A facsimile edition of the Annals of Roscrea Bart Jaski and Daniel Mc Carthy

existence this chronicle went virtually unremarked for over a century until 1959 whenDermot Gleeson and Seán Mac Airt published an edition of the post-Patrician section in thePRIA.1 Sinc

A facsimile edition of the Annals of RoscreaBart Jaski and Daniel Mc Carthy

Abstract

The Irish chronicle known to modern scholarship as the ‘Annals of Roscrea’ is found only inthe manuscript Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97−161 It was first registered inprint in the comprehensive catalogue of the manuscripts in the Burgundian Library atBrussels published in 1842, and an edition was published by Dermot Gleeson and Seán MacAirt in 1959 Recent research has shown that the principal scribe, the Franciscan friar FrBrendan O’Conor, transcribed his source, ‘mutila Historia D Cantwelij’, in two successivephases and then in a third phase it was annotated and indexed by his fellow Franciscan FrThomas O’Sheerin This research has also shown that the edition of Gleeson and Mac Airt isincomplete, having omitted the pre-Patrician section of the chronicle Hence this, the first fulledition of the work, has been prepared in facsimile form so as to make clear the successivephases of compilation of the text, to provide an accurate account of its orthography, toidentify the relationship of its entries to those of other chronicles, and to furnish an ADchronology consistent with the other Clonmacnoise group chronicles

Introduction

The sixty-five pages of the composite manuscript, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301−20

pp 97−161, contain a chronicle in Latin and Irish written by the Franciscan friar, Fr BrendanO’Conor It is virtually certain that O’Conor transcribed this chronicle in London in July

1641 from an exemplar then in the possession of Finghín Mac Carthaigh, alias Florence MacCarthy Subsequently O’Conor’s transcription was known in Louvain to his Franciscancontemporaries, Fr John Colgan †1658 and Fr Thomas O’Sheerin †1673, and a substantialindex to it was compiled by O’Sheerin.1 However, after O’Sheerin’s work we have no furtherreference to this chronicle until 1842 when it was recorded in the comprehensive catalogue ofthe manuscripts in the Burgundian Library in Brussels that was published under the direction

of J Marchal, ‘le conservateur des manuscrits de l’État’.2 Two years later, Laurence Waldron,

at the instigation of Eugene O’Curry, re-discovered the Franciscan manuscripts in theBurgundian Library in Brussels Two years later again Samuel Bindon compiled a shortcatalogue of the manuscripts of Irish interest which was first published in 1847 in the PRIA

on the initiative of James H Todd, and very shortly afterwards Bindon also published thecatalogue independently These two publications of Bindon’s catalogue of Burgundianmanuscripts are virtually verbatim and in the latter he gratefully acknowledged the RIA’spermission ‘to get a few additional copies struck off’.3 However, even after publication of its

1 Mc Carthy, Irish annals, 26−8 (O’Conor’s transcription, exemplar, date and O’Sheerin’s index).

2 Catalogue des manuscrits i, 107 and ii, 392 (‘Annales Roscreenses’), ccxlviii (J Marchal).

3 O’Curry, Manuscript materials, 174−5 (re-discovery of Franciscan manuscripts); Bindon, ‘MSS relating to Ireland’, 477–502 (Bindon’s catalogue), 490−2 (Brussels 5301−20); Bindon, Notices of manuscripts, 3

(citation), 5–30 (Bindon’s catalogue) However, Bindon’s two Burgundian catalogues are not absolutely

verbatim and the latter publication also suffixes a brief account of some Irish manuscripts in the Archives du

existence this chronicle went virtually unremarked for over a century until 1959 whenDermot Gleeson and Seán Mac Airt published an edition of the post-Patrician section in thePRIA.1 Since then the ‘Annals of Roscrea’ (AR) have been regularly mentioned in mostserious discussions of Irish Annals; for example, Mac Niocall in 1975, Grabowski andDumville in 1984, Mc Carthy in 1998 and 2008, Charles-Edwards in 2006, and Evans in

2010.2 Most of these authors have recognised the close relationship between the content andorganisation of AR and that of the Annals of Tigernach (AT) and Chronicum Scotorum (CS),and hence most have classifed AR as a member of the Clonmacnoise group of annals.3

However, in some of these publications uncertainty has been expressed regarding both theextent of the chronicle ‘Annales Roscreensis’, and the exemplar from which it was drawn,and it is to this matter that we now turn.4

Scope and origin of the title ‘Annales Roscreenses’ and its exemplar

In a subsequent addition made on the upper margin of p 1 of his transcription O’Conorbriefly described his transcription and exemplar as ‘Adversaria rerum Hibernij quae excerpta

ex mutila Historia D Cantwelij’, that is, ‘Memoranda of Irish affairs excerpted from themutilated History of D Cantwel’ O’Conor also inscribed the title ‘Annales Roscreensis’ onhis transcription, and, either this title, or its English translation, have been regularly used todesignate this chronicle ever since However, there has not been agreement amongst modernscholars either as to whether this title refers to the entire sixty-five page transcription, orwhether the ‘Historia D Cantwelij’ served as exemplar for the entire sixty-five pages Thereasons for this confusion and its resolution become quite clear when the manuscript itself isexamined for it then emerges that O’Conor, who himself paginated the entire sixty-five pages

as pp 1−65, first inscribed ‘Annales Roscreensis’ on the upper left-hand margin of p 1, butthen subsequently cancelled this and wrote it in very large letters on the upper margin of p

Royaume on pp 30–2.

1 Neither O’Curry, Manuscript materials (1860) nor O’Rahilly, Early Irish history (1946) made any reference to AR; Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 137–80 (introduction and edition).

2 AR mentioned: Mac Niocall, Medieval Irish annals, 20, 23, 40, 46; Grabowski and Dumville, Chronicles and

annals, 6, 8 sqq; Mc Carthy, ‘Chronology of the Irish annals’, 238−9, 248−58; Mc Carthy, Irish annals, 26−34;

Charles-Edwards, The Chronicle of Ireland vol 1, 65 sqq; Evans, Present and Past, xiii, 7 However, AR was not mentioned by Hughes, Early Christian Ireland, 99–159 (chapter on Annals), 115 (‘other recensions’).

3 Evans, Present and past, 11–12, did not include AR in his definition of the ‘Clonmacnoise group’.

4 Uncertainty expressed: Gleeson and Mc Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 138 ‘it is not clear that the Annals of Roscrea were taken from the “mutila historia” of Cantwell; but it is at least probable that the two texts in this

section are connected’; Grabowski and Dumville, Chronicles and annals, 6 ‘Although it [sc The pre-Patrician

section] forms a separate section there, there is every indication that O’Connor conceived of it as a unity with

25, immediately before the account of S Patrick’s mission to Ireland Thus the mostprominent appearance of this title in the manuscript is that at the head of the post-Patriciansection Indeed O’Conor’s cancelled inscription on p 1 has never been acknowledged inmodern times Consequently most modern scholars have taken the title ‘Annales Roscreensis’

to refer only to the post-Patrician section, and they have expressed ambivalence regarding

their relationship with the ‘Historia D Cantwelij’ However, O’Conor’s action in placing thedescription ‘Adversaria … ex mutila Historia D Cantwelij’ at the very head of histranscription and then numbering his pages serially pp 1–65 shows both that he considered it

a textual unity and that he had drawn all of these ‘Adversaria’ from the ‘Historia D.Cantwelij’ Furthermore collation of AR’s pre- and post-Patrician sections with AT/CSrepeatedly discloses cognate entries throughout, and this independently confirms the unity ofAR’s entire chronicle

Moreover this view was certainly shared by O’Conor’s contemporary, O’Sheerin, whowas responsible for the first stage in the compilation of the composite volume, now Brussels,Bibl Royale 5301−20 In this compilation O’Sheerin originally assembled thirty-seven itemsinto a single volume and prefixed to this a page listing the ‘Series hîc contentorum’ in whichthese items were registered under twenty-three headings enumerated ‘1’–’23’ The hand ofthis ‘Series hîc contentorum’ and the indices to FA and AR is established as that of O’Sheerin

by collation with his four signed letters to Francis Harold, MS Killiney D.5 pp 9, 15–16,177–8, 237.1 In his compilation of this composite manuscript O’Sheerin originally placed ARfirst and explicitly stated its title and page count in his prefixed list of contents as ‘1 Annales

Roscreenses per pag 65’.2 Subsequently, O’Sheerin, when he compiled his index to theseannals, made absolutely explicit his view that ‘Annales Rosreenses’ referred to the wholechronicle and that its ‘extracta’ had all been drawn by O’Conor from ‘Historia D Cantwelij’.For O’Sheerin commenced by cancelling O’Conor’s own heading ‘Index AnnaliumRoscreensium’ on p 163, and then wrote his own heading immediately below as follows:3

Extracta per Patrem Fratrem Brendanum Conorum ex Annalibus Roscreensibus seu Codice R.D Cantwel, hîc digesta ordine Alphabetico, praetermissis tamen iis quae praecesserunt Missionem S Patricii, annotatis ad marginem annis quibus quaeque acciderunt, juxta Annales Dungallenses.

Here by placing ‘seu’ between his references to ‘Annales Roscreenses’ and ‘Codex R.D.Cantwel’ O’Sheerin showed he considered them synonyms; by stating that these ‘extracta’

1 Mc Carthy, Irish annals, 27 (identification of O’Sheerin).

2 MS Brussels 5301–20 ‘Series hîc contentorum’ – this un-numbered folio is glued to the front end-paper (citations); O’Sheerin subsequently inserted ‘Fragm ta tria ex cod Nehemiae mac Aegain’ above ‘Annales Roscreenses’, and indeed the FA now occupy pp 1–70 of Brussels 5301–20.

3 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 143 n 20 (citation, with minor orthographical emendation from

the manuscript), cf Catalogue des manuscrits ii, 392.

had been ‘hic digesta ordine Alphabetico’ he affirmed his authorship of the index; byremarking that the extracts preceding the mission of S Patrick had been omitted from hisindex he made it absolutely clear that he considered that O’Conor had taken all of these

‘extracta’ from the codex of ‘R.D Cantwel’

O’Sheerin made another reference to ‘Annales Roscreenses’ when compiling hiscatalogue of the manuscripts and books in John Colgan’s study in Louvain following thelatter’s death in 1658, now designated as MS UCD Killiney A34 item 1.1 It is evident thatO’Sheerin compiled this catalogue shortly after Colgan’s death because the catalogue givesprecise locations on tables and in presses and chests for virtually all of the listed items That itwas in Colgan’s study is indicated by Bonaventure O’Docherty’s heading to his catalogue of

c.1673, ‘Catalogus Manuscriptorum tam Latinè quam Hibernicè, olim in Camera R.P.

