro Christi nomine and left a lasting imprint on the history of many countries in Western Europe. They included St Columba of Iona, Apostle of Scotland († 597), St Aidan of Lindisfarne, Aposde of Northern England († 651), St Columbanus of Luxeuil and Bobbio († 615), St Gall, after whom Sankt Gallen in Switzerland is named († c. 630), St Fursey († 650) and St Fiachra († 670) of northeast France, St Feuillen († 652) of Belgium, St Kilian and his companions of Würzburg († 689), St Fergal or Virgilius of Salzburg († 784), whose twelfth centenary was celebrated four years ago, and several others.

The historiographical background to this paper is provided by a recent dramatic change of perspective in the study of the Reformation in Ireland. Traditionally the failure of Protestant reform has been explained in ways that amounted to determinism. In its crudest expression, this involved the self-sufficient premise that the Catholic faith was so deeply ingrained in the Irish as to be unshakable. More subtly, it assumed a set of equations, of Protestantism with English conquest and Catholicism with national resistance, that acted to consolidate the faith. In the 1970s, these simplicities were questioned. Dr Bradshaw and Dr Canny argued that religious reform had made sufficient headway in its initial phase to suggest that the replacement of Catholicism by Protestantism was at least within the bounds of possibility, and raised a fresh question; why did this not happen? That the debate which followed was inconclusive was due in part to an inability to shake off an old habit of circular thought, so that the issue has remained one of deciding whether Protestantism failed because Catholicism succeeded, or Catholicism succeeded because Protestantism failed. Both Dr Robinson-Hammerstein, when she observed that ‘Ireland is the only country in which the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the Head of State’, and Dr Bottigheimer, when he insisted that the failure of the Reformation must ‘concentrate our attention on the nature and limits of political authority’, implied that what needs to be explained is how actions were deprived of their effect. The alternative possibility is that the actions themselves were inherently ineffectual. The premise of this paper is that the failure of Protestantism and the success of Catholicism were the necessary condition, but not the sufficient cause, of each other, and its object is simply to recall attention to the existence of very practical reasons why the Church of Ireland should have evolved as it did in the hundred years or so between the first and second Acts of Uniformity, that is, from an inclusive Church, claiming the allegiance of the entire community, to one that excluded all but a privileged minority.

‘The mayor, aldermen, merchants and inhabitants of Dublin are notorious papists, hating the English nation and government’, wrote a state official in 1596. It was noted about the same time that, by contrast, there had been scarcely six of that ilk to be found there in the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. While grossly mistaken in perceiving a conjunction of religious dissidence and political disaffection, this commentator on late sixteenth-century Dublin correctly identified a steady trend towards adherence to the older religion on the part of the leading citizens and others. Within a decade the assertion was publicly confirmed, at least in the case of the aldermen. More than half of that elite group of senior city councillors were convicted of recusant offences and suffered imprisonment and heavy fines. And by 1613 the much-feared merging of the religious and political discontents of Dubliners seemed to be closer to becoming a reality. The freemen chose as their members in the forthcoming parliament two avowed Catholics. The election of Aldermen Thomas Allen and Francis Taylor (which was later overturned by state intervention) was regarded as a deliberate effort by the civic body to defend cherished liberties, including that of conscience, through determined recusancy.

The name of Geoffrey Keating is familiar to generations of students of Irish language and literature. His prose works are fine examples of seventeenth-century Irish writing. He was credited by scholars of Irish with having saved from oblivion many stories of the Gaelic heroes of old in his magnum opus, the Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, a compendium of knowledge on the history of Ireland. Writing in the early part of the seventeenth century, when the native Irish system of learning and patronage of scholars was disintegrating, Keating synopsized many manuscript sources for the history of Ireland into a flowing text full of stories and curiosities. His writings were frequently transcribed and are preserved in countless manuscript copies.

Kearing’s literary stature has meant that his tracts were more read for their language and style than studied for their content and it may appear curious at first sight to discover that this father figure of early Irish history and the preserver of the Irish language also wrote two theological tracts, on a continental Catholic Reformation model. This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Kearing’s background. Although subsequently hailed as a champion of Gaelic Ireland, Keating was not a product of that society. In fact he was of Anglo-Norman (Old English) descent. He was ordained as a secular priest and was educated at two of the continental colleges set up to train Irishmen for the priesthood, Bordeaux and Rheims, where he came under English Jesuit influence. The precise dates of his sojourn on the continent are not known, but pre-date 1619. It is thought he was born about 1570 and died about 1644, spending most of his life as a priest working in Munster.

The name controversy, I confess, is the name of a disease; but necessary … to be known first, to make a readier way for the cure; and he that cares not which way disputes about religion go, brands himself with the palpable neglect of his faith and religion. Not as though all were equally interested in the study of controversies, but that everyone may be ready to give an answer to every man that asks him a reason of the hope that is in him.

