Anglo-Norman Dublin

Chapter II

Anglo-Norman Dublin

St. Patrick's before restoration. (22181 bytes)The news of the successes of the Anglo-Norman barons had not been favourably received by King Henry II., who doubtless foresaw how dangerous an ally the disaffected at home might find in their connexions firmly seated in Irish lordships. That so far-seeing a statesman as was Henry of Anjou should anticipate trouble from these early conquerors of Irish territory must at least seem probable in the light of after events, when the de Courcys, de Lacys, de Burghs, and Geraldines were the most untiring enemies of the English Crown.

He determined accordingly to exert his feudal authority, and so to order matters that his paramouncy should stand unquestioned. He relied on the Bull of Pope Hadrian IV., brought to him from Rome by John of Salisbury in 1155, to establish his lordship of Ireland; and having summoned Strongbow to render an account of his conquest, and exacted from him full submission, he sailed for Ireland, landed at Croch, now Crook, near Waterford, and held a synod at Cashel.

He then proceeded to Dublin, where he kept his court for three months, having ordered to be constructed for him, ‘close to the church of St. Andrew the Apostle outside the city of Dublin’, says Roger de Hoveden, (Rerum Anglicanarum Scriptores post Beda) ‘a royal palace, constructed with wonderful skill of peeled wands, according to the custom of that country.’ He seems to have treated Dublin as his personal property, it having been surrendered to him, as their suzerain, by the Anglo-Norman adventurers, who had taken it from its Danish owners The wattled dwelling on the Thingmount of the Norsemen may have had a significance as indicating a claim to a kind of elective lordship. Having expedited a charter to his men of Bristol, ‘whereby he gave *his *City of Dublin to the said men to inhabit and hold as they held Bristol, he appointed, as we have said, Hughes de Lasci, or Hugh de Lacy, *pro tempore *Bailli thereof. The King’s unhappy affairs now called him to England and to Normandy, leaving behind him in Ireland a turmoil which his presence had for a time somewhat abated.

In 1174, by a charter dated ‘Apud Sanctum Laudinuin,’ probably St. Laud or St. Lo, in Normandy, Henry granted to his burgesses of Dublin ‘freedom from toll, passage, portage, lestage, pavage, murage, quayage, carriage, and all custom, for themselves and their goods throughout his entire land of England, Normandy, Wales, and Ireland.’

The Ostmen, though expelled, were not entirely expatriated, but were probably confined, as in Limerick and their other Irish cities, to a particular district outside the walls-most likely to that Ostmanstown, on the northern bank of the river, which would thus retain its name. That they were neither banished nor extirpated is evidenced by our finding a body of the Ostmen of Dublin with the force which, in 1174, Strongbow led against Donal O’Brien of Thomond; and in the Calendar of Patent Rolls we find that Cristin the Ostman ceded to Strongbow a house which the Earl granted to de Ridlesford.

The men of Bristol were not the only colonisers of the deserted city. Besides the followers of the Anglo-Norman lords, who are specially referred to by the contemporary chronicler as their hardy English vassals (‘les vassals Engleis aduriz’), many English traders would naturally be attracted by the reputation of Dublin, with its ‘far-famed harbour,’ say the English chroniclers, ‘the rival of our London in commerce.’ For instance, we find that when, in 1337, a certain Master John Rees came as Treasurer to Ireland he brought with him ‘many Welshmen to the number of 200, and arrived in the haven of Dublin.’

In 1176 died Strongbow, and his tomb, as we have seen, is still pointed out in Christchurch, which he had re-edified and enlarged; and after more than one change of governors, the English King determined to take the rule of Ireland into his own family. In 1177 he had, at the Council of Oxford, with the authority of Pope Alexander, invested his youngest son John, then 11 years of age, as Lord of Ireland. At the same Council a royal charter was granted to the Priory of St. Thomas at Dublin. The first Anglo-Norman coinage of Ireland bore the full face of John, with a diadem of five pearls, and the inscription JOHANNES DOM.: the reverse a double cross, with a pellet or annulet in each quarter, with the names of the minters at Dublin and Waterford. In 1185 John sailed from Milford on the Wednesday after Easter, and landed at Waterford on the following day, 25th April, accompanied by Ranulf de Glanville, the King’s viceroy in England, and Girard de Barri, better known as the chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis.

He was the grandson of Nesta, the mistress of Henry I., the ancestress as well of the de Barris as of the Fitz-Henrys, Fitz-Stephens, and Fitz-Geralds, whose families supplied so many of the barons of the English Pale. John had been preceded in 1184 by the successor of St. Laurence O’Toole, Archbishop Comyn, to whom the archiepiscopal estates had been granted in barony.

A curious extract from the Pipe Roll for Devonshire records a payment of 40 shillings to ‘Ricardo de Rupe et aliis hominibus Johannis filii Regis ad transfretandum cuin canibus predicti Johannis per breve Ranulfi de Glanville,’ proving that John was not unmindful of the possibilities of sport in thus haviug his hounds shipped, probably from Normandy, to await his arrival in Ireland.

The young prince did not favourably impress his new Irish subjects. At an interview with the Munster chieftains, accompanied by their leading retainers, we are told that ‘two of the guard, Normans, pickthankes, shook and tare the Clownes by the glibs (long hair) and beards unmannerly,’ (Campion’s *Historie of Ireland *(written in the yeare 1571). and we are not surprised that the chiefs considered him ‘but a boy, peevish and insolent,’ - he was then in his 19th year.

The same author says of his following:-

‘About the young Earle were servants and counsellours, three sorts, first Normans, great quaffers, lourdens, proud, belly swaines, fed with extortion and bribery; to whom he most relyed: secondly, the English brought with him, meetly bold: thirdly, the English found in the land, whom being best worthy and most forward in all good services, hee least regarded.’

On his arrival in Dublin, John confirmed the charter of his father to ‘my men of Bristol,’ and granted to the Canons of the Priory of St. Thomas of Dublin the tenth of ale and mead which he had ‘by usage from the taverns of that city.’ His troops were defeated with great slaughter by O’Brien, King of Thomond, and John returned on 31st December, ‘departing away the same yeare he came and leaving the realme a great deal worse bestedde than he found it.’

St. Patrick's (5589 bytes)In 1190 Archbishop Comyn founded the Church of St. Patrick, as a collegiate or prebendal church, adopting the site, outside the city walls, of the early Celtic church of St. Patrick’s in Insula *(i.e. *in the holm or strath. of the Coombe, the va1ley through which the now subterranean Poddle flows). ‘the church was solemnly dedicated on St. Patrick’s Day, 17th March 1191, by the Archbishops of Armagh and Dublin, and the Legate O’Heaney, ‘to God, our Blessed Lady, and St. Patrick.’ This prelate conferred the Church of St. Audoen, founded by the Anglo-Normans in honour of the great Norman saint, Audoen or Ouen, on the convent of Grace Dieu, situated north of Swords.

In 1192 King John issued a fresh charter, stipulating that the citizens ‘shall have all their reasonable Guilds as the burgesses of Bristol have or had.’

The year 1209 is unhappily noteworthy in the Dublin annals by the occurrence of the long-remembered ‘Black Monday.’ On Easter Monday in that year, the citizens, while amusing themselves, according to custom, in Cullen’s Wood, where, says Stanihurst, ‘being somewhat recklesse in heeding the mounteine enimie that lurked under their noses, they were wont to rome and roile in clusters:,’ were attacked by an ambuscade of the O’Byrnes and O’Tooles from their fastnesses in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, and 500 of their number slain. ‘Whereupon the remnant of the citizens deeming that unluckie time to be a crosse or a dismall daie, gave it the appellation of Black Mondaie.’ The district was thenceforth known till towards the close of last century as the ‘Bloody Fields’; but was then built on as part of the growing residentiary suburb of Rathmines, and they are now represented by Palmerston Park and the adjacent roads, lying between Rathgar and Ranelagh.

The depleted population of the city was reinforced by a new colony from Bristol; and a custom was established whereby the citizens marched out on each succeeding Easter Monday, with banners displayed, to defy the native Irish. In the following year King John, now under sentence of excommunication, returned to Ireland with a fleet of 700 sail. Landing at Crook, near Waterford, on 20th June, he marched into Meath, and reached Dublin on the 28th June, where 20 of the chieftains did him homage and fealty.

The parts of Ireland under English rule he parcelled out into 12 shires, to which he appointed sheriffs and other county officers. He appointed judges and circuits, and reformed the coinage. He also built, or caused to be built, the Castle of Trim, and doubtless some others of the many whose ruins in Ireland bear his name. He returned to England the same year.

An interesting relic of the visit of this monarch was unearthed during the relief excavation works in the precincts of Christchurch in 1884. A small bronze object was picked up by a choir-boy, and proved to be a crescent surmounted by a star - the badge adopted by Richard I. in the Holy Land, and retained by John and Henry III. A similar device surmounts the stalls of the dean and precentor of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and forms the reverse of John’s Irish coinage. It has been plausibly surmised that this badge, which bears evidence of having been hooked to some leather trapping, was torn or struck from the clothing of one of his retainers in a broil, when it may have slipped into an interstice of the pavement. (*Journal R.S.A.I. *for 1901, p.74.)

To John Comyn, who died in 1212, succeeded as Archbishop of Dublin Henry de Loundres, or the Londoner, who became Viceroy in the following year, and who ‘builded the King’s Castle’ in Dublin ‘four square or quadrangle wise’. He constituted, in 1220, his predecessors’ church of St. Patrick a cathedral, with a dean, precentor, chancellor, and treasurer, and henceforth continual bickering marked the intercourse of the two cathedrals. This prelate’s style and title ran as follows:

‘Henry, by divine mercy Regular Abbot of the Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity and Bishop of St. Patrick’s, Archbishop and Primate of the Irish Church by grace of the Apostolic See, Dean of the free royal chapel of St. Mary’s of Penkridge, (On 13th September 1215,** **King John bestowed on the See of Dublin the advowson of the manor of Penkridge in Staffordshire, making the Archbishop and his successors Deans of the Collegiate Church of Penkridge. In the time of Archbishop King, the Bishop of Lichfield applied to the Archbishop of Dublin ‘for leave to visit and confirm within his peculiar jurisdiction of Penkridge.’) Prince Palatine of Harold’s Cross, Custos of the Suffragan Sees when vacant,’ etc. (Professor Stokes, Ireland and the Anglo-Norman Church.) De Loundres obtained the unenviable sobriquet of ‘Scorch-bill, or Scorch-villeyn,’ from his attempt to burn the leases of the tenants and farmers of his see, when they had produced them, at his summons, for inspection. (More probably, ‘Ecorche villeyn’ = flay farmer.) He was afterwards present at Runnymede, and officiated as Papal Legate.

About this time an organised effort seems to have been made to fortify Dublin, as we find by a charter of Henry III., dated 1221, that the citizens were empowered ‘in aid of enclosing their city to levy a toll of 3d. on every sack of wool, 6d. on every last (12 dozen) of hides, and 2d. on every bottle of wine brought into the city for sale until the King comes of age,’ (Marleburrough’s Chronicle.) - he was then 14; and in 1233 and 1250 further tolls were authorised for enclosing and strengthening the city. In 1283 a dreadful fire raged in Dublin, whereby the greater part of the city was consumed, including the ‘campanile et capitulum Sanctae Trinitatis’ (Christchurch); and in 1304 another accidental fire consumed St. Mary’s Abbey with its church and steeples, and destroyed the Chancery rolls which were there deposited.

In 1308 Edward II., in order to remove his favourite Piers Gaveston from the attacks of the English barons appointed him by letters-patent Lord-Lieutenant of’ Ireland. He sailed from Bristol with a large retinue, he himself crossing the Channel in the royal barge. He seems to have acted with vigour and prudence, and kept splendid court in the Castle of Dublin. ‘Ubi regaliter vixit, et fuit bene delectus, erat enim dapsilis et largus in muneribus dandis, et honoribus et terris sibi adhaerenti bus procurandis.” (Adam Murimuth)

In May 1315 Edward Bruce, brother of the King of Scotland, and descended in the female line from Dermot MacMurrough, landed near Carrickfergus with ‘sixe thousand Scots fighting men,’ (Campion) and two years later arrived near Dublin and captured the Castle of Knock, now Castleknock, built by Hugh de Tyrrel, outside the western gates. The citizens had made preparations for the defence of the city. They hastily strengthened the walls, and, destroying for that purpose the Monastery of St. Saviour, erected an inner wall, a fragment of which still survives in St. Audoen’s Arch, close to the church of that dedication. On the news of the approach of his forces they burned the outlying portions of the city, including ‘St. Thomas his street, least he should upon his repaire to Dublin have anie succour in the suburbs’; (Stanihurst) even setting fire to a portion of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Meantime Bruce’s suspected ally, Richard de Burgh, the Red Earl of Ulster; lay in St. Mary’s Abbey north of the Liffey, close to the Danish settlement of Ostmanstown, and at the rear of the north side of the present Capel Street. The Red Earl was here surprised by the citizens, who plundered and wrecked the Abbey, and imprisoned him in Dublin Castle. Fearing to expose his ally to the revenge of his captors, and doubtless impressed by the strenuousness of the defence, Bruce raised the siege, and marched to Kilkenny and thence to Limerick; but was in the following year defeated and slain by Sir John Maupas at Faughart, near Dundalk, on Sunday, 14th October 1318. His body was quartered, and one portion, together with his arms and heart, were sent to be set up in Dublin.

