By Jesse Harrington
This month (11 May 2025) will see the international public commemoration of the 800th anniversary of the canonisation of St Lorcán Ua Tuathail (Laurence O’Toole), twelfth-century archbishop and patron saint of Dublin. The event will be attended by municipal, regional and state dignitaries and officials, and will be marked by an ecumenical service jointly celebrated by the two archbishops of Dublin, the Most Revd Dr Dermot Farrell and the Most Revd Dr Michael Jackson, alongside the archbishop of Rouen, Monsignor Dominique Lebrun, and the bishop of Amiens, Monsignor Gérard Le Stang.
This commemoration will not take place in the city of Dublin, however, but in Eu, within the French département of Seine-Maritime and the Norman archdiocese of Rouen, where the saint is better known by his French name, St Laurent d’Eu, or Laurence of Eu. This contemporary celebration evokes the important French connections of Dublin’s patron saint, and how a series of historical episodes helped create a unique and significant site of Irish memory in northern France.
NORMAN RULERS AND FRENCH CANONS
St Laurence was one of the outstanding political and religious figures of twelfth-century Ireland. Born c. 1128, son of Muirchertach Ua Tuathail, Uí Muiredaig king of north Leinster, Laurence became a monk and abbot at Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, before being installed as archbishop of Dublin in 1162 and papal legate in Ireland in 1179. Laurence’s family connections and the church offices over which he presided put him at the middle of a critical juncture of medieval Irish history. His sister, Mór, was the wife of Diarmait Mac Murchada (Dermot MacMurrough), the Leinster overking who set in motion the English invasion of Ireland in 1169 and who famously offered his daughter, Aoife, in marriage to the leader of the invaders, Earl Richard de Clare (‘Strongbow’). This placed the archbishop at centre stage as a peacemaker and power broker of the invasion.
From the siege of Dublin in 1170 until his death in 1180, Laurence was involved as archbishop in high-level political negotiations in Ireland, England and Normandy. At the same time, he had become uncle-in-law to Strongbow, at whose funeral he officiated in 1176. These events drew Laurence inexorably into the secular politics of the medieval Francophone world. Although many of those who came to Ireland in 1169 had been born in England or Wales, their leaders were typically French-speakers of Norman heritage, noblemen who might hold estates in northern France and whose English king, Henry II (r. 1154–89), had been born in Le Mans and continued to rule as duke of Normandy. These figures were to dominate the final decade of Laurence’s life.
Beyond secular politics, Laurence had become indirectly acquainted with the French Church prior to the events of 1169. The reform of the Irish Church earlier in the century had already seen the introduction of French-inspired reforms and Continental religious orders into Ireland. The decades from the 1140s onwards witnessed the arrival of French-trained Cistercian monks and Augustinian canons. Laurence is often credited with introducing Augustinian canons at Glendalough and Arrouaisian canons at Holy Trinity Priory (Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin), who notably followed the Augustinian Rule as observed at the abbey of Arrouaise in Picardy.
In 1177, moreover, Laurence helped to establish the Abbey of St Thomas the Martyr in what is now the Liberties in Dublin. This church was founded by order of Henry II of England, in royal penance for the murder some six years earlier of St Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. Crucially, its community followed the Augustinian Rule as observed at the Abbey of St Victor in Paris. St Victor was one of the leading lights of the twelfth-century renaissance; his was a scholarly religious community that was a bulwark of the nascent University of Paris, was patronised by the kings of France and was an important Continental stop for travellers to and from Britain and Ireland. By helping to establish a Victorine community in Dublin, Laurence forged another lasting cultural, political and religious connection between France and Ireland. It was one that was to prove useful to him later.
EU, SEINE-MARITIME
In late October/early November 1180, Laurence travelled from England to Normandy to petition Henry II on behalf of the Irish Church, embarking from the port of Dover in Kent and landing at Wissant near Calais. Stricken with fever during his winter voyage, he broke his journey at the town of Eu near Dieppe.
Eu is one of the region’s ‘three sister towns’ (les trois villes soeurs), being set inland from the high chalk cliffs of the adjoining coastal towns of Le Tréport in Upper Normandy and Mers-les-Bains in Picardy. It was one of the most important castle towns of medieval Normandy, being the seat of a county, archdeaconry, market and fair. At its thirteenth-century peak, Eu’s approximately 8,000 inhabitants ranked it comfortably after Normandy’s larger regional centres at Rouen (30,000–40,000) and Caen (10,000), but with double the number of inhabitants of the similarly important diocesan centres of Bayeux and Lisieux (roughly 3,000–4,000 respectively). There was also a distant family connection, since Laurence’s de Clare in-laws were a branch of the same dynasty that ruled as counts of Eu; Strongbow’s great-great-grandfather had been Count Gilbert of Eu.
Besides its coastal position, Eu lay on a significant cultural and political boundary. The steep-sided valley of the River Bresle, which had given its older name to the town, marked the border between the duchy of Normandy and the county of Ponthieu in Picardy. The town was thus of strategic significance. The counts of Eu were routinely courted by the kings of France and of England during the medieval jockeying between the two monarchies. Much later, the town would ultimately become a French royal city, whose château served in the nineteenth century as the summer residence of France’s penultimate monarch, Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–48), twice welcomed Queen Victoria and later became the residence-in-exile of the Brazilian imperial family.
On reaching Eu in 1180, however, Laurence sought the hospitality not of the castle but of the local Victorine canons of the Abbey of Sainte-Marie. By entering a Victorine house, he was taking advantage of ties of confraternity that he had helped establish at St Thomas’s Abbey in Dublin. Within a few short days of his arrival, he died on 14 November. His funeral was conducted by the passing Roman subdeacon, Alexis, papal legate for Scotland, who had previously been a canon at St Victor in Paris. The archbishop was buried in the Victorine collegiate church which would later bear his name, the Collégiale Notre-Dame-et-Saint-Laurent d’Eu.
