Around 1174, Richard de Clare, Second Earl of Pembroke, known as
Strongbow, granted a large estate to the Hospitallers on the north-western
fringes of the medieval city of Dublin. Kilmainham became the seat of
their Priory. By
1212, the Hospitallers had twelve preceptories in Ireland, with
at least three foundations in County
Kerry: Rattoo, Ardfert, and Tralee. Ardfert
and Tralee were
later dependent on the Knights’ great commandery at Awney(Knockaney) in
County Limerick .
The former site of the Tralee foundation now houses the Church of
Ireland School, local housing and the Church of St John the Evangelist
and Parish Centre on Ashe St.
A little east of Ardfert and north-east of Tralee, they may also have
had a brief
connection with Mount Crusline, the tallest peak in Kerry north
of Tralee, and its townland of Ballintobeenig, called after St Aubin.
Rattoo
The Knights Hospitaller reached County Kerry and established themselves
in Rattoo (Ballyduff) near Listowel around 1200. In that year Meiler,
son of Meiler FitzHenry, a grandson of King Henry I of England who
served as Justiciar of Ireland under John, Lord of Ireland and King of
England, established a preceptory in Rattoo
It was a hospital headed by a Fra’ William from Dublin, but
the Knights Hospitaller yielded Rattoo just before 1207 to the Arroasian
Augustinian Canons under the tutelage of Ss. Peter and Paul
By 1400, the latter were known as the Order of the Crouched Friars under
the rule of St. Augustine, the Fratres Cruciferi
Whether under the Knights Hospitaller, or their successors the Augustinian Cruciferi,
the hospital at Rattoo must have served at full capacity
every year around 24th June, the feast day of St. John the Baptist, for
on that day an annual combat took place over the nearby River Cashen. The
politico-military origins of the fighting lie in the contest around the year
1200 between the Anglo-Norman knights and their Gaelic allies versus the
local Gaelic rulers O’Connors-Kerry, over control of the River Cashen
which at the time was the access route into the Kerry interior.
The final battle, by now between
protagonists known as the Cooleens
and the Lawlor-Black Mulvihills, took place on St. John’s Day, 24
June 1834 on the strand at Ballyeagh on the Cashen estuary in north Kerry.A
fair was being held in Listowel at the time. It was the
last of aseries of annual combats the origins of which seemed
lost in time to the participants, and which took place at the mid-summer
fair, races and pattern of Ballyeagh, renowned throughout Munster.
Within the
decade that followed, these large-scale occurrences of civil disturbance,
incidents of inter-communal warfare at festivals or markets, died out.
The Great Famine had arrived, and mere survival was at stake. Like
much of the rest of the country, north Kerry would be decimated.
Ardfert
The Knights Hospitaller of the Order of Saint John also had a foundation
in Ardfert. Ardfert was founded originally by St. Brendan the Navigator,
and at the time of the Knights arrival was a prosperous walledtown,
and in fact the medieval capital of County Kerry. It remained the ecclesiastical
capital for a long time after its economic prominence declined
to the state of a mere village today.
Little evidence remains recorded of the presence of the Knights Hospitaller
there, but they were closely allied to, and hosted by, the FitzMaurices,
the Anglo-Norman Lords of Kerry, who were a cadet branch of the
Fitzgeralds, Earls of Desmond. They are known to have run a hospital
there and also catered to victims suffering from leprosy. The leper
house had been established in 1312 by Nicholas FitzThomas- FitzMaurice,
second Baron of Kerry
The Fitzmaurices also involved themselves
with the Order of the Knights Templar. Sir Gerald FitzMaurice was
Grand Prior of the Templars in Ireland until that Order was suppressed
in 1307-1312, when its properties and many of its members were absorbed
by the Knights Hospitaller
There is a minor record of a dispute with the Franciscans in 1325 over
a market cross and a pillory in Ardfert, which would seem to attest to
the fact that they had a continuous presence there for at least a
century
St. Aubin
To the east of Ardfert and north-east of Tralee lies the townland of
Ballintobeenig, called after St. Aubin, a Norman knight
It may have been the feof and ville of
such a knight in the 13th century, but no direct record
seems to survive. Not far away rises a peak known as Knockariddera,
the “Hill of the Knight”.
Ardfert Cathedral
The St. Aubin family was
established in Ireland by William deSancto
Albino, who became Lord of Cumsy in County Kilkenny in the early twelfth
century
He granted lands thereabouts to the Hospital of St.
John of Jerusalem. Another Chevalier St. Aubin was a renowned Knight
Commander of the Knights Hospitaller, by now known as
the Knights of Malta, who returned from a
reconnaissance mission off the Barbary Coast, and ran a naval campaign
against the maritime blockade imposed
by the Ottoman Turks during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565
Ballintobeenig, the ville of St. Aubin, lies on the
south flank of Mount Crusline,
known locally as “Crois”
(the gaelic for Cross, pronounced “Crush)”, and which was called
after a cross once mounted there
In the Civil Survey of 1656, Crusline was
called “the Great hill called Crucifloyne It is
thought to have been called after a long‐disappeared
cross, placed there by the Flynns, or more likely the local Gaelic
lords, the Leanes, hence Crusline or
Crois Uí Laeghain.
