Pyramids by the Boyne telling us of the genius of the De Danaans. The
Milesian epoch is even now revealed to us in the great earthworks of
Tara and Emain and Cruacan. We can, if we wish, climb the mound of
heaped-up earth where was the fortress of Cuculain, or look over the
green plains from the hill of Find.
[Illustration: Mellifont Abbey, Co. Louth.]
In like manner, there is an unbroken series of monuments through the
early Christian epoch, beginning with the oratories of the sixth
century, continuing through the early churches of Killiney, Moville,
Dalkey, Glendalough and Monasterboice, from before the Norse inroads;
followed by the epoch of Round Towers, or protected belfries, with their
churches, nearly three score of these Round Towers remaining in fair
preservation, while many are perfect from base to apex; and culminating
in Cormac's chapel and the beautiful group of buildings on Cashel Rock.
For the next period, the age of transition after the waning of the
Norsemen and the coming of the first Normans, we have many monuments in
the Norman style, like the door of Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin,
with its romance of Danish conversion and Norse religious fervor.
Finally, we come to the age whose progress we have just recorded, which
covers the whole of the Middle Ages. For this period, which was for
Ireland an epoch of foreign influence much more than of foreign rule, we
have many beautiful Abbeys, built for those foreign orders whose coming
was in a sense a return tide, a backward flow of the old missionary
spirit which went forth from Ireland over nascent modern Europe. The
life of these abbeys was full of rich imaginative and religious power;
it abounded in urbanity and ripe culture of a somewhat selfish and
exclusive type. Yet we cannot but feel a limitless affection and
sympathy for the abbots and friars of the days of old who have left us
such a rich heritage of beauty and grace.
All these abbeys seem to have been formed on a single plan: a cruciform
church symbolized the source of all their inspiration, its choir
extending towards the east, whence the Light had come; the nave, or main
body of the church, was entered by the great western door, and the arms
of the cross, the transepts, extended to the north and south. Here is a
very beautiful symbol, a true embodiment of the whole spirit and
inspiration of the monastic orders. From one of the transepts a side
door generally led to the domestic buildings, the dormitory, the
refectory, the chapter house, where the friars assembled in conclave
under the presidency of the abbot. There were lesser buildings,
store-rooms, granaries, work-rooms, but these were the kernel of the
establishment. The church was the center of all things, and under its
floor the friars were at last laid to rest, while brother friars carved
tombs for them and epitaphs, adding a new richness of decoration to the
already beautiful church.
We may record a few of these old foundations, showing at the same time
the present state of the old abbey buildings. At Newtown on the northern
bank of the Boyne, about a mile below Trim, Simon Rochfort founded an
abbey for the Augustinian Canons in 1206, dedicating it to Saint Peter
and Saint Paul. The capitals of the pillars in the church, the vaulting
of the roof and the shafts of the arches which supported the tower are
full of singular grace and beauty, even now when the abbey is roofless
and in part destroyed, while the corbels and mouldings round the
lancet-shaped windows are full of luxuriant fancy and charm. We can
divine from them the full and rich spiritual life which brought forth
such exquisite flowers of beauty; we can imagine the fine aroma of
fervor and saintly peace which brooded over these consecrated aisles.
A few miles below Trim, and an equal distance from the old royal palace
of Tara, Bective Abbey stands on the northern bank of the Boyne, with a
square, battlemented tower overshadowing its cloistered quadrangle. The
cinque-foil cloister arches, the fillets that bind the clustered shafts
of the pillars, the leaf ornaments of the plinths at their base all
speak of a luxuriant sense of beauty and grace, of a spirit of pure and
admirable artistic work. This rich creative power thus breaking forth in
lovely handiwork is only the outward sign of a full inner life, kindled
by the fire of aspiration, and glowing with the warm ardor of devotion.
Bective Abbey dates from about 1150. We are told that the king of Meath
who founded it for the Cistercian order "endowed it with two hundred and
forty-five acres of land, a fishing-weir and a mill." From this meager
outline we can almost restore the picture of the life, altogether
idyllic and full of quiet delight, that the old Friars lived among the
meadows of the Boyne.
Grey Abbey was founded a little later, in 1193, for the same Cistercian
order, where the promontory of the Ards divides Strangford Lough from
the eastern sea. Over the waters of the lough, the red sandstone hills
of north Down make a frame for the green of the meadows, as the tide
laps and murmurs close to the old monastic church. Grey Abbey owes its
foundation to the piety of a princess of the Isle of Man, wedded to De
Courcy, the Norman warrior whose victories and defeats we have recorded.
The great beauty of its church is due to the soaring loftiness of the
eastern window, and the graceful daring of the arches which in former
days upheld the central tower.
