Down to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce.Footnote ¹ The document presented here affords a small window into what was happening in the late sixteenth century at a crucial transitional time, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. By the mid-1590s an exodus of survivalist native clergy from the established church in the south-east was underway. This occurred in tandem with the departure of laity, those ‘church papists’ who hitherto had given a nominal adherence to the new ecclesiastical regime, as the government relaxed efforts to enforce conformity, arising from the need to retain loyalty in the Nine Years War (1594–1603).Footnote ²

Thus control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century following the introduction of the Henrician Reformation in Ireland. By the beginning of the sixteenth century many parishes were impropriate to particular religious houses. The religious community received the tithes of the parish, and in return undertook to supply a pastor. With the secularisation of the monasteries from the 1530s, these arrangements devolved to the new owners of monastic properties. By 1615 it has been estimated that nationally about 60 per cent of church livings were impropriate. A high proportion of these were in the hands of those Catholic laity who benefited from the dissolution of the monasteries.Footnote ³ While regional variations in the denominational composition of land ownership were emerging (most undertakers under the Munster plantation, and the O’Briens, earls of Thomond, were Protestant), Catholic landowners predominated. As a result, in a majority of Irish parishes the landed elite was Catholic, and it controlled the resources (chiefly tithes) which nominally were to support the clergy of the established church. The emergence of parallel ecclesiastical structures from the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign necessitated diverse systems of maintenance for both sets of clergy. The economic consequences of this situation for the Church of Ireland have received some attention.Footnote ⁴ However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted.Footnote ⁵

This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. The document presented exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation. In contemporary Catholic theory, parish temporalities (in effect, chiefly tithes) existed for the maintenance of Catholic pastors; however, circumstances in Ireland were exceptional. De facto these resources were in lay hands, recusant or Protestant, and were likely to remain so as long as Protestants retained power. From the 1580s, Catholic prelates exercising jurisdiction over a wide territory customarily issued dispensations giving members of their flock permission to retain revenues from ecclesiastical property with some conditions, including the provision that a part of the income should maintain the local Roman clergy, though without indicating a precise formula.

By the last decade of the sixteenth century, it was a major role of papally-appointed prelates ministering in Ireland to issue a range of dispensations and decrees to the laity. These touched on a variety of situations, and included marriage within the prohibited degrees of kinship, divorces, and the retention of tithes: when Robert Lalor, vicar-apostolic of Dublin, Kildare and Ferns, was arrested in Dublin in 1606, a number of these documents, largely written in his own hand, were discovered.Footnote ⁶ Given the prevalence of lay impropriations of benefices, responsibility for granting dispensations to the individual recusants who controlled these church resources fell to prelates in Ireland, as indicated in the present text. While it was probable that many of these dispensations were issued in the period c.1580 to 1641, extant documents are extremely rare.

The few surviving decrees adumbrate an anxiety, possibly widespread, among holders of ecclesiastical properties regarding the rectitude of their acquisitions. Exceptionally, one of the largest beneficiaries had recourse directly to the Holy See: in the mid-1630s, Richard Nugent, earl of Westmeath, made great efforts to acquire a papal dispensation for his family’s many impropriations.Footnote ⁷ With the emergence of Catholic self-government in the 1640s under the Confederation, clerical demands for a restoration to the Roman church of properties lost in the wake of the Reformation was an issue in debates about a possible settlement of the conflict with the crown.Footnote ⁸

The text presented here illustrates one woman’s acquisition of church properties in the early 1590s; it also raises associated issues of conscience at a time when Catholic clerics were becoming more assertive in regard to the changing ecclesiastical landscape. The parishes concerned lay in the vicinity of the town of New Ross, County Wexford. With origins in the time of Anglo-Norman settlement, by the early seventeenth century New Ross was one of the lesser important port towns of the south-east, and it had entered into a period of decay.Footnote ⁹ In this urban context, where the long-established colonial elite still held sway, the struggle for control of local ecclesiastical resources took place. The temporalities involved comprised half of the rectory of Baylevayn, in Ferns diocese;Footnote ¹⁰ the vicarage of Rossbarcken (or Rosbercon) in Ossory diocese; and the quarter part of the rectory of Whitechurch, in Ferns diocese. These parishes lay just outside New Ross, on the border between the dioceses of Ferns and Ossory. In the 1591 visitation of Ossory diocese, the incumbent of Rosbercon, John Tobyn, was one of nine clergy in the diocese who were deprived of their living, because of a refusal to conform to the established church.Footnote ¹¹

