At the centre of the city of Dublin for almost a thousand years, Christ Church cathedral (or more formally, The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity) has a rich cultural history which can be traced from the Vikings and the Anglo-Normans to the present day.
The earliest manuscript suggests Christ Church cathedral has been in its current location since around 1030. Dúnán, the first bishop of Dublin and Sitriuc, Norse king of Dublin, founded the original Viking church, which is believed to have been subject to the archbishop of Canterbury. By 1152 it was incorporated into the Irish church and within a decade Archbishop Laurence O’Toole (the first Irish-born bishop of Dublin) had been appointed.
Extensive renovations were carried out in Victorian times at a cost of £230,000, equivalent to approximately €26 million in current terms) and while the seriously decayed structure was saved from collapse, it remains difficult, to tell which parts of the interior are genuinely medieval and which parts are Victorian pastiche.
The cathedral famously contains the purported tomb of Strongbow, a medieval Norman-Welsh peer and warlord who came to Ireland at the request of King Diarmuid MacMorrough and whose arrival marked the beginning of English involvement in Ireland.
On one wall alongside the Choir is the famous mummified group of "Cat and Mouse," found trapped behind the organ and preserved by the very dry air of the cathedral.
Christ Church contains the largest cathedral crypt (over 63 long) in Britain & Ireland, which was constructed in 1173.
The crypt contains various monuments and historical features, including:
- the oldest secular carvings in Ireland, two carved statues that until the late 18th century stood outside the Dublin's medieval city hall (which was demolished in 1806),
- a tabernacle and set of candlesticks used when the cathedral last operated under the Roman rite, when the Catholic King James II, having fled England in 1690, came to Ireland to fight for his throne and attended High Mass in the temporarily re-catholicised Christ Church,
- and the stocks, formerly in Christ Church Place, made in 1670 and used for the punishment of offenders before the Court of the Dean's Liberty.