Other Cistercian foundations are commemorated in the names of
Abbey-leix in Queen's county, and Abbey-dorney and Abbey-feale in Kerry;
all three dating from after the reformation of the order by Saint
Bernard the Younger, though the work of that ardent missionary did not
apparently extend its influence to Ireland until a later date. This
reformer of the Cistercians must not be confused with the elder Saint
Bernard, whose hospice guards the pass of the Alps which bears his name.
Saint Bernard of the Alps died in 1008, while Saint Bernard the reformer
was born in 1093, dying sixty years later as abbot of Clara vallis or
Clairvaux, on the bank of the Aube in northern France. It was at this
Abbey of the Bright Vale, or Clara vallis, that Archbishop Maelmaedog
resigned his spirit to heaven, five years before the death of the
younger Saint Bernard, then abbot there. This is a link between the old
indigenous church and the continental orders of the Friars.
Killmallock Abbey, in Limerick, belonged to the order of the Dominicans,
founded by the scion of the Guzmans, the ardent apostle of Old Castile,
known to history as Saint Dominick. Here again we have a beautiful abbey
church with a square central tower, upborne on soaring and graceful
arches from the point where the nave joined the choir. There is only one
transept--on the south--so that the church is not fully cruciform, a
peculiarity shared by several other Dominican buildings. The eastern
window and the window of this transept are full of delicate grace and
beauty, each containing five lights, and marked by the singularly
charming manner in which the mullions are interlaced above. Enough
remains of the cloister and the domestic buildings for us to bring back
to life the picture of the old monastic days, when the good Friars
worked and prayed there, with the sunlight falling on them through the
delicate network of the windows.
Holycross Abbey, near Thurles in Tipperary, was another of the
Cistercian foundations, its charter, dating from 1182, being still in
existence. Its church is cruciform; the nave is separated from the north
aisle by round arches, and from the south aisle by pointed arches, which
gives it a singular and unusual beauty. The great western window of the
nave, with its six lights, is also very wonderful. Two chapels are
attached to the north transept, with a passage between them, its roof
supported by a double row of pointed arches upheld by twisted pillars.
The roof is delicately groined, as is the roof of the choir, and the
whole abbey breathes a luxuriant richness of imagination, bearing
everywhere the signs of high creative genius. The same lavish
imagination is shown everywhere in the interlaced tracery, the black
limestone giving the artist an admirable vehicle for his work. Though
the charter dates from the twelfth century, some of the work is about
two centuries later, showing finely the continuity of life and spiritual
power in the old monastic days.
[Illustration: Holy Cross Abbey, Co. Tipperary.]
The Friars of Saint Augustine, who were in possession of the abbey at
Newtown on the Boyne, had another foundation not far from West port in
Mayo, in the Abbey of Ballintober, founded in 1216 by a son of the great
Ruaidri Ua Concobar. Here also we have the cruciform church, with four
splendid arches rising from the intersection of nave and choir, and once
supporting the tower. The Norman windows over the altar, with their
dog-tooth mouldings, are very perfect. In a chapel on the south of the
choir are figures of the old abbots carved in stone.
One of the Ui-Briain founded a Franciscan Abbey at Ennis in Clare about
1240, which is more perfectly preserved than any of those we have
described. The tower still stands, rising over the junction of nave and
choir; the refectory, chapter house, and some other buildings still
remain, while the figure of the patron, Saint Francis of Assisi, still
stands beside the altar at the north pier of the nave.
Clare Abbey, a mile from Ennis, was founded for the Augustine Friars in
1195, and here also the tower still stands, dominating the surrounding
plain. Three miles further south, on the shore of Killone Lake, was yet
another abbey of the same period, while twenty miles to the north, at
Corcomroe on the shore of Galway Bay, the Cistercians had yet
another home.
We might continue the list indefinitely. Some of the most beautiful of
our abbeys still remain to be recorded, but we can do no more than give
their names: Bonamargy was built for the Franciscans in Antrim in the
fifteenth century; the Dominican priory at Roscommon dates from 1257;
the Cistercian Abbey of Jerpoint in Kilkenny was begun in 1180; Molana
Abbey, in Waterford, was built for the Augustinians on the site of a
very old church; and finally Knockmoy Abbey in Galway, famous for its
fourteenth century frescoes, was begun in 1189. We must remember that
every one of these represents, and by its variations of style indicates,
an unbroken life through several centuries. The death-knell of the old
life of the abbeys and priories, in Ireland as in England, was struck in
the year 1537 by the law which declared their lands forfeited to the
crown; as the result of the religious controversies of the beginning of
the sixteenth century.
