ften subordinate officers in
monasteries, reverenced because of their office, but executing their
special functions at the command of the abbots. Sometimes a bishop was
attached to a single tribe. Sometimes a group of bishops--often seven in
number--dwelt together in one place. But in no case, I repeat, had they
jurisdiction. Thus ecclesiastical authority was vested in the abbots.
The episcopate was bestowed on certain individuals as a personal
distinction. Thus the bishops, if they were not also abbots, had only
such influence on the affairs of the Church as their sanctity, or their
learning, might give them.

It may surprise some that so anomalous a system of government should
have persisted as late as the eleventh century, in other words for a
period of over 500 years. But we must take account of the Danish--or as
we should rather call it, the Norse--invasion of Ireland. Danish ships
first appeared off the Irish coasts about the year 800. From that time
for two centuries Ireland was to a large extent cut off from intercourse
with the rest of Europe. The aim of the northern hordes, as it seems,
was not mere pillage, but the extinction of Christianity. Ecclesiastical
institutions were everywhere attacked, and often destroyed. And these
institutions were centres of scholarship. Heretofore Ireland had been
the special home of learning, and had attracted to itself large numbers
of foreign students. But in those disastrous centuries its culture was
reduced to the lowest point. In such circumstances it was not possible
that the organization of the Church should be developed or strengthened.
The Danish domination of the country must have tended to stereotype the
old hierarchical system. It might, indeed, suffer from deterioration: it
probably did. But it could not be assimilated to the system which then
prevailed on the Continent. We should expect that the constitution of
the Church in the eleventh century, whatever abuses may have crept into
its administration, would in principle be identical with that of the
pre-Danish period.

There can in fact be no doubt that it was. We have in our hands writings
of Lanfranc, Anselm, St. Bernard and Giraldus Cambrensis which picture
the state of the Irish Church at that time. They speak of it in terms
which are by no means complimentary. But when they come to details we
discover that the irregularities in its hierarchical arrangement which
shocked them most went back to the days of St.