Colgani repertorum, quibus postea R.P Sirinus usus fuit’.2 Under the heading of ‘Post

praedicta [sc manuscripta Latina] manent sequentia in mensa in fasciculus distinctis’

O’Sheerin included the item ‘De Hiberniae etcra quaedam ex Annalibus Roscreensibus, et aliaRegulae diversorum Ssorum Hiberniae’.3 While this entry makes no reference to either thescope or exemplar of the chronicle it does demonstrate that the expression ‘AnnalesRoscreenses’ was in use as a title in Louvain in Colgan’s time, and hence that Colgan knewthe chronicle Indeed, since we have seen above that O’Sheerin used this title as a synonymfor ‘Codex R.D Cantwel’ it seems most likely that his ‘quaedam ex AnnalibusRoscreensibus’ actually refers to O’Conor’s transcription itself; certainly there is no otherentry in the catalogue that could be considered to reference AR Taken together O’Sheerin’sreferences to ‘Annales Roscreenses’ clearly demonstrate that he considered the title to

designate O’Conor’s transcriptions from both the pre- and post-Patrician sections of the

codex of R.D Cantwel We know of no other subsequent reference to ‘Annales Roscreenses’from the context of Louvain; it does not appear, for example, in Bonaventure O’Docherty’scatalogue compiled evidently following O’Sheerin’s death in 1673.4 However, under theheading ‘Catalogus Librorum in Camera R.P Sirini repertorum praeter illos de quibus inpraecedenti catologo’ O’Docherty entered the item, ‘Analecta de Rebus Hiberniae’, and this

1 Dillon, Mooney and de Brún, Catalogue of Irish MSS, 74 (MS A34); Fennessy, ‘Printed books’, 83 (A brief account of MS A34 item 1 as ‘List I’) Mc Carthy, Irish annals, 339 (O’Sheerin’s list).

2 Mac Donnell, ‘MSS of John Colgan’, 96 (citation with minor emendations from MS UCD Killiney A34 Item

2, p.1).

3 MS UCD Killiney A34 Item 1, 12 (heading), 13 (item).

description would indeed accord with O’Sheerin’s composite volume including the ‘AnnalesRoscreenses’, now Brussels, Bibl Royals 5301−20.1

Indeed, we know of no other references to ‘Annales Roscreenses’ until 1842 when acomprehensive catalogue of the manuscripts in the Burgundian library at Brussels wascompiled under the direction of J Marchal In the first volume the contents of O’Sheerin’scomposite volume were numbered as the twenty items 5301–20, and in most instances foreach item was cited the names of the authors, incipit, language and its date Our chronicle andO’Sheerin’s index were catalogued as items 5303–4 as follows:2

Date ou Siècle

5304 Brendani Conori – Extracta ex annalibus Roscreensibus Adamnani abbatis

Latine-irl.

XVII 1 /3

Here clearly the Burgundian cataloguer considered the chronicle a single textual entity drawn

in the seventeenth century from the work of Cantwel, while he mistakenly characterised thesubsequent index as simply ‘Extracta’ by Brendan O’Conor Five years later in 1847 SamuelBindon published his short catalogue of the books of Irish interest in the Burgundian Library

in which, although he acknowledged the existence of the Burgundian catalogue, he gave nobibliographic details other than the following vague footnote: ‘The “Inventaire” is the firstvolume of the printed catalogue In it the MSS are enumerated without reference to subject;the second volume, or “Repertoire,” is a “Catalogue Methodique.”’3

Examination of Bindon’s catalogue shows that, while he regularly supplied additionaldetails regarding the Irish manuscripts, these details are fairly frequently either inaccurate orinconsistent with the Burgundian catalogue For examples: having stated that the volumecontained ‘Nos 5301 to 5320, inclusive’, Bindon only gave identifiable accounts of 5301–14and 5317–18, thereby omitting to register 5315–16 and 5319–20; he wrote that ‘5314 is anextract from Marianus Scotus’ whereas the Burgundian catalogue lists 5314 as ‘Martini Crusi– Extr De annal Suevicis’; Bindon was inaccurate in his identification of the number ofmanuscript folios and/or his citations of titles or incipits, and in particular his account of thischronicle and its index reads as follows:4

1 Fennessy, ‘Printed books’, 99, 103 (citations).

2 Catalogue des manuscrits i, 107 (nos 5303–4)

3 Bindon, ‘MSS relating to Ireland’, 477 n* (citation), 477–8, 482–3 (references to the “Inventaire”); the

‘Repertoire’ actually comprises tomes ii–iii.

4 Bindon, ‘MSS relating to Ireland’, 491 (citation).

No 5303 consists of sixty-five pages; the first twenty-six are entitled “Adversaria Rerum Hiberniae excerpta ex mutila Historia D Cantwelly,” and commences thus: “Hoc anno ante diluvium.” At page

25 commences “Annales Roscreenses.” The initial line is “Patricius Archiepus in Hiberniam venit atque Scotos baptizare inchoat, nono anno Theodos minoris,” &c These Annals, as well as the

“Adversaria,” are in Latin and Irish, and very badly written.

No 5304 is a very long alphabetical Index of the Annals of Roscrea, made by “Frater Brendanus Conorus,” accompanied by marginal references to the Annals of Donegal.

Here Bindon’s citation ‘Adversaria … D Cantwelly’ is both incomplete and orthographicallyinaccurate, and it was said to entitle only pp 1–26 On the other hand the title ‘AnnalesRoscreenses’ was applied only to pp 25–65, and the first line of p 25, ‘Patricius Archiepus

…’ described as the ‘initial line’ Thus Bindon divided the chronicle into two sections andincongruently placed pp 25–6 in both sections At the same time, while correctly identifyingitem 5304 as an index, he mistakenly attributed this to O’Conor In this way Bindon’scatalogue effectively restricted O’Conor’s identification of ‘Historia D Cantwelij’ as hisexemplar to just the pre-Patrician section, and restricted the title ‘Annales Roscreenses’ to thepost-Patrician section, and misrepresented the authorship of the index Most of these mistakeswere repeated by Van den Gheyn in 1907 when he published a much more detailed catalogue

of the contents of Bibl Royale 5301−20.1 Citing the PRIA publication of Bindon’s cataloguefor ‘une analyse de ce volume par Bindon’, Van den Gheyn represented O’Conor’stranscription and O’Sheerin’s index as three distinct items as follows:2

6 (F 51−76) Adversaria rerum Hibernie excerpta ex mutila historia D Cantwelli En irlandais et

en latin.

7 (F 76−83) [Annales Roscreenses] Latin et irlandais.

8 (F 84−119 v ) Extracta per Patrem fratrem Brendanum Conorum ex annalibus Roscreensibus seu

codice R.D Cantwel, hic digesta ordine alphabetico.

Thus Van den Gheyn, like Bindon, represented the ‘Adversaria …’ and ‘AnnalesRoscreenses’ as separate textual entities that incongruently shared ‘F 76’, and then incontradiction of this representation he cited O’Sheerin’s heading to his index that assertedthem to be identical In this way the second and third published accounts of O’Conor’stranscription of ‘Historia D Cantwelij’ erroneously restricted this source effectively to thepre-Patrician section of the text

This confusion introduced by Bindon regarding the extent of the ‘Annales Roscreenses’and the exemplar used by O’Conor had a serious consequence in 1959 when Gleeson andMac Airt compiled their published edition of the text In their description of the manuscriptthey followed Bindon and Van den Gheyn in designating the pre-Patrician section as the

1 Van den Gheyn, Catalogue des manuscrits vii, 48−50 (lists 39 items in Brussels 5301−20).

2 Van den Gheyn, Catalogue des manuscrits vii, 50 n.8, 48 (citations); his division of the text at ‘F 76’ is clearly

‘Adversaria historia D Cantwelli’ and asserted that ‘At p 25 there commences the text of

“Annales Roscreenses”’.1 Since subsequent scholarship has referred to this published editionthe consequence has been that the pre-Patrician section of the text has been effectivelyabandoned For example, Grabowski and Dumville stated that, ‘The text of the annals [ofRoscrea] is divided into four fragmentary series: (i) A.D 432−40, (ii) A.D 550–602, (iii)A.D 440–77, (iv) A.D 620−995’.2

Regarding the origin of the title ‘Annales Roscreenses’, it is the case that the earliestrecorded instance of ‘Annales’ followed by a personal or place name used to entitle an Irishchronicle is that of James Ussher in 1609 referring to the manuscript, now TCD 1282, as

‘Annales Ultonienses’ Ussher’s student James Ware followed suite over 1625–48 entitlingother Irish chronicle texts as ‘Annales Tigernachus’, ‘Annales Inisfallenses’, ‘Annales deLoghkea’, ‘Annales Buellienses’ and ‘Annales Connachtus’.3 The medieval Irish conventionwas to suffix a personal name to the words ‘leabhar’ and/or ‘airis’.4 Now, as Gleeson andMac Airt observed of AR, it is not the case that ‘the collection had any particular associationwith Roscrea’, so that it appears most likely that the title ‘Annales Roscreenses’ was in factO’Conor’s own invention inspired by the Latin entitling conventions employedcontemporaneously by Ussher and Ware, together with a knowledge of the Cantwel family’sassociation with Roscrea.5 However, Ussher and Ware employed the word ‘annales’ to entitlechronicles that were substantially annual in character, as the word itself intimates Thissuggests that O’Conor’s ambivalence in first inscribing his title on p 1, and then cancellingthat and inscribing it on p 25, arose because the pre-Patrician section of his transcription isextremely intermittent as his own marginalia testify Thus it appears that in relocating

‘Annales Roscreenses’ to p 25 O’Conor was bringing his own nomenclature into accordancewith the practice of Ussher and Ware A title for this chronicle based upon its exemplar

‘Historia D Cantwelij’ would in many ways be more appropriate and helpful, but since either

‘Annales Roscreensis’ or ‘Annals of Roscrea’ have been in use since c.1641, and are attached

1 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 138 (citation)

2 Grabowski and Dumville, Chronicles and annals, 6 (citation).

3 Ussher, ‘Corbes’, 423, 432–3 (Annales Ultonienses); O’Sullivan, ‘Finding List’, Ware’s ‘Annales’: 72, 87 (Tigernachus); 71, 90 (Inisfallenses); 90 (Loghkea); 94 (Buellienses); 97 (Conantienses) The word ‘annalad’

was used occasionally in Irish in its generalised sense of ‘chronicle’, e.g Gilla Cóemáin’s poem Annalad anall

uile q.v Smith, Gilla Cóemáin, 180–203 (Annalad edition), cf Best et al., Book of Leinster iii, 496–503 For

Ussher’s references to ‘Annales’, see Ussher, Whole works xvii; this index to Ussher’s work shows that in his

Veterum epistolarum Hibernicarum sylloge published in 1632 he referred to ‘Annales Dubliniensis’, cf iv 488,

517, and in his Antiquitates, published in 1639, he referred repeatedly to ‘Annales Ultonienses’, ‘Annales Tigernaci’, ‘Annales Inisfallenses’, cf Whole works v–vi passim.

4 O’Donovan, FM i, lxvi–vii (examples of Irish chronicle nomenclature).

5 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 141 (citation), 138 (Cantwel family and Roscrea).

to the first published edition of the chronicle, it seems more practicable to retain these titles.However, it must be clearly understood that these titles apply to the entire sixty-five pages.