We find successive remissions of Crown rent and of old debts due to the Crown by the city to the amount of £600, to enable the citizens to repair the destruction of the suburbs. Encouraged by the early successes of Edward Bruce, the O’Tooles, O’Byrnes, and O’Mores had wasted the country with fire and sword from Arklow to Leix, but ‘with them coped the Lord Justice’ (Sir Roger Mortimer), ‘and made a great slaughter, so that fourscore of their heads were set upon Divelin (Dublin) Castle’; which fortress, indeed, was seldom without such gruesome ornamentation. But the people of Dublin seem to have deemed the successes of the Viceroy against the Irish enemy as dearly purchased, for we read in Campion that ‘Mortymer went over to the king indebted to the citizens of Divelin for his viandes, a thousand pounds, whereof he payde not one smulkin, and many a bitter curse carried with him to the sea.

In 1320, under a Bull of Pope Clement V., a University was established, under the direction of the Franciscans, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral by the Archbishop, Alexander de Bicknor, Treasurer of Ireland, which had a lingering existence until the dissolution of the cathedral establishment by Henry VIII.

Pestilence and famine seem to have been frequent visitations: a notable dearth in 1331 was relieved by the appearance, in June of that year at the mouth of the Dodder, of a shoal of huge fish called ‘turlyhydes,’ said to have been from thirty to forty feet long, in the capture of which Sir Antoine de Lucy, Baron of Cockermouth, the newly lauded Justiciary, with his soldiers assisted. These fish were doubtless a school of bottle-nosed whales, a smaller specimen of which was captured in the Liffey in May 1905.

In 1361 Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, third son of King Edward III., who had married Elizabeth., only child and heiress of William de Burgh, Earl of Ulster, to whom he had been affianced when three years of age, was sent as Viceroy to extend the English rule in Ireland: King Edward believing ‘that our Irish dominions have been reduced to such titter devastation, ruin, and misery that they may be totally lost if our subjects there are not immediately succoured.’ He busied himself with various works, ‘agreeable’ to him for sports and his other pleasures, as well within the Castle of Dublin as elsewhere.’

By the Statute of Kilkenny he defined the English territory, afterwards known as the Pale, within which the King’s writ ran, leaving the rest of the country to Irish laws and customs. This district varied in extent in proportion to the relative strength and cohesion of the native Irish and the English settlers, and of it Dublin was the acknowledged capital and centre.

The Earldom of Ulster and the Lordships of Connaught, Meath, Leix, and Ossory, the great heritage of the de Burghs, which Lionel claimed in right of his wife, passed, by the marriage of his daughter and heiress, to her husband, Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. In May 1380. Edmund de Mortimer, Earl of March and Ulster, and Marshal of England, arrived in Dublin as Viceroy while still a minor. He maintained considerable state, and the magnificence of the appointments of his table is particularly dwelt on by the chroniclers. On an expedition into Munster in the following winter the Viceroy took cold from crossing a river, and died suddenly at midnight, on the 26th December, in the Dominican Abbey at Cork.

In 1394 Richard II., who had created his favourite Robert de Vere Earl of Oxford, Marquess of Dublin, and subsequently Duke of Ireland, conceived the idea of strengthening the power of the English colonists, and, landing at Waterford, arrived with an army of 30,000 men in Dublin, where he spent his Christmas, and on 1st February wrote to his uncle, the Duke of York:-

‘In our land of Ireland there are three kinds of people - Wild Irish, our enemies; Irish rebels, and obedient English.’ In the second class we recognise the Anglo-Norman barons, already *Hiberniores quam Hibernicis ipsis; *the *old *English as distinguished from the *new *English - the English by *blood *from the English by birth.

In March Richard entertained some of the Irish chiefs with great splendour at Dublin, and conferred the order of knighthood on O’Neill, O’Connor, MacMurrough, and O’Brien, apparently as representing the four provinces or kingdoms of Ireland. Their vigil was passed in Christchurch. Richard left behind him as Viceroy his cousin Roger Mortimer, Earl of March and Ulster, Lord of Wigmore, Trim, Clare, and Connaught, who was defeated and slain by the O’Briens, on 20th July 1398, at Kenlis, in the present Queen’s County.

‘The traytorous death of Mortimer, whom he loved entirely, being wonderfull eager in hastening the revenge thereof upon the Irish,’ (Campion). induced King Richard, in an evil hour for his own fortunes, again to visit Ireland, and he landed at Waterford on Sunday, 1st June 1399, almost simultaneously with the landing of Henry of Lancaster at Ravenspur, the news of which reached him in Dublin. It is a striking indication of the thriving state of the port of Dublin that it is recorded that, though Richard II. occupied the city with an army of 30,000 men for six weeks, yet there was no rise in the price of provisions.

On the deposition and subsequent death of Richard II., Henry IV. sent to Ireland, in 1402, his third son Thomas of Lancaster, Seneschal of England and Lord of Holdernesse, afterwards Duke of Clarence, then 12 years of age, as Viceroy for a term of 21 years. He landed at Blowyk, now Bullock, near Dalkey, bringing with him as his deputy Sir Stephen le Scrop or Scrope.

The citizens of Dublin in the same year marched against the O’Byrnes under John Drake, their Major *(i.e. *Mayor) or Provost. Proceeding south along the coast they encountered near Bray a force of 4,000 of the O’Byrnes, whom they defeated with great slaughter, killing 500 of their number. In consequence, the king granted to the Mayor and his successors the privilege of having a gilt sword carried before them.

In 1424 Edmund de Mortimer, the fourth of his family who had field the office, landed as Viceroy, having a salary assigned to him of 5,000 marks per annum. But Ireland proved as fatal to him as to his father and grandfather, as he died in Dublin of the plague in the following year.

In 1449 Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, Lieutenant by letters-patent, landed at Howth, and nominally held the Viceroyalty for ten years. He had succeeded, through his mother Anne, daughter of Roger de Mortimer, to the Earldom of Ulster and the other lordships of the de Burghs. He brought with him his wife, ‘the Rose of Raby.’

‘To this Richard then resciant in Divelin was borne within the Castle there,’ (Campion)** **on 21st October 1449, his sixth son George, the third who survived infancy, afterwards the ill-fated Duke of Clarence. By his firmness and tact the Duke of York made many friends among the great Anglo-Norman houses, and, on the triumph of the Lancastrians at Ludlow, York with his second son, the Earl of Rutland, took refuge in Ireland.

Here a compact with Gerald, seventh Earl of Kildare, chief of the eastern Geraldines, whom he had appointed his deputy, gave him the support of that powerful family; their hereditary rival James Butler, fifth Earl of Ormonde, known as the ‘White Earl,’ supporting the Lancastrian cause. The latter fought on that side at St. Albans and Wakefield, and after the defeat of the Lancastrians at Towton (1461) was beheaded at Newcastle, and the English colony in Ireland became predominantly Yorkist.

