Evocative abbey ruins dot the Irish landscape, but few are as well presented as Jerpoint (founded in 1180). Its claim to fame is fine stone carvings on the sides of tombs and on the columns of the cloister arcade.
The Cistercian monks, who came to Ireland from France in the 12th century, were devoted reformers bent on following the strict rules of St. Benedict. Their holy mission was to bring the wild Irish Christian Church (which had evolved, unsupervised, for centuries on the European fringe) back in line with Rome.
With an uncompromising my-way-or-the-hell-way attitude, they steamrolled their belief system across the island and stamped the landscape with a network of identical, sprawling monasteries. The preexisting form of Celtic Christianity that had thrived in the early Middle Ages was no match for the organization and determination of the Cistercians.
For the next 350 years, these new monasteries held the moral high ground and were the dominant local religious authority. Monks got closer to God by immersing themselves in the hardships of manual field work, building water mills, tending kilns, and advancing the craft of metallurgy.
The wealth created by this turbo-charged industriousness caused communities to form around these magnetic monastic cores. What eventually did them in?
King Henry VIII’s marriage problems, his subsequent creation of the (Protestant) Church of England, and his eventual dissolution of the (Catholic) monasteries. Walls were knocked down and roofs were torn off monasteries such as Jerpoint to make them uninhabitable.
Their lands were forefeited to the king, who sold them off and enriched his treasury. It’s good to be king. We saw this all over England – and now here again in Ireland.
