Armagh and papal nuncio, Octavian de Palatio,
preached there in support of a crusade against the
Turks. The earliest known morality play from Ireland,
The Pride of Life,survived in the fourteenth-century
priory account roll, and in 1528 the priors of Holy
Trinity, Kilmainham, and All Hallows attended perfor-
mances of passions at Hoggen Green.
Commerce coexisted with this world, with many
guilds or fraternities having chapels at Holy Trinity,
such as the merchants’ Trinity guild (1451) or the guild
of St. Edmund, asked in 1466 to provide bows and
arrows for the defense of the city. Shops soon emerged
from crypt cellars. The “utestale[s]” mentioned in 1423
had oaken beams and stone roofs by 1466. Internally,
maintenance was continuous. Four windows were newly
glazed in 1430 in St. Mary’s chapel, a structure with a
complex building history, little of which survives. South
of it lay the long quire where, in 1461, the east window
blew in, destroying numerous relics but notably exclud-
ing the Baculus Ihesu(staff of Jesus). The priory’s ear-
nest protection of visiting pilgrims’ “immunities,” as in
1493, can be attributed to the lucrative supply of income
that they provided. The cathedral’s relics were publicly
burned in 1538 by Archbishop George Brown. Christ
Church was the sole religious house to survive the dis-
solution of the monasteries in 1539, abandoning its
monasticism for a secular constitution based on St.
Patrick’s. Henry VIII confirmed Prior Castle, alias Payn-
swick, as first dean in 1541, and by 1544, three prebendal
parishes were established: St. Michael’s, St. Michan’s,
and St. John’s. If not the Reformation, then certainly
the fall of the roof and south wall of the nave in 1562,
partially destroying the Strongbow monument, signalled
the end of the medieval period.
STUART KINSELLA
References and Further Reading
Milne, Kenneth, ed.Christ Church Cathedral Dublin: A History.
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000.
See alsoAbbeys; Architecture; Church Reform,
Twelfth Century; Cumin, John; Dublin; Education;
Fraternities and Guilds; Gilla Pátraic, Bishop;
Henry of London; Moral and Religious Instruction;
Music; Parish Churches and Cathedrals;
Pilgrims and Pilgrimages; Records, Ecclesiastical;
Religious Orders; Sculpture; St. Patrick’s Cathedral;
Scriptoria; Ua Tuathail (O’ Toole), St. Laurence
CHRISTIANITY, CONVERSION TO
The year 431 marks the date of the official introduction
of Christianity to Ireland. In that year (according to
Prosper of Aquitaine, Chronicle, s.a.) Pope Celestine I
dispatched the newly ordained Palladius as “first bishop
to the Irish believing in Christ” (primus episcopus ad
Scottos in Christum credentes). Prosper appears to allude
again to the mission of Palladius in his polemical tract
Contra Collatorem(written in the later 430s in defense
of Celestine against his detractors), when he refers to
Celestine’s having made Britain (Romana insula, the
Roman island) Catholic, while making Ireland (barbara
insula, the barbarous island) Christian. Prosper was here
referring to an earlier episode, in 429, when Celestine
dispatched Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, to Britain in
order to combat a recent recrudescence of the heresy
known as Pelagianism. That mission (again according to
Prosper) had been undertaken at the instigation of a dea-
con named Palladius, who is undoubtedly identical with
the man of that name sent to Ireland in 431. It is generally
assumed that the mission to Ireland in 431 followed on
from the one to Britain in 429.
Native tradition, however, associates the beginnings
of Irish Christianity with Patrick, not Palladius, who
was subsequently written out of Irish history. Because
Palladius disappears from the historical record in Ireland
(and elsewhere) after 431, Irish historians were forced
to fill the perceived void in the historical narrative by
dating Patrick’s arrival immediately afterward, in 432.
Patrick, a Briton by birth and upbringing, was captured
at age sixteen by Irish pirates in a raid on his family’s
estate (uillula), “along with many thousands of others”
(as he says himself), and was brought to Ireland as a slave.
His account of that episode, and of the events that
unfolded because of it, has survived in his famous Con-
fessio, which is a unique testimony to the experiences
of a Roman citizen snatched from his home by alien
marauders, and who lived to tell the tale. The Confessio
and the only other writing of Patrick’s to survive, his
letter addressed to the soldiers of Coroticus, offer
unique insights into the everyday experiences of a man
in the front line of missionary activity beyond the fron-
tiers of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, we do not
know the dates of Patrick’s mission in Ireland. In fact,
we have no dates at all for the saint, for the simple
reason that he offers none, and no other reliable con-
temporary source exists that might fill that gap.
Modern scholars are unanimous that Patrick’s two
surviving writings reveal an individual of genuine spir-
itual greatness. Historians have been troubled, how-
ever, by the fact that Patrick nowhere in his writings
refers to Palladius or anyone else involved in mission-
ary activity in Ireland, but constantly reiterates the
claim that he has gone “where no man has gone
before.” It is not at all impossible, therefore, that
Patrick came to Ireland beforePalladius, rather than
after him, perhaps in the late fourth century or in the
generation before Palladius was dispatched by Pope
Celestine to the “Irish believing in Christ.” That wouldCHRIST CHURCH CATHEDRAL