Richard FitzRalph was born in Dundalk probably slightly before 1300. Although not a member of the Gaelic race, he was referred to by his Oxford contemporaries as “Hibernicus,” as was the Anglo-Norman Peter of Ireland (Petrus de Hibernia, ca. 1200–1265) a generation before. Around the age of 15, he went to Oxford (there was no university in Ireland before the reign of Elizabeth I) where he was a fellow of Balliol College, and he gained his MA there. He later went to University College (then University Hall), where he graduated with a doctorate in theology in 1331. He became chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1332, embarking thereafter on a successful ecclesiastical career both in England and in Ireland. On his first visit to Avignon, only five years after concluding his lectures on the Sentences, FitzRalph it seems was consulted as one of the eighteen leading theologians of Europe by Pope Benedict XII to correct the views of his predecessor, John XXII, on the beatific vision. He became archbishop of Armagh in 1347. He is perhaps best known for his opposition to the mendicant orders on the question of evangelical poverty and his defense of the rights of the secular clergy against the friars. It was while pursuing his suit against the mendicants that he died at Avignon in 1360. In the company of Ockham, Bradwardine, and Wodeham, FitzRalph became one of the four most frequently cited insular theologians in the fourteenth century.