Perhaps it was associated with the
Cruciferi ,
the crouched Augustinian Fratres Cruciferi
who also succeeded to the hospital of Rattoo formerly established
by the Knights Hospitaller. There can be little doubt that during
their presence in Kerry, the Knights Hospitaller would also have often
beheld north Kerry from its most commanding vantage point over the
entire area, i.e. its highest peak, Mount Crusline, the tallest and western
most peak of Stack’s Mountains north-east of Tralee
Tralee
A vague belief that the Knights of St. John once had a commandery
in Tralee appeared in 1833 in a topographical dictionary. It was
subsequently investigated by William Maunsell Hennessy of the Public
Record Office, and by Mary Hickson, who wrote a detailed account of
its nature, locations, and fate. In
Tralee, the Knights had a “liber hospes”, i.e an inn or
guesthouse for travellers,
different in nature from their hospital in Ardfert. Their hospital lay
approximately on what is today St. John’s Park in Tralee, just east
of Rock Street
Their church, dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, was
known as Teampull
an tSolais - the Church of the Light: a lantern
used to hang from its tower in medieval times to guide people across a
footbridge spanning an old creek now concealed in a culvert. The Parish
Centre which now stands near the site is called Teach
an tSolais – House of Light
On the site of the original church, a new one was built in the early
1600s, and is now said to be the oldest surviving building in
regular use in Tralee. Today, it is the parish church for the Church
of Ireland/Anglican Communion, to the rear of which lies St. John’s Lane
running from the old Bohereen to the back gates of the old market place.
It is a curiosity of the passage of history that it is still a St.
John’s church, but now of St. John the Evangelist, and no longer St.
John the Baptist. A disused
gated archway leads from the Church to St. John’s Lane, and this used
to be the main entrance in the past. It seems the Knights Hospitaller still
had a presence in St. John’s Lane in 1602
Unlike the church, the lane’s
name however, refers back to St. John the Baptist.
The former Rectory now demolished, near to the site of what is now Teach
an tSolais, the Parish Centre
The Church of St John the Evangelist.
The Knights also owned land, adjacent to their original church, called Clounalour, named
after a “meadow of the Leper”
and another field,
Gortateampull “ field of the church”
an ancient glebe land. Clounalour
now forms an urban area north of Boherbee and east of the former
hospital site at St. John’s Park in Tralee town.
The
name of the Knights’ patron saint was preserved a short distance
away in Castle Street by the dedication of the later Roman Catholic
Church to St. John the Baptist, built between 1854 and 1870. Its
structure incorporates an earlier chapel of 1780. Part of the wall of
its baptistry contains a slab with effigies of two infants dating from
the late thirteenth/early fourteenth centuries
Eclipse and return in modern times
The Knights lost many possessions in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, partly due to their disposal by sale by the then-Prior of
Kilmainham, Sir James Keating, and for which malgovernance he was ‘deprived
of his dignities’ by the
Grand Master of the Order then based at Rhodes. He
died shortly after he was ejected from Kilmainham in 1491.But it was a
later Prior, Sir John Rawson, present at the loss of Rhodes to the
Ottomans, who yielded most, accepting to become Viscount Clontarf with
a pension, and surrendering the Priory of Kilmainham and other assets
to King Henry VIII as the latter broke with the papacy in Rome
Soon afterwards, the Reformation confirmed the loss of all lands and indeed
of all rights of the Order when it was suppressed as a Catholic
Institution in 1542. However,
during the Jacobite resurgence of Catholicism, the Knights
Hospitaller appear to have recovered a presence in Ireland, and evolved
towards a more Irish identity, eventually siding with the Catholic Jacobites
in the counter-reformation.
By this time, their demographic profile better reflected the evolving
make-up of Irish society, including scions
of Cambro-Norman, Hiberno-English, Gallowglass Scots and Gaelic
families. Many in the Grand Prior’s regiment would eventually join the ’Wild
Geese’ in exile
By the nineteenth century their
very presence in Kerry and especially Tralee was largely
forgotten. It wasn’t until the early twentieth
century that the Knights Hospitaller made a return to Ireland in the
form of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem,
of Rhodes and of Malta, whose Ambulance Corps recently achieved its 75th
anniversary. The Military Hospitaller Order of Malta cooperates
with the Alliance of Orders of St. John, as the mutually-recognised Orders
of St. John , in accordance with their joint
declaration of 14 October 1987. It thus also collaborates with the Most
Venerable Order of
St. John (Anglican), and the continental Johanniter Orders.
Though knights and dames still form the core of its structure, the
numerical strength of the Order today lies in the thousands of its volunteers
who give their time and resources in local communities to help the
needy. No
longer identified with military prowess but rather with its original
humanitarian mission, the Order is present across Ireland today, north
and south, and is well-known for its assistance to the sick, the handicapped
and the poor, very much in keeping with its original ethos.
Note about the Author
Francis M. O’Donnell, BA, GCMM, KC*SG, KM, KCHS, KCMCO, is former
Ambassador of the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St.John
of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta accredited to the Slovak Republic
(2009-2013).