Religious Communities and Their Closures in Ireland during the Sixteenth Century

The closure of religious communities throughout England, commonly known as the ‘dissolution of the monasteries’, was commenced in 1536 and completed to all intents and purposes by 1540, resulting in what one commentator has recently described as ‘the greatest dislocation of people, property and daily life since the Norman Conquest’. This was an important part of Henry VIII’s break with Rome and served as a means not only of further establishing his new authority as supreme head of the Church of England but also as a fundraising mechanism. Ireland’s religious communities, as part of the Tudor kingdoms, now also fell (in theory, at least) under the control of the Crown and were therefore due for closure from the mid-1530s onwards. But in reality, due to the limited power held by the Crown throughout much of Ireland, the only religious houses to be dissolved were those in the Pale, the most English part of Ireland (inter Anglicos, encompassing mainly Counties Dublin, Meath, Tipperary and Kildare, as well as some other areas). In the Gaelic part of Ireland (inter Hibernicos), the king’s writ, which in theory was law, did not actually run, so much so that in one case, the commissioners appointed to inspect a religious house in Granard, County Longford, merely noted that they did not do so, ‘for fear of the wild Irish’. The dissolution process in Ireland was drawn out and took place in two stages, with a second wave of monastic dissolutions in the 1570s and 1580s, long into Elizabeth’s reign. This was just one arm of the queen’s expansionist movement into parts of the island hitherto out of the reach of Tudor administration. Although the Reformation process in Ireland as a whole can ultimately be said to have been a failure, the dissolution process (in parts of the island, at least) was a success, one of the very few triumphs of Henry’s Irish Reformation programme. Vast tracts of property and land exchanged hands, a land grab that was facilitated by characters such as William Brabazon, the Irish vice-treasurer whose corruption was notorious. Despite this, a small number of communities managed to escape closure and continued on, protected by their local communities and gentry. Since the early 1970s, Brendan Bradshaw and others have written of the Henrician ‘first wave’ of dissolutions, but little consideration has been given to the later wave of closures that took place in parts of Gaelic Ireland that had previously been out of the Crown’s reach. This essay will survey the closures of the 1530s before discussing the dissolutions that took place in the later sixteenth century, and by doing so, it is hoped, will present a new consideration of these events that irrevocably altered Ireland’s landscape and society.