XIII.
THE TRIUMPH OF FEUDALISM.
A.D. 1603-1660.
The confiscation of the abbey lands, as the result of religious
controversy, closed an epoch of ecclesiastical life in Ireland, which we
cannot look back on without great regret for the noble and beautiful
qualities it brought forth in such abundance. There is a perennial charm
and fascination in the quiet life of the old religious houses--in the
world, yet not of the world--which appeals to aesthetic and moral
elements in our minds in equal degree. From their lovely churches and
chapter-houses the spirits of the old monks invite us to join them in an
unworldly peace on earth, a renewal of the golden age, a life full of
aspiration and self-forgetfulness, with all the burdens of egotism
laid aside.
Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the
spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came. There
was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which they
supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation in two, all
things within their consecrated walls being deemed holy, while all
without was unregenerate, given up to wrath. A barrier of feelings and
hopes thus springing up, tends to harden from year to year, till at last
we have a religious caste grown proud and arrogant, and losing all trace
of the spiritual fervor which is its sole reason for being.
The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily to be
understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed, cause for
wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had not where to
lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in
Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might
and did often arise from this very fact. Ambition, the desire of wealth,
the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had
never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which
is the essence of religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten,
or allowed to be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet
not essential; and difference of view about these unessential things led
to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and war.
We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and
wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the
individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from
egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not
in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the
greatest good for himself and others equally; that one shall not
dominate another for his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth
in that other whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their
finest growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's
neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the
common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the
beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced; something new,
wider and more humane, something universal, is added to it from above;
something consciously common to all souls. And through the inspiration
of that larger soul, the individual life for the first time comes to its
true power--a power which is held by all pure souls in common.
We can see that something like this was the original inspiration of the
religious orders. Their very name of Friars or Brothers speaks of the
ideal of a common life above egotism. They sought a new birth through
the death of selfishness, through self-sacrifice and renunciation. All
their life in common was a symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the
very form of their churches bearing testimony to their devotion. More
than that, the beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old
abbey buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was
actually attained.
Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large wealth and
costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit, fanning back to
life the smouldering fires of desire. We can see even more clearly that
the division between the secular and the religious life would tend to
raise a moral barrier, hardening that very sense of separation which the
humane and universal consciousness seeks to kill. Finally, we should see
what the world has often seen: the disciples of the Nazarene dwelling in
palaces, and vying with princes in the splendor of their retinues. This
is hardly the way to make real the teaching of "the kingdom not of this
world." This world, in the meaning of that saying, is the old world of
egotism, of self-assertion, of selfish rivalry, of the sense of
separation. The kingdom is that very realm of humane and universal
consciousness added from above, the sense of the one soul common to all
men and working through all men, whether they know it or not.
We can, therefore, see that the confiscation of the monasteries, and
even the persecution of the religious orders, might be the cause of
lasting spiritual good; it was like the opening of granaries and the
scattering of grain abroad over the fields. The religious force, instead
of drawing men out of the world, thenceforth was compelled to work among
all men, not creating beautiful abbeys but transforming common lives.
Persecution was the safeguard of sincerity, the fire of purification,
from which men's spirits came forth pure gold. Among all nations of the
world, Ireland has long held the first place for pure morals, especially
in the relations of sex; and this is increasingly true of those
provinces where the old indigenous element is most firmly established.
We may affirm that the spiritualizing of religious feeling through
persecution has had its share in bringing this admirable result,
working, as it did, on a race which has ever held a high ideal
of purity.
Thus out of evil comes good; out of oppression, rapacity and
confiscation grow pure unselfishness, an unworldly ideal, a sense of the
invisible realm. We shall presently see the same forces of rapacity and
avarice sowing the seeds for a not less excellent harvest in the world
of civil life.
The principle of feudalism, though introduced by the first Norman
adventurers in the twelfth century, did not gain legal recognition over
the whole country until the seventeenth. The old communal tenure of the
Brehon law was gradually superseded, so that, instead of innumerable
tribal territories with elected chiefs, there grew up a system of
estates, where the land was owned by one man and tilled by others. The
germ of this tenure was the right of private taxation over certain
districts, granted by the Norman duke to his barons and warriors as the
reward for their help in battle. Feudal land tenure never was, and never
pretended to be, a contract between cultivator and landowner for their
mutual benefit. It was rather the right to prey on the farmer, assigned
to the landowner by the king, and paid for in past or present services
to the king. In other words, the head of the Norman army invited his
officers to help themselves to a share of the cattle and crops over
certain districts of England, and promised to aid them in securing their
plunder, in case the Saxon cultivator was rash enough to resist. The
baronial order presently ceased to render any real service to their
duke, beyond upholding him that he might uphold them. But there was no
such surcease for the Saxon cultivator. The share of his cattle and
crops which he was compelled to give up to the Norman baron became more
rigidly defined, more strictly exacted, with every succeeding century,
and the whole civil state of England was built up on this principle.