From the late 1560s, the tithes of some of the parishes listed belonged to a number of New English figures who were presumably Protestant.Footnote ¹² As indicated in the present document, Helina Whyte, a Catholic widow, had only recently acquired these properties; the previous proprietors were conformists to the established church. By 1610, however, the tithes were no longer in her or her family’s possession.Footnote ¹³ It has not been possible to find references elsewhere to Helina Whyte, but the surname and the locations suggest she belonged to one of the patrician merchant families prominent in the town since the thirteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴

Changes in parish life in Irish towns during the 1590s formed the broader context of her acquisitions. By then, in those parts of Ireland where confessional change, however minimal, had taken place, a withdrawal from the established church was underway. This was associated with the return of continentally-trained priests, especially to the towns of the south and east. Educational links to Catholic Europe from the late sixteenth century, together with earlier established trading patterns with the continent, reinforced the Catholic culture of port towns including New Ross. Contemporaries noted the particular influence clerical returnees exerted on women in the households of the social elite. Thus, at a local level, women were prominent in the espousal of recusancy.Footnote ¹⁵ By the late 1580s, a widow’s home in New Ross was an established venue for celebrating mass, storing liturgical vessels, and sheltering seminary priests.Footnote ¹⁶ The present document offers further elucidation of how propertied women contributed to the support of these priests. As Kenneth Nicholls has noted, Irish port towns in the sixteenth century had many rich widows with means at their disposal who were in a position to acquire property of various kinds.Footnote ¹⁷ Helina Whyte exemplifies this trend. Although it is not clear how she obtained these resources, they may have been a legacy she inherited or resources she purchased.

As a result of Helina Whyte’s recent gains, these parish resources had passed from Protestant to Catholic hands, a fact noted by Dermot McGrath (‘Creagh’), papally-appointed bishop of Cork and Cloyne. Thus, the Catholic widow’s new properties may be seen more broadly as part of the struggle from about 1590 in the old-established towns (as in New Ross) for control of the ecclesiastical patrimony. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the parish church there was in contention between the civic elite and the clergy of the established church. On Christmas Day 1605, the town’s sovereign arrived in church accompanied by a crowd of about two hundred, ‘with an extraordinary noise and tumult, and making their popish offering, then disturbed the poor minister from making a sermon, which he had prepared for his small auditory’.Footnote ¹⁸ A similar incursion took place on Easter Sunday 1606. Some time prior to these events the high altar had been removed, in line with the liturgical changes of the new establishment, yet on several days in the year the townsmen continued to gather there for traditional devotional purposes at the place once occupied by this altar.Footnote ¹⁹

The dispensation granted by the bishop contained the proviso that a part of these revenues was to be used for the support of local Catholic clergy. The form of the dispensation suggests that it was a common practice for propertied Catholics to make similar requests to the prelate, and that these were granted in the same formulaic fashion. The case of Helina Whyte illustrates how some revenues designated for the upkeep of clergy of the established church were informally used, in part, for the maintenance of Catholic priests – and how women property-holders played a role in this process.

Catholic proprietors like Helina Whyte may have been concerned that resources for the support of Church of Ireland clergy could be a source of opprobrium for her in the local community, overwhelmingly adherents of the old religion. By the early 1590s, in the south-east as elsewhere in Ireland, antipathy towards the established church was growing.Footnote ²⁰ Worship conducted under the auspices of the new establishment was linked, in the popular mind, with the devil, a perception which provided a strong incentive to avoid their services.Footnote ²¹ Animosity, however, was not limited to the issue of church attendance. Clearly many propertied Catholics benefited from the widespread secularisation of the old church’s patrimony from the late 1530s onwards. Yet this transfer could at times be the subject of strong social sanction. In the early 1610s, for example, the Franciscan Donatus Mooney noted the terrible nocturnal visions, and disturbing noises, which attended the new residents who had acquired the friars’ convent at Drogheda; in addition, the wife of Moses Hill, the Protestant official who purchased the building about 1612, was struck by paralysis, not by any natural cause, but as a sign of divine displeasure at the profanation of the friars’ habitation.Footnote ²²

In preaching and in spiritual direction, Catholic ecclesiastics undoubtedly articulated the clear expectation that possessors of ecclesiastical resources should use part of these revenues for the maintenance of the Roman clergy. As confessional alignments hardened from the 1590s, the threat of social disapproval, as well as the more personal issue of conscience, may have inspired those who had acquired church properties (or whose families had made these acquisitions) to make propitiatory arrangements with influential Catholic ecclesiastics in the localities. These included a formal declaration of permission from the relevant prelate.