In this edition we shall use the siglum ‘AR’ prefixed to O’Conor’s page numbers 1–65concatenated with the line numbers of his text to reference the entries, as will be explained infurther detail below In their edition Gleeson and Mac Airt also included O’Conor’s pagenumbers, and so these page and line number references may be used to readily locate entries

in their edition However, whenever it is necessary to refer precisely to entries in the edition

of Gleeson and Mac Airt we shall use ‘AR’ followed by ‘§’ and their paragraph number.Thus, for example, AR 25.16 and AR §8 both refer to the entry ‘Natiuitas sanctae Brigidae’commencing on the sixteenth line of p 25

Description of the manuscript1

Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301–20 pp 97–162 is a seventeenth-century Franciscanmanuscript, and the only witness to AR The published descriptions by the BurgundianLibrary, Bindon, Van den Gheyn, and Gleeson and Mac Airt are all brief and contain aconsiderable number of inaccuracies, and since we shall see that AR is an important witness

to the Clonmacnoise group it is necessary to give here a detailed account of the manuscriptand its text.2 The manuscript was written by Fr Brendan O’Conor, a Franciscan friar who wassent from Louvain to Ireland in 1641 to collect historical material It comprises thirty-three

leaves measuring c.20.5×13.5 cm, and bears two paginations; the first, by O’Conor running

pp 1–65, was used by Gleeson and Mac Airt in their partial edition, and will be used in thisedition.3 The second, a modern pagination running pp 97–162, is needed for references to theother texts in Bibl Royale 5301–20 This volume consists of a compilation of over thirtyFranciscan manuscripts, of which the first on pp 1–70 is the only surviving copy of

Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh’s Fragmentary Annals (FA), transcribed by O’Sheerin, Colgan’s

successor in scholarship in Louvain, followed on pp 71–88 by O’Sheerin’s alphabetic index

to these annals.4 Next, a letter by O’Conor on pp 89–96 is followed by the text of AR on pp

97–162, and its range is c.Flood–AD c.995, with lacunae at c.948 BC–AD 157, AD 252–335,

480–549 and 602–619 The annals for AD 336–358 and 441–479 are also displaced, probably

1 Cf Mc Carthy, Irish Annals, 26–34.

2 MS descriptions: Catalogue des manuscrits i, 107 and ii, 391; Bindon, ‘MSS relating to Ireland’, 491; Van den Gheyn, Catalogue des manuscrits vii, 48–9; Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 137–8, 141–2.

3 Mc Carthy, Irish annals, 27 gave the dimensions as ‘c.21.5×16 cm’ which were estimated from the microfilm,

the above dimensions have been taken from the manuscript itself.

as a result of the mutilated state of its exemplar The text of AR, like that of FA, is followed

on pp 163–234 by an index compiled by O’Sheerin, in which the personal and place names

cited in AR following S Patrick’s uenit are arranged alphabetically and indexed by

O’Conor’s page number, and the chronology of events involving them is regularly tabulated

‘juxta Annales Dungallenses’ Thus the whole context of AR’s manuscript suggests anenvironment of intensive Annalistic study in Louvain, stimulated, no doubt, by the presencethere of Michéal Ó Cléirigh’s compilation of the ‘Annales Dungallenses’, alias Annals of theFour Masters In his heading to the index for AR O’Sheerin identified ‘Patrem FratremBrendanum Conorum’ as the scribe of extracts, ‘ex Annalibus Roscreensis seu Codice R.D.Cantwel’, and this identification is confirmed by comparing the Latin handwriting of AR withO’Conor’s letter which immediately precedes it There is no date on the text of AR, but as ithappens we do know something of the activities of Brendan O’Conor over 1641–2

On 10 July 1641 O’Conor, enroute for Ireland, wrote a letter in haste from London toJames Ussher, then also in England, urging him to return to Ireland to rejoin Ware and otherfriends there so that they could study manuscripts together In this letter O’Conor asked to beexcused for the shaking of his hand, indicating that he was about to mount his steed, and healso mentioned that he had just partly copied a ‘Librum Annalium’ which he had obtainedfrom Finghín Mac Carthaigh, alias Florence Mac Carthy.1 We shall see that AR was indeedcopied in great haste, and that it is also an incomplete transcription of its exemplar, and so

circumstantially it seems virtually certain that O’Conor copied AR in July 1641 from an

exemplar provided by Finghín Mac Cárthaigh Three months later, on 22 October 1641, amajor uprising commenced in Ireland, and in a subsequent letter written by O’Conor on 20September 1642 to Hugh Bourke, superior of the Franciscans in Belgium, O’Conor assertedthat he was under some obligation to participate in this uprising His early participation in aleadership role is confirmed by Rory O’More, a general in the uprising, in a letter written also

to Bourke on the same day, wherein he stated:2

We the first undertakers have Father Brandon O’Cnoughour with us from the first day and afore …

He [was] so much imployed in our very temporall affayres to unite all and see us orderly proceed at home and abroad, whereof we have great need …

1 Gwynn, ‘Archbishop Ussher’, 281–2 (letter now TCD 567 f.62), 282, ‘Tertium, quod vrgeo, est, domum ad nostrum Waraeum et caeteros Philopolitas scribas, me in notis Tibi studiis promoveant codd’ MSS mecum communicent, … 2 m Librum Annalium a D’no Carthaeo obtineas, quem exscribere mihi non fuit integrum … Excusa P’r festinationem equu’ ascendatis atq’ Motam manu’ London 10 Julii stylo nouo 1641.’ Idem, 280 identifies ‘D’no Carthaeo’ as ‘Finghin Mac Carthaigh Mór’.

2 Historical Manuscripts, Franciscan manuscripts, 192–4 for both letters Explaining his lack of progress in

‘procuring monuments’, O’Conor wrote of ‘my charge to assist some of the generals which I cannot choose’, and, ‘If you blamed me ever for these wars, truly you wronged me; for it was God that stirred all; but afterwards, to tell you truly, mine endeavours were not found wanting.’

Anticipation of this uprising may explain both O’Conor’s urgency to proceed to Ireland inJuly 1641, and also the word with which he commenced his text of AR.

O’Connor began by writing with a flourish in large letters the single word ‘Jubuleu’ atthe centre top of the first page, which word has been subsequently emended to ‘Jubileus’, i.e.the Jewish cry of freedom Above this title O’Conor subsequently added the description,

‘Adversaria rerum Hibernij [sic] quae excerpta ex mutila Historia D Cantwelij’, and hisdescription of his exemplar as ‘mutila’ would explain why some of the annals he transcribedare out of sequence, as noted above Furthermore, his description here of his transcription as

‘Adversaria rerum Hibernij’, i.e provisional memoranda or jottings of Irish affairs,accurately describes what follows for the subsequent sixty-five pages O’Conor’stranscription of ‘mutila Historia D Cantwelij’ was done in two phases, and in the first ofthese, leaving ample margins and a generous spacing between lines, he transcribedprincipally Irish items in either a rapid, cursive, flourishing Latin hand, or in an inclined,semi-cursive Irish hand, neither of which is attractive but both are readily legible.1 Hecontinued thus, leaving occasional blank spaces, up to p 23 which finished with asynchronism on the death of Conchobar mac Nessa, and then he left p 24 blank except forthe catch-word ‘Patricius’ for the following page.2 On the following page O’Conor

transcribed the entry for S Patrick’s uenit, and continued then with post-Patrician entries

maintaining the same generous margins and line spacing through to p 65, on the top of which

he wrote a single entry, a Clonmacnoise obit for c.995 Since this single entry would have

readily fitted at the bottom of p 64, the inference is that while his exemplar continued,O’Conor discontinued his transcription at this point, and thus AR represents a truncatededition of ‘Historia D Cantwelij’ This marks the end of the first phase of O'Conor'stranscription

O’Conor then returned to p 1 and commenced phase two, where, now writing with afiner nib and with greater haste, he commenced transcribing principally chronological criteriainto the broad left-hand margin, and further annotations in the top and bottom margins.Initially these comprised Biblical epochs and kalend counts, but from p 3 large ‘K’sintermittently appear showing that kalends existed in his exemplar, and his marginalcomment at AR 15.1 ‘A morte Josue ad hunc annum 21 K numerantur’ shows that he haddeliberately omitted most of these By p 17 these marginal comments included informaldesignations such as ‘duobus annis’ as well as the AD data ‘157’ and ‘158’ After this these

1 Mc Carthy, Irish annals, plate 6 (a reproduction of AR p 27 showing O’Conor’s Latin and Irish hands).

marginal criteria became more frequent, including on pp 25–30 the monotone sequence ofnumbers: 26, 27, 29, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45, 51, 58, 59, [62], 66, 71, 78, 79, 81, 84, 88, 95, 102.Following this, on pp 31–7, O’Conor inscribed chronological data informally, commencingwith, ‘sub seqti cum fig 5’.1 Collation of the ensuing series of these numbers with AT/CSshows them to be ferial data, extending for 571–601 and 625–42 where they terminate justtwo years before the corresponding series in CS.2 An important observation here is that whilethese AR ferials correlate most closely with those of CS, they are in places noticeably betterthan either CS or AT For example, CS lacks both kalend and ferial at 571 and ferial at 574,while AT’s ferial ‘u’ at 574 is corrupt But O’Conor’s exemplar had the appropriate ferials,

‘5’ and ‘2’ respectively at these years, showing that it had here preserved a betterkalend+ferial apparatus than either CS or AT Furthermore, if the differences between thesuccessive figures of the monotone sequence cited above are computed it will be found thatthey all lie in the range 1–7 This, together with the fact that O’Conor transcribed ferial dataover 571–601 and 625–642, suggests that the monotone sequence itelf derived from ferialdata At the very first of these data O’Conor wrote, AR 25.10–13 ‘Ab adventu Patrici ad huncannum 6 K ponuntur qui videntur per adiunctas figures computa[n]di 26 anni’, and it isexplicit from this statement that O’Conor mistook the ferial data associated with thepreceding ‘6 K.’ to represent kalend multipliers, and he thought that he was computing thetotal number of years, cf ‘26 anni’.3 In confirmation of this inference we consider O’Conor’snext four marginal annotations which read: AR 25.16 ‘Precedentum K quod facit 27’; AR26.1–2 ‘Sequenti K Cassianus obit quod facit 29’; AR 26.10 ‘Sub seqti K quod facit 36’; AR26.16 ‘Sub seqti K quod facit 38’ It is clear from these annotations that O’Conor took theseyears to be sequential, whereas in fact they refer to the years 439–440 (AR 25.16–26.9) and550–551 (AR 26.10–18) For the years 439–440, 550–1 AT/CS witness the ferial series 1, 2,

7, 2 and these when accumulated to O’Conor’s ‘26’do indeed yield his monotone sequence,viz 26+1=27, 27+2=29, 29+7=36, 36+2=38.4 From these mistakes, and the clumsy way inwhich he transcribed the whole chronological apparatus, it is apparent that O’Conor had noreal understanding of the kalend+ferial chronological apparatus of his exemplar, and

1 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 145–7; (marginal criteria where ‘[62]’ represents a restored

reading due to the digits being obscured by the binding), 148 (cit.).

2 Mc Carthy, ‘Chronological synchronisation’, s.a 571–601 and 625–642.

3 Our only other witness to ferial data over 433–8 is CS whose data when summed yield 7+1+[omitted] +3+5+6=22 The implication therefore of O’Conor’s summation result of 26 is that the ferial omitted at CS 435 was 26–22=4; in this case the ferial datum was both corrupt and sequentially impossible, and this may well

explain its omission in CS For CS ferial data see Mc Carthy, ‘Chronological synchronization’, s.a 433–38.

4 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 141–2 (Mac Airt was perplexed by O’Conor’s monotone sequence and mistakenly concluded, ‘the series can hardly have a chronographic importance’).

consequently it seems likely that the intermittent AD data that he inscribed marginally weresimply transcribed from his exemplar.1

Nevertheless, it is possible to reconstruct from O’Conor’s monotone sequence most ofthe kalends and ferial data of his exemplar, ‘Historia Cantwelij’, over the years 550–67, and it

is of interest to collate these with the parallel series in AT and CS This reconstruction isshown in Table 1 below

1 O’Conor’s marginal AD data: AR 17.2, 17.4, 20.1, 29.4, 29.19, 30.0, 32.19, 33.7, 33.9, 36.18, 37.15 40.10,

Table 1 Reconstruction of the kalend and ferial series of AR’s exemplar for 550–67

AD

AR p.l AR monotone sequence Dif.

