The metropolitan see of Dublin was one of thirty-two territorial units through which the church in Ireland was administered during the sixteenth century. Although Armagh had long maintained its title to the ecclesiastical primacy of all Ireland, Dublin was regarded by most observers as the premier see on the island, because it surpassed the other dioceses either in terms of its financial resources, or the relative order and sophistication of its institutional fabric. Many aspects of this construct – including the political and social authority attached to the archbishop's office, the recruitment and training of his leading officials and the constitutional and liturgical forms adopted by his secular cathedral, St Patrick's – were, by the sixteenth century, long established expressions of the political and socio-cultural heritage of English Ireland, having originated and evolved through conscious imitation of English church structures, and their societal contexts, throughout the Middle Ages. Thus, on the eve of the Reformation, the ecclesiastical landscape of the heartland of the diocese – effectively, the modern county of Dublin – would have presented a generally recognisable picture to those familiar with the pattern of ecclesiastical life in Tudor England and, as such, it is arguable that it fitted broadly within the mainstream of the Western Church.

Throughout most of Ireland, however, the church operated in a markedly divergent political and socio-cultural milieu, the Ireland of independent Gaelic and ‘degenerate’ English lordships. The prevailing conditions in the independent lordships – they were highly militarised, economically underdeveloped and culturally self-assured – created very considerable difficulties for the institutional church.