Mellifont Abbey, Co. Louth
Maol Maodhóg Ua Morgair, better known today as Malachy, was born in Armagh in 1095. During his early life he was closely associated with the cathedral city of Armagh, then and now the spiritual home of Christianity in Ireland.
By the 1130s Malachy had become inspired by the church reforms that had swept across Europe.
In 1140 he visited Rome to discuss with the Pope the slow progress of these reforms in Ireland. His journey took him through Scotland, England and France. He spent a month in Rome, after which Pope Innocent II appointed Malachy apostolic legate to Ireland.
On his journey to Rome in 1140, Malachy visited St Bernard at the Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux in Burgundy, France. The Cistercians were a French order that closely observed the rule of St Benedict.
Malachy was convinced of the need to radically reform the ancient Irish monastic system. He felt that this could not be achieved from within, and inspired by what he saw at Clairvaux, he decided to bring the Cistercians to Ireland to initiate that reform.
With the assistance of St Bernard, Malachy introduced the Cistercians to Ireland and founded an abbey at Mellifont in 1142.
The Cistercian monks that arrived here were French, as well as Irish novices who had trained at Clairvaux.
Malachy died in 1148 at Clairvaux, by which time the French monks at Mellifont had fallen out with their Irish brethren and returned to France. Despite this, five daughter houses had already been established across Ireland.
Though founded in 1142, it wasn’t until 1157 that the newly completed abbey at Mellifont was consecrated. This was a national event that attracted seventeen bishops, as well as many of the most powerful kings in the country.
The abbey is located in the valley of the Mattock, a tributary of the River Boyne. Most of the buildings were demolished in the 18th century, and for the most part, only the foundations of the abbey can be seen today.
Despite this, what survives demonstrates the former scale of what was one of the most important Cistercian abbeys in Ireland throughout the late medieval period. They also highlight just how revolutionary the new monastic architecture was in Ireland at this time.
The Cistercians were a closed order who wished to remove themselves from the outside world. In order to achieve this they had to be fully self-sufficient. This is reflected in the architecture of their abbeys, whereby the church buildings and residential quarters were all self-contained within a single complex of buildings.
The church was larger than anything previously built in Ireland, and was cruciform in plan, which relatively unknown here at that time.
On the north side of the church was the cloister, where the monks could walk, read and meditate.
Arranged around the cloister were a series of buildings that included the library, sleeping quarters, kitchen, dining hall, and the chapter house where the monks gathered each morning to hear readings from the Rule of St Benedict.
The whole complex was designed so that a monk would never have to leave the monastery and could completely disengage from the outside world, other than to farm the fields that surrounded the abbey.
To feed the community of monks that resided here, the abbey needed extensive agricultural lands, which the monks and lay brothers farmed themselves. Excess lands were leased to tenants, and the revenue this created was used to maintain the buildings themselves. Mellifont Abbey was at the centre of this enormous 22,000 hectare estate.
Today, the main feature that survives at Mellifont is the lavabo in the cloister area. Here the monks washed their hands before entering the church. Once a common feature of Cistercian abbeys, this is the best surviving example in Ireland.
The abbey was dissolved in 1539, and after 1556 Sir Gerald Moore converted the buildings into a Tudor mansion.
Mellifont Abbey is a National Monument in State Care and is managed by the Office of Public Works.