AR K.f.

AT K.f.

CS K.f.

550 26.10 Sub seqti K quod facit 36 7 K.uii K.uii Kl.ui

551 26.16 Sub seqti K quod facit 38 2 K.ii K.ii Kl.i

552 26.21 Sub seqti K quod facit 40 2 K.ii K.u Kl.ii

553 27.3 Sub seqti K quod facit 43 3 K.iii. K.iii. Kl.iii.

558 27.15 [62] sub seqti K 3 K.iii K.iii Kl

559 27.17 66 sub seqti K 4 K.iiii K.i Kl

561 29.1 78 sub seqti K 7 K.uii K.ui Kl.ui

565 30.9 88 Sub seqti K 4 K.iiii K.uii Kl.iiii

566 30.9 95 × Sub seqt K 7 K.uii K.ui Kl.iii

567 30.13 102 Sub seqt K 7 K.uii K.uii Kl

In this table the column ‘Dif’ registers the difference between the successive data of themonotone sequence which then furnishes the reconstructed ferial datum for AR’s exemplarshown in the next column, and beside this are tabulated the parallel kalends and ferial data for

AT and CS.1 From this table it can be seen that the kalend and ferial data of ‘HistoriaCantwelij’ shared many numerical and structural features with AT/CS For example, at AR29.18 it had the interpolated kalend found in AT/CS at 562, at AR 30.6 it was missing the thesame kalend missing from CS at 564, as well as exhibiting numerous ferial datacorrespondences with AT/CS It seems quite likely that O’Conor abandoned his contruction

of this monotone sequence at ‘102’ upon realising that the entries that he was transcribing

had occurred much later than a century after Patrick’s uenit For example, the obit of Oena

mc hui Laigsi, the second abbot of Clonmacnoise, found at the very point where heabandoned the monotone sequence at AR 30.18, could not have taken place only about a

century after Patrick’s uenit and so before Clonmacnoise had been founded Instead, from AR

31.1 O’Conor continued simply recording the ferial datum

In phase two over pp 1–25 O’Conor also intermittently added non-Irish entries, usuallymarginally but occasionally interlinearly However, on p 27 he began to regularly insert

1 Mc Carthy, ‘Chronological synchronisation’, s.a 550–67 (AT/CS kalend and ferial data).

these additional entries interlinearly and since the overall sequence of his entries, includingthese interlinear entries, matches very closely the sequence of entries in AT/CS, it is virtuallycertain that all these additions represent entries that he had omitted in the first phase of histranscription On p 37 he began mixing chronological criteria and increasing numbers ofadditional entries interlinearly, with the consequence that his text became chaotic, and hesubsequently began to omit the chronological criteria By p 43, where nearly everyinterlinear space has received an additional entry, he had largely forsaken chronologicalcriteria, and used instead large ‘L’-shaped brackets to try to gather his accumulated entriesunder one year He continued thus to p 53, at which point he was evidently obliged toabandon phase two, for neither chronological criteria nor interlinear entries are found in pp.54–65

After O’Conor had finished transcription it is evident that he himself started toconstruct an index to it, because, leaving p 66 blank, he took a fresh page and wrote the title,

‘Index Annalium Roscreensium’, across the top It appears likely that it was at this time that

he cancelled ‘Annales Roscreensis’ at AR 1.1 and inscribed it instead at AR 25.0, and he alsocancelled his earlier foliation ff 1–29 and replaced this with his pagination 1–65, writing allthese in the same brown ink.1 This was as far as O’Conor’s indexing progressed, and it wasleft to O’Sheerin to complete the job and he began by striking through O’Conor’s index title,and writing underneath it:

Extracta per Patrem Fratrem Brendanum Conorum ex Annalibus Roscreensibus seu Codice R.D Cantwel, hîc digesta ordine Alphabetico, praetermissis tamen iis quae praecesserunt missionem S Patricii, annotatis ad marginem annis quibus quaeque acciderunt, juxta Annales Dungallenses.

It may be first noted that O’Sheerin characterised O’Conor’s exemplar as ‘Codex R.D.Cantwel’, and his introduction of ‘R.’ here suggests that ‘D Cantwel’ was a ‘Reverendus’, orpriest, and that O’Sheerin knew something of his person At AR 1.3 O’Sheerin prefixed

‘Dmi’ to the surname and this surely is an abbreviation for ‘Domini’, and indeed this titleaccords well with the social status of the Cantwel family in post-Norman Ireland in theneighbourhood of Roscrea.2 However, from the form of this title it is unlikely that Cantwelwas a Franciscan.3 It should also be noted that O’Sheerin here explicitly acknowledged hisdecision to omit the pre-Patrician entries, further underlining the unitary character ofO’Conor’s ‘Adversaria … ex mutila Historia D Cantwel’ O’Sheerin’s heading is then

1 O’Conor’s foliation is defective for ff 21–9 because over pp 40–8 he enumerated both the recto and verso of each folio.

2 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 138 (Cantwel estates proximate to Roscrea).

followed by seventy-two pages of his neat, carefully compiled index in which O’Conor’sentries were substantially re-written and indexed by page number.1

As indicated above O’Sheerin’s hand may be assessed from his indices and hiscorrespondence to Francis Harold, and these all show it to be far more compact, upright andneater than the strongly cursive hand of O’Conor As well, O’Sheerin’s ink is noticeably greycompared to the brown ink used by O’Conor In the course of constructing his index to ARO’Sheerin made a considerable number of marginal additions to O’Conor’s text, and it isclear that he had access to a substantial library of chronicles for he added numerous marginalannotations, sometimes supplying an AD datum In some instances he explicitly identified hissource for these as ‘Q Mag.’ or ‘Annal Dungall.’, ‘Beda’, ‘Gordanus’, ‘Tritemius’, and

‘Marianus Scotus’.2 In the case of his annotations of Irish events where he supplied an AD,some of these may be safely identified as coming from FM since his AD corresponds withtheir chronology, cf AR 41.8, 41.12, 55.16, 65.1 In the case of his AD citations from Bede it

appears he was mainly using Bede’s recapitulation in his Historia Ecclesiastica v.24 Some

of his annotations express an explicit interest in chronological matters, for example, heinserted the summation 440+80=520 beside AR 25.16 ‘Natiuitas sanctae Brigidae’, evidently

assigning Brigit’s natus to 440 and allocating her an eighty-year life span, and then

computing the year of her obit

We have described this compilation process in considerable detail in order to try tocorrect a number of misapprehensions that arise from Gleeson and Mac Airt’s publishededition, specifically:3

a) Gleeson and Mac Airt were ambivalent regarding the relationship between O’Conor’sdesignations ‘Annales Roscreensis’ and ‘Historia D Cantwelij’, and they were evidentlyunaware of his cancelled inscription of ‘Annales Roscreensis’ on p 1 Consequently, theychose to edit only the post-Patrician section of the text, i.e pp 25–65 However,examination shows that the range of O’Conor’s exemplar, ‘Historia D Cantwelij’,

included the Flood and extended beyond AD c.995

1 Both Bindon, ‘MSS relating to Ireland’, 491, and Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 138, 142–3 stated that the index was by O’Conor, but this is absolutely ruled out by both the handwriting, and O’Sheerin’s title, which, while identifying O’Conor as the scribe of the ‘extracta’, implicitly acknowledges O’Sheerin’s own work with ‘hic digesta’.

2 O’Sheerin’s explicit source references: to FM at AR 27.1, 27.4, 31.9, 31.13, 31.16, 39.14, 40.13, 43.8; to Bede

at AR 28.22, 32.21, 38.16, 46.5, 46.22; to Gordanus at AR 25.20, 27.20; to Tritemius at AR 25.20; to Marianus

Scotus at AR 43.7 Mc Carthy, Irish annals, 31 and plate 6 was mistaken in attributing O’Sheerin’s references

on page 27 to ‘Q Mag.’, ‘Marianus Scotus’ and ‘Gordanus’ to O’Conor.

3 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 137–44 (historical introduction), 145–70 (edition), 138, 143 (ambivalence regarding ‘Annales Roscreensis’), 140–1 (‘interpolated’ entries), 143 (‘accurate’ transcription),

142, 144 (attribution of FM references to a ‘later annotator’), 143 (‘fair copy’) Mc Carthy, ‘AU compilation’, 77–84 (the mistaken belief that AU commenced at 431).

b) Gleeson and Mac Airt described the interlinear entries as, ‘entries or parts of entrieswhich appear to us to have been interpolated in O’Conor’s exemplar’, and concluded that

‘the transcript is an accurate one and certainly not abbreviated.’ In this they passed overO’Conor’s descriptions of his transcript as ‘adversaria rerum Hibernij’ and ‘excerpta’,and the fact that he indeed transcribed mainly Irish entries in phase one, but included non-Irish entries in phase two Therefore, their hypothesis that the interlinear position of theseentries reflected an interpolated status in ‘Historia D Cantwelij’ is not sustainable Theseinterlinear entries were a consequence of O’Conor’s two-phase transcription

c) Gleeson and Mac Airt printed all of the material from the left-hand margin in a smallfont, implicitly suggesting thereby that it was written by another hand, whereas it waspractically all written by O’Conor in his second phase Incongruently, even though theyregarded the material written in the right-hand margin to be that of a ‘later annotator’,they printed it in the standard size font

d) Gleeson and Mac Airt concluded that ‘there is no reason to think that our text of the

“Roscrea Annals” is not a fair copy of the Cantwell exemplar.’ However, closeexamination of the manuscript shows that O’Conor, working in haste, made only anincomplete and truncated transcription of his exemplar

Regarding the entries transcribed by O’Conor it is remarkable that, notwithstanding hishaste and late date, the orthography of some of them preserves some old details For example,compare the orthography of S Columba’s name in AR 31.18 ‘Columbae Cille’ with that of

AU 573.2 ‘Columbe Cille’, normally considered to preserve the oldest Annalisticorthography; these are the only two annals to retain both the Latin ‘b’ and ‘e’ of ‘Columbae’.Moreover, some entries that in AR are entirely in Latin appear in the other Clonmacnoisegroup annals translated into Irish, for example:

AR 48.5: Exberect Christi miles in II Paschae die pausat

AT 729.1: [Eicbericht] Ridire Crist do éc la casca …

Regarding the chronological apparatus of AR, collation of AR with AT/CS shows that,despite labouring under the disadvantage of not understanding its chronological apparatus,O’Conor transcribed enough kalends and ferial data to show that his exemplar preserved abetter kalend+ferial apparatus than that of AT/CS These two considerations together showthat ‘Historia D Cantwelij’ preserved features of the Clonmacnoise chronicle not transmitted

by AT/CS Moreover, examination of the lacunae of AR shows that its only substantial

lacuna is that over c.948 BC–AD 157 and this lacuna closely corresponds with the range of