In early 1642 a Scottish army under the command of Robert Munroe arrived in Ulster as part of a scheme to defeat the native Irish rebellion which had begun late in the previous year. The conquest was not to be purely a military one. As a contemporary historian of Presbyterianism, Patrick Adair, observed ‘it is certain God made that army instrumental for bringing church governments, according to His own institutions, to Ireland … and for spreading the covenants’. The form of church government was that of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and in June 1642 the chaplains and officers established the first presbytery in Ireland at Carrickfergus. Sub-presbyteries, or meetings, were created for Antrim, Down and the Route, in north Antrim in 1654, for the Laggan in east Donegal in 1657, and for Tyrone in 1659. Within these units the Church was divided into geographical parishes each with its own minister. This establishment of a parallel structure rivalling that of the Anglican Church, but without the king at its head, is what has been termed the ‘presbyterian revolution’.It supported the Presbyterian claim to be ‘the Church of Ireland’, a claim which was to bring it into conflict with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities in the late seventeenth century. In order to further underpin this claim the reformed church began to move out of its Ulster base by the 1670s. The Laggan presbytery ordained William Cock and William Liston for work in Clonmel and Waterford in 1673 and was active in Tipperary, Longford, and Sligo by 1676. Its advice to some Dublin ministers was to form themselves into a group who were ‘subject to the meeting in the north’. The presbytery of Tyrone also supplied Dublin.

When Gladstone decided, some time in 1885, that the only way to achieve ‘social order’ in Ireland was to concede Home Rule, he was disappointed to find that among his most implacable and vociferous opponents were the Irish Presbyterians. In vain he was to remind them that their ancestors had been United Irishmen in the 1790s, the founding fathers of Irish republicanism. His appeal to them to ‘retain and maintain the tradition of their sires’ fell on deaf ears.

It seemed to Gladstone as it has seemed to Irish nationalists and to some historians that the Irish Presbyterians had turned their political coats, that the grandsons of the United Irishmen had repudiated the principles of their grandfathers. Lecky, in his monumental History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, writing in the context of the Home Rule crisis, expressed his magisterial opinion that ‘the defection of the Presbyterians from the movement of which they were the main originators, and the great and enduring change which took place in their sentiments… are facts of the deepest importance in Irish history and deserve very careful and detailed examination’.

Popular Protestantism in Ulster in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, characterized by variety and liveliness, was directly related to events of more immediate national significance. While remaining a mere undercurrent in Irish affairs, Ulster evangelicalism in this important transitional period—shaped and moulded by the rebellion, the Act of Union, and the rise of a more articulate and assertive Catholicism—laid the foundations of a scripture-based, politically conservative Protestantism, which continues to influence the province’s social and political development.

Gideon Ouseley was born in the year of John Wesley’s second visit to County Galway, was ‘converted’ in the year of Wesley’s death, and died on the one hundredth anniversary of Wesley’s introduction to field preaching. A Methodist rural revivalist could have no better pedigree. I first encountered him, not in a dream as many Methodist contemporaries seem to have done, but in the correspondence of Joseph Butterworth, MP, to whom Ouseley sent graphic details of the nature of Irish Catholicism for his controversial speeches against Roman Catholic emancipation, and in the records of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, in which Ouseley stands out as the most flamboyant missionary of his generation. In terms of published works Ouseley’s career can also be traced through his prolific anti-Catholic pamphleteering and in the pages of William Arthur’s unexceptional Victorian biography. But by far the most revealing record of his life and work is to be found in the manuscripts collected by John Ouseley Bonsall, a Dublin businessman who hero-worshipped his missionary uncle.

It is a commonplace to observe that the life of the Anglo-Irish community was profoundly altered by the Act of Union in 1800, but this was particularly true in its ecclesiastical effects. Whereas in the eighteenth century the antipathy between Protestant and Roman Catholic had diminished and even as late as 1824 the possibility of a union of the Church of Ireland with the Roman Church was seriously being discussed by older churchmen, the effect of the Act of Union was to isolate the Anglo-Irish. Reluctantly they had accepted the Act and now, dependent upon it for their survival, many of them took refuge in a ‘garrison mentality’ which invested their ascendancy with almost sacred connotations by which their community was transformed into a ‘faithful remnant’ with a mission to bring light and truth to Ireland.

James Marrineau is generally known as a Unitarian divine, who in the years which followed the publication of Origin of Species (1859) brought his massive intellect to the defence of Christianity, especially in his debates with Henry Spencer, Professor John Tyndall, and Henry Sidgwick. What is less well-known about Martineau is that in 1828 at the age of twenty-three he began his ministry in Dublin at Eustace Street Presbyterian Meeting House. Through his ‘Biographical Memoranda’, a sermon preached before the Synod of Munster, and his hymn book, A Collection of Hymns for Christian Worship which he compiled for the Dublin congregation, we are given a glimpse of his view of Irish Christianity and see in them a reflection of his strong catholic spirit, which was confirmed and strengthened by his Dublin experience.

The Birmingham congregation suggests what Manchester Catholicism might have looked like if Irish immigration had been a fraction of what it was.’ This remark of John Bossy points in the direction of a different view of the impact of Irish migration on urban Catholic congregations in England from that which has become familiar. The relationship between Irish and English Catholic population growth in Birmingham before 1850 was not straightforward and led consequently to an interesting pattern of social and religious interaction. What Birmingham illustrates in the period up to 1850 is the effect of relatively modest Irish immigration into an English Catholic congregation already well advanced in prosperity and organization. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Birmingham Catholicism was not over whelmingly Irish, but the reception of the Irish had significant demographic and social effects on the congregation. These can be used to highlight and illustrate urban Catholic population structure, industrial enterprise, and quasi-parochial organization.