The accession of Henry VII.** **gave to the Geraldines an opportunity to exhibit Ireland as that ‘home of lost causes’ which she was to become in her relations to English royalty. In 1487 Gerald Fitzgerald, eighth Earl of Kildare, adopted the pretender Lambert Simnel, who had landed in Ireland, and who was joined there by the exile Lord Lovel; and by the Earl of Lincoln, nephew of Edward IV., and declared by Richard III. to be his heir.

The Earl of Kildare, Lord Deputy, with ‘the lords of the council and other great men of quality’ … ‘in all haste assembled at Divelin’ (Dublin), on Whitsunday, 24th May, ‘and there in Christchurch they crowned this Idoll, honouring him with titles imperiall, feasting and triumphing, rearing mighty shoutes and cryes, canyi ng him from thence to the King’s Castle upon tall men’s shoulders.’ (Campion)

The crown used on this occasion is said to have been taken from the statue of the Virgin in the Church of Sainte Marie del Dam, and the ‘tall man’ who carried the new-crowned king to the Castle was a huge Anglo-Irishman known as ‘Great D’Arcy of Platten.’

The pretender crossed to Lancashire with 2000 trained German mercenaries as well as the Irish troops of Kildare, but was utterly defeated at Stoke, and relegated to the royal kitchen as a scullion or turnspit.

Undeterred by the fate of the pretender, Kildare and his kinsman, the Earl of Desmond, gave some support to Perkin Warbeck, who lauded at Cork in May 1492, which led to the temporary removal of the former from his post of Lord Deputy; to which, however, he was soon after restored, it is said, for the whimsical reason that on his enemies complaining to the King that ‘All Ireland could not rule this Earl,’ the astute monarch replied, ‘Then, in good faith, shall this Earl rule all Ireland.’ Though the story be apocryphal, yet the wisdom of the course adopted is unquestionable, for on Warbeck’s again landing at Cork in 1497 he received neither shelter nor countenance.

The constant rivalry between the Geraldines and Butlers led to continual brawls in Dublin, from which even the churches were not always free, their precincts often resounding with the war-cries of ‘Crom aboo’ and ‘Botiller aboo’; and in 1512 the Mayor of Dublin was forced to do public penance by walking barefooted through the city, in consequence of a riot in St. Patrick’s Cathedral between the followers of the Earl of Ormonde and the citizens who guarded the Lord Deputy.

In 1513 died the Lord Deputy Gerald, eighth Earl of Kildare, known to Irish annalists as ‘the Great Earl,’ and was ‘intoomed in the new chappell builded by him in 1510, that standeth in the choir in Christchurch,’ ‘a mighty made man, full of honour and courage.’ (Campion) He was succeeded alike in his title and office by Gerald the Younger, or Garrett Oge.

During the early years of the reign of Henry VIII. constant intriguing took place between the Geraldines of Kildare and the Irish branch of the Ormonde Butlers; Pierse Butler, afterwards Earl of Ormonde, for a short time holding the office of Lord Deputy. Kildare was again and again summoned to London to answer charges and even impeachment, and in 1530 Sir William Skevington, or Skefflngton, was sent as joint-deputy with the Earl, but was recalled two years later. Soon after, Kildare was once more summoned to London and thrown into the Tower.

He had left in Dublin as vice-deputy his son, not yet 21 years of age. This young nobleman, named by his Irish retainers ‘Tomas-an-teeda,’ or Silken Thomas, either from the silken mantle worn by him, or from the silken streamers in the helmets of his followers, had a deadly enemy in John Allen, or Alan, Archbishop of Dublin, a special friend of Cardinal Wolsey, whom the Deputy, Garrett Oge, had deprived of the Chancellorship. By the machinations, it is said, of the Archbishop, a false rumour reached Lord Thomas that his father had, by order of Henry VIII., been beheaded in the Tower of London on St. Swithin’s Eve.

The English officials with the Archbishops of Armagh and Dublin were assembled in council in St. Mary’s Abbey on St. Barnaby’s Day, the 11th June 1534, when the young lord, surrounded by his armed followers, burst into the chamber, tore off his robes of office and showed himself in complete mail; then, flinging the sword of state upon the council table, he renounced his allegiance to the English monarch. To all appearance, after nearly four centuries of domination, the English rule in Ireland had collapsed in a moment.

Loid Thomas could have seized the Castle, but a quixotic scruple induced him first solemnly to, divest himself of his office and fealty. On leaving St. Mary’s Abbey he found that the citizens had shut the gates against him, and he returned to Kilmainham to provide for the garrisoning of his castles in Kildare and Ofaly.

Reinforced by some Irish chieftains he returned to beleaguer Dublin; and, after a short siege, scarcity of provisions and water compelled a surrender of the city, though not including the Castle, which was strongly held by its Constable, John White.

The *Annals of *the Four Masters inform us that ‘he took Dublin from Newgate outwards.’ Meantime Archbishop Allen, knowing in what deadly peril he stood of the revenge of the Geraldines, determined on flight; ‘and being in ship to depart towards England,’ (Campion) **he was wrecked near Howth, and conveyed to Artane, where he was brought before Lord Thomas, and on a hasty command to ‘take the clown away,’ was butchered by his retainers, or, as it is stated in a letter of the Prior of Kilmainham, was ’ murdered in his sight and by his command.’

For this act he and certain of his followers were solemnly excommunicated in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But Henry VIII. was not a monarch to be thus trifled with. He at once despatched Sir William Skeffington, ‘whom the Irishmen call the Gunner, because hee was preferred from that office of the King; Master-gunner *(i.e. *Master of the Ordnance) to governe them.’

Landing in Dublin, he at once relieved the Castle, and, marching into Kildare, stormed the great Geraldine stronghold of Maynooth, hitherto supposed to be impregnable. This success was probably due to his battering train, of heavier metal than had yet been known in Ireland, but is commonly attributed to the treachery of its warden, Christopher Parris, or Ap Harris, a foster-brother of Lord Thomas, who stipulated for a reward of his treachery.

In the words of Stanihurst,’ the Governor willed the money to be told to Parese, and presently caused him to be cut shorter by the head,’ and 26 of the garrison to be hanged, giving occasion for the proverbial expression ‘a pardon of Maynooth’ for a summary execution. Lord Thomas’s Irish allies fell away from him; his castles, of which he had ‘six of the chiefest’ in Ireland, one by one were taken; and he and his five uncles were captured and brought as prisoners to London, where they were ‘drawne, hanged, and quartered at Tiburne,’ (Campion) and their heads set upon six spikes on London Bridge. The unfortunate Garrett Oge had died in the Tower on hearing the news of his son’s rebellion and excommunication.

Thus ended the rebellion of Silken Thomas, and with it the power of the Geraldines; and from this date a new era in the history of their country may be said to commence. The English rule in Ireland had hitherto, save for spasmodic efforts, been merely nominal. The Anglo-Norman barons ruled from their strongholds their own immediate lordships. The maritime cities, mainly of Danish foundation, had developed some measure of corporate existence. But even for the citizens of Dublin there was little security beyond the city walls.

