Religion and Reformation in the Tudor Diocese of Meath (review)

This short book forms part of an increasing body of local and regional studies which collectively are bringing about a transformation of our understanding of early modern Ireland. This developing preoccupation with the lesser political and administrative units of the island—its lordships, counties, and dioceses—is in large part a reflection of continuing dissatisfaction with the attempts of previous generations of scholars to provide an adequate account of the major historical developments of the period through wide-ranging and general lines of interpretation. As political and administrative historians failed to identify fundamental forces underlying the process of the Tudor conquest and its consequences across the country as a whole, so they turned to intense analysis of particular regions in order to uncover and assess specific factors hitherto obscured in the broad canvass of historical explanation. And similarly, as there is no agreed account as to why the Protestant Reformation failed and the Counter-Reformation succeeded, religious and cultural historians have begun to undertake intense studies of the primary units within which the great confessional struggle took place. Already important original work informed by these concerns has been completed for the archdiocese of Armagh, the archdiocese of Dublin, and the diocese of Kildare and Leighlin by Henry Jeffries, Colm Lennon and James Murray, and Mary Anne Lyons respectively, and further research on other dioceses is well underway. And it is in this context that Brendan Scott's study of the diocese of Meath is best seen.

In his choice of topic Scott has been singularly fortunate. As part of the archdiocese of Armagh and as a county of the Pale, Meath has been relatively rich in surviving primary materials, and Scott has been able to exploit important work on the diocese already published by the nineteenth-century ecclesiastical historian Anthony Cogan, and by more recent scholars including John Brady, Gerard Rice, Helen Coburn Walsh, and Hubert Gallwey. What he offers himself is a not unsubstantial contribution to this corpus. An opening chapter provides a topographical and social survey of the diocese which will prove highly informative to those unfamiliar with the internal characteristics of the area. A second chapter develops an interpretative narrative of the course of the Reformation, and its decline from the 1530's to the 1590's.

Three analytical chapters follow. The first conducts a detailed examination of the economic and social status of the diocesan clergy. A second investigates the course of the dissolution of the diocese's religious orders and the distribution of monastic lands. A third supplies a social survey of the laity, reviewing the genealogical history of the leading noble and gentry families, and providing solid evidence of the drift toward recusancy which was such a marked feature of the later sixteenth century. Of these the first is the most successful and valuable. Combining a wide variety of difficult and hitherto underused sources, and applying a well-informed comparative perspective, Scott supplies convincing evidence both for the extremely perilous financial state of the diocese at the start of the Reformation and for its subsequent deterioration as the century advanced. The analysis is concluded by a case study of one egregiously offending clergyman which, while making due allowance for the exceptional features of the case, Scott uses to cast fascinating light on the conditions of the parish clergy as a whole. In the following two, however, the author is less imaginative. Though he carefully traces the early stages of the sale of monastic lands and throws some light on the subsequent fate of the disposed religious (most continued to draw on relatively generous pensions), he does not consider the subsequent course of the monastic estates on the land market. This is unfortunate as so much of the property was distributed not by outright grant but by...