Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum; Or, Ireland's Ancient Schools and Scholars

by John Healy

But what useful purpose does this extreme austerity serve? We can only answer very briefly that it serves two things—first, it serves to emancipate and ennoble the soul in its conflict with the flesh; second, it serves to assimilate us with Christ crucified. We with our selfish hearts, our sordid ungenerous souls, cannot understand the saints of God; we cannot realize how God speaks to them, and comforts them, and feeds them like the ravens in the wilderness. Yet this bishop was a man like ourselves, a man whose life was cast on evil days, and who lived in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation.

Yes, the prelate was a Saint and an Apostle; but the people were sensual and wicked; they would not hearken to his word, nor turn away from their evil courses. Danish Dublin at this time was not a model city, nor a truly Christian city. It was still, in many ways, half pagan; or if they had faith, they certainly had not works. The Archbishop was sorely grieved; he forewarned them, like another Jeremias, of the wrath to come. He told them, what even human sagacity might perceive, that every kingdom divided against itself must fall; that an evil day was in store for them, as well as for the wicked and perverse generation that was over all the land. God had sent them prophets, and they would not hearken; apostles, but they would not be converted. “So the day is at hand, and thy house will be laid desolate.” It was even at their doors—a day of wrath and vengeance—and yet a day of justice and mercy, because their bitter chastisement was yet their salvation.

Shortly after the arrival of the Norman freebooters in the year A.D. 1169, Dermott M‘Murrough and Maurice Fitzgerald made their first attack on Dublin. On this occasion the citizens kept within their gates, and the enemy was not strong enough to take the city. But the midnight sky was red with the glare of burning homesteads through all the valley of the Liffey; and when the plunderers departed, scarcely a living thing survived in all that fertile region.

Next year the attack was renewed in force, and this time it was directed against the city itself. The citizens had great reason to fear the vengeance of M‘Murrough, for they had put his father to a cruel death in the midst of their city, and had shamefully buried him with a dog. Now M‘Murrough, with the Normans led on by Strongbow in person, was thundering at their gates. The city, too, was badly prepared for a siege, and there were traitors within the walls; so the citizens resolved to make the best terms they could, and surrender the city. The Archbishop was asked to negotiate the terms of surrender; but even whilst he and the Earl were in conference outside the walls of the city, Milo de Cogan, and some of the more lawless spirits, burst over the walls, and attacked the town. They burned, robbed, and slaughtered as usual, so that the streets were filled with the dead and dying. Then it was that St. Laurence proved himself a true pastor. Rushing from the false parley, he entered the city, and snatched from the brutal soldiers the palpitating bodies of their victims. A hundred times he interposed his own body to ward off the fatal stroke from others. He went about through the slippery streets in his episcopal robes, with the cross in his hands, imploring the merciless foe for Christ’s sake to stop the horrid carnage; and when he could do no more, he gave absolution to the dying, and helped to bury the heaps of dead. It was a fearful foretaste of what his native land was destined to endure in the future.

But the Archbishop was not only a true pastor, but a true patriot. He knew that the first adventurers were simply robbers, some of whom were afterwards imprisoned for daring to effect a hostile landing in Ireland, without the licence of the king, at the invitation of a traitor. So he stimulated the slothful king, Rory O’Connor, to action; he implored the native princes to give up for a while their insane divisions, to unite against the common foe, and come to the aid of the Capital. These efforts were partially successful. Some thirty thousand Irish soldiers under the supreme command of Roderick himself beleagured the city from Dalkey to Clontarf, whilst the ships of Hasculf the Dane crowded the river, and watched the river-gate. It was the supreme moment of Ireland’s destiny. Had the Irish been soldiers, or even men, they might have annihilated their foes. But they were neither. After a two months’ siege, in which the garrison was reduced to the verge of starvation, Milo de Cogan made a desperate sally with a few hundred soldiers, and routed the hosts of the Irish, almost with a shout, as boys frighten away the flocks of birds from the fields in spring.