Dermot McGrath, to whom Helina Whyte turned for ecclesiastical validation of her recent gains, was the most senior cleric of the Roman church functioning in the south-east in the early 1590s. From 1580, he was the papally-appointed bishop of the dioceses of Cork and Cloyne (covering the greater part of County Cork). In 1600, he claimed to have been the only functioning Catholic bishop in the entire ecclesiastical province of Cashel for the previous twenty years.Footnote ²³ Thus in the absence of other resident bishops, McGrath operated beyond the confines of his dioceses.Footnote ²⁴ He was involved in the appointment of prelates in other sees; jointly with Richard Brady, bishop of Kilmore, he received a papal commission to institute Robert Lalor as vicar-general in the dioceses of Dublin, Kildare, and Ferns.Footnote ²⁵ Like similar ecclesiastics prior to the re-establishment of a resident episcopate after 1618, he travelled widely, rallying support for a clear and unambiguous adherence to Rome. These men actively contributed to the erosion of participation in the established church among the communities of Gaelic and Anglo-Norman identity.

It was not uncommon that some Catholics in the 1590s were uneasy in conscience by holding church properties, and these were seeking a dispensation from duly authorised ecclesiastics.Footnote ²⁶ In response to the increasing rigour in imposing adherence to the established church in the 1580s, Bishop Dermot McGrath petitioned the Holy See for faculties to absolve clergy and laity whose conduct had been at variance with the norms of the Roman church; this included the issue of deriving profit from church properties.Footnote ²⁷ The document presented here illustrates neatly the role of a Catholic prelate in validating lay ownership of ecclesiastical resources, with a concomitant obligation to support Catholic clergy, thereby granting the individual layperson peace of mind and some protection from possible criticism within the local community.

This original document, signed by Dermot McGrath, is preserved in T.C.D. MS 567, a volume containing various materials concerning Irish recusants in the early seventeenth century. Based on internal evidence, this collection served as a dossier on Catholic ecclesiastical life by the early 1610s for use in government circles in the struggle against recusancy.Footnote ²⁸ How and when the present document came into possession of the Dublin authorities is unclear. It may have been seized from Bishop McGrath (and subsequently filed in this collection) as a result of a search or raid by government agents, as the crown regained control of Munster towards the end of the Nine Years War.Footnote ²⁹

The folio (measuring c.30.5 cm by 19 cm) has been reinforced by affixing to the verso a sheet of similar dimensions. The paper is frayed on the right-hand margin, rendering some words difficult to read. The subscription is of the same ink, but of different hand from the body of the text. The seal is missing, and in the space thus created the reinforcing sheet is clearly visible.

I acknowledge the permission of The Board of Trinity College Dublin to reproduce this text.

For this edition, a summary in English follows the Latin of the original.

T.C.D. MS 567, f. 61rFootnote ³⁰

Universis et singulis sanctae matris ecclesiae filiis ad quos praesantes literae pervenerint Dermitius permissione divina Cluanensis et Corcagensis Episcopus salutem in eo qui est vera salus. Notum vobis facimus quatenus helina WhyteFootnote ³¹ Rossiensis vidua proba et catholica ab ecclesiae adversariis obtinuit et adhuc occupat Dimediam partem rectoriae de bayleyayn in fernensi Dioecaesi et vicariam de Rossbarcken in Osserensi Diocesi et rectoria capellae dictam et quartam partem rectoriae templi albi ut vulgo vocant[ ] in praedicta fernensi dioecaesi: Nobis igitur humiliter supplicavit ut cum illa dispersare velimus ac licentiam concedere qua possit secura conscientia redditus et emolumenta praemissorum beneficiorum percipere retinere ac de illis libere disponere donec de illis per ecclesiam libiter dispositum fuerit Nos igitur tam humili supplicatione iustis de causis inducti et inclinati cum praefata helina Whyte auctoritate apostolica nobis ad hoc et hiusmodi concessa dispensamus, ac [ ]Footnote ³² percipere retinere et in usus proprios convertere redditus fructus proventus et emolumenta omnia [word erased] dimediae partis rectoriae de baylayan et vicariae de rossbarckan et rectoriae capellae dictae et quartam partem rectoriae templi albi libere et licite possit et valeat concedimus permittimus et indulgemus per praesentes quand[ ] ecclesiastica beneficia in illis partibus ab adversariis occupata et usurpata fuerint. Inimigentes et praecipientes praefata helinae Whyte ut gubernatoribus ecclesiae tempore reformationis designandis pro digna satisfactione praestanda inFootnote ³³ praemissis se submittaret obedia[ ]Footnote ³⁴ In cuius rei testimonium his praesentibus manu nostra propria

Subscriptis sigillum nostrum quo in talibus utimur apponi fecimus

Dat[um] in loco mansionis nostrae nonis Iunii 1595

Dermitius Cluanensis

et Corcagensis EpiscopusFootnote ³⁵