Fitzralph, Richard

Fitzralph, Richard (c.1299–1360). Fitzralph, a noted campaigner against the mendicant orders, died in Avignon. There he had been conducting a legal process against the friars, a task which occupied him for the last decade of his life. Born into an Anglo‐Norman family, he was educated, probably by Franciscans, in his home town of Dundalk, before going to Balliol College, Oxford, about 1315. He became a fellow of the college, gained his doctorate in theology in 1331, and in the following year began a tempestuous two‐year period as chancellor, which embraced the ‘Stamford Schism’, when a group of students decamped from Oxford, out of disgust for the authorities, to set up another studium in the town of Stamford. The first of his four visits to Avignon took place in 1334–5. By this time he had made some influential friends, most importantly Bishop Grandisson of Exeter (c.1291–1369), to whose nephew he was for a while tutor. Thanks to the influence of Grandisson and that of another patron, Thomas Bradwardine, he became dean of Lichfield in 1335. He spent little time in Lichfield, preferring to work and preach in Avignon (1337–1344). In 1346 he was elected archbishop of Armagh, with which diocese he became so closely identified that he was known as Armachanus. Grandisson consecrated him in his cathedral in Exeter in 1347. He went to Avignon on two more extended visits (1349–51, 1357–60) before his death.

All his extant writings, even the sermons originally preached in English, survive in Latin. The inventory of the sermons comprises about 90 items preached from 1335 onwards. The manuscript collections which contain the full set have been described as a ‘Sermon Diary’, because they contain details of the date and place of delivery, the original language in which a sermon was preached, and the preacher's own title as he moved up the ecclesiastical ladder. Several of the sermons which he preached in his diocese demonstrate his determination to make peace between the two nations, native Irish and Anglo‐Norman, but he is chiefly famous for the sermons and treatises he wrote against the friars, especially the Franciscans. His other writings deal with disparate material (e.g. his Commentary on the Sentences (c.1328–9), or the Summa de questionibus Armenorum (c.1340–4)).

His anti‐mendicancy centred on the way the friars interpreted Christ's poverty. In his dialogue De pauperie Salvatoris (1356) he linked the friars' alleged delinquency to the theory of Dominion and Grace: wrongdoing merits dismissal. Many of the anti‐mendicant arguments he advanced in this treatise resurfaced in a series of sermons he preached in English in London between December 1356 and March 1357, but the tour de force of his career took place on 8 November 1357, in Avignon, when he preached before Pope Innocent VI and the cardinals an address now known as the ‘Defensio Curatorum’, in which he called into question the justification of the mendicant orders. He lost his case, and because of the power of the friars in the curia the cause for his canonization foundered, except in his native Dundalk, where, in the church of St Nicholas, which contained his tomb, there is a chapel dedicated to St Richard.

Bibliography

Walsh, Katherine , A Fourteenth‐Century Scholar and Primate: Richard Fitzralph in Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (1981).

Terence Dolan