In the very first year of the twelfth century, 1101, a council of the Irish Christian church met at Cashel. In the previous century, there had been a gradual movement towards church reform, intended to bring the insular church into a more orthodox communion with Rome in terms of liturgy, law and governance.
The best evidence we have of this movement is a letter from the great reforming Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) to the king of Munster, which is the only known communication between the Papacy and anyone in Ireland for over 400 years. The long isolation of the Irish church was ending.
The process of reform begun at Cashel reached its full maturity half a century later at the Synod of Kells. It established the four Irish archdioceses that have survived to the present day, adding Dublin and Tuam to the existing Armagh and Cashel. Although named for Kells, the synod also met at the new Cistercian foundation at nearby Mellifont.
Mellifont stands on the northern side of the Boyne valley about half way between Slane Priory and the great monastery at Monasterboice, which holds two of the finest high crosses in Ireland. Mellifont was founded by St Malachy in 1142 on land granted to him by the local Gaelic lord. It was the first Cistercian house in Ireland.
Malachy had been a reforming archbishop of Armagh in the 1130s but his modernising efforts met with robust opposition from conservative clergy. Not the least of these was a sept whose kinsmen had had a stranglehold on appointments in the archbishopric of Armagh for almost two centuries, precisely the sort of nepotistic abuse the reformers were trying to tackle. Frustrated, he resigned and made his way to Rome, where he was appointed papal legate to Ireland. On both his outward and return journeys, he had visited the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux, south-east of Paris near Troyes. Here, he left four of his followers to be trained as Cistercians. It was they who founded Mellifont, under Malachy’s leadership, in 1142.
The Cistercians spread rapidly throughout Ireland during the rest of the century, and by its close Mellifont was joined by a further twenty-six foundations. The order reached its peak by the mid-thirteenth century and thereafter declined, with most foundations eventually being suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s. But although their glory days were relatively short, their contribution to medieval Ireland was exceptional. To understand why, it is necessary to look — as so often in Irish history — to the wider European perspective.
The Cistercian order had been founded in France in 1098. Its origins lay in the desire of its founders to restore the austerities of the rule of St Benedict, which had been diluted by the worldly riches of many Benedictine foundations. They were a product of the Gregorian church reforms, a series of changes in church governance associated with the name of Pope Gregory VII. The reforms were aimed at ending nepotism and clerical marriage (and marriage generally within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity), and at asserting both the primacy of the Pope over all temporal Christian kings and his position as absolute monarch of the Christian church.
The Cistercians fitted well into this new, rigorous regime. From their beginnings in northern France, they spread rapidly to England, Wales and the Scottish borders, following in the footsteps of the Norman conquest. Tintern Abbey, Fountains and Rievaulx in Yorkshire and Melrose in Scotland are all Cistercian houses. Moreover, they established themselves in other Norman kingdoms in southern Italy and Sicily. It was not simply a matter of following the Norman-French trail. The eastward drive of German-speaking merchants and adventurers towards Poland and the Baltic was also accompanied by a Cistercian presence. A monk from the Polish monastery of Lekno became bishop of Prussia in the early thirteenth century. Lithuania became the last territory in Europe to embrace Christianity, not doing so until the 1380s.
It was an age of expansion, conquest and colonialism throughout many parts of Europe. Ireland was no exception, nor in any way unique. And these expanding tribal and proto-national movements, of which the Norman-French and German examples are just the most prominent, were accompanied by evangelising missions (crusades in effect) in the eastern lands and ecclesiastical reform movements in western lands already Christian, the latter spearheaded by reforming orders like the Cistercians. It was no accident that the rapid expansion of the Cistercians in Ireland followed hard on the arrival of the Normans after 1170.
The Cistercians preferred relatively remote sites for their rigorous rule and were famed for their physical work ethic. They cleared uncultivated land and brought it under the plough. They developed a distinctive style of architecture for their monasteries, as we can see here at Mellifont. Typically, the monastery is arranged around a cloister (a fine surviving example of which can be seen at Jerpoint Abbey in Co. Kilkenny) with a church at the northern end and a chapter house at the southern. The combination of late Romanesque and early Gothic features is especially notable, although naturally the parts of each monastery that are of later date — as with the chapter house at Mellifont — display a greater Gothic emphasis. The finest surviving fragment at Mellifont — the octagonal lavabo or washing house — has the rounded arches so typical of the Romanesque style.
And fragments are all that remain, thanks to the state-sanctioned vandalism known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries. In a fit of destructive zeal, the sixteenth-century Reformers were not content to suppress religious houses — they had considerable justification for that, because of the luxury and corruption into which many had fallen — they felt the need to physically obliterate these beautiful places. Even in their ruinous state, the monasteries remain islands of civilised calm.
They were also, in their day, agents of colonialism. Just as the Normans represented the secular usages of continental Europe coming into Ireland, so the Cistercians and other orders (but especially the Cistercians) represented the spiritual analogue to the conquest. In one of history’s ironies, it was here at Mellifont that Hugh O’Neill finally submitted to the crown of England in 1603 at the end of the Nine Years’ war, the moment when Gaelic Ireland finally bows to the force majeure of the new order.
