Cross - Market cross, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin
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Crosses & Monuments
Somewhere near the eastern end of what is now Bishop Street, a stone cross once marked the spot where butter was sold on the edge of medieval Dublin.
Nothing of it survives above ground today. The street itself has changed its name, the market it served is long gone, and the cross that gave the whole arrangement its identity has left no physical trace whatsoever. What remains is a scattering of documentary references and a single line on a map, enough to suggest that something genuinely significant once stood here, even if the pavement underfoot gives nothing away.
The cross appears in the historical record under the name the Butter Cross, and the explanation for that name is given directly in a 1603 survey of the boundaries of Dublin City, recorded in the Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin. The surveyors, walking the city's southern limits, turned north along what they called Butter Lane, now Bishop Street, and noted that in that lane there lay an old stone cross, which was said to be called the Butter Cross because in former times the butter brought from the marches and the Tooles' country to Dublin was sold there. The Tooles' country referred to the territory of the O'Toole clan in the Wicklow uplands, and the marches were the borderlands between the Pale and the Gaelic hinterland. A similar reference appears in an inquisition held at the Common Pleas in Dublin in 1326 to 1327, overseen by Thomas Fitz John, Earl of Kildare and justiciary of Ireland. That earlier document used the cross as a fixed boundary marker, directing the surveyors from the gate of St Kevin's Church northward as far as the stone cross where the old market had formerly been. The Friends of Medieval Dublin Map, published in 1978, plots a probable location for the cross near the eastern end of Bishop Street, and this remains the best available guide to where it once stood.
Bishop Street today is a short, mostly unremarkable stretch of road running between Kevin Street and Aungier Street in the south inner city, not far from St Patrick's Cathedral. There is nothing to see at the site itself, no plaque, no marker, no remnant. The value of knowing about the Butter Cross lies less in what can be observed and more in what it reframes: a busy urban street as the former outer edge of a medieval city, where goods from the Wicklow hills were traded at a stone cross that doubled as a landmark precise enough to appear in legal documents nearly seven centuries ago.