Although the great days of Hiberno-Latin composition were past, the tradition of compiling annals, mar-tyrologies, and hagiographical composition continued apace in the post-Norman church. There seems to have been a distinct impetus to the redaction of older materials and the composition of new ones in the centuries following the Anglo-Norman invasion, a spurt of assertive cultural creativity not seen since the early Christian period. But in the post-conquest age we are dealing with a dual tradition of compiling ecclesiastical records. The churches inter Anglicos and inter Hibernicos were run and organized on quite different lines. For most of the Middle Ages, ten sees, the wealthier ones, were in Anglo-Norman hands, thirteen in Gaelic hands, and the remaining nine fluctuated between both communities or were held by absentees. Among the Irish, tenure of church lands, religious houses, and the custody of sacred relics were concentrated in the hands of hereditary ecclesiastical estate managers, erenaghs (from Old Irish airchinnech), and coarbs (from Old Irish comarba). Marriage within the native clergy was thus essential to the maintenance of the system, since ecclesiastical families ruled the church. Within the colonial enclaves, the clergy operated within defined territorial limits and were controlled by the state and by a carefully regulated system of ecclesiastical courts. Senior clergy were royal officers, episcopal temporalia were controlled by the crown, and the clergy at all levels were subject to tax. Diocesan synods and episcopal visitations were much more regular within the Pale. In consequence, we are much better provided with documentation from the colonial church, but we can be sure that the functioning of the Gaelic church in most fundamental respects was not entirely independent of or unlike that of the Anglo-Norman church.
The major sets of annals, monastic in origin and compiled and r-combined from various sources, were continued through the Anglo-Norman period and written for the most part in Irish. Other Anglo-Irish annals, written in Latin, were compiled in the new monastic centers established by the continental Orders, the Cistercians, Franciscans, and so forth, for example, the so-called Annals of St Mary’s, Dublin and the Annals of Multyfarnham, compiled by Stephen Dexter, O.F.M., the so-called Kilkenny Chronicle, and the annals of Friar John Clyn, which ceased in the Great Plague of 1348-1349. They certainly continued to be written by men in clerical orders, and as such, although strictly a secular source, they are a valuable complement to the often scanty material from ecclesiastical sources.
From the eleventh century onward, new impetus was given to the composition of hagiographical material in both Irish and Latin, and an Irish homiliarium was composed. The manuscripts of the saints’ lives survive in three large medieval collections put together in the fourteenth century. They include lives of Irish saints as well as imported lives of continental saints, all of them redacted in the period following the diocesan reorganization of the Irish Church at the synod of Kells-Mellifont (1152) from sources now lost. These lives were intended for an ecclesiastical audience, but the great vernacular religious compilations such as Leabhar Breac and the Book of Lismore were written for educated lay patrons but by clerical scholars.
The earlier martyrologies were adumbrated and new ones composed. They took external sources like the ninth-century martyrology of Bishop Ado of Vienne and merged it with native material, especially the commentary on the Martyrology of Oengus compiled between 1170 and 1174 at Armagh. At least four new martyrol-ogies—those of Drummond, Turin, Cashel, and York—were compiled in the immediate post-conquest period, perhaps in response to Anglo-Norman accusations of cultural backwardness.
Documents detailing transfer of ecclesiastical property or rights existed in the pre-Norman Church, and indeed in the early Christian period. However, they are not, strictly speaking, charters, since Ireland had no central administration and no chancery. What might be described as primitive charters defining ecclesiastical property rights and prerogatives can be found in the eighth-century Book of Armagh, but they are best defined as notitiae (records of legal transactions or proceedings). They are only records of transactions between donor and recipient and lack the disposition and witness list found in later charters. The Irish charters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries differ in character and in form but derive their authenticity and sanction from transcription in Gospel books, a tradition found all over Europe. They are bilingual, written partly in Irish and partly in Latin. They were not produced by royal scribes, writing in a distinctive notarial hand, and carry no royal seal, as do later charters; they were produced for new church foundations, particularly of continental origin, by their own scribes. Diplomas, writs, and deeds are a product of the Anglo-Norman administration. A probable link has been suggested between the reform of the Irish church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the introduction of "full" charters (Flanagan 1998).
The native Irish church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries continued to hold synods and issue decrees, quite separate for the most part from those that came from Anglo-Norman centers like Dublin. The Synods of Cashel (1101) issued canons against simony, clerical marriage, the exemption of the Church from rent and exaction, incestuous marriage, and the joint administration of contiguous monastic dioceses. The synods of Raith Bressail (1111) and Kells-Mellifont (1152) reorganized the native diocesan system and issued similar canons against the recurring issues of simony and concubinage as well as inheritance of benefices, taxation of churches, and abuse of sanctuary. Like all syn-odalia of the medieval period, however, they are badly preserved and scattered among sources and manuscripts of later date. We know little of the provincial constitutions or councils held within the Gaelic dioceses. The earliest record of a synod held within the Pale is that convened in 1186 by Archbishop Cumin of Dublin, preserved in a confirmation of Pope Urban III. From the later thirteenth century, it can be seen that English synodal statutes were commandeered into service in modified form in many Irish foundations and that, consequently, little original formulation or legislation was undertaken in Ireland. The undated group of canons in the Crede Mihi, the register of the see of Dublin, probably belong to the episcopate of Archbishop Fulk de Sanford (1256-1271) and, perhaps, specifically to his visitation of his diocese in 12561257. They relate chiefly to the education of diocesan clergy. They derive ultimately from statutes promulgated at York between 1241 and 1255 and were adapted, without acknowledgment of source, for use in Dublin by Fulk or his predecessor Luke. Similarly, the surviving statutes of the diocese of Ferns derive from English legislation. Cross-miscegenation and repromulgation to suit local circumstances are universal in early canon law.
The Vatican archives are an invaluable source of information on the affairs of the medