Category: Departments & Disciplines

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Gold among the Ashes: The Deeds of the Guild of St. Anne

In 1430, King Henry VI granted Richard Talbot, archbishop of Dublin, members of Dublin’s city council, and other prominent merchants and citizens the right to form a guild dedicated to St. Anne for the purpose of supporting six priests at the altars at St. Audoen’s church, which stood near the High Street on the western end of the medieval walled city of Dublin.[1]

Fig. 1: Map of Medieval Dublin. Blue arrow points out St. Audoen’s Church. From Howard B. Clarke, “Dublin c. 840 to c. 1540: The Medieval Town in the Modern City,” Dublin: Ordinance Survey, 1978.

Guild members were laypeople – both men and women. Membership in the Guild of St. Anne conferred spiritual, social, and business privileges; members likely supported one another in business, political, marriage, and property transactions. As lessees of Guild property, they received extremely favorable rates. Upon death, members were frequently interred in St. Audoen’s church and its adjoining churchyard; a survey of names on surviving gravestones matches closely with names in Guild records. St Anne’s Guild also appears to have had a close relationship with civic offices. Many of the medieval and early modern mayors, bailiffs, and city officials of Dublin also appear in St. Anne’s Guild documents – both within and outside of their official capacities. There is strong evidence that some of the Guild’s scribes were also active as city clerks or their assistants; these include scribe and author James Yonge (fl. 1404-1438) and his apprentices Thomas Baghill (fl. 1419-1439) and scribe and author Nicholas Bellewe (fl. 1423-74).

Fig. 2: Seal of the Guild of St. Anne, showing the saint instructing the Blessed Virgin Mary. From IMC GSA/17/54, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, 43 Elizabeth I, Item 54 (8 December 1600)’. Accessed on Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/IMC-GSA-17-54> PID: <https://arks.org/ark:/75929/i501895> (22 February 2026). Repository: Irish Manuscripts Commission.

The founding charter of the Guild allowed it to develop its own seal and acquire and control property yielding up to 100 marks per annum for the support of St. Audoen’s chaplains, and in its early years, the Guild set about building its portfolio. One of its notable early acquisitions was the bequest of several properties belonging to John Stafford, a wealthy baker, whose name appears on the founding charter.

Fig 3: Grant of lands to the Guild of St. Anne by Joan Richard, widow and executrix of John Stafford, baker, deceased. IMC GSA/9/79, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, 28 Henry VI, Item 79 (4 March 1450)’. Accessed on Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/IMC-GSA-9-79> PID: <https://arks.org/ark:/75929/i501617> (22 February 2026). Repository: Irish Manuscripts Commission.

As with the Stafford properties, many additional properties were acquired as bequests from Guild members, and several transactions provide for the grantor or his or her survivors for the rest of their natural lives, at which time the property was to revert to the full ownership of the Guild. The gift of property usually ensured that the grantor and his spouse would be remembered forever in the prayers of the priests of St. Audoen’s. When the Guild acquired a new property, they also received previous grants and quitclaims related to the property, which could be consulted if there were ever a challenge regarding the chain of ownership of a parcel. These older documents, dating back to the 1230s, were kept together with the documents granting the property to the Guild and the Guild’s subsequent leases of the property. By the seventeenth century, these were locked in a stout wooden chest to which the Master and two Wardens of the Guild had keys. To guard against malfeasance, the chest was only to be opened in the presence of at least three Guild members.[2] By the time the Guild was dissolved sometime after 1795, it controlled an extensive portfolio of property largely between Winetavern Street and the western city walls and from the quays to the southern city wall. They also controlled individual properties in Dublin’s suburbs and exurbs, including in Dolphin’s Barn, Oxmantown, Kilmainham, and the area around St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In 1535, the Guild acquired the area to the north of the church, known as Blakeney’s Inns, in exchange for £20 and their lands in Saucerstown (near Swords). Blakeney’s Inns consisted of several buildings including a tower, gallery, cellars, a hall, and a garden. It was home to St. Audoen’s College for a short time before being used as housing for St. Audoen’s priests.[3]

Fig. 4: 1535 Agreement in which the Guild of St. Anne acquired Blakeney’s Inns from James Blakeney of Rykynhore, in exchange for £20 and lands held by the Guild in Saucerstown. IMC GSA/14/44, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, 26 Henry VIII, Item 44 (10 February 1535)’, accessed on VRTI (22 February 2026).