Rawl B 502, viz c.769 BC–AD 140, particularly at its later boundary These three aspects

taken together suggest the hypothesis that ‘Historia Cantwelij’ in fact derived from a goodcopy of the now-missing sections of Rawl B 502.1 This and its conservative orthography andaccurate chronological data make it an important witness to the Clonmacnoise group,complementary in its range to Rawl B 502 and preserving many entries lost from AT/CS.However, the purview of AR corresponds closely with that of AT/CS, and certainlynothing in it suggests a Roscrea provenance This was also Gleeson and Mac Airt’sconclusion, viz., ‘Their general tenor suggests a close affiliation with the Clonmacnoisegroup’, and ‘It would not appear … that the collection had any particular association withRoscrea.’2 In summary, it emerges that Bibl Royale 5301-20 pp 97–162, while at first sight

an unattractive manuscript, appears on present evidence to preserve an independent witness

to some of the now-missing sections of Rawl B 502, and hence to some sections of theClonmacnoise chronicle at an earlier stage of its history than either AT (Rawl B 488) or CS(TCD 1292)

Compilation of this edition

It may help the reader understand the organisation of this edition if the circumstances thathave lead to its compilation are explained In 2002 I, Daniel Mc Carthy, commenced a study

of all the manuscripts of the principal Irish Annals, or, when these were not available,surrogates such as digitised or microfilm reproductions Regarding these latter I was in thefortunate position of being able to examine the invaluable collection of microfilms of Irishmanuscripts assembled by Pádraig de Brún and maintained by the Library of Celtic Studies atthe Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) My examination of the microfilm of Bibl.Royale MS 5301–20 disclosed a number of the observations noted above, and, also that thepre-Patrician section included entries cognate with entries in AT/CS/AI/AB, some of whichmaterial clearly related to the Irish origin legend In February 2006 I drew this material to theattention of Dr Bart Jaski of the University of Utrecht, and he kindly expressed both aninterest and willingness to transcribe the pre-Patrician section of the chronicle This he didover the ensuing months using scans made from the DIAS microfilm printouts, and hefollowed this with a visit on 3 October 2006 to the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels to

1 Ó Cuív, Catalogue, 164 points out that f 1r and 12 v of Rawl B 502 are ‘dark and rubbed’ whereas the ‘inner pages show comparatively little discoloration’, showing that ff 1–12 have been long separated from the remainder of their codex.

2 Gleeson and Mac Airt, ‘Annals of Roscrea’, 141 (cit.)

examine the manuscript This examination resolved numerous questions concerning readings

of text that were obscure on the microfilm, and in particular confirmed that O’Conor hadindeed initially inscribed ‘Annales Roscreenses’ on p 1 of his transcription We then agreedthat an electronic edition of the text in facsimile would be the best way to display theincremental nature of O’Conor’s transcription, as well as the later additions made byO’Sheerin Furthermore, this would allow us to employ colour to highlight our own editorialadditions to the text, and would also also provide a readily searchable text Thus Icommenced arranging Dr Jaski’s transcription as an approximate facsimile employing thetable function of Word to assign one cell to each line that O’Conor had written in the firstphase of his transcription Subsequent entries were then represented in a smaller fontpositioned interlinearly or marginally as a appropriate, as will be discussed in further detailbelow in the section ‘Phases’

Having thus compiled the electronic facsimile edition of the pre-Patrician section of thechronicle it seemed unsatisfactory to leave the post-Patrician section of the chronicleavailable only in printed form Thus in January 2008 Prof John Byrne of the Department ofComputer Science, TCD, generously undertook conversion of the printed edition of Gleesonand Mac Airt to electronic form using optical character recognition (OCR) This was firstchecked against the published edition and then arranged in page facsimile form, again usingthe microfilm copy of the manuscript In the course of these transcriptions and collations aconsiderable number of orthographical and textual questions arose, and so on 29 April 2010

Dr Jaski again visited the Bibliothèque Royale and was able to re-collate the whole Patrician section, but unfortunately had insufficient time to complete a collation of the post-Patrician section Fortunately, on 19 April 2011 he was able to visit the Bibliothèque againand complete a comprehensive check of both sections and so resolve many of theorthographical and textual issues In this way the pre-Patrician section of this edition has beenthrice collated by Dr Jaski with the manuscript, and the post-Patrician section once collated.Finally, on 12 September 2011 I was able to visit the Bibliothèque Royale and examine themanuscript and so resolve satisfactorily the identity of the hands of some of the very briefmarginalia and other details not clearly reproduced on the microfilm copy

pre-Principles of this edition

The objectives of this edition are fourfold: first, to provide an accurate reading of thetext; second, to make apparent the different phases of O’Conor’s work by showing thelocation of his primary and subsequent interlinear and marginal entries, as well as the

chronicles; fourth, to provide a chronology for the Christian era entries consistent with that ofthe other annals of the Clonmacnoise group To these ends the following principles have beenemployed in this edition.

Accurate reading

Regarding the pre-Patrician section, AR 1–24, this has been transcribed first of all from amicrofilm printout which was subsequently thrice checked against the manuscript asdescribed above Following this, wherever we consider either that our reading of characters isuncertain, or that even though the reading appears certain but the resulting word seems to usinappropriate to its context, then we have inserted a superscript question-mark ‘?’ at the end

of the word to identify the uncertainty Wherever characters are either illegible orincomprehensible to us they have been represented by white squares, ‘□’, whose numberapproximates the number of such characters Wherever characters or words are cancelled oroverwritten these have been shown as struck through, thus ‘Annales Roscrenses’, andlikewise cancelled illegible characters have been shown as cancelled white squares ‘□’ Incases where we have considered a word to be either incomplete or mis-written we haveinserted a footnote in which will be found the reading that we consider to be appropriate Insome instances where the manuscript reading is uncertain due to staining, for example, lettershave been added from parallel texts and inserted between square brackets

Regarding punctuation, O’Conor’s usage is confined to points ‘.’, and occasionallyhyphens ‘-’, but his use of these and also of capitalization is very erratic Consequently, inorder to provide a text that may be read comfortably we have introduced modern norms ofpunctuation using points, commas, hyphens, and the capitalization of both all proper nounsand the letter immediately following a point marking the end of a sentence However, wehave identified all instances of O’Conor’s own points, hyphens or capitalization in themanuscript by reproducing them in bold Consequently, all non-bolded punctuation andcapitalization represents our editorial emendation Regarding O’Conor’s use of marks ofsuspension, we have expanded these in the normal way by representing the expanded letters

in italic Hyphens have also been added in the case of emphasizing pronouns, e.g AR 2.3

‘Partholon-sin’, or nasalization before a vowel, AR 20.3 ‘n-ingen’ An apostrophe has beenused with ‘d’ for the preposition ‘de’ before a vowel, e.g AR 4.1 ‘d’ochtmadh’ Propernames beginning with ‘He’, or ‘H’ before another vowel, have been rendered ‘He’ in thenominative, but ‘hE’ in oblique cases, where is may be regarded as a mark of lenition, e.g

AR 3.11, 4.19 ‘Heremon’, and AR 6.15 ‘la hEremon’; AR 8.6 ‘bean hEremoin’ Themanuscript has variously the spellings ‘Erind’, ‘Erinn’, ‘Erend’, and ‘Eirind’, but we have

expanded ‘Er-’ as ‘Erenn’ or ‘Erinn’, e.g AR 2.11, 9.6 Similarly, while the manuscriptusually has the spelling ‘meicc’, e.g AR 3.3–4, but we have expanded ‘m-’ or ‘mc’, as ‘meic’

or ‘mac’ On the other hand because the manuscript usually has ‘cat’, we have expanded ‘c’

to ‘cat’ in the same section, even though the Old- and Middle Irish spelling is ‘cath’ We havenot noted where single letters are written in superscript

Regarding the post-Patrician section, AR 25–65, as described above this has been takenfrom the published edition of Gleeson and Mac Airt using OCR In their prefatory discussionneither Mac Airt nor Gleeson indicated what source they had used for their edition, but itappears from their partial repetition at the end of p 48 of two entries that are actually located

at the end of p 46 and which are visible when viewing p 48 as a consequence of the removal

of the bottom centimetre or so of p 47, cf AR §169.3 and AR §187, that they did not use themanuscript but they must have used a photographic image In their edition, whenever theywished to register uncertainty with regard to either a reading or its meaning, they interpolated

a question-mark in parentheses ‘(?)’, and these have all been re-examined against themanuscript and, where possible, resolved However, where these questions cannot beresolved they have been indicated, as in the pre-Patrician section, with a superscript ‘?’, andlikewise with white squares ‘□’ for any illegible letters In this section, we have simplyreproduced their expansions of marks of suspension in italic, however it does appear thattheir identification of these is erratic, and quite incomplete Similarly, they did not distinguishtheir editorial punctuation and capitalization from that of O’Conor’s, and regrettably we havenot had the resources available to upgrade this but hope that this may be undertaken in afuture revision In making textual restorations they usually placed these within squarebrackets ‘[…]’, but occasionally used parentheses ‘(…)’, however in this edition all of theseparentheses have been standardized to square brackets

Regarding the scripts used in both pre- and post-Patrician sections, O’Conor normallywrote Latin in a cursive script and Irish using a semi-cursive Gaelic script, but we have notconsidered it necessary to reproduce these distinctions since O’Conor’s usage is systematicand to represent it accurately would require the introduction of a relatively rare font into theedition For the same reason the frequent occurrences of the customary Irish notation for

‘ocus’ have been rendered with a subscript seven, thus ‘7’ Finally, as mentioned above,O’Conor frequently endeavoured to identify groups of entries as belonging to one year bydrawing lines about them, frequently in the form of an ‘L’-shaped bracket However, we havenot reproduced these in this edition because they detract from the legibility of the text, and

As has been described above O’Conor transcribed excerpts from his source, ‘Historia D.Cantwelij’, in two phases, followed by a third phase in which O’Sheerin annotated it bycollation with other sources in the course of contructing his index to the text.1 In the firstphase O’Conor transcribed entries down the middle of each page, fairly frequently leavingsome lines blank, cf AR 2, 9, 15–16, 22–4, 27–8, 53, 55–61, 65, and these blank lines clearlysignal O’Conor’s intention to return to further transcription It is these lines from phase one,whether written or blank, which have been used to define the primary lines of this edition inwhich these lines are spaced at 7 mm for reasons to be explained below These lines havethen been enumerated in red down the extreme left-hand margin of the edition, and then all ofthe text that O’Conor transcribed in phase one has been transcribed into these lines andrepresented in 11-point Times font

Then in phase two O’Conor typically transcribed chronological criteria and annotationsinto the left-hand margin, additional entries interlinearly and into blank lines or the blankends of lines, and annnotations into the right-hand and upper and lower margins All of thesesubsequent additions by him, including his pagination 1–65 and the two titles ‘AnnalesRoscreenses’ have been represented in 9-point Times font As far as possible thesesubsequent entries have been appropriately positioned with respect to the phase one lines,whether marginal or interlinear, and all of O’Conor’s line breaks have been accuratelyreproduced The aforementioned primary line spacing of 7 mm has been chosen because itcan accommodate one line of 11-point Times Roman text with another line of 9-point TimesRoman text above it separated at exactly 10-points In this way O’Conor’s interlinearadditions may be satisfactorily represented, as can his multi-line additions on phase one blanklines, cf AR 32.8, 32.11, 34.7 Furthermore, this smaller font size accords in general with thesmaller size of O’Conor’s writing in phase two, with, however, the notable exceptions of his

‘Annales Roscreenses’ addition at AR 25.0 and his pagination pp 1–65 in the upper marginswhich considerably exceed the size of his phase one writing Very occasionally it has notbeen practicable to reproduce the orientation of his text, as, for example, his first inscription

of ‘Annales Roscreenses’ at AR 1.1, which is written obliquely, and his marginal addition at

AR 46.11–23 which is written in the left-hand margin vertically on lines 11–23 In the edition

1 Mc Carthy, Irish Annals, 31, working from the microfilm mistakenly identified some marginalia citing explicit

sources with O’Conor, and so attributed a third phase to him; however, subsequent examination of the manuscript has shown these marginalia to be the work of O’Sheerin.

this entry has been moved to line 24 and a marginal comment added to explain its originalposition.