The baronial order assembled at Runnymead to force the hand of the king.
From that time forward their power increased, while the king's power
waned. But there was no Runnymead for the Saxon cultivator. He
continued, as to this day he continues, to pay the share of his cattle
and crops to the Norman baron or his successor, in return for
services--no longer rendered--to the king. The whole civil state of
England, therefore, depends on the principle of private taxation; the
Norman barons and their successors receiving a share of the cattle and
crops of the whole country, year after year, generation after
generation, century after century, as payment for services long become
purely imaginary, and even in the beginning rendered not to the
cultivator who was taxed, but to the head of the armed invaders, who
stood ready to enforce the payment. The Constitution of England embodies
this very principle even now, in the twentieth century. Two of the three
Estates,--King, Lords and Commons,--in whom the law-making power is
vested, represent the Norman conquest, while even the third, still
called the Lower House, boasts of being "an assembly of gentlemen," that
is, of those who possess the right of private taxation of land, the
right to claim a share of the cattle and crops of the whole country
without giving anything at all in return.
This is the system which English influence slowly introduced into
Ireland, and with the reign of the first Stuarts the change was
practically complete, guaranteed by law, and enforced by armed power.
The tribesmen were now tenants of their former elected chief, in whom
the ownership of the tribal land was invested; the right of privately
taxing the tribesmen was guaranteed to the chief by law, and a share of
all cattle and crops was his by legal right, not as head of the tribe,
but as owner of the land, with power to dispossess the tribesmen if they
failed to pay his tax.
But very many districts had long before this come under the dominion of
Norman adventurers, like the De Courcys, the De Lacys, and the rest, of
whose coming we have told. They also enjoyed the right of private
taxation over the districts under their dominion, and, naturally, had
power to assign this right to others,--not only to their heirs, but to
their creditors,--or even simply to sell the right of taxing a certain
district to the highest bidder in open market.
The tribal warfare of the Middle Ages had brought many of the old chiefs
and Norman lords into open strife with the central power, with the
result that the possessions of unsuccessful chiefs and lords were
continually assigned by the law-courts to those who stood on the side of
the central power, the right to tax certain districts thus changing
hands indefinitely. The law-courts thus came into possession of a very
potent weapon, whether for rewarding the friends or punishing the
enemies of the central power, or simply for the payment of personal and
partisan favors.
During the reign of the first Stuarts the full significance of this
weapon seems to have been grasped. We see an unlimited traffic in the
right to tax; estates confiscated and assigned to time-serving
officials, and endless abuses arising from the corruption of the courts,
the judges being appointed by the very persons who were presently to
invoke the law to their own profit. The tribal system was submerged,
and the time of uncertainty was taken advantage of to introduce
unlimited abuses, to assign to adventurers a fat share of other men's
goods, to create a class legally owning the land, and entitled, in
virtue of that ownership, to a share of the cattle and crops which they
had done nothing to produce.
The Stuarts were at this very time sowing the seeds of civil war in
England by the introduction of like abuses, the story of which has been
repeatedly told; and we are all familiar with the history of the great
uprising which was thereby provoked, to the temporary eclipse of the
power of the crown. The story of the like uprising at the same epoch,
and from kindred causes, in Ireland, is much more obscure, but equally
worth recording, and to this uprising we may now turn.
Its moral causes we have already spoken of. There was, first, the
confiscation of the abbey lands, and the transfer of church revenues and
buildings to Anglican clergy--clergy, that is, who recognized the
sovreign of England as the head of the church. This double confiscation
touched the well-springs of intense animosity, the dispossessed abbots
using all the influences of their order in foreign lands to bring about
their re-installation, while the controversy as to the headship of the
church aroused all the fierce and warring passions that had been raging
on the Continent since the beginning of the sixteenth century.
There were, besides, the griefs of the dispossessed chieftains, whose
tribal lands had been given to others. Chief among these was the famous
house of O'Neill, the descendants of Nial, the old pagan monarch whose
wars are thought to have brought the captive of Slemish Mountain to
Ireland. The O'Neills, like their neighbors the O'Donnells, descendants
of Domnall, had been one of the great forces of tribal strife for eighty
generations, and they now saw their lands confiscated and given over to
strangers. But they were only representatives of a feeling which was
universal; an indignant opposition to arbitrary and tyrannous
expropriation.