The properties of the Guild became a point of contention in 1620, when in the religious controversies and foment of the Protestant Reformation, the Guild became a target of the officials of the now Protestant Christ Church Cathedral. Not having enough ready cash on hand to effectively fight the legal challenges raised against it and to pay fines and other debts, the Guild in 1620 revoked many of its existing long-term leases, converting them to fee farms, where the grantees paid an up-front fee, then owned the property but owed the Guild an annual rent, in this case at a rate a little higher than the favorable rent on the previous lease. This effectively raised ready cash for the Guild and transferred lands out of Guild ownership while the Guild was able to retain some annual income from them. In 1633, the Guild faced a serious threat to its existence when officials of Christ Church Cathedral, including Thomas Lowe, John Bramhall (Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth’s personal chaplain), and John Atherton (who would become Bishop of Waterford before his execution in 1640) claimed that the Guild was wealthier than it should be and that the leaders were misappropriating funds. The Guild lost its case before Lord Deputy Thomas Wentworth, who ruled that the fee-farm grants must be converted into sixty-year leases at much higher rents. Bramhall and Atherton were allowed to go through the Guild’s documents. In 1638, they raised rents to ruinous amounts, disregarding tenants’ investments in the properties, and using threats and intimidation to get tenants to sign new leases. They also packed the membership of the Guild with supporters, voting out the existing Master and Wardens and placing their own hand-picked appointees in leadership positions. The new officers took control of the Guild’s seal matrix and its documents.

This hostile takeover did not last. Some ousted guild members in the crowd may have looked on with satisfaction when Atherton was hanged in Oxmantown – just across the Liffey from Dublin – on 5 December 1640. Lord Wentworth himself was executed on May 12, 1641 in London. It took the Guild a few more years after the downfalls of Atherton and Wentworth, however, to undo the damage. A memorandum from a meeting of the Guild in 1653 attempts to turn back the clock, ordering that (1) all tenants would have their leases restored to the terms and rents they had prior to 1638, (2) those who had fallen behind on rent could catch up by paying their original rates, and (3) all of the members who had been placed in the Guild by Bramhall and Atherton be expelled.[4]

Fig. 4: Memorandum of Guild meeting of 26 July 1653 in which properties, rents, and Guild membership was restored to conditions prior to the attacks by Bramhall and Atherton on Guild property and sovereignty. IMC GSA/20/4, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, Interregnum, Item 4 (26 July 1653)’, accessed on VRTI (22 February 2026).

The Guild continued into the early modern period as a large property owner in Dublin, and as an organization protecting Roman Catholic sympathizers, leaning on ancient legal precedent to continue operating. They continued to keep records, collecting them in an abstract book until ca. 1800. The Wide Streets Commission, formed by an act of Parliament in 1757, set about creating a new city with wide avenues and a center located east of the medieval city. The Commission had the power to purchase property to achieve their goals, and much of the Guild’s property wound up in the hands of the Commission. Buildings, alleyways, and even once-bustling streets were cleared to create a new, planned city. Dublin’s past was further obscured in the disastrous explosion and fire in the Public Record Office at the Four Courts on June 30, 1922. Before then, the Guild had faded into obscurity, and its documents became the property of historian and book collector Charles Haliday (1789-1866). They were given to the Royal Irish Academy by Haliday’s widow, Mary, in 1867. The Royal Irish Academy continues to be the steward of this precious collection of medieval and early modern documents. The documents have, however, entered a new period in their history as featured Gold Seam materials on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, made available to the public as of October 22, 2025.[5] Through the efforts of the Royal Irish Academy, former RIA librarian Ludwig Bieler (1906-1981), the Irish Manuscripts Commission, and a large team of researchers, historians, and computer experts at the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, these documents are now available in a searchable online database. Users can view high-resolution images of each document and its surviving seals. An English-language summary accompanies each document. As a group, these records preserve a great deal of the medieval history of western Dublin, providing glimpses of lost buildings, streets, and alleyways and those who lived and worked there, along with the infrastructure residents used, such as waterways, markets, and places of education and entertainment. Several documents, particularly wills, provide glimpses into the lives of those whose stories would otherwise be lost, particularly women. The collection, formerly a physical manifestation of the wealth of the Guild of St. Anne, now offers its unparalleled treasures to historians, genealogists, sigillographers, and the curious.

Theresa O’Byrne, Ph.D., VRTI
Associate Researcher
Delbarton School

[1] RIA GSA/9/17, ‘Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, 9 Henry VI, Item 17 (16 December 1430)’. Accessed on Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/RIA-GSA-9-17> PID: <https://arks.org/ark:/75929/i500361> (22 February 2026). Repository: Royal Irish Academy.

[2] IMC GSA/21/9, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, 21 Charles II, Item 9 (6 September 1669)’. Accessed on Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/IMC-GSA-21-9> PID: <https://arks.org/ark:/75929/i501965> (22 February 2026). Repository: Irish Manuscripts Commission.

