319 



liberal in their eulogies of the Irish priesthood, and even Giraldus* 

 does not decline to add his suffrage, qualifying it by a complaint, that 

 they too much confined themselves to the internal practice of monastic 

 rules, " and neglected the principal office of clerg3anen, the duty of 

 instructing the ignorance and of reproving the vices of the people. "i* ; 

 The most remarkable circumstance in the ecclesiastical govern- 

 ment of this interval, was the revolution by which the nomination of 

 bishops, being for centuries domestic, J was ultimately transferred to 

 the Pope ', and this too will be found equally referrible to the religious 

 laxity induced during the occupation of the Danes. It has been 

 already shewn, § how lay abbots insinuated themselves into the govern- 

 ment and revenues of particular ecclesiastical establishments. By a 

 still greater enormity, and evidently with a view to countenance and 

 maintain these usurpations, the powerful septs assumed not merely to 

 recommend, but even in some instances to elect, the bishops of their 

 districts ; and this was one of the grounds of Lanfranc's remonstrance 

 to king Murtough, as well as of that multiplication of bishops and 

 episcopal jurisdictions which Saint Bernard justly deprecates.il From 

 the period of Saint Patrick, though there were no Archbishops in Ire- 

 land, the metropolitan of Armagh seems to have been more particu- 

 larly respected as his vicar, comorb, or successor, and a paramount 

 ecclesiastical power acknowledged as consequential thereto by all the 

 Christians of Ireland. The Danes, however, of the seaports, alarmed 

 at the innovations which threw such a weight of influence into the 

 hands of the native septs, would not submit to have their bishops 



* Top. Hib. Dist. 3. c. 27. + Lingard's Hist. Eng. c. 12. 



X See Cambrensis, Top. Hib. Dist. 3. c. 17. § Ante, p. 274. 



II " Mutabantur et multiplicantur episcopi pro libitu Metropolitani, ita ut unus episcopa- 

 tus uno non esset contentus, seel singulae pene ecclesiae singulos hab^ent episcopos." — Saint 

 Bernard, Vit. Malach. 