In 1327 King Donall MacMurrough planted his standard within two miles of Dublin Castle. Twenty-two years later Sir Thomas do Rokeby, Viceroy, entered into a pact with the septs of O’Byrne, Archbold, and Harold, the last named undoubtedly a remnant of the Danish settlers, for the protection of Dublin and its vicinity; and also agreed with Aedh O’Toole to defend, the English borders about Tallaght, seven miles south-west of Dublin, with a force of 20 ‘hobelers’ (light-armed horse) at fourpence each per day, and forty foot-soldiers at twopence; their leader to receive ten marks for himself, forty shillings for his brother Shane, twenty shillings for his marshal, and six shillings and eightpence for his chaplain, who was to explore and transmit intelligence to the Viceroy respecting projected hostile incursions.

In 1374 the Government were obliged to send troops by sea, to relieve the Castle of Wicklow, as they were unable to convey supplies by land. In 1423 the Mayor and commonalty of Dublin received a grant to march with a body of men-at-arms and archers under the Viceroy, the Earl of Ormonde, to defend the frontiers of Louth.

But the English power in Ireland had, in the reign of Henry VII., reached its lowest ebb. In 1515 the boundary of the English Pale was a line from Dundalk through Ardee and Kells, and so to Kilcock; thence to Naas, Kilcullen, and Ballymore Eustace; back ward to Rathmore, and through Tallaght to Dalkey: i.e. portions only of the counties of Louth, Meath, Kildare, and Dublin; a territory of some 60 miles by 30.

The policy of Henry had been to entrust the rule of the country alternately to the head of the Geraldines and of the Butlers. The most successful rebel thus became the Viceroy of the English king. ‘What hadst thou been,’ said Sir Gerard Shaneson to Silken Thomas, when endeavouring to incite him to rebellion, ‘if thy father had not done so? What was he set by until he crowned a king here’ (alluding to Lambert Simnel), ‘took Garthe, the king’s captain, prisoner; hanged his son; resisted Poynings and all Deputies; killed them of Dublin upon Oxmantown Green?’ (in 1493).

And life and property alike stood in equal jeopardy. James Cornewalshe, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, while at supper in his manor-house at Baggotrath, now immediately outside the east city boundary, was attacked and murdered by William Fitzwilliam of Dundrum, at the head of a troop armed with swords, bows, lances, and clubs. A letter of a Mr. Dethyke, dated from Dublin 3rd September 1533, gives the following graphic picture of the condition of the city:-

‘I assure your Mastership, all the butchers of Dublin hath no so such beaf to sell as would make one mess of browes; so as they use white meat (foods made from milk) in Dublin, except it be in my Lord of Dublin’s house, or such as have of their own provision. And cause thereof is, they be nightly robbed. There have been five or six preys taken out of St. Thomas, within this 10 days, so that one butcher for his part hath lost 220 kine. … So as the poor butchers be remediless and have closed up their shops, and have taken to making of prekes (skewers), thinking there is a new Lent.’ (State *Papers, *vol. ii. part 3, p. 181.)

Evidently such a state of things could not be allowed to continue. England must either evacuate Ireland or decide on its conquest, and the latter course was adopted. The next stage in the history of Dublin finds that city the headquarters of a real, not a mythical, English rule. Her Viceroys are English captains, stern indeed, and often merciless; but slowly developing an order from the welter of bloodshed and rapine in which the land was plunged; enforcing an alien law, an alien faith, an alien tongue upon the native inhabitants, and filling the districts which they devastated with an alien population, kindling the flames, in fact, of that race hatred and creed bitterness whose smouldering embers it has exercised all the genius of modern statesmanship to endeavour to extinguish.

A bye-way (4466 bytes)The city, though it had grown in wealth and importance, was still confined within narrow limits. The walls had been completed, and in the earliest published map of Dublin - that of John Speed, 1610 - they enclosed a district north of the Liffey, extending from Blackhall Place east about as far north as Grangegorman, and from Henrietta Street along Capel Street on the west till it reached the Liffey between Upper and Lower Ormond Quay.

On the south of the Liffey the wall extended from Bridgefoot Street to Thomas Street, along Thomas Street east to James’s Gate, thence back to St. Catherine’s Church, thence south to Tripoli, at the head of Marrowbone Lane, thence by Pimlico to the Coombe and by Long Lane, Bride Street, Kevin Street, and Mercer Street to South Great George’s Street, and so back to the Liffey at foot of Essex Street.

An extension west took in Trinity College, and on the opposite side of the Liffey a wall seems to have extended along Liffey Street to Henry Street. But little traces remain of the city walls. The passage known as the ‘Castle Steps,’ leading from Castle Street into Little Ship Street, passes under St. Austin’s Gate; but the present archway is of modern construction, and the continuation of the wall which faced Hoey’s Court was cased with limestone in 1856.

Behind the houses in Back Lane, leading from Nicholas Street to Corn market, portions of the old wall still exist; and the curved wall of a house in Lamb Alley, at the rear of No. 23 Cornmarket, was once part of one of the outer towers of New Gate, used as a prison from the latter end of the 15th century up to 1794, when it was abandoned on the building of the present sheriff’s prison in Green Street. At the opposite side of Corn-market stood Gormond’s, now Wormwood Gate.

But the most interesting relic of the ancient fortifications is to be found in St. Audoen’s Arch, situated at a distance of 51 feet from the northern wall of the church of the same name, and forming part of the inner wall built by the citizens to repel Edward Bruce, and which extended from that gate, north of St. Audoen’s churchyard, to a building called Fagan’s Castle in Pagee’s Court, where there was another portal, and thence to New Gate. It measures 26 feet from the ground to the crown of the arch; it is 15 feet wide on the inside, and 20 feet deep. On the western side of the passage is a built-up doorway, possibly the remains of a postern.

The Arch was formerly surmounted by a tower, mentioned by Pembridge in the 14th century, and in which the Corporation of Tanners kept their hall until about 1760. In 1764 it became the printing office of *The Freeman’s Journal *newspaper, of which the first number had appeared on Saturday, 10th September 1763. The issue of 11th September 1764 contains the announcement - ‘Printed by order of the Committee at their own Printing Office over St. Audoen’s Arch, near Cook Street.’

The Church of S. Audoen, the last surviving of the many mediaeval parochial churches of Dublin, was of early Norman foundation, and was dedicated to the great patron saint of the Normans, Audoen or Ouen, Bishop of Rouen in 640. In 1219 Archbishop Henry de Loundres conferred the *new church *church of St. Audoen on the Treasurer of St. Patrick’s.