[3] IMC GSA/14/44, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, 26 Henry VIII, Item 44 (10 February 1535)’. Accessed on Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/IMC-GSA-14-44> PID: <https://arks.org/ark:/75929/i501769> (22 February 2026). Repository: Irish Manuscripts Commission.

[4] IMC GSA/20/1, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, Interregnum, Item 1 (26 July 1653)’. Accessed on Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/IMC-GSA-20-1> PID: <https://arks.org/ark:/75929/i501949> (22 February 2026). Repository: Irish Manuscripts Commission, and IMC GSA/20/4, ‘Calendar of the Deeds of the Guild of St Anne, Interregnum, Item 4 (26 July 1653)’. Accessed on Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland <https://virtualtreasury.ie/item/IMC-GSA-20-4> PID: <https://arks.org/ark:/75929/i501952> (22 February 2026). Repository: Irish Manuscripts Commission.

[5]https://www.ria.ie/2025/10/28/launch-of-new-digital-resource-providing-access-to-hundreds-of-dublin-records-from-the-period-1237-1778/ (accessed 22 February 2026)

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Preaching without Permission? Women Preachers in Medieval Islam with Dr. Linda G. Jones

A few months ago, Ben and Will sat down with Dr. Linda Jones, Professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, where she teaches medieval history. Dr. Jones is an expert in religious and cultural history of medieval al-Andalus and the Maghreb, especially on topics such as gender dynamics , Islam-Christendom encounters, and oratory practices. She is the author of The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the first monograph to consider the significance of preaching in the medieval Islamic world.

We typically imagine women as having been entirely subordinated to men in the medieval world, especially in those contexts which were explicitly religious. However, Dr. Jones offers to us a striking counterexample. In the medieval Islamic world, she explains that women were allowed to preach, not in formal contexts, but informally. Even despite the lack of formality, their preaching still carried authoritative weight, one that was often expressed in exhortative form—encouraging listeners to undertake ascetic practices or to pray more fervently.

In addition to fascinating topics of cultural and religious practices in the medieval Islamic world, Ben and Will speak with Dr. Jones about the differences of teaching college students in the US versus Spain, the challenges of interpreting medieval manuscript handwriting, and the enduring importance of the humanities today.

Thanks for listening, and stay tuned for more!

Transcript – Jones (12_24)Download
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Ivo of Chartres, In Purificatione S. Mariae (On Candlemas)

In parallel with a certain popular celebration centered in the city of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the second day of February, in most Christian traditions, also marks the commemoration of the presentation of Christ in the Temple and the ritual purification of Mary. Due to the prominent role played by candles in the liturgical celebrations in the Latin tradition, the feast is commonly referred to as “Candlemas”.

The Presentation in the Temple (along with the text of the Nunc Dimitis). Taken from the Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry. Musée Condé, Ms 65, 63r. Via Wikipedia Commons. Public Domain.

For Ivo of Chartres, whose homilies on Advent and Christmas have short commentaries and translations elsewhere on this blog, his work In Purificatione takes the opportunity to reflect on the details of the liturgical celebration itself as a symbol of the moral imperatives of the Christian life. For him, the wax from which the candles are made represents the flesh of this life, but which also bears a light that illumines the shadows, echoing the Prologue of the Gospel of John. Carrying the candles in procession echoes, in a physical sense, the spiritual carrying of God accomplished through the imitation of Christ.

Interestingly, Ivo cites two short passages from liturgical texts. The first is taken from a version of the Exultet of Good Saturday, in which the celebrant, standing in front of lit candles, commemorates the bee as a symbol of the virginity of Mary. This verse, while it does not exist in the modern Roman rite, can still occasionally be found in use (for example, in this video of the Exultet intoned by a member of the Discalced Carmelites) [1]. The second passage is from a text of the feast of the Purification itself, in which Sion (i.e., the church) is commanded to adorn the bridal chamber in order to receive Christ. This text is well-attested as both a responsory and an antiphon in the manuscript tradition [2]. For Ivo, again, the spiritual meaning is clear: we are to adorn our hearts with virtues that we may have God dwelling within us.

The recourse to liturgical texts, at least for me, lightens the content by focusing more on the act of celebration, rather than emphasizing the grander themes of the economy of salvation and the final judgment found in some of his other homilies. The ultimate effect is almost to encourage a more active personal participation in the ritual on the part of his listeners, a suggestion to meditate on the texts and the actions of the liturgy and to apply the deeper, spiritual meaning in day-to-day life.

The translation and Latin text (Patrologia Latina) of the homily are available here.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

[1] For the full text of the Preface, categorized as the “Franco-Roman Version”, see Thomas Forrest Kelly, The Exultet in Southern Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38.

[2] See, for example, the list hosted in the Cantus Database: https://cantusdatabase.org/chant-search/?search_bar=Adorna+thalamum+tuum.