The Ecclesiastical Taxation of the Diocese of Kilfenora
by Michael MacMahon

Source: The Other Clare no. 42 (2018)

The Medieval Diocese of Kilfenora

The Ecclesiastical Taxation lists 1302-07 copied over a century ago by Sweetman from the con-temporary exchequer rolls provide us with the earliest list we have of our diocesan parishes (1). The tax was a subsidy granted by the Pope to the kings of England for the purpose of financing the Crusades. In the first column of the table below I have set down the names of the Kilfenora churches in the phonetic forms as read by Sweetman from the Exchequer Rolls. Sweetman’s at-tempt at matching the archaic forms of the place names with modern parishes, however, is not always successful - some names are misplaced or missing - and in order to avoid confusion, I have omitted it from the table. It should be borne in mind that Sweetman was working without the benefit of local knowledge and before any of the series of volumes of papal letters (from about 1190) from the calendars in the Public Record Office in London, had appeared in print (2). Moreover, it should be said that rarely will one go through the taxation list for any diocese with-out finding some unusual or anomalous situation, and in that regard Kilfenora is no exception. In particular, I refer to the two Aran churches – Kileany, named after St. Enda’s celebrated monastic school, and Dissert or Desertbrachan (better known today as ‘The Seven Churches’) at Onaght (Eoghanacht), Inishmore - the identification of which has been a stumbling block for many his-torians. In general the difficulty arose from the fact - not always understood by those who have written about the diocese - that the Aran Islands belonged to the diocese of Kilfenora until the beginning of the seventeenth century when they were placed under the jurisdiction of the archdi-ocese of Tuam (3).