It formerly consisted of a group of separate gild chapels, and seems to have formed a kind of centre for the Dublin city gilds, as we find at the close of the 18th century in its immediate neighbourhood the halls of the Smiths or Gild of St. Loy, the Bakers or Gild of St. Anne, the Butchers or Gild of the Virgin Mary, the Feltmakers, and the Bricklayers or Gild of St. Bartholomew.

Portlester Chapel (16030 bytes)The original plan of the church seems to have consisted of a nave and continuous chancel, with a quadrangular tower at its western end. In 1431 a chantry was erected ‘in praise of God and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in honour of St. Anne.’ This chapel forms a kind of side aisle, to the south of the nave, by the name of St. Annie’s Chapel. Some 20 years later a second chapel, forming a continuation of that of St. Anne, was added by Sir Roland Fitz-Eustace, Baron of Portlester (ob. 1455), Lord Deputy under the Viceroyalty of George, Duke of Clarence. The altar-tomb of the founder was removed, and now occupies a place in the porch under the tower. It bears tine recumbent figures of Roland Fitz-Eustace and of his wife, the daughter of Jenico d’Artois. The remains of the chapel have been committed to the custody of the Board of Works*, *udler the Ancient Monuments Protection Act.

St. Audoen’s when complete ‘exhibited a style of plan not very common-that of a double-aisled church eight bays in length, without distinctive chancel, and the side aisle nearly equal in breadth to the nave.’ (Sir Thomas Drew.) In its present state the church consists of the nave of the ancient building, which opened into the chapel of St. Anne on the south by an arcade of six octagonal columns, supporting pointed arches. In the western gable is a beautiful 12th-century Transition doorway, with deeply grooved semicircular arch mouldings, and capitals and bases of Early Pointed architecture.

In addition to the Church of St. Audoen, those of St. Andrew, St. Martin, and St. Michael le Pole, or of the Pool, in Ship Street, stood amid trees and gardens along banks of the Poddle stream. The remains of the last mentioned were converted into a schoolhouse in the reign of Queen Anne; which is now the Widows’ Alms-house of St. Bride’s Parish.

On the north side of the Liffey, between Capel Street and Upper Arran Street, are still to be found some traces of the Abbey of St. Mary, the building in which the Council of State were assembled when ‘Silken Thomas’ renounced his allegiance to the English king. The origin of the Abbey is veiled in uncertainty: Irish annalists refer it to Maolrechlamh, or Malachy I., who reigned from 846 to 862. Archdall, with more plausibility, assigns to it a Danish foundation in 948. It is certain that it numbered at least one ‘Ostman’ amongst its abbots.

Possibly the Danes, as the Anglo-Normans in the founding of St. Patrick’s, may have availed themselves of an earlier Irish dedication. It was transferred from the Benedictine to the Cistercian order in 1139. In 1238 Felix O’Ruadan, Archbishop of Tuam, and uncle to King Roderick O’Connor, retired to this monastery, and was buried in the chancel of the church on the left of the altar.

In the course of excavations at the beginning of the 18th century a coffin, containing the body of a prelate in full pontificals, was exhumed, and, by the advice of Archbishop King, redeposited in the place where it had been found. On the 27th May 1304 St. Mary’s Abbey, with its church and steeple, was destroyed by fire. At the dissolution of the monasteries, under Henry VIII., St. Mary’s Abbey was surrendered to him; and in the reign of Charles II. Humphrey Jervis, Lord Mayor of Dublin, employed a portion of the building to provide materials for the erection of Essex Bridge, which fell into the river, 10 years later, while a coach and horses were passing over it, and the coachman was drowned.

A life-size statue of the Virgin and Child in Irish oak, once an ornament of the Abbey, is still preserved in the Church of the Carmelites in Whitefriar Street, where it stands on a side altar at the epistle side of the high altar. But little now remains of the original buildings of the Abbey, but the Chapter-house, dating from the rebuilding after the fire, is still in good preservation, abutting on Meetinghouse Lane, on the right of Mary’s Abbey from Capel Street. It extends east and west, and measures 47 feet by 23 feet 3 inches. The compass-roof forms a barrel arch, resting on finely moulded groinings, divided into four compartments by parallel arches supported by columns.

In the east wall may be traced three lancet-shaped windows, splayed inwards; one of which, a fine example of the earliest lancet style, is still in good preservation. The building is disfigured by having been divided into two storeys by a modern floor - the upper, 10 feet in height, being used as a store, and the lower as a cellar. A fragment of the south wall of the Abbey church is still to be seen at the rear of the houses in South Arran Street. Some interesting tiles and pottery were unearthed during excavations made in 1886.

But the chief memento of the Anglo-Norman period is undoubtedly the Cathedral Church of St. Patrick, since 1872 the National Cathedral, having a common relation to all the Dioceses of the Church of Ireland. Founded, as we have seen, in 1190 by Archbishop John Comyn, and erected into a cathedral 23 years later by his successor in the see, Henry the Londoner, it has since had a chequered existence, until the munificence of a private citizen in 1865 renewed the dilapidated fabric, to which his family have since added all that was necessary to its complete restoration.

In 1316 the spire was blown down in a violent tempest, and in the same year part of the building was destroyed by fire by the citizens on the approach of Edward Bruce. In 1362 the north-west end of the nave was turned down through the carelessness of John the Sexton. This damage was repaired by Archbishop Minot, by whom ‘60 straggling and idle fellows were taken up, and obliged to assist in repairing the church and building the steeple, who, when the work was over, returned to their old trade of begging and were banished out of the diocese by Archbishop de Wikeford.’

Modern sedilia. (7020 bytes)To Archbishop Minot’s exertions is also due the erection of the great tower, strangely out of square with the church, 147 feet in height from the floor of the nave to the battlements, with walls of Irish limestone 10 feet thick, and said to be unsurpassed as ‘a belfry in the United Kingdom.’ (Dean Bernard’s St. Patrick’s)

During the confiscations of Henry VIII. the palace of St. Sepulchre, now a police barrack, was given as a residence to the Lord Deputy, the Archbishop receiving the Deanery in exchange. (The Palace was purchased by Government for £7000,** **deposited in the Bank of Ireland to an account for the fund for providing a see-house for the Archbishop of Dublin.)

In 1544 we learn that the great stone roof had fallen in at its western end, and in 1633 the Lady Chapel was in ruins. The north transept, used from the 14th century as the parish church of St Nicholas Without fell into ruins in 1784, but was rebuild about 1822; and in 1792 the south wall and the roof of the nave were found to be in a perilous position, the wall being two feet out of the perpendicular. The first strenuous effort to preserve the structure was made by Dean Pakenham, 1845-52, who restored the choir and the Lady Chapel, and effected many necessary repairs. But it was not till 1864 that anything like a complete restoration was even attempted. In that year Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness undertook, at his own proper cost, the renewal, within and without, of the dilapidated building, and the work was executed by 1865 at a total expense of £150,000. He took down and erected five bays of the south aisle and the bays of the original triforium in the nave, rebuilt the south wall of Irish granite, restored the clerestory throughout and the south front of the south transept. The north transept was rebuilt, the roof of the nave restored, and the porch added at the south-west corner.