A FRENCH AFTERLIFE
Although he had spent only a few days in Eu before his death, Laurence’s French afterlife was every bit as rich as his Irish life. Interest in the Irish archbishop spread through the north of France, especially in Normandy, Picardy, Brittany and Île-de-France. Local recognition of his sainthood came swiftly. In 1186 the solemn translation, or removal, of Laurence’s body to a new tomb in the crypt at Eu accompanied the newly commenced construction of a larger collegiate church. At some point after this, in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, a Romanesque recumbent effigy was carved atop the tomb, important to art historians as one of the oldest such effigies in France.
Local recognition was followed by no fewer than six formal attempts at Laurence’s canonisation, which was finally confirmed by Pope Honorius III at Rieti in Italy in December 1225. Thus Laurence became only the second Irishman to be canonised by Rome, after the French Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux had successfully advanced the cause of St Malachy of Armagh (1190). Although Laurence’s canonisation was the result of an internationally coordinated effort, involving bishops, abbots, clergy, kings, knights and landowners from England, France and Ireland, the individual efforts were often French initiatives, especially in the final stages.
On 10 May 1226 a second translation took place at Eu, by which Laurence’s relics were removed from the crypt to their new place of honour in the main church. Well into the early modern period the saint’s reliquaries would be brought out in procession when plague struck the archdiocese, and a piece of his relics was sought by King Louis XIII in 1641. The saint acquired four annual feast-days in the Christian calendar: a local feast at Eu on 2 February, a commemoration of the first translation on 17 April, a commemoration of the second translation on 10 May and a universal feast on 14 November. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the canons at his shrine at Eu recorded some 256 miracles worked through his intercession, adding new details to his French legend.
ENDURING MEMORY
Laurence was not the first Irish saint to be so honoured in northern France. By coincidence, his death had fallen on the feast-day of St Séadna, more commonly known in France as St Sidonius, Sidonaire or Saint-Saëns. This seventh-century Irish monk of Jumièges had founded the monastery and town of Saint-Saëns in Normandy, which thereby gave an Irish saint’s name to the nineteenth-century French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.
What was impressive in Laurence’s case, however, was the comparative rapidity, longevity and far-reaching extent of his saintly cult. In many ways, Laurence retained a more powerful hold over French historical and religious memory than he did in Ireland. Among the numerous biographies of Laurence composed in Latin in the Middle Ages, no fewer than five were copied into manuscripts written and preserved in the north of France.
One of these later manuscript copies served as the basis for the first print edition of the life of Laurence, prepared in the sixteenth century by a German Carthusian namesake, Laurentius Surius. This edition was later reproduced in 1624 by Thomas Messingham, rector of the Irish College in Paris (then a recognised seminary of the University of Paris but now the Centre Culturel Irlandais on the Rue des Irlandais), as part of his Florilegium Insulæ Sanctorum. Messingham’s Florilegium was a print anthology of Irish saints’ lives, intended to secure support from wealthy French patrons for the Counter-Reformation cause of Irish Catholicism. The manuscript and a copy of Messingham’s edition ultimately derived from it are now held in the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève, beside the Panthéon, only two streets away from the Centre Culturel Irlandais. Thus manuscript and print edition of Laurence’s life came full circle in the streets of early modern Paris.
TIME LOST AND TIME FOUND
After Laurence’s tomb at Eu was defaced and his reliquaries (though not his relics) lost or destroyed during the French Revolution, those who supported their nineteenth-century repair or replacement included none other than the locally resident king of France, Louis-Philippe. Later restorations at the collegiate church were undertaken in the 1860s by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, most famous for his work on Notre-Dame de Paris. The great architect is said to have remarked of the medieval church that had been raised in Laurence’s honour at Eu: ‘I have seen bigger, I have seen higher, but I have never seen more beautiful’.
A chapel was also built on the hill overlooking the town, marking the spot from which Laurence was said to have first spied the collegiate church and prophetically pronounced that it would be the place of his final rest. Both the collegiate church and the hillside chapel retain Laurence’s relics. The chapel became the site of more recent folk traditions. During the twentieth century, an old granite cross beside it was venerated by local girls who wished to marry. The hill likewise became a long-standing site of local pilgrimage. In May 1940, the 300 pilgrims who processed to the chapel as part of the annual devotions during the saint’s octave were said to have escaped, without casualty, the aerial bombing of the town that day. Processions to the chapel continue to this day.
Laurence also occupied a notable place in modern French literature. In the fourth book of Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu, or In search of lost time (1921–2), a character expounds on the fictional French town of Saint-Laurent-en-Bray as taking its name from the medieval archbishop of Dublin, considering it ridiculous that one could think it might refer to anyone else. In this Proust appears to have captured an intriguing paradox. As this year’s celebration may show, for the last eight centuries Dublin’s patron saint has arguably—almost involuntarily—been better remembered in France than he has been in Ireland.
Jesse Harrington is a research fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and adviser to the national and international commemorations of St Laurence O’Toole for 2025–30.
Further reading
G. Blondel, La Ville d’Eu au Moyen Âge (Eu, 2020).
M. Browne & C. Ó Clabaigh (eds), Households of God: the Regular Canons and Canonesses of St Augustine and of Prémontré in medieval Ireland (Dublin, 2019).
D. Forristal, The man in the middle: St Laurence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin (Dublin, 1988).
A. Legris, The life of St Laurence O’Toole (Dublin, 1914).