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VI.—St. Manchan's Shrine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2011

T. D. Kendrick  and
Elizabeth Senior
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Extract

Very little is known about St. Manchan. He died of the plague in 664, composed a poem of which two lines survive, and may have been the author of a commentary, parts of which are quoted in an early twelfth-century manuscript (British Museum, Harley 1802). But though various attempts were made to establish his genealogy, there were other saints of the same name, so that the references to him are sadly confused, and all that is certain is that he lived in the first half of the seventh century, and gave his name to the place now called after him Lemanaghan, i.e., Manchan's grey land (Manchan's church). This was a small monastery in co. Offaly that has little recorded history and can never have been a house of much importance. In 1531 it was under the charge of the prior of the neighbouring monastery of Gallen, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century it was almost unknown, being described at that time as situated in the middle of an impassable bog. Its chief treasure, the shrine, attracted no notice from the outside world; but it was still preserved there, and there is a record of its existence in the church at Lemanaghan about 1630.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 86 , 1937 , pp. 105 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1937

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References

page 105 note 1 B.M. Cat. Early Irish MSS., ii, 429.

page 105 note 2 Martyrology of Donegal, 24th January (p. 27).

page 105 note 3 O'Donovan's letters; Banagher, 18th January 1838. Cf. Lewis, Topographical Dictionary; 1842, ii, 257. My friend Mr. George Enraght Moony tells me that the shrine was brought to The Doon during the lifetime of his great-grandfather and was taken back to Boher when his father, born in 1830, was still a young boy.

page 105 note 4 Exhibition Expositor and Advertiser, Dublin, 1853, no. 12, 4. Cf. Arch. Journ. x, 157.Google Scholar

page 106 note 1 Journ. R. Hist. and Arch. Assoc. of Ireland, 4th ser., III (1874–1875), 134.Google Scholar

page 106 note 2 George Petrie, for instance, opened the shrine when it was at The Doon; see Cooke, T. L., Early History of the Town of Birr, Dublin, 1875.Google Scholar

page 108 note 1 The completely exposed strut (pl. xxvi) was made at the British Museum to replace the clumsy piece of wood that had been used for the nineteenth-century repair; the missing lower portion of another strut was also replaced by a modern piece when the shrine was in London.

page 110 note 1 A small piece of Gothic embossed metal-work has been inserted in one of the empty settings on the central boss on the face with the figures (pl. XXVIII, fig. 3).

page 111 note 1 Note the panelled central boss and its rolled edges, the jewelled animal-heads, the red and yellow geometric cloisonné enamel, and the plaques with the animal-ornament which are so like those on the bosses of the shrine.

page 111 note 2 The entry in the Annals of the Four Masters sub anno 1166, that records the making of a shrine of St. Manchan, can be disregarded here. It refers to another saint who may not even have borne originally the same name, and certainly had a different ‘day’, and lived in a district far removed from Lemanaghan.

page 113 note 1 Mahr, A., Christian Art in Ancient Ireland, I, 1932, pls. 60, 61.Google Scholar

page 113 note 2 Mahr, op. cit., pls. 28, 29 (II).

page 113 note 3 F. Henry, La Sculpture irlandaise, 1933, ii, pls. 126, 131, 133,147. See also Leask, H. G., ‘The Characteristic Features of Irish Architecture from Early Times to the Twelfth Century’, North Munster Antiquarian Journal, 1936.Google Scholar

page 114 note 1 Goldschmidt, , Die Frühmittelalterlichen Bronzetüren, ii; Die Bronzetüren von Gnesen und Novgorod, 1932. See especially pls. 42, 55, and 66.Google Scholar

page 115 note 1 Nørlund, Poul, Gyldne Altre, 1926. See especially fig. 41.Google Scholar

page 115 note 2 Cast in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

page 115 note 3 Borenius, , Burlington Magazine, LVIII, 1931, 174, pl. I, A and B.Google Scholar

page 116 note 1 Focillon, , L'Art des sculpteurs romans, 1931, pl. XVII.Google Scholar

page 117 note 1 Detailed notes of the publications of these figures are to be found in Crawford, H., List of Irish Shrines and Reliquaries, i; Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. 53, 1923, p. 87, and pl. IV: I. 15, 16, 17, and 18. The inclusion by Crawford of another figure I. 14 (p. 86) is due to Miss Stokes's misleading description of the British Museum figure as holding a book.Google Scholar

page 117 note 2 F. Henry, op. cit. ii, pl. 112.

page 117 note 3 See Mahr, op. cit., pls. 60, 61.

page 118 note 1 F. Henry, op. cit. ii, pls. 100, 107, 108, 109.