Entering the south-west porch and” descending the flight of steps to the south-west door the visitor is at once struck by the noble proportions of the Cathedral, which is the largest church in Ireland. ‘The ground plan as a study on paper is of singular beauty of proportion and perfect symmetry, of which there is no similar example in England. It reveals itself as the design of a mathematical mind which arrived at the proportions of a Latin cross by the placing together a number of absolutely uniform equilateral triangles, which are found to agree in indicating the widths and proportions of every main feature.

‘The choir, nave, and transepts in plan present a perfect cross. The aisles of the nave and transepts and choir which surround this, extended on the same accurate system of triangulation, present another proportion of a Latin cross of no less beauty, the repeated dimension of 16 feet being evident as a factor in the proportion of every feature of its plan.’ (Sir Thomas Drew)

The external length from east to west is 300 feet, the nave, exclusive of the aisles, measuring 132 feet 6 inches by 30 feet; the external breadth across the transepts is 156 feet, and the height from floor to roof in the nave and choir is 56 feet 3 inches. On the left of the south-west door is the baptistry, probably the oldest part of the building, as evidenced by the vaulting, and containing the old stone font which once shared with Strongbow’s monument in Christchurch the notoriety of being commonly mentioned in deeds as the place where payment of sums of money due should be tendered.

In a glass case are exhibited some of the ancient charters and seals, and some autographs of the famous Dean Swift. Proceeding up the south aisle we pass the robing-room, on the right of the door of which is the epitaph to ‘Stella,’ above the door the more famous epitaph composed by Swift for himself, and on the left a fine bust in Carrara marble of the great Dean. Further on in the south wall is the historical tablet of the Deans or St. Patrick. Turning into the south transept we find, on a curious stone corbel in the west wall, a massive 14th century statue, believed to be that of St. Patrick, and possibly that referred to in the will of Dsean Alleyne (1514), which directed that he should be buried ‘antes pedes ygaminis S. Patricii, quae, stat in navi.’

On the south wall are Archboshop Smyth’s monument (1771) by Smyth, with handsome pillars of Sienna marble, and that of Viscountess Doneraile (1761), in front of which is the handsome recumbent figure of Archbishop Whateley (1863). East of the south transept is the Chapel of St. Paul, in which is preserved the door of the ancient Chapter-house exhibiting an interesting momorial of the riot of 1492 between the followers of Lord Ormonde and those of the Deputy. The latter ‘pursuing Ormonde to the chapiter-house doore undertooke on his honor that he should receive no villanie, whereupon the recluse craving his lordship’s hand to assure him his life, there was a clift in the chapiter-house doore, pearsed at a trice, to the end both the earles should have shaken hands and be reconciled; but Ormonde surmising that this drift was intended for some furthere treacherie, that if he would stretch out his hand it had been percase cut off, refused that proffer; until Kildare stretcht in his hand to him, and so the doore was opened, they both imbraced, the storme appeased, and all their quarrels, for that preseent, rather iscontinued than ended’ (Stanihurst)

In the south wall of this chapel is the monument of Archbishop Marsh (ob. 1713), which originally stood in the churchyard. To the right of the choir in the south wall are some interesting tablets and brasses, notably those of Dean Sutton (ob. 1528), Dean Fyche *(ob. *1537), and of Sir Edward Ffitton, President of Thomond under Queen Elizabeth, and his wife, whose fifteen children are represented kneeling behind their parents.

Passing up the south choir aisle the Chapel of St. Stephen is entered, in which is the well-preserved recumbent effigy of Archbishop Tregury *(ob. *1471), bearing, impaled with the arms of the See of Dul)lin, three Cornish choughs, testifying to the accuracy of the proverb:-

‘By Pol, Tre, and Pen,

You may know the Cornish men.’

The beautiful Lady Chapel ‘with its lateral chapels of St Stephen on the south, and of forgotten dedication’ (probably of St. Peter and the Apostles) ‘on the north side, are a rebuilding from nearly floor-level in 1846, a scholarly, true, and careful reproduction from well-marked evidence of the chapels of Fulk de Saundford of 1260.’ (Sir Thomas Drew)

The design, it has been conjectured, may have been modelled on that of the Chapter-house of Salisbury Cathedral. From a letter of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, of 1633, we learn that the Lady Chapel was then in ruins, and that the arch at the east end of the choir had been filled up by a lath and plaster partition. Thirty years later it was assigned as a church to the French Protestant refugees, conditionally on their conforming to the rites and discipline of the Church of Ireland.

The opening service was attended by the Lord-Lieutenant, the Duke of Ormonde, and the French pastor, M. Hierosme, chaplain to the Duke, read the prayers and preached the sermon. The chapel of St Stephen was used by this congregation as a vestry-room The restoration of the Lady Chapel was taken in hand by Dean Pakenham, but unfortunately soft Caen stone was used, which necessitated further extensive repairs executed at the cost of Lord Iveagh in 1901.

‘The roof is supported on slender piers consisting of four detached Purbeck marble shafts clustered round a core of Caen stone.’ (Dean Bernard’s St. Patrick’s)** The arcade which now surrounds the walls of the Lady Chapel was the gift of Sir J. G. Nutting in 1892. One of the two old high-backed chairs which stand outside the altar rails was used by King William III. when he attended service here after the Battle of the Boyne. The remarkable oaken chest was constructed of wood from the beams of Archbishop **Minot’s tower, and its materials have thus been in use for a period of nearly five centuries and a half.

Almost the entire north choir aisle is ancient work restored, including some uninjured 13th-century shafts, some missing capitals only being of modern workmanship. This aisle contains the defaced effigy of Archbishop Fulk de Saundford *(ob. *1271), and opposite to it is the grave of the Duke of Schomberg, killed at the crossing of the Boyne. The latter was marked by the slab, erected in memory of the Duke by Dean Swift. bearing the caustic inscription

‘Plus potuit fama *virtutis *apud alienos

Quam sanguinis proximatas apud suos,’

in allusion to the refusal of his relatives to contribute to the cost of a fitting memorial. Passing round the stone pulpit, erected by Sir Benjamin Guinness in memory of Dean Pakenham, we enter the choir, hung with the banners of the Knights of St. Patrick, whose escutcheons are emblazoned on the stalls.

