Burial at the Black Friary in Trim, Ireland: 700 Years of Friary-Town Relations

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Lord of Trim, Geoffrey de Geneville, established a Dominican friary to the north of the town in AD 1263. Ongoing excavations at the Black Friary since 2010 have documented a sequence of burials that date from the 13th through the early 20th centuries. Despite this continuity in the use of the site, the characteristics of the interred individuals varied over time. As an important religious center in the late Middle Ages, the Black Friary provided a final resting place for both the Dominican friars and the lay population living around the town. The friary lost its formal religious status in AD 1540 during the dissolution of the monasteries under King Henry VIII. Yet the site retained significance for local Catholics who continued to bury their dead within the church and cemetery. The most recent interments are all infants and young children, suggesting that the final stage of burial took the form of a cillín, or burial ground for unbaptized children. In this paper, we explore how these temporal differences in the burial population not only reflect larger changes in religious practice in Ireland but also illuminate the long relationship between the Black Friary and the town of Trim.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The State of the Art in Medieval European Archaeology: New Discoveries, Future Directions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23285