Abbey days – Brian Maye on clergyman and antiquary Mervyn Archdall

Mervyn Archdall, a Church of Ireland clergyman and antiquary, was the author of an ambitious and pioneering history of Ireland’s pre-Reformation monasteries and abbeys, the fruit of 40 years’ labour and which is still of relevance, and he was a founder member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was born 300 years ago on April 22nd.

The English Archdall family settled in Co Fermanagh late in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and he was a descendant of this gentry family from Castle Archdale.

He was born in Dublin, one of five children of William Archdall, a goldsmith who was assay master (an officer who tests gold or silver coin or bullion) of Dublin 1736-51, and Henrietta Gonne, whose father was curate of Finglas. Mervyn was probably educated at home by a tutor and entered Trinity College Dublin in 1739, from where he graduated with a BA (1744) and MA (1747), and was then ordained a Church of Ireland clergyman. He had several curacies in Dublin, including Howth and Taney, and was a rector in the diocese of Cloyne for almost a decade.

His appointment, in 1756, as domestic chaplain to the bishop of Ossory, Richard Pococke, who was a noted explorer and antiquary as well as being a churchman, was significant for his career. Pococke gave him the livings of Agharney and Attanagh in Ossory diocese, which he held until 1786, becoming rector of Slane in the diocese of Meath that year.

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From his student days, Archdall had a keen interest in antiquities and ancient history and for some 40 years he gathered sources and material together with a view to publishing a work similar to William Dugdale’s Monasticon Anglicanum, originally published in 1673 in Latin; an English translation was published in 1693. Dugdale’s work was a history of the ancient abbeys, priories, hospitals and churches of England and Wales and Archdall wished to provide the same for Ireland. He hoped to publish two or three volumes but lost his main sponsor when Bishop Pococke died. Because he had to cover the cost of publication himself, he imposed limits on its breadth and scope.

Monasticon Hibernicum or, An History of the Abbeys, Priories and Other Religious Houses in Ireland came out in 1786, in quarto volume. Though shorter than Archdall would have wished, it still extended to 800 pages. “Archdall attempted encyclopaedic coverage of the history of Ireland’s pre-Reformation monasteries and abbeys. The work was ground-breaking and ambitious though marred by mistakes and inadequacies,” according to Linde Lunney, who wrote the entry on Archdall in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

John Lanigan’s Ecclesiastical History of Ireland (1822) corrected some of the shortcomings in Archdall’s work.

Friends had assisted Archdall in his work, among them antiquarians such as Richard Pococke and Edward Ledwich (a clergyman, historian, and one of the founders of the Hibernian Antiquarian Society but whose unfortunate anti-Irish bias coloured his work).

With them and others, he founded the Royal Irish Academy in 1786. Three years later, he had his second important publication for which he is remembered, a new edition of The Peerage of Ireland, originally written by John Lodge. Lodge was an archivist and genealogist and his Peerage of Ireland was published in 1754. Archdall expanded this original four-volumed work into seven volumes, doing so by using a good lot of his own research to update the genealogies and he was also able to include manuscript additions that Lodge hadn’t published.

A curious and interesting detail about this Lodge material was that it was in a type of code which no contemporary experts in Dublin had been able to decipher. Archdall had been about to give up on trying to solve the mystery when his wife, a woman of remarkable ingenuity, managed to work it out. This was his second wife, Abigail (née Young), whom he’d married in November 1782. His first wife, Sarah Colles (or Collis), whom he’d married in 1747, had died. It’s been contended that she was related to Thomas Prior, a famous philanthropist and friend of Jonathan Swift and founder of the Dublin Society, the aim of which was to improve Irish agriculture, industry, arts and sciences; it afterwards became the Royal Dublin Society.

Archdall had two sons and a daughter with his first wife. When his daughter married a clergyman, he resigned some of his preferments in Ossory to his son-in-law and obtained the rectory of Slane in Meath, where he died suddenly on August 6th, 1791, and was buried near the east wall in Slane churchyard.

“Archdall’s works are still of interest to historians and genealogists, and surviving copies are valuable collectors’ items. In an apologia in his preface to the Peerage, he noted: ‘I have left that inaccurate which could not be exact, and that imperfect which cannot be completed’,” according to Linde Lunney.