The Dean, Precentor, Chancellor, and Treasurer have their stalls at the four corners, the Dean’s ‘Stall of Honour’ being at the south-west. Above the two former is King John’s badge of the star between the horns of a crescent. The head of that monarch is carved as the south terminal of the arch at the east eud of the choir. At the south-east end is the Loftus vault, above which hang the spurs of Lord Lisburn, killed at the siege of Limerick, and the cannon-ball which caused his death. ‘The arches of the choir are narrower than those of the nave, and the mouldings ate richer. The piers are octagonal as in the nave, and between the shafts a roll moulding is continued to the ground. The noble groined roof of stone, with its great bosses representing the four evangelic symbols, follow strictly the lines of the ancient wall ribs which survived in 1900; and the graceful Early English arches at the triforium and clerestory levels are of beautiful design.

The rich mouldings of the triforium openings rest on detached shafts of Irish limestone, two on each side, with foliaged capitals; the central shaft is also of limestone. The triforium is returned across the east end, over a dignified arch, opening into the Lady Chapel. The aumbrey recesses at either side of the sacrarium are an interesting feature. The absence of a reredos impoverishes the general appearance of the choir, but there is some compensation in the uninterrupted view of the Lady Chapel, which can be had from the nave.’ (Dean Bernard’s St. Patrick’s) The mosaic pavement, the steps of black Kilkenny marble, and the oaken sedilia and screens are the gift of Lord Iveagh.

Returning to the north transept-the beautiful spiral staircase, designed in 1901 by Sir Thomas Drew from a similar one in the Cathedral of Mayence, leads to the new organ-chamber, pronounced by the builder of the new organ, Mr. Henry Willis, to he ‘an ideal position for an organ.’ The construction of this chamber at a cost of £11,000, defrayed by Lord Iveagh, rendered possible the restoration to the church of the beautiful chapel of St. Peter and the Apostles, ‘for centuries built off and unknown, and since 1864 occupied by the organ. The masonry walls which closed its east and west ends have been removed, and the whole beautifully groined arch of five bays, terminating in a triplet window to the east lately fitted with a fine memorial window, constitutes in itself a gem of 13th-century architecture, such as few would believe remained to be discovered in any part of the kingdom.’ (Sir Thomas Drew).

In the eastern corner of the transept is the 17th-century monument of Dame Mary Sentleger, wife of Sir Anthony Sentleger, ‘Knyght, Mr. of ye Rolls,’ her fourth* *husband, whom she predeceased at the age of 37. There are also some military memorials, notably a representation, by Farrell, of the storming of the Shoe Dagon Pagoda, Rangoon, 14th April 1832.

The north aisle is peculiarly rich in monuments, the principal being those of Lord Chief-Justice Whiteside *(ob. *1876), Lord Buckingham, Viceroy in 1783, when the Order of St. Patrick was founded, Dean Dawson *(ob. *1840), and Archbishop Jones *(ob. *l619). Of more than common interest are the bust of John Philpot Curran, close to the entrance to the tower; the slab to Samuel Lover, the Irish song-writer *(ob. *1868), close to the monument of Archbishop Jones; and the bas-relief to Turlough Carolan, last of the Irish bards *(ob. *1738), which is in the wall of the north aisle at the corner of the north transept.

In the north-west corner is the granite stone, bearing two ancient Celtic incised crosses, found during the excavations in 1901 consequent on the main drainage works, in the precise position marked by Sir Thomas Drew in 1890, on his map of the precinct, as the spot where any trace of St. Patrick’s ‘famous and sacrosanct well’ might be looked for; and of which he later warned ‘antiquaries of reverend instinct, and ecclesiologists … of a coming chance of recovery.’ (Journal RSAI for 1899) **The well itself has disappeared, probably owing to a diversion of the Poddle stream by an arched culvert of the time of Charles II. There is little reason to doubt that this inscribed stone originally stood over St. Patrick’s Well, and dates from the ninth or 10th century. Close to the west window stands the old wooden 18th-century pulpit from which Dean Swift preached. In the west end of the nave, adjoining the north wall of the Baptistery, is ‘the very famous, sumptuous, glorious tombe,’ of black marble and alabaster, of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, the removal of which, in 1634, from its former position in the east wall of the choir by Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, was never forgiven by the Boyles, whose enmity contributed to procure his execution.

Kevin St. police barracks. (6247 bytes)Amongst the kneeling figures of the children on the monument is that of the celebrated Robert Boyle, ‘the father of Pneumatic Philosophy, and the brother of the Earl of Cork.’ Opposite to this structure at the west end of the north aisle is an unpretending monument to Captain John M’Neill Boyd, R.N., of H.M.S. *Ajax, *who lost his life on the 9th February 1861, off the rocks at Kingstown, in attempting to rescue the shipwrecked crew of the brig Neptune.

The windows, though modern, are worthy of notice. The three-light Early English west window, by Wailes of Newcastle, representing scenes in the life of St. Patrick, replaced during the Guinness rebuilding the 17th-century Perpendicular window restored by Dean Dawson in 1830. The east window, by the same artist, is in memory of Dean Pakenham *(ob. *1863), the first of the modern benefactors of the Cathedral: The quintuplet of windows over the east arch represents the three Irish patron saints, SS. Patrick, Columba, and Brigid.

The window at the west end of the north aisle, representing the martyrdom of St. Stephen, is a memorial to the Earl of Mayo, Viceroy of India, assassinated in the Andaman Islands in 1872. In the east wall of the north transept the memorial window to the 18th Royal Irish who fell at the siege of Sevastopol is being replaced (1907) by a more worthy tribute to that regiment, Royal Irish Fusiliers, including a noble Celtic cross, nine feet high, in white marble, commemorative of the South African campaign, grouped with those of Burmah and China. The three-light Crucifixion window in the east wall of the north choir aisle is in memory of Dean Jellett *(ob. *1902). In the same aisle is preserved a sacristan’s chest of great antiquity.

The organ, the gift of Lord Iveagh, built in 1902 by H. Willis of London at a cost of nearly £6,000, is one of the finest in the United Kingdom. Some of the old bells, preserved in the parvise chamber of the tower, were recast in 1670 by William, Roger, and John Purdue of Salisbury, and rang a peal on the 25th October 1798 in honour of Nelson’s victory of the Nile, fought on August 1st, the news having taken that time to reach Dublin. The present peal of ten bells was presented by Lord Iveagh in 1897.

Badge of King John.(1829 bytes)The precincts present many features of interest to the antiquary who may undertake the task of tracing and defining the situation of the ancient ‘Liberties of St. Patrick.’ The ancient Liberty of St. Sepulchre was independent of the Lord Mayor and Corporation up to 1840, and extended from Miltown to St. Stephen’s Green south. The district to the north, once portion of the ‘Dean’s Liberty,’ and covered, prior to 1903, with squalid and ruinous dwellings, has been acquired by Lord Iveagh, and laid out by him as a public garden for the poor of this crowded neighbourhood.

The library of St. Sepulchre, known from its founder (1707), Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, as ‘Marsh’s Library,’ which lies east of the Cathedral, with an entrance in Guinness Street, contains an interesting collection of 20,000 volumes and about 200 manuscripts.

Chapter III. Fitzpatrick Contents Home.