Abstract
In 1221, the Dominican general chapter, meeting in Bologna, commissioned a group of 13 friars under the leadership of Gilbert de Fresnay, to establish the order’s presence in England. In 2021, the eighth centenary of this decision was marked by celebratory events including pilgrimages, academic conferences and publications of which this impressive volume, by the distinguished friar-theologian Richard Finn, is the latest outcome. Finn displays a complete mastery of the relevant primary and secondary sources that is all the more impressive because of the volume’s broad chronological and geographical sweep. He writes in a crisp, accessible style, enlivened by occasional flashes of dry wit and provides a reliable and comprehensive introduction to the history of the Friars Preachers in Britain, Ireland, Flanders and further afield. Although clearly a labour of love and fraternal pietas, he does not shirk from presenting controversial incidents and characters, an approach that is particularly noticeable in his treatment of the province’s more recent history. Given that this project was completed in the face of grave illness (p. xii), the author’s diligence in producing such a comprehensive and wide-ranging survey is all the more admirable.
The volume is divided into eight chapters with a brief introduction and conclusion, bibliography and index. In the introduction the author outlines his methodology, gives an overview of the surviving sources and outlines the earlier historiography, paying particular attention to works that have appeared since the publication of Bede Jarrett’s The English Dominicans in 1921. The first chapter outlines the establishment and growth of the province from the first foundation established in Oxford in 1221 to the upheaval caused by the Black Death in 1348. As the English province included Scotland, Ireland and Wales, he emphasizes how the friars were deployed to advance the authority of the English and Scottish crowns in border territories. The first foundations in Ireland, where the friars arrived in 1224, were concentrated in the towns and boroughs of the Anglo-Norman colony and the friars were initially closely allied with their colonists. In England, the friars’ role as royal confessors meant that they received considerable royal patronage (pp. 30–34) while their commitment to the pastoral programme outlined by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 placed them at the forefront of theological education wherever they went, not least in Ireland (pp. 57–64). The second chapter deals with the period between the cataclysm that was the Black Death and the destruction of the province during the English Reformation. Despite the overall success of the friars as preachers, confessors and pastoral agents, they also attracted the opprobrium of critics ranging from Archbishop Fitzralph of Armagh to John Wycliff and the Lollards and the author of Piers the Plowman (pp. 77–82). The 15th century also witnessed a second flowering of the order in Ireland with ten new foundations being established, mostly in the west of the country. Most writers, including this reviewer, see this as evidence of the strength of the Observant movement amongst the Irish friars. Finn regards this as a ‘hasty generalisation’ (p. 75) but I think he is mistaken here, particularly considering the efforts of Friar Maurice Moralis Ó Morcháin to promote the Observant reform among the Irish Dominicans between 1484 to 1491 and the fact that both the Augustinian and Franciscan Observants established several houses in the West of Ireland at the same period. A curious omission from this chapter is any discussion of ethnic tension between Anglo-Irish and Gaelic friars or between the Anglo-Irish Dominicans and their English confreres. Conflict between the latter groups led to a physical altercation in St Saviour’s priory, Dublin, in August 1380 where friars on both sides were found to be wearing chain mail beneath their habits. The Henrician reformation and subsequent dissolution of the English monasteries saw the disappearance of the Dominicans from England with some, like John Hilsey of Bristol and Richard Ingworth of King’s Langley, actively promoting the new dispensation. In Cambridge, Friar John George was reprimanded by his mother for promoting heresy in his correspondence with a Dominican nun of Dartford. Until he mended his ways, she assured him, he would be as welcome in her house as ‘water is to the sheep’ (p. 102). A small number of friars like Edmund Hercock of Norwich preached against the royal supremacy but the majority quietly acquiesced in the new arrangements. The experience of the friars between 1559 and 1655 forms the subject of a short third chapter. During this period the province faced institutional collapse but a number of candidates became friars in continental houses and exercised a clandestine ministry alongside some Irish confreres in England. The stress of this sometimes proved too much as was the case with Friar John Sacheverill who had entered the English College in Rome and later became a Dominican before apostatizing in England, providing information on his erstwhile confreres to Sir Robert Cecil (pp. 113–14).
