The title given to the chief historical work of a small team of scribes and historians under the leadership of the Franciscan friar Mfcheal (Tadhg) O Cleirigh, these annals were compiled in two stages between 1632 and 1636 in the "place of refuge" of the Donegal Franciscan community at Bundrowse on the Donegal/Leitrim border. Known to its compilers and patron as Annala Rioghachta Eireann (The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland), its more popular (if inaccurate) title The Annals of the Four Masters first appears in 1645 in the introduction to the Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae (Deeds of the Saints of Ireland) of the Franciscan hagiologist John Colgan, who adapted the phrase from a thirteenth-century commentary on the Franciscan rule. The Annals form part of the remarkable historical, doctrinal, catechetical, and hagiographical publishing program undertaken by the exiled Irish Franciscan community in Louvain (Belgium) in the first half of the seventeenth century. From their arrival in Louvain in 1607, the friars labored to produce Irish language material for their missionary work in Ireland and Scotland and for circulation among exiled Irish Catholics on the continent. In 1614, they acquired their own printing press and in 1617 moved to their permanent site at St. Anthony’s College. Important publications included Bonaventure (Giolla Brighde) O hEoghasa’s An Tea-gasg Crfosdaidhe (Antwerp 1611, Louvain 1614), the first catechism to be printed in Irish; Flaithn O Mao-ilchonaire’s translation of a Catalan devotional text Desiderius (1616); and Aodh Mac Aingil’s Sgathan Shacramuinte na hAithridhe (Mirror of the Sacrament of Penance, 1618).
Like many of the friars involved in this program of scholarship, Mfcheal Ua Cleirigh was a member of a hereditary learned family who had traditionally been professors of history to the O Domhnaill (Ua Domnaill) lords of Tfr Conaill. Born circa 1590 and baptized Tadhg, he appears to have followed a military career in the Spanish Netherlands before joining the friars in 1623 in Louvain, where he was received as a lay brother and given the religious name Mfcheal. His older brother Bernardine (Maolchonaire) had already joined the order. Friar Mfcheal’s skill as a scribe and historian was soon recognized, and in 1626 he was sent back to Ireland by the guardian of St. Anthony’s, Hugh Ward, to gather whatever he could of the surviving ecclesiastical, political, and hagiographical material with a view to its publication. He spent eleven years traveling from his base in Donegal to various religious houses and lay schools throughout the country, transcribing saints’ lives and martyrologies, compiling genealogies of the saints and kings of Ireland, and producing a new redaction of the Lebor Gabala (The Book of Invasions), which was the standard account of the early history of Ireland. To assist him, O Cleirigh assembled a small team of scribes from among his own kinsmen and members of other traditional learned families. His chief assistants were Fearfeasa O Maoilchonaire, Cuchoigcnche O Duibhgeannain, and Cuchoigcnche O Cleirigh, while Conaire O Cleirigh and Muiris O Maoilchonaire worked with him for shorter periods.
The Annals of the Four Masters represent a compilation or conflation of earlier annals and other historical sources. While a number of the sources listed by O Cleirigh in a preface to the Annals still survive, others have been lost, making the Four Masters the sole authority for much of the material they contain, particularly after 1500. As this source material came from a variety of scholarly traditions using different dating systems, the work of compilation and editing proved a major difficulty, and the chronology of the Four Masters is defective for large sections of the work. The content is also heavily weighted in favor of entries relating to the North of Ireland and to Connacht as the compilers do not seem to have been aware of the principal Munster source, the Annals of Inisfallen, or of any of the Anglo-Irish chronicles, including those compiled by fellow Franciscans.
Though steeped in the conventions of traditional Irish historiography, the Annals of the Four Masters differ significantly in scope and tone from earlier works. Earlier works represented the concerns of a particular monastic community or learned family while in theory, if not always in practice, the Four Masters concerned themselves with the whole of Ireland.
Bernadette Cunningham has demonstrated the extent to which the compilers were influenced by the ideals of Counter-Reformation Catholicism emanating from Louvain. Priority in each entry was given to ecclesiastical events of that year, such as the deaths of bishops or abbots. Details in earlier sources considered unedifying in a Counter-Reformation context are silently edited and events like the dissolution of the monasteries, or the destruction of the relics in the 1530s, which earlier annals saw as part of military campaigns, are presented by the Four Masters as the action of heretics. This confessional and controversial emphasis in their work did not however prevent the Franciscan scholars of Louvain and Rome from exchanging sources and information with Anglican antiquarians like Archbishop Ussher of Armagh and Sir Ware.
Two complete sets of the annals, each consisting of three volumes, were produced. One set was presented to Fearghal O Gadhra of Coolavin, who had sponsored the project, and the second set was to be forwarded to Louvain for publication, but only two volumes were sent, one of which has now disappeared. The five surviving volumes of the six originally produced are now housed in the libraries of Trinity College Dublin, The Royal Irish Academy, and University College, Dublin. The edition and translation of the Annals published by John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry in six volumes between 1848 and 1851, though not a critical one, is remarkable for O’Donovan’s extensive scholarly apparatus and remains the most accessible and useful edition of the text.
