Lismore Crozier

Lismore Crozier
View of crozier’s drop, crook and upper knopes
Material	wood, silver, gold, niello, glass
Size	height: 116cm
Created	early 12th century, probably c. 1100
Discovered	Lismore Castle, County Waterford, Ireland
Present location	National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin

The Lismore Crozier is an Irish Insular-type crozier dated to between 1100 and 1113 AD. It consists of a wooden tubular staff lined with copper-alloy plates; embellished with silver, gold, niello and glass; and capped by a crook with a decorative openwork crest.^[1] The inscriptions on the upper knope record that it was built by "Nechtain the craftsman" and commissioned by Niall mac Meic Aeducain, bishop of Lismore (d. 1113). This makes it the only extant insular crozier to be inscribed, and the only one whose date of origin can be closely approximated.^[2] It was rediscovered in 1814, along with the 15th-century Book of Lismore, in a walled-up doorway in Lismore Castle, County Waterford, where it was probably hidden in the late Middle Ages during a period of either religious persecution or raids.

The crozier is held in the National Museum of Ireland (NMI) on Kildare Street, Dublin.^[3] During a 1966 refurbishment, two small relics and a linen cloth were found inside the crook (the curved top-piece). An early 20th-century copy is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.^[4]