The Archbishop doubtless saw clearly enough from what he witnessed on that occasion, that the Irish soldiers had no discipline, that their leaders had no union amongst themselves, and that such a heap of uncementing sand, as the event proved, would have no chance of withstanding the mail-clad warriors, who were victorious on every battlefield in Europe. So when the king himself came over towards the close of A.D. 1171, Laurence O’Toole, with the rest of the Irish prelates, followed the example of the kings of the West, and South, and East, who had all submitted to Henry without striking a blow. Herein, too, he proved himself a true patriot, although submission must have cost him a bitter pang. He had seen enough to prove that resistance was utterly hopeless, and that his duty to God and to the people was to yield to a power which he could not oppose. So we find his name amongst the prelates who assembled at Cashel in A.D. 1171, or the beginning of A.D. 1172, to enact such disciplinary laws as the deplorable state of the times had rendered imperatively necessary for the reformation of morality and the reform of discipline. From the Pope’s reply to the Synodical letter of this Council we can readily infer, what indeed we might naturally expect from the disturbed state of the times, that very grave abuses prevailed at this period in various parts of the country—abuses which it was a blessing to have reformed almost at any cost.

Yet the great Archbishop was devotedly loyal to his own sovereign, Rory O’Connor, and continued to be faithful to him to the end, even when he became a crownless king, forsaken by his own subjects, and despised and imprisoned by his own sons. Indeed it is not too much to say that Laurence lost his life in the service of that worthless king, whose misfortunes he had done so much to alleviate.

In A.D. 1175 Rory O’Connor finally and formally gave up all claims to the kingdom of Ireland, and was content to accept his own hereditary kingdom of Connaught as a fief from the English monarch. The treaty is still extant; and we find the name of Laurencius Dublinensis as Chancellor for the unfortunate King of Connaught. He even went over to London in person in company with the Archbishop of Tuam, and the Abbot of St. Brendan’s, Clonfert, to negotiate the treaty for his old and beloved monarch. Such fidelity to fallen princes is rare, and is highly honourable to the great prelate of Dublin.

Towards the end of the year A.D. 1178 Alexander III. convoked for the first Sunday of the following Lent a General Council to meet in Rome, in order to heal the deplorable wounds which the Church had received from a schism of some twenty years’ standing. The Letters of Convocation did not arrive in Ireland until near Christmas; the journey to Rome was toilsome and perilous, especially in the winter season; yet the good Archbishop at once prepared to obey the voice of the Pope as the voice of God. He started immediately after Christmas, and crossing over to England was, with the Irish prelates, his companions, very rudely treated by the king. Before they were allowed to cross to France the jealous tyrant compelled them to swear that during their stay in Rome they would do nothing derogatory to the dignity of the English crown. But in spite of every obstacle they succeeded in making their way to Rome, and were present at all the sessions of the Council. It is a proud thing to find the names of six Irish prelates amongst the signatories of that great Council—a larger number than came from England and Scotland together—and at their head stands the name of Laurence, Archbishop of Dublin.

But Laurence did more than attend the sessions of the Council. He opened the eyes of the Pope to the true state of affairs in Ireland, and not only secured many privileges for his own Church in Dublin, but also insisted on the Pope recognising and safeguarding the liberty and independence of the Church in Ireland. Unfortunately our information on this question is very scanty. However we are inclined to think that, when it is said St. Laurence secured the liberty of the Church in Ireland, it means not only that, like Thomas à Becket, he took measures to protect it against the encroachments of the civil power, but what was at least of equal importance, he preserved it from all dependence on the See of Canterbury. It was only two years before in A.D. 1177 that the Scottish prelates and abbots were forced to swear obedience to the Archbishop of York as their metropolitan. The same crafty policy would no doubt be also attempted in Ireland; and although we cannot prove it, we are convinced in our own mind that it is to St. Laurence O’Toole we owe the spiritual independence of the Catholic Church in Ireland.