ABSTRACT
The men at home were taking a much livelier interest in their brethren abroad than they had done earlier. Irishmen at home seem to be more in touch with their fellow-countrymen abroad than they had been for centuries. Information about the Benedictine reform must have been reaching Ireland in the eleventh century, though with no apparent effect on the structure of Irish monasticism. The royal pilgrimages must have brought Irish courts into contact with Rome, where the reforms of Leo IX and his successors were active from 1048 onwards. The Dubliners were trading with England, and their eleventh-century coinage followed English patterns; their type of settlement, centred on the town, was English rather than Irish in style, better suited to the English diocesan see than the Irish monastic paruchia. A bishop might be consecrated in the Irish rite by one bishop alone instead of by the minimum of three normally required by Roman practice.
