Shrine of St. Patrick's Bell

St. Patrick's Bell Shrine
Material	Bell: Iron, bronze Shrine: bronze, silver, gold, glass, rock crystal
Size	Bell: Height: 20 cm (7.9 in) Shrine: height: 23 cm (9.1 in)
Created	Bell: 800-900 Shrine: c. 1094-1105[1]
Period/culture	Early Medieval, Insular, Romanesque
Present location	National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin
Identification	Shrine: NMI, R4011[2]

The Shrine of St. Patrick's Bell is a bell shrine reliquary completed c. 1094–1105 in County Armagh, Ireland, to contain a c. 500 iron hand-bell traditionally associated with the Irish patron saint Saint Patrick (d. 5th-century). Inscriptions on the back of the shrine record that it was commissioned after 1091 by the Uí Néill High King Domnall Ua Lochlainn and completed c. 1105 by the metalworker Cú Dúilig, about whom nothing is known.^[3] Both objects are historically significant, with the bell being one of the few Irish very-early medieval artifacts with a continuous provenance lasting from around the 8th century to the present, and the shrine is a highpoint of Irish metalwork from the late Insular and early Romanesque periods.

The bell is made from iron lined with bronze, while its slightly larger shrine is made from bronze, silver and gold and is trapezoidal and sloping in shape, mimicking the form of the bell it was designed to enclose. The shrine's front is minutely decorated having once held thirty gilded filigree panels organised in complex arrays, although some are now lost. Its short sides contain pairs of openwork panels showing elongated beasts intertwined with ribbon-bodied snakes.^[4] The bell was enshrined during a period when many older reliquaries were being preserved or protected with metal encasings; see also Cumdachs (metal containers for Early Medieval Irish manuscripts).

Both objects were kept together for centuries by their hereditary keepers until acquired by the Irish state in the late 19th century.^[4] Today both are on permanent display in the Treasury room of the archaeology branch of the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) in Dublin. An early 20th-century copy is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.^[5]