Early Medieval Ireland 400-1200

Daibhi O Croinin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317192695
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Irlande

This impressive survey covers the early history of Ireland from the coming of Christianity to the Norman settlement. Within a broad political framework it explores the nature of Irish society, the spiritual and secular roles of the Church and the extraordinary flowering of Irish culture in the period. Other major themes are Ireland's relations with Britain and continental Europe, the beginnings of Irish feudalism, and the impact of the Viking and Norman invaders.

The expanded second edition has been fully updated to take into account the most recent research in the history of Ireland in the early middle ages, including Ireland's relations with the Later Roman Empire, advances and discoveries in archaeology, and Church Reform in the 11th and 12th centuries. A new opening chapter on early Irish primary sources introduces students to the key written sources that inform our picture of early medieval Ireland, including annals, genealogies and laws.

The social, political, religious, legal and institutional background provides the context against which Dáibhí Ó Cróinín describes Ireland's transformation from a tribal society to a feudal state. It is essential reading for student and specialist alike.

1

Early medieval Ireland: sources

I have written this new introductory chapter because I was asked to. More than one reader of the original book remarked that a gentle introduction to the sources for early Irish history would be very helpful to students and teachers alike. My feelings in the matter are similar to those that the Venerable Bede expressed in the preface to his great work on technical chronology, De temporum ratione,¹ when he told of how the brethren for whom he composed his original work ‘On times’ (De temporibus, published in 703) complained at its excessive conciseness, and asked him to compose a longer, more detailed work which they could more easily follow. This he did, publishing his De temporum ratione in 725. Mindful that I too am writing twenty-two years after Early Medieval Ireland first appeared, while I have not expanded the text of the book very much, I have endeavored to make the materials for the history of Ireland in the Early Middle Ages accessible and understandable, without overwhelming readers with details. With that purpose in mind I have added the following introductory chapter on the principal sources that historians draw on to reconstruct the picture of that society: the annals, genealogies, and early Irish (‘brehon’) laws. These are not the only sources, needless to say, but a full description of these and the ‘ancillary’ texts – ecclesiastical (canon) law; saints’ Lives (hagiography); archaeology and literature in Latin and Old Irish – would swell this chapter into a book by itself. Most of these other sources will come into the narrative anyway, but I have not the space to discuss them in the same detail as I will the principal sources.² On the other hand, if some readers should ask why there is no discussion at all of charter evidence or coins in the centuries up to c. 1000, the answer is simple: there are none.³ Uniquely, among the early medieval societies of western Europe in the period, Ireland appears to have functioned as an entirely coinless society, while the wealth of charter material (legal documents relating to ownership of property) that colleagues have to draw on when writing the histories of Anglo-Saxon England, the Merovingian kingdoms of Francia, or of Visigothic Spain has no counterpart in early medieval Ireland.⁴ The reason doubtless lies in the fact – which can never be too often repeated – that Ireland was never a part of the Roman Empire, and never acquired the habit of using coins as currency or charters as expressions of legal title. Those innovations were to enter Irish society in the period after c. 1000.

Annals⁵

An annal may be defined as the contemporary record of an event under the year of its occurrence. A series of such events, however brief or long, in chronological sequence, is what we call annals.⁶ Crucial in all this is the fact that such events are recorded when they happen. It is precisely the contemporary nature of the recording that qualifies the event as an authentic annal and justifies the use of that term (from Latin annus/annalis), as it ties the event to the year in which it happened; a later retrospective entry, while it may contain an element of truth or fact, does not qualify as a true annal.⁷ Events recorded in such a sequence need not necessarily have any relation to one another, and in most cases probably had no cause-and-effect connection. They can record celestial phenomena (comets, eclipses, etc.) or meteorological events (unseasonable dry or wet weather, unusual bounty of crops or the opposite), as well as battles and the deaths of prominent ecclesiastical or political figures. They may vary from the barest single entry under a given year to a lengthy and more elaborate continuous narrative extending, more or less unbroken, over a range of years. This latter kind of text is sometimes also described as a chronicle, to distinguish it from the more laconic kind of text usually encountered in annals. There certainly were Late Antique Roman chronicles in circulation in Ireland in the centuries following the formal introduction of Christianity, but there is a difference between the two types of text, one that we need to keep in mind at all times. This distinction will be touched on again further later.

That said, historians of early medieval Ireland in the years from c. 400 to c. 1200 are exceptionally fortunate in that they have available to them an extraordinary amount of annalistic information. It is not possible here (nor is it advisable!) to give a detailed description of all the different sets of Irish annals; that has been done already in the works by Mac Niocaill, Hughes, and Mc Carthy referred to in the notes. The purpose of this section is to try to explain to readers what are the peculiar features of annals, what are the challenges they present, what are the problems about using them, and what are the techniques that historians use when trying to extract information from them. The question then is not where to find such records but how to cope with their sheer profusion. It is the quantity of that information that presents the greatest challenge; for historians, in trying to extract meaning from the hundreds of annalistic entries, are presented with the phenomenon that modern computer specialists describe as ‘data overload’.

