Medieval Dublin XII, XIII, XIV, ed. Seán Duffy

Abstract

This beautifully produced series continues to showcase the considerable interest of Dublin throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond). The seemingly endless wealth of material available for its study, originally presented in papers delivered at the annual symposia organised by the Friends of Medieval Dublin or commissioned later, has been brought to publication year after year by Seán Duffy, backed by the Department of History of Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City Council. A paper in Medieval Dublin XII on the manuscripts in the library of Trinity College continues the series’ custom of drawing attention to available historical sources for the history of the city. Others examine the impact of the Hospitallers and Templars who held the manor of Clontarf after 1171 and the origins (from the county, not the town) of Dublin’s fourteenth-century sheriffs. The bulk of Medieval Dublin XII, however, continues the documentation of the physical character of the early medieval town that has been at the heart of the series since its inception in 1999. Here we have papers reporting on excavations within the Viking-Age settlement and its expanding (often industrial) suburbs over the centuries, especially extending to the west and south, plus an important consideration of how discoveries elsewhere in Ireland have affected interpretation of the first Scandinavian settlement on the site. Excavations at an early church site at Dundrum, now a suburb of the modern city, raise questions about its fate during the Viking takeover and its evolution over succeeding centuries. Investigations in the precinct of St Mary’s Abbey on the north bank of the Liffey demonstrate the physical legacy of that religious house, exemplifying the evidence so often provided in this series of the remarkable degree to which the past has left its mark on Dublin’s modern streetscape. That so much new physical evidence is available is largely thanks to the building boom in Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. While allowing unprecedented access to Dublin’s archaeology, it has also contributed to the destruction of a great deal of the urban framework that had been built up over more than a millennium. The paper that closes Medieval Dublin XIII, an architect’s account of the plan commissioned (but not since implemented) in 2007 by Dublin City Council, raises the question of how to reclaim ‘the damaged memory’ of the town (p. 320) and build in the present in a way that does not forget the past. Medieval Dublin XIII also includes three important papers on the politics and material culture (especially coins) of the Viking-Age town and a report on excavations of a medieval priory and the early buildings of the institution that replaced it, Trinity College. Other articles follow the development of municipal government in Dublin from its Scandinavian origins to the end of the Middle Ages, chart the links between the city and Bristol, and document a medieval ‘Black Monday’ (in 1209). The early holdings of the diocese of Dublin and the early history of Ireland’s Dominicans are also examined. Discussions of the historical writing of James Yonge in the early fifteenth century and an eighteenth-century survey of the city by John Rocque continue the task of drawing attention to the wealth of sources for Dublin, to which a study of Elizabethan-era literary memories of the battle of Clontarf in 1014 (which preserve a different view from the one that became traditional) is a welcome addition. This theme of the recycling of traditions about Clontarf is reprised in its anniversary year in Medieval Dublin XIV, with discussion of a twelfth-century story about Hereward from Lincolnshire which likewise might reflect a Scandinavian perspective on the conflict. Several reports of archaeological investigations continue the process of considering the town’s material culture in the Viking Age and mapping the medieval suburbs, while others investigate the conversion of its Scandinavians to Christianity, the system of grange farms that supported Dublin’s Cistercian abbey (St Mary’s) and the early stages of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Dublin’s mayors take centre stage in three papers, a discussion of a dispute with the archbishop in 1266–7, an account of the mayor’s role in the coronation of Lambert Simnel, and a study of mayors, bailiffs and sheriffs from c.1200 to the present, listed in an appendix.