Here it is appropriate to comment briefly upon O’Conor’s substantial addition written

on the bottom margin of p 1, which we have read as follows:

Circa modum computandi per locis K consulerimus P Sirmond us et author etiam qui is de ratione fratrum

Jermiae de Parisijs, et videndus insuper D Anselmij liber De Imagini Mundi capilibus penultimis De

Termino Saeculum Paschali et De Regularibus Item in capitula De Insulis ad Finem ubi de S.

Brandano.

This we tentatively translate as:

Concerning the manner of computing by placements of Kalends, we should have consulted Pater Sirmondus and the author, moreover, who is about [comments on?] the reckoning from brother Jeremiah of Paris, and which is to be seen, moreover, in Lord Anselm’s book, The Image of the World, the penultimate chapters, About the Second Era of Easter and About the Regulations Likewise in the chapter About the Islands at the End [of the World] where it is [related] about Saint Brendan.

Our transcription of a number of words is uncertain and these are shown above in italic, andthis in turn renders the translation uncertain Nevertheless, some comments on the contentcan be made It seems virtually certain that the reference to ‘P Sirmondus’ is to the FrenchJesuit scholar, Fr Jacobus Sirmondus, 1559–1651, who became rector of the Paris College in

1617 and it was there that he served as confessor to king Louis XIII Earlier Sirmond hadassisted Cesare Baronius with his historical works, and then between 1611 and 1647 hepublished his own editions of numerous Latin and Byzantine chronicles While there is noimmediate connection between Sirmond’s own work and computus, it is the case that in Paris

he had in his possession the manuscript now Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS 309 Thismanuscript contains a wealth of computistical and annalistic material, and provided theprimary source for two contemporaneous computistical publications, namely Dionysius

Petavius’ De Doctrina Temporum (Paris 1627), and Aegidius Bucherius’ In Victorium Aquitani Canonem (Antwerp 1633).1 In these circumstances O’Conor’s conspicuousreference on p 1 to Sirmond, who in the mid-seventeenth century represented the Catholicauthority on chronicle matters, is readily comprehensible We have not, however, been able

to identify his reference to Jeremiah of Paris, if the reading itself is correct, though it maypossibly refer to a pupil of Sirmond while he was in Paris As regards O’Conor’s attribution

of the work De imagine mundi to ‘Anselmi’, it was indeed long considered that this tract in

two books was written by Anselm of Canterbury; it is, for example, incorporated in the

collected edition of his works, Omnia divi Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opuscula

(Paris 1544), pp 217-26 However, around the beginning of the seventeenth century

alternative attributions were made; for example, in the Divi Anselmi … opera omnia (Cologne

1612), pp 245-61, it is also attributed to Honorius of Autun, and Anselm’s authorship of thetract is refuted in the Lyons edition of 1630 Later the tract was printed by J.-P Migne among

the work of Honorius of Autun in Patrologia Latina (PL) 172, col 115-64, with the third

book, a chronicle of world history, at col 165-88 Regarding O’Conor’s reference to ‘S

Brandan’ and ‘de Insulis ad finem’, this is consistent with the 1612 Cologne edition of De imagine mundi, book I chapter 21, p 250, where it is stated concerning the islands in the

western ocean (insula dicitur Perdita), ‘Ad hanc fertur Brandanus venisse’, cf PL 172, col

133, book I, ch 36 In the PL edition (col 163-4) the chapter headings of the final chapters ofbook II, on computus, are different from in the 1544 edition (p 225-6) and the 1612 edition

(p 261) The 1612 edition of Anselm’s works has: cap 24 De termino Paschali (termini in the 1544 edition); cap 25: De regularibus eiusdem termini; cap.26: De embolismis; cap.27:

De diebus Aegyptiacis The titles of the penultimate two chapters agree with O’Conor’s

addition

Subsequent to O’Conor’s work Thomas O’Sheerin added numerous annotations,usually marginally, often based upon his collation with FM or other chronicles and these haveall been identified and represented in 9-point Arial Narrow font, cf AR 1.2–4, 18.4–5, 18.7–

8, 18.13 All subsequent annotation, including the re-pagination of the manuscript as pp 97–

161, which evidently postdates the catalogue of Van den Gheyn and hence is of century origin, and also our own annotations have been represented in a 9-point CenturyGothic font Our own marginal annotations have also been rubricated in order that they may

twentieth-be readily distingushed from the manuscript text which is in black O’Conor’s pagination 1–

65 together with our enumeration of his phase one lines allow for relatively precise references

to be made to the text by concatenation of the page and line number Thus AR 3.6 refers tothe coming of Nel mac Fenios to Egypt, and this notation has been used in all the references

to this edition In these references line zero is taken to reference the upper margin, so that AR

3.0 refers to the upper margin of p 3 wherein are found O’Conor’s marginalia ‘K vel sequenti’, ‘Natali Moy’, his cancelled foliation ‘2’, his pagination ‘3’, and the modern

pagination ‘[99]’

Cognate entries

For the pre-Patrician section we have identified entries cognate with those of AR in the

following works: the Annals of Tigernach, Ulster, Inisfallen, Boyle, Four Masters and the Chronicum Scotorum, in Lebor gabála, Jerome’s Chronica, Orosius’ Historia, Isidore’s Etymologiae, and Bede’s Chronica maiora To cryptically reference these works the sigla,

editions and conventions listed below have been used, and these identifications in CenturyGothic font all coloured red are placed in either the left or right margins encased in brackets,e.g at AR 1.8 ‘[CS 4a, AB §21]’ signifies that a cognate entry will be found in the upperquarter section of page four of Hennessy’s edition of CS, and in paragraph twenty-one ofFreeman’s edition of AB Regarding the post-Patrician section, in their edition of thisGleeson and Mac Airt provided substantial but incomplete identification of cognate entries in

AU, AT, FM, and occasionally CS and Bede’s Chronica maiora, but there is insufficient

marginal space in our edition to allow this to be reproduced comprehensively, so it has allbeen omitted from this section, with the exception of some identifications of Bede However,cognate entries in the other Irish Annals may be readily identified by using the marginal ADchronology, as is discussed below

AD chronology

In order to provide an AD chronology for the chronicle in the Christian era which isconsistent with the other annals O’Conor’s first phase AR entries have been collated, wherepossible, with cognate entries in AT/CS/MB/AU and then the AD from Mc Carthy’ssynchronisation of the Irish Annals has been assigned to the AR entry This synchronisation

is available in both Word and html at www.irish-annals.cs.tcd.ie entitled

‘Chronological synchronisation of the Irish Annals’, and this synchronised AD has then beenadded marginally in 9-point Century Gothic font encased in square brackets all coloured red For the pre-Patrician section this synchronised AD has been followed by the list of thesigla of cognate entries as discussed above For example, textually the first such instance is at

AR 16.13, which announces the natus of S Patrick, and this has the marginal annotation

synchronised at AD 336 Consultation of the online synchronisation at AD 336 will thenshow that these entries are located at AT p 74, CS p 12, AU §163 and AI §313

For the post-Patrician section the great majority of AR entries are found in one or more

of AT, CS, MB, or AU, and in these instances the synchronised AD has been addedmarginally in 9-point Century Gothic font encased in square brackets all coloured red

Consultation of this AD year in the ‘Chronological synchronisation of the Irish Annals’ willassist in the location of cognate entries in the other annals However, a small number of ARentries are either found only in FM, or are unique, and these are all listed below Because ithas been demonstrated that FM’s AD chronology is unreliable, in these cases, and also for theAR-unique entries, the best we may do is to bound their AD from the synchronisedchronology of their preceding and succeeding synchronised entries, and this is shown inTables 2–3 below.1 A small number of AR’s entries are found otherwise either only in MB oronly in MB/FM, and these are listed in Table 4; in these cases the entry has been assigned an

AD based on upon the online synchronisation of MB with the other annals In the case ofO’Conor’s phase two entries there is in general insufficient marginal space to allow theirchronology to be documented, so these have been omitted, however it is invariably the casethat their chronology relates very closely to the proximate phase one entries

Table 2 AR entries found otherwise only in FM AR

51.10 210.3 Leargal sapiens 774.3 779–8052.4 213.3 Q Flaithniad 776.12 781–2

52.19 218.3 Q Leamnatha 802.4 807–1053.9 222.4 B Daolgair 809.14 81453.15 224.3 Q Connmaich 812.4 816–21

54.8 228.7 Mael Rubai ob 823.9 82554.18 233.2 Cailti dorm 828.6 827–3455.7 236.1 Occ Echnig 837.5 837–8

56.1 241.1 Q Mael Dithraibh 840.2 840–357.1 249.1 Cathasach dor 854.3 854–657.9 252.2 Mael Tuile p 856.4 858–60

59.13 270.1 Fergil dul 927.6 923–6

61.17 279.3 Cormacan m 946.7 948–962.11 282.1 Fothud m 961.2 957–64

1 Mc Carthy, Irish annals, 298–9 (unreliability of FM’s AD chronology).

63.2 283.5 Suibne m 962.3 964–7064.1 289.1 Faolan ob 979.2 976–8664.3 290.1 Mugron ob 978.1 976–86

Table 4 AR entries found otherwise either only in MB or in MB/FM

AR p.l

Sigla, editions and referencing

Sigla Edition(s) and conventions

AB A.M Freeman (ed.), ‘The annals in Cotton MS Titus A xxv’, RC 41 (1924) 301–30; 42 (1925)

283–305; 43 (1926) 358–84; 44 (1927) 336–61 Pre-Christian era entries have been referenced using Freeman’s paragraph numbers prefixed by ‘§’ Entries in the Christian era have been referenced using the synchronised AD, except when it is necessary to make a specific reference to this edition when the paragraph number ‘§’ will be used.

AI S Mac Airt, The Annals of Inisfallen (MS Rawlinson B 503) (Dublin 1951) Pre-Christian

entries have been referenced by the paragraph number assigned by this edition prefixed by ‘§’ Entries in the Christian era have been referenced using the synchronised AD, except when it is necessary to make a specific reference to this edition when the paragraph number ‘§’ will be used for pre-Patrician entries and Mac Airt’s marginal AD for post-Patrician entries

AR D Gleeson & S Mac Airt (edd), ‘The Annals of Roscrea’, PRIA 59C (1959) 137–80.

Referenced by their paragraph number prefixed by ‘§’.

AT W Stokes (ed) The Annals of Tigernach, first published in RC 16 (1895) 374–419; 17 (1896)

6–33, 119–263, 337–420; 18 (1897) 9–59, 150–97, 267–303, which were reprinted in

facsimile as The Annals of Tigernach i–ii (Felinfach, Wales 1993) Pre-Christian entries have

been referenced using the page number of this facsimile edition suffixed by a page quarter letter, a−d, where a=first quarter, d=fourth quarter Entries in the Christian era have been referenced using the synchronised AD.

