St. Brigid’s Day: Courageous Women
Posted on: 05 February 2025
Professor Jane Ohlmeyer celebrates the lives of courageous women across history – ‘the viragos and matrons’ from Brigid to Bishop Budde – who have inspired, advocated for the oppressed, and never hesitated to speak truth to power.
The 1 February, St. Brigid’s day, coincides with the pre-Christian feast of Imbolc, the coming of spring, also associated with fertility, blessings, and protection. Despite her prominence as one of the three great Irish saints, alongside St. Patrick and St. Colm Cille, we know remarkably little about Brigid. According to the Annals of Ulster she died in 524 having founded at Kildare one of the most important religious settlements of the early Christian period. Later chroniclers recorded Brigid’s kindnesses to the poor and to animals, along with her humility, compassion, courage, and her many miracles.
One might see today’s equivalent of Brigid in Mariann Edgar Budde, the 65-year old Episcopalian bishop of Washington. At an inaugural prayer service on 21 January 2025 Bishop Budde asked President Trump for ‘mercy’ for the LGBTQ+ and migrant communities in the USA, many of whom now live in fear. Lauded by many for her courage and compassion, others– including the President – have excoriated her.
On this occasion no riot ensued, as it had on the Feast of the Epiphany (6 January) 2021. However, in the past, moments like this, did end in violence. As communities came together on feast days, the state took the opportunity to make a public display of its power and authority. In Dublin, for example, on St. Brigid’s 1612 there was a public execution by the Protestant authorities of Catholic priests, which then triggered a riot as men and women in the crowd stormed the gallows.
A detailed report of another feast day riot, that of St. Stephen (26 December) 1629, paints a vivid picture of Dublin city officials, Protestant clergy, and soldiers raiding and ransacking a Franciscan mass house on Cook Street in the heart of the walled city, close to Christ Church Cathedral and Dublin Castle.
According to one account, ‘a certain matron’ called Elinor Nugent was fired with the ‘spirit of zeal and indignation’ and led resistance to this sectarian attack by launching herself against the marauding soldiers. Following her lead, ‘the rest of the viragos and matrons’ in the congregation joined her: ‘they strike, they shoulder, they catch, they scratch, thump and tread underfoot whomsoever they lay hands upon; so that the mayor, bishop and soldiers were glad to hasten out of doors; where they met, as they fled through the streets, with a shower of stones’. Others, including those from the surrounding countryside who were making a pilgrimage to St. Stephen’s well, joined the fray ‘casting stones and the dirt of the kennel’ (i.e. dung). The following day, Widow Nugent – a woman probably in her fifties – and others were arrested and imprisoned.
Who was Elinor Nugent? The daughter of an established family of aldermen, Elinor Handcock was probably born in Dublin in the 1570s. She married Richard Nugent, a prosperous merchant, and the couple made their home on Winetavern Street, close to the River Liffey and near Wood Quay, in the bustling and overcrowded parish of St. John. Aside from a few court records relating to Richard’s recusancy (he was regularly fined for the family’s devotion to Catholicism) and another recording his borrowing, the details of their lives are largely lost.
What is clear is that the couple formed part of a closeknit and prosperous Catholic mercantile community coming to terms with a period of profound political transition and religious turmoil, compounded by a major gunpowder explosion on Winetavern Street in 1597 (that claimed the lives of 126 people) and subsistence crises, especially in the 1630s. They worshipped openly at the Franciscan mass house on Cook Street and possibly at the other nearby religious houses that opened over the course of the 1620s. No doubt Elinor shopped, gossiped, and transacted business in the Cornmarket and along the quays and may even have frequented one of the many local inns. Widowed in 1621, it is likely that Elinor took over Richard’s business, which allowed her to pay a ‘cess’ (or tax) of 10 shillings, more than her neighbours, on at least nine occasions throughout the 1620s and 1630s.
Elinor’s funeral entry (the seventeenth century equivalent of RIP.ie) is extant in the Genealogical Office in the National Library of Ireland and tells us that she mothered a large family, many of whom died young. A daughter and two sons did survive into adulthood. Her daughter, Mary, admitted in 1611 as a freewoman of Dublin, appears to have worked for the family business and pre-deceased her. Her son, John, studied in the Irish College in Lisbon, where incidentally there is a church in the north of the city at Lumiar dedicated to Brigid, or Sancta Brígida as she is known in Portuguese. In 1619 Elinor incurred the wrath of the local authorities by corresponding with John and sending him ‘eleven shillings in gold’, a very considerable sum. John’s very presence in Portugal connected Elinor to an international mercantile, and possibly clerical, network. Another son, George, who recorded the funeral entry, lived with and presumably worked alongside his mother.
Elinor died on 9 June 1638 and three days later was buried in the graveyard of St. Johns church. A burial fee of 6s 8d, recorded in the parish vestry book, provides a final glimpse of the ‘certain matron’ who in 1629 led resistance to a state-sponsored onslaught against beleaguered Franciscan priests and in doing so risked her life, livelihood, and reputation.
Hidden behind their menfolk for centuries, our challenge is to tell the story of Elinor and of those like her by interrogating extant records, however fragmentary and incomplete.
As we do so, let’s also take this moment to show solidarity with and celebrate the lives of those courageous women across history – ‘the viragos and matrons’ from Brigid to Bishop Budde – who have inspired, advocated for the oppressed, and never hesitated to speak truth to power.
Jane Ohlmeyer, Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Modern History (1762), Trinity College Dublin and the principal investigator for an Advanced ERC project, VOICES, that is documenting the lived experiences of non-elite women in Ireland, 1550-1700.
Image: Artist: Lucas de Heere. Irish woman and girl of the 16th century.