Peter CostelloFor many people Viking Dublin and Protestant Georgian Dublin, thanks largely to the fierce controversies over the years about their preservation, are more familiar than the long intervening centuries of medieval Dublin, when the capital might be said to have been a truly Catholic though English speaking city.
This book is a notable attempt to bridge this gap in a creative way. It is drawn from a long series of public talks given by experts in the period under the auspices of the Friends of Medieval Dublin and the Dublin City Council some time ago. A large selection of them have been edited into a chronological sequence running from about 740AD up to Elizabethan times.
The title and the theme makes a genuflection to Geofrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, in allowing the lives and experiences of a variety of individuals to lead the reader back into the realities of the past. The book is both richly informative and greatly entertaining, very often in a counter-intuitive way, a sure sign that something new is being passead on to the reader.
The first essay, however, by Sean Duffy, sets the scene by describing just how the various different sources, archaeology, records and modern scientific tests can be brought together. His topic is St Beraigh, whose name is found in a manuscript of the Annals of the Four Masters as the head of a church at Dublin.
But Duffy demonstrates that the saint’s existence is an illusion, a late addition to the text. Duffy has to admit that the existence of an earlier record suggests there was indeed a large ecclesiastical establishment in pre-Viking Dublin, of which a man called Siadal was the abbot.
For those who think history is a matter of certainties, this essay is a demonstration of how all history, even modern history, has to be reconstructed from broken fragments.
The basic idea of the book is to use actual persons and their lives to illuminate the different periods. Though the second essay deals with a skeleton, F196, excavated in South George’s Street, he was nicknamed ‘Eric’ by the diggers, and Eric he remains.
The emphasis is on ordinary lives in these essays. I would have liked to have learned a little more about religion in pagan and Catholic Dublin. As it is, some interesting insights into the medieval Church are provided in ‘The Archdeacon’s Tale’ by Margaret Murphy. Her character is Nicholas de Clere, who was Archdeacon of Dublin between 1287 and 1303.
At this time, as clerks in Holy Orders were among the few people who could read and write in the community, to their lot fell much of the administration of the city. The archdeacon was called “the bishop’s eyes” and he often acted as deputy for the bishop. He had to oversee the moral behaviour of both the clergy and the laity, which then as now, was not all that it should have been.
The wrongdoers were tried before his court. But he was able to keep the money paid in fines. So in the eyes of the public, a cloud hung over the office. Inevitably trouble follows wherever money leads, and Nicholas de Clere ended up in prison. He lost his office and died in shame. His successor, curiously enough, was “a 15-year-old papal appointee”. One suspects he, too, must have been quickly corrupted.
Historian
Think what you will of that, the author notes that the contemporary historian and bishop John of Salibsury records in his time a debate over whether an archdeacon could get into Heaven. “He certainly did not think so and perhaps, having heard this tale of an Archdeacon of Dublin, the readers may not think so either,” Margaret Murphy writes.
All of these essays are of interest, but another one of special interest is the essay by Gillian Kenny on a middle-aged wife and mother, Gillian de Moenis, who died of the Black Death in February 1348 – a truly terrible Visitation of God that swept over Europe at that time.
This piece explores what the life and daily round of an ordinary woman was like at the time. Her life, as the author points out, was focussed on her family, on her sister, her friends and her daughters. For medieval women friendship was of vital importance. Yet she was also a widow.
“As an independent widow in 14th Century Dublin she had greater freedom than a married woman to act as she chose.
“She could make donations to the Church, act as a patron, pursue her debtors and generally dispose of her affairs as she liked.”
If there are echoes here of what seems a modern outlook, it is perhaps because across the long centuries, what we catch in these essays are glimpses of real people and their real activities, rather than the often rarified generalities of national history.