AU S Mac Airt & G Mac Niocaill (eds), The Annals of Ulster (to A.D 1131) (Dublin 1983) All

its surviving entries are in the Christian era and thus have been referenced using the synchronised AD, except when it is necessary to make a specific reference to this edition when the paragraph number ‘§’ will be used for pre-Patrician entries and the MS AD for post- Patrician entries.

CH R Helm (ed.), Eusebius Werke: Die Chronik des Hieronymus, GCS 7 (Berlin 1956) All

references have employed the Anno Abrahami (AA) of the edition.

CM C.W Jones (ed.), ‘Chronica maiora’ in Bedae venerabilis opera, CCSL cxxiii B (Turnhout

1977) 461–535 All references have used the paragraph numbers of this edition prefixed by

‘§’.

CS W.M Hennessy (ed), Chronicum Scotorum, a chronicle of Irish affairs from earliest times to

A.D 1135 (London 1866, repr Wiesbaden 1964) Again the pre-Christian entries have been

referenced using the page number of this edition suffixed by a page quarter letter, a−d, where a=first quarter, d=fourth quarter Entries in the Christian era have been referenced using the synchronised AD.

Etym W.M Lindsay (ed.), Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX Isidori Hispalensis episcopi

(Oxford 1911 repr 1985) All references are by a concatenation of the book, chapter and section numbers.

FM J.O’Donovan (ed.), Annala Rioghachta Eireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland i–vii

(Dublin 1848–51; repr New York 1966) Pre-Christian era entries have been referenced using the edition’s Anno Mundi data, and Christian era entreis have been referenced using the edition’s AD data concatenated with the entry number assigned in the CELT edition of FM HAP C Zangmeister (ed.), Paul Orosii historiarum adversum paganos libri vii, CSEL v

(Vindobonae 1882) All references are by a concatenation of the edition’s book and section numbers.

LG R.A.S Macalister (ed.), Lebor gabála Érenn i–v in ITS vols xxxiv, xxxv, xxxix, xli, xliv

(Dublin 1938–56) All entries have been referenced using the paragraph number of the edition prefixed by ‘§’, followed if relevant by the recension siglum where a=R 1 , b=R 2 , c=R 3 , m=Míniugud.

MB D Murphy (ed), The Annals of Clonmacnoise, being Annals of Ireland from the earliest

period to A.D 1408, translated into English A.D 1627 by Conell Mageoghagan and now for the first time printed (Dublin 1896, repr Llanerch, Wales 1993).

By comparison with other Irish annalistic manuscripts O’Conor’s transcription of Cantwel’s

‘Historia’ is complex, disorderly, and incomplete, and as a consequence appears ratheruninviting However, on closer examination a considerable amount of the content and thechronology of his exemplar may be deduced, and from this it can be seen that thechronological apparatus of the ‘Historia’ comprised first of all kalends, and then kalends plusferial data as far as AD 642, as in the other annals of the Clonmacnoise group, AT and CS It

is also the case that AR’s range is substantially complementary to that of Rawl B 502, so that

AR represents a valuable witness to the Clonmacnoise group of annals

It also emerges that AR’s pre-Patrician section has preserved an account of the Irishorigin legend that is both cognate and complementary to that of the other annals.1 Thus wehope that this, the first complete edition of this work, will enable other scholars to explorethese and other aspects of this chronicle

Finally, the authors wish to express their gratitude to the following: the Library staff atthe School of Celtic Studies, DIAS, Burlington Road, for arranging access to their microfilm

of the manuscript; the Library staff at the Bibliothèque Royal, Brussels, for arranging access

to the manuscript itself; Professor John Byrne for his assistance with the OCR of the edition

of Gleeson and Mac Airt; Nike Stam of the Celtic Department of the University of Utrechtfor checking the transcription of the Irish abbreviations of the pre-Patrician section

Author(s) Short title Title and publication

manuscrits

Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Royale des ducs

de Bourgogne, publié par ordre du ministre de l’intérieur, tom

i (Inventaire No 1–18000), tom ii–iii (Repertoire Méthodique), (Brussels & Leipzig 1842)

The Book of Leinster formerly Lebar na Núachongbála i–v

Whole works The whole works of the most Rev James Ussher, D.D i–xvii

(Dublin 1847–64) Cited as ‘Ussher, Whole works’.

Evans, N Present and

Gwynn, A Archbishop

Ussher

‘Archbishop Ussher and Father Brendan O Conor’, in

Franciscan Fathers, Father Luke Wadding: commemorative volume (Killiney 1957) 263–83

Historical

Manuscripts

Commission

Franciscan manuscripts

Report on the Franciscan manuscripts preserved at the Convent, Merchants’ Quay, Dublin (Dublin 1906).

Hughes, K Early

Christian Ireland

Early Christian Ireland: Introduction to the sources (London

1972)

Jaski, B The Irish origin

legend ‘The Irish origin legend: seven unexplored sources’, in John Carey (red.), Lebor gabála Érenn: textual history and

pseudohistory Irish Texts Society, Subsidiary Series 20 (Dublin

2009) 48-75

Author(s) Short title Title and publication

Jones, C.W Sirmond

Manuscript

‘The ‘lost’ Sirmond Manuscript of Bede’s ‘Computus’’,

English Historical Review 52 (1937) 204–19.

Mc Carthy,

D.P

Chronological synchronisation

‘Chronological synchronisation of the Irish Annals’ at:

chron

‘The chronology of the Irish annals’, PRIA 98C:6 (1998) 203–

55

Mc Carthy,

D.P

AU compilation

‘The original compilation of the Annals of Ulster’, Studia Celtica 38 (2004) 69–96.

The medieval Irish annals (Dublin 1975).

Ó Cuív, B Catalogue Catalogue of Irish language manuscripts in the Bodleian

library at Oxford and Oxford College libraries (Dublin 2001).

FM Annala Rioghachta Eireann: Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland

i–vii (Dublin 1848–51; repr New York 1966) Cited as FM i–

vii

O’Rahilly,

T.F

Early Irish history

Early Irish history and mythology (Dublin 1946, repr 1971).

Fragmentary annals of Ireland (Dublin 1978).

Smith, P.J

(ed) Gilla Coemain Three historical poems ascribed to Gilla Coemain in Studien und Texte zur Keltologie Band 8 (Münster 2007).

Ussher, J Corbes ‘Corbes, herenaches and termon lands’ in Elrington, Whole

works xi, 419–73.

Van den

Gheyn, J

Catalogue Catalogue des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Royale de

Belgique vii (Brussels 1907).

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

Adversaria rerum Hibernij quae excerpta ex mutila Historia1

Cantwelii [O’Sheerin] Virginibus ut Eachoid ait.

Hoc Anno uenit diluuium i 600 anno uitae Noe [AB §14]

Ab Adam ergo usque ad diluuium 1656 annis vel iuxta Habraeos Iuxta vero 70 Interpretes a

1000 2242 Finit prima aetas Incipit 2a [CS 4a, AB §21]

Aetas quae Continet Annos 292 iuxta Habraeos

ut poeta Ait Sempere qui praecedit Eochaidh

O dilind co Abram hi ngeanair ar setaib

di bliadain balcc totacht nocat ar dib cetaibh. × secundum Eusebium

Iuxta vero 70 Interpretes 940 × computum 70 Interpretes est 942

Tertia aetas incipit quae annos 942 et cipit a natauitate Abram Patriarchae ut Poaeta

in-.i Abram

ait On gein-sin corgabad Dauid hi flait feidil

cethraca de bliadnaib noe cet canid deimin cain cituistin duile nócha ni aisc nuide ocht

cét cruth dorime di mile mor n-uile.

annum 2008·

Hoc anno natus est Abram in terra Caldeorum. [AB §20]

Tera anno 70 genuit Abram cui supervix- [AB §18; Bede, DTR ch 37 + 66]

it annis 135 Ab Adam ergo usque ad Abram 1945.

ut Poaeta ait Ced othustin duili co a gein gnim

ad rime cetraca oct mbliadna noi ced ocus mile.

Circa modum

dus et

computandi per hunc an lvium4 K consulepimus P

Sirmon-author etiam quid is de ratione fratrum Jermiae de Parisijs, et

vidensque5

penultimis in super D Anselmij liber De Imagini Mundi capitilibus

6

de secundo saeculum7 ? Paschali et de regularibus.

Item in capitula de Insulis ad finem ubi de S Brandano.

1 This heading was written by O’Conor using the same brown ink that he used to strike out ‘Annales Roscreenses’ below, cf also

AR 25.0 Note that by this heading O’Conor explicitly indicated that his transcription included principally Irish entries from

Historia Cantwelii, and this is indeed substantially what he did in phase one.

2 The position, oblique orientation, and cancellation show this title was written after ‘Jubuleu’, but before the heading at AR 25.0.

3 Belongs after ‘virginibus’.

4 MS ‘lvu’m’, with the m being written by a vertical stroke The ‘’’ probably represents an ‘i’ (cf 2.23), hence ‘lvuium’ (sextum quinquagesimum = 56) Alternatively ‘lviiium’ = 58 The ‘de’ preceding ‘Parisijs’ is superscript.

5 ‘s’ crossed by a ‘d’, apparently the scribe had begun to write ‘vidend’, repeating the second ‘d’ by mistake.

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

2

[98]

Hoc anno 60 aetatis Abram tenuit Partholón [CS 4c, AB §22]

filius Seara filij Easrau Hiberniam Is he

dia Mairt

in Partholon-sin ceta ragaib hEirind iar ndilind for xiiii

ochtur a lín i iiii fer 7 iiii ban Ro forbrisset iarom

co rabatar l ar ceitri milib fear 7 mile ban.

Cethri maige in hÉrind fo roillsheachta la Partho- [CS 4d]

lon i Mag Tuired le Connacta 7 Magh nItha la Connachta

7 Magh nItha la Laigniu 7 Magh Latrainn la Dal

nAraide 7 le hUa Macc hUais etir Bir 7

Cammus.

Sect mbliadna iar ngabail hErenn do Partolon conerbalt [CS 4d]

in cetna fer dia muintir i Feaa a ainm Is and

ro adnact hi Maigh Fea conid huad ro ainmniged.

Sect loca do madmadh and fo tir hi flait Partoloin

.i Loch Measca, Loc Con, Loc nDechet.

Treas bliadna iarsin cetna cath hErenn ro bris Partolón

for Fomorib for deamnaib imorro iar fir in dealbaibh

daoi-ne is sleamnuib Maige Íta i fir cona oenlamaibh 7

oen-cosaib ro fersat fris In bliadain do dánastar at bath [CS 6b]

Slanga in cetramad aire hErenn co ro adnact la lon hi Sleib Slangai conid huaidh ainmnigtur in sliabh.

Parto-[blank line]

× A morte Joseph in

Egypto usque ad hoc septimus? 1 × Hoc tempore ro gabsat Fir Bolg hErind i Gant

7 Seangant 7 Geanand 7 Rudhraige 7

[AI §24, CS 8c, AB

§32]

conquistus Fir Bolg plenatur

38 K· vide si totius? 87 anni Slaine.

[blank line]

dia deic mbliadain

na nGaoideal

iar cosracrad2 in tuir do repi Fenius Forsaid in suidbearla

arna dib mberlaibh lxxat 7 do rat iarsin

do Goediul Glas mac Agnomin.