The fourth chapter is arguably the most interesting in the book, detailing the experience of the English friars and nuns between 1655 and 1827. The role of the Dominican cardinal, Philip Howard, who became a friar in Cremona in Italy in 1645, is particularly noteworthy. Regarded as the ‘second founder’ of the province, Howard drew on his connections with Flemish friars and English recusant benefactors to secure a foundation for the English friars at Bornhem in Flanders in 1658. This priory of the Holy Cross became the centre for training young friars, following a strict conventual discipline and experiencing the insecurity, financial hardship and external meddling by benefactors that was the lot of many such emigré communities on the Continent. A house for English Dominican nuns was also established at Vilvoorde in 1660, later transferring to Spellikin in Brussels in 1669. By the 18th century the friars were running a school and the surviving accounts provide an illuminating sidelight on domestic life of the community, as does the correspondence between the three Huddleston brothers, students at the school in the 1780s, and their parents at Sawston Hall near Cambridge. A short-lived foundation was made at Rome in 1675 and another at Louvain in 1685 which ‘had a central place in the training of the English friars until the final years of the eighteenth century’ (p. 145).
Chapters six and seven deal with the revival of the province during the 19th and 20th centuries and contain much that is original and interesting. The support offered to the English province by friars from elsewhere, including Ireland, in establishing a novitiate house at Woodchester is noteworthy and as a result the English province tripled in size in the 1850s and 1860s and numbered 102 friars by 1899. The Dominican nuns also experienced a revival with the community at Carrisbrooke numbering 28 sisters in 1888. The 20th and 21st centuries, dealt with in the final two chapters, saw the emergence of Bede Jarrett as a dominating force and the involvement of friars as military chaplains in two World Wars, and was a period of numerical growth and intellectual vitality. The period from 1964 onwards witnessed excitement and upheaval in equal measure as new pastoral initiatives were tried and old certainties questioned. The large number of departures of both male and female Dominicans, the collapse of the laybrother vocation within the province and the withdrawal from locations and ministries are presented with admirable candour but also with great sensitivity. The short conclusion recapitulates many of the themes of the volume and concludes with a line that puts the lives, successes and failures of countless Dominican men and women into the only context that matters: ‘The historian can record their sacrifice. Another will reward it’ (p. 369).
There are a small number of drawbacks to this otherwise excellent volume. The illustrations are appended at the back of the book in an unpaginated section that occurs after the index. These would have been better deployed throughout the text and would have broken up what is a very ‘wordy’ volume. All illustrations are in black and white (perhaps appropriately, given the subject matter!), and it is regrettable that the book does not include some colour plates. This is particularly the case in the brief discussion of the material culture of the medieval friaries (pp. 82–87) where reference is made to the altar retables that survive from the priory at Thetford and the Dominican nuns’ house at Dartford. These are among the finest surviving examples of 14th-century English panel painting and it would have been helpful to include illustrations of both. Likewise, the discussion of medieval Dominican architecture would have benefitted from the inclusion of floor plans or pictures of surviving features like rood lofts, towers, altars and window tracery which survive in abundance at numerous Irish sites. It is particularly regrettable that the book does not include maps illustrating the places and foundations mentioned in the text, as places like Athenry, Beverly, Bornhem, Clonshanville and KwaThema, for example, will not be familiar to the vast majority of readers. In an Irish context, a map indicating the 15th-century foundations would have illustrated the emergence of the West of Ireland as the stronghold of the Observant movement among the friars.
At £90 / €105 this book is probably beyond the pocket of most non-specialist readers and is likely only to be accessible in academic libraries. This is unfortunate as Finn has produced a most lively, erudite and accessible text that would be of interest to a wider audience, not least the Dominican friars, sisters and laity and those with an interest in ecclesiastical history. His colleagues, past and present, are in his debt and he has served them well with his labours. He has also set the bar high for his Irish confreres who will commemorate the eighth centenary of the establishment of the Dominicans in Ireland in 2024.