The commonly accepted theory of the origin of the earliest Irish annals was for a long time that they stemmed from marginal notes in Easter tables. That was the view of the most eminent authority in the field forty years ago,⁸ and I believe that this theory still holds good today.⁹ How early such phenomena began to be recorded, however, and where they were first written down, are questions that have exercised historians for more than a century. The problem was the subject of a superb study by Prof. Alfred Smyth nearly forty-five years ago,¹⁰ a model of its kind in which he showed, with exemplary clarity, how the earliest known set of Irish annals came into existence in the island monastery of Iona, off the western coast of Scotland.¹¹ He also demonstrated conclusively that the first, sporadic contemporary records of events in Ireland and Scotland had commenced shortly after the mid-sixth century. That this coincided with the known date for the foundation of the Irish monastic community on Iona in 563 can hardly be a coincidence. On this general point, however, of when historians can take the early annals at face value as authentic records of events more or less as they had happened, scholars over the years have expressed differing opinions. Prof. Francis John Byrne, for example, in 1967 stated as his view that ‘the entries begin to be contemporary in the second half of the sixth century’.¹² By contrast, the Harvard historian, Prof. John V. Kelleher, had previously argued that everything in the annals up to about 590, and a large number of entries from thence to 735 (the entry on Bede’s death) were either freshly composed or wholly revised not earlier than the latter half of the ninth century.¹³ In other words, in his estimation, the earliest section of our Irish annals was completely rewritten (for propaganda purposes) around the year 900. While no scholar of the present day would subscribe to such a radically pessimistic view of the Irish annals and their reliability as contemporary records for events of the earlier centuries, the fact that such an eminent authority could arrive at such a view in the first place is, in itself, instructive. For her part, Kathleen Hughes believed that what she termed the Iona Chronicle¹⁴ was a contemporary record ‘from about the 680s’.¹⁵ Regarding the annalistic collections as we have them now, however, it is important to bear in mind Dan Mc Carthy’s note of caution: ‘None of our Annals can be considered the compilation of a single monastery or dynasty; rather they all incorporate, to different degrees, a number of separate institutional compilations’.¹⁶

Writing of those (theoretical) sporadic marginal notes in Easter tables that previous scholars had posited as the origins of our earliest annals, Gearóid Mac Niocaill remarked: ‘The use of such notes in the early Irish church is very likely’; but while he acknowledged that such practices were known from England and the continent in the same period (there are dozens of manuscripts from the Carolingian era containing myriad marginal entries), he added that ‘no Irish example of such tables is known to have survived’.¹⁷ That turns out not to be the case, as it happens, for we have just such an Easter table still extant which provides a perfect example of how the Irish annals began as random annotations in the margins of such texts. A manuscript now in France (Angers, Bibl. municipale, 447, fol. 36v)¹⁸ preserves an Easter table, extending from 532 to 1063; its first page, running from 532 to 569, is written in eight parallel columns.¹⁹ I give the first and eighteenth lines of text, to illustrate the phenomena:

Dxxxii	xi	xi	v	xviii	viii kl. Ap.	vi kl. Ap.	xvi
Dxlviiii	xiii	xviii	v	xvi	xv kl. M	viii kl. M	[…]

In the left-hand margin, beside the entry for Dxlviiij (= 549) there is an insertion that reads: Pestilentia in aqua uuiniaus obiit (‘Pestilence in the water, Uuiniaus died’). If we consult the Annals of Ulster²⁰ for the year 549 we find the following entries:

• [1] Kl. Ianair /6. f., l. 16./²¹ Anno Domini. ccccc^oxl^o.uiii^o. Dormitacio filii artificis, /.i. Ciaraini,/ anno. xxx.iii. aetatis sue, /uel anno .7^o. postquam Cluain Mc. Nois construere cepit/.
• [2] Tigernach Cluana Eois.
• [3] Mortalitas magna in qua isti pausant: Finnio maccu [Tel]duib; Colaim nepos Craumhthainan; Mc. Tail Cille Cuilind; Sinchell mc. Cenanndain, abbas Cille Achaid Drummfoto; 7 Columbae Insae Celtrae.

1. 1 Kalends of January [= 1 Jan.], 6th feria [= Friday], 16th day of the moon. AD 548 [= AD 549, after correction].
2. 2 The falling asleep of the son of the wright [= Ciarán mac int Sáeir = Ciaran of Clonmacnois], in the thirty-third year of his age (or in the seventh year after he had begun to build Clonmacnois).
3. 3 Tigernach of Clones [Co. Monaghan] (died).
4. 4 A great mortality in which these rested: Finnio moccu Telduib, Colum grandson of Crimthann, Mac Táil of Kilcullen; Sinchell son of Cenandán, abbot of Killaghy Drumadd, and Colum of Inisceltra.

In the annal entry describing the ‘great mortality’ (mortalitas magna), the Finnian listed first among the dead of 549 is Finnian of Clonard (Co. Meath), who was regarded by contemporaries as the preeminent Irish monastic founder of the mid-sixth-century Irish church. It is clearly the same Finnian whose death was recorded in the margin of the Easter table in the Angers manuscript (but with his name in the older, more archaic form, Uuiniaus). The only difference between the two entries is that the Easter table mistakenly (?) turned the Latin in qua (‘in which’) into in aqua (‘in the water’)! What is clear, however, is that the two notices of the death of Finnian must represent independent and unrel...