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

sis usque ad hunc an- for Feraib Bolcc i Delbaeth 7 Breas 7 In Dagh- sunt anni a na-

K vide si totius anni 7 tri meicc In Dagdai i Cermait Coem 7

usque Aaron usque

ν Ab hoc anno usque co Nél mac Fenios in Eagyptum venit qui Peritus ν secundum 70 Interpretes

ha-post liberandi ? buit hos sex vel verius septem i Dond,

Here-mon, Herech Is acht tra do rimter h□□gabal□

hi nGabalaib hErenn is dia cetri mbliadan xx iar mbas

Iartact meicc Iardeanolo Tancatar meicc

Mi-led Easpain i Mil mac Bile meic Brigi meic

Bre-et reliqua usque Adam

guind meic Brata a Scitia Do cumlai didiu for [LG §127]

longais asin Scitia Mil mac Bili meic Brigi iar nguin Reafeloir meic Naemi meic Breguin oc cosnam

flaitem-nacta Scitiae Cethri barca a muircoblach

coic lánamhna dec cacha barce 7 amus forcraid

□□ cen mnai indi Ansait tri miosa Inis

Tap-fane 3 Tri mís aile dano for fairge Mara Ruaidh

co rancatar co Forainn co rig Egept Ro

fogh-lain setar sáirsi in dú-sin ocus ansait ocht [LG §128]

mbliadan la Forainn in Egept á rosnailset a n-ildana

7 a n-ilgnioma Ocus luid Scotta ingen Forainn

1 Read: Natalis Moysi.

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

4

[100]

co Mil mac Bili isin d’ochtmadh bli bliadain iarom ro

badhed Forainn cona sluag hi Muir Ruad O ro fitir [LG §129]

Mil mac Bili cona muintir anísin do cumlai for muir mor

a lin cetna 7 Scotta ingen Forainn leis co ngabsat

tir in Insi Tapfane1

7 ansait mis inte

Imrai-set iarsin timcell Scitiae do inbior Mara Caisp.

Gabsait tost teora nomada for Muir Caisp fri dord

na muir mórann cona conda tesart Caicher drúi sit iarom seac rinn Sleibe Riphei at tuaid co ngabh- sat in Dacia Ansait mis and-sin Asbert Caicher Drui friu co rissam hErind ni ainfem de Raissit iarom seach Gotiam sech Germain do Breguinn co-

Rai-ngabsat hEaspain Ba folam-side ara cind.

Ansait and-sin xxx mbliadan ina truib Ocus ficsetar

cetri cata ar l fri Fresena 7 Longbardu 7 Bachru

7 roinsit huile r□□□l re Mil mac Bili Im ceart nEaspaine ro ferta na catha-sin h□ hule 7 is

□□□ de-sein ro ainmniged-som Mil Easpaine 7

is inti ro geanatar da mac Miledh i Heremon

7 Héranin it e in dá ósar In dá sinser imorro i.

Don 7 Heber ar is tair ro genatar i Dond in

Scithia 7 □□□ Heber in Egipt Dosnanic

tám oenlati in Espain conerbaltatar di lanamain déc diib imna tri rigu i Mil mac Bile 7 Uicce 7

Oicce.

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

5 3

[101]

la maccu Miled 7 la Scoit ingen Forainn for

fairgi da tascnaim docum nEareand. [AI §35 diverge

Dollotar didiu do gabail hErenn oc Inbiur Slaine Ar

issed don airchet no gebath tascur oirnide hErenn

a Inbiur Sláne Cectan do rochtis tír nErenn

no delbtais in deamnai comba druim muicce in

port Timcelsat didiu hErenn fo tri go ro gaibhset

fo deoid in Inbiur Scenae.

Drebraing Eranin ossar mac Miled isin fernai siuil [LG §434]

do descin caeret huadib co tir Adbat and-sin

co ro scáilset a baill im na murcargi 7 do breat

a ceand in uct a matar oca bas 7 foceird osnaidh

ica ecaib Is deitbir, ar a mathair, foidheir etir da

n-impir Seach ni roacht in n-impir cosa tanic Ro scar

o tanic isind lo-sin dano dosfánic ainbtine h□ huatmar

7 scarais friu in mbairc hi raibi Dond mac Miledh cetrur

vel 40 ut alij aiunt

ar ficet d’fearaibh 7 di mnái déc 7 ceitri amhuis [LG §416]

coro batiside oc na dumachaib isin d’fairge tiar dia n-abart

Teach nDuind Dia Dartain for tt? Kl- May □□□ vel for Kl- [LG §418]

Maij ut Eochaidh ait tascar mac Miled in hErind in

Inbiur Scene for xuii escai Ocus atbat and bean [LG §419]

Amairgin Gluinfind i Scene Daulsire a lanamin di

7 fochreas a fert forsind inbiur-sin a qua nominatur Inber

Scene

7 srut Scene 7 focreas feart Eranin dind leith aile

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

treas la te iar ngabail hErenn do maccaib Miledh

ficsetar cath Sleibe Mis fri deamnu 7 Fomoru

7 memaid ria maccaib Miled 7 do ceardar di mnai [CS dive

in □ na freccura Scotta ingen Forainn 7

Fas ben Uin meicc Uccai Focreas iarom [LG §431]

fert Scotta 7 fert Faisse Is de ata

Gleand Faisse etir Sliabh Mis 7 muir

isin aidci-sin dano tomaidim Loca Lugdach in

Iarmumain Ria ciurid inna bliadna-sin ro roinsat

meicc Mileadh cosna dib tigernaibh dec hErind

in da se Hereamon forsind leith tuaiscertaich

o Tuinn Clidna co Buaill Is he in coicer ogtigern

ro lean i Amorgin Glunfind 7 Goiscean 7 Setga

7 Surge 7 Sobairce Isin bliadain-sin ro clas Rait

in Argetros la hEremon mac Mileadh 7 ro olas Rat

Fuamain i lLaignibh la hEbir mac Mileadh 7 cidtach

tocair Inbir Moir hi cric Cualand la Amargein

Gluin-geal 7 cumtach a dune la Sobairce isin Murbulg

Dail Riaddai 7 cumtach Dune Delginnsi Cualand

la Setga 7 cumtach Duin Etuir la Suirge 7

cumtach Dúin Binne la Caicer iar nErind 7

cumtach Cairce Blaraige in airter tuasciurt hErenn

la Mantan 7 cumtach Rata Aird Suird i Fanat

hi tuasciurt hErenn la Fulman 7 cumtach Ratha

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

7 4

[103]

Righbaird hi Muriusc la Etan mac nUicce

7 cumtach cruaich in Aird Feataich la Etin mac nOicce 7 cumtach Catrach Nairr iar Sleib

Mis la Goiscean.

[Etym XIV.vi.6, cf LG §101m] Hibernia autem proxima Brittaniae insula

spatio terrarum angustior sed situ faecundior.

Haec ab Affrico in Boream porrigitur Cuius partes priores in Hispaniam et Cantabri

cum oceanum intendent unde et Hibernia dicta,

et Scotia hoc quod a Scottorum gentibus colitur

appellata est Illic nullus anguis reperitur

avis autem rara, et apes priscis temporibus

nulla ni autem multae in ea apes a Modomroij

ab Albania ductae adeo ut siquis advectos

inde pulveres seu lapillos alibi sparserit

□□ inter apvaria examina favos deserant.

Scotti autem a Scotta filia Pharonis Regis

Egyp-× quem alij esse

dicunt Mil filium

quem alij esse d□□□ □□le filium □□B□li

ti vocati sunt quae fuit × N Niuil filij Fenios

Bili

uxor a quo Fenij vocantur.

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

8 [104]

[Etym IX.2.103] Scotti idem et Picti olim dicebantur eo quod

aculeis ferreis cum atramento variarum

variarum figurarum stigmate adnotaretur.

Ethindus hoc anno regnavit suum annum lv in ipse

[cf AI §39, AB §38] cuius Moyses mortuus est.

.i atbath

In bliadain do danastar bebais Tea bean

hErem-Hoc numeratur 2 us annus

ab adventu horum gen. oin batar rata fr□□ fria sear a cele i

Amor-2us post adventum.

gein Glungeal 7 Heber riasiu tisad cepedh

tir no togfad in hEr 1 combad ann no adnusta

[LG §396a, 423b,

443c] 7 no tocabtha a mur 7 a lige 7 combad ann

no bet Tea 2 rig orddan no geinfed

dia-cloinn co brath Togaid-si didiu Liath Druim daigh

ba he fot as aildem forsa n-acca trom ordan fer nErenn conid andsein didiu ro adnactis 7 tor gabadh

a mur conid de ro ainmniged Temuir eadhon

Tea múr □□ insin.

2us annus post adventum. In bliadain do donastar do □□□□ choaid o

maccaibh

Breatnu Fortreann do cat fri Saxanu 7

ro selaigh a claideb tir doib i Cruthentuait

7 taras air occaib act ni rabatar mna

acca ar atbat bantroct Alban.

Do

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

5 9 [105]

Dolluid didiu for a cúlu dochum mac Miled [LG §495cM]

Crutnecán 7 ro gáid nem 7 talam

7 esca, druct 7 datin, muir 7

Tir, be do mat riu flait forru co

Gildas ergo do ait esse ductas.

brat 7 beart di mnai dec forcraidi

do lotar la tascur mac Miled in hErinn ar

ro bata a fir isind fairge tiar immaille

la Dond Conid do feraibh hErenn flait for

Crutentuait do gres o sein.

[blank line]

Miledh for Tenus im□□1 magib hUa Foilge

im cosnamh Dromma Classaich hi crich Maine

7 Dromma Betic hi Moenmaigh 7 Droma Fingin la Mumain ar at□rtige 2 bá tir

Ferr Drommaib hErenn □□baid didiu in cat for hEaber 7 marbthair hé and 7 Seatga

7 Suirge 7 Sobairce 7 Goiscen 7 ferta

ar rig orbba 7 ro cresa a ferta 7 anaib Enda in fili:-

K Dia bliadain do cer Caicer la Amargen nGluin- [LG §474a, 477b, 486c]

geal hi cat Cuilo caicer Caicir 7 focres [FM 3502.4]

a fert and.

MS Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 5301-20 pp 97–161

KK· In bliadan iarsein do cer Amargein Gluingel [LG §474am, 477b, 486c]

hi cat Bile Tened hi culaib Breg la hEre- [FM 3503.2-3]

mon 7 ro madmesttatar noi mBrosnaca [AI §47]

tire hEle fo thír 7 teora hUinnsinn

vel iii.

7 noi Righi.

Crotopus rexit Argos annis ·xxi· [CH AA 512]

Ceres rexit Aegyptios annis ·xv· [CH AA 514]

In tres bliadain iarsin do cer Fulmán [LG §473am, 478b, 487c]

7 Mantan hi cat Breguin hi Femiun [cf FM 3506.2]

la hEremon 7 seact 1 loc tomadmand

fo tir nErend i Loc Cimbi, Loc mBoadaich,

Loc mBaigi, Loc F[inn]maigi, Loc nGraine

Loch R[iac]h, Loc da Chaech.

K In bliadain do dunastar do cear Eatan 7

[LG §473am, 478b,

487c]

Etín hi cath Comruire Mide la hEremón [cf FM 3510.1]

7 focresa a ferta.

annis ·x· vel uii· ut alij dicunt.

KKK· Dia thri mbliadna iarsin atbath hEremon [LG §475am, 479b, 489c]

mac Milead in Arggatros 7 focres a [cf FM 3516.1-3517.1]

fert and 7 randsait a tri meicc [AI §41, 68]

.i Muimne 7 Luigne 7 Laigne dia

héis