St. Thomas’ Abbey

St. Thomas’ Abbey

The Augustinian abbey of St Thomas the Martyr lay outside the medieval walls of Dublin in the western suburbs, just off of modern-day Thomas Street.

The Abbey was founded in 1177 by William FitzAldelm on behalf of King Henry II of England as an act of restitution for the murder of Thomas Becket. The abbey followed the Victorine rule and was the only royal foundation in medieval Ireland. It received generous patronage from Henry II, his son King John, and many Anglo-Norman settlers. While no trace of the abbey remains above ground, archaeological excavations have uncovered its south wall and the cemetery of the adjacent St Catherine’s church still exists as a public park.

Association with Poddle

The Poodle would have run past the western side of the Abbey. The large church on the site is now gone but its archaeological remains have been discovered on South Earl Street on what is now an allotment site.

What the Newspapers Say

Going Back to Our Roots: Rediscovering St Thomas’s Abbey

    The area we know today as The Liberties first developed as a self governing district or ‘liberty’ based around the medieval Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr. The Abbey was founded in 1177 on the orders of King Henry II of England. The King was the first Henry to engage in a struggle between Church and State in England that in 1170 had led to the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett (later made a saint) by some of Henry’s henchmen. As part of his atonement for the murder, Henry was required to endow a series of religious houses in England, and curiously here in Dublin in what was then his new Irish lands around the Pale.

    The medieval Liberty of St Thomas & Donore thrived, given the abbey’s control of the western approach to the walled City of Dublin and its extensive lands in Meath, Dublin and Wicklow. Its wealth grew to the degree that it became a rich picking for a later Henry (VIII), who confiscated the abbey and its estates during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s. The Liberty passed into the control of a courtier named William Brabazon and in time developed into the Earl of Meath’s Liberty. The Liberties lasted well into the 19th century until they were eventually abolished and subsumed into the city. The name, however, stuck.

    So where can we find St Thomas Abbey? Well the Abbey is long gone and little archaeology of the abbey complex remains.

    [Source: https://libertiesdublin.ie/going-back-to-our-roots-rediscovering-st-thomass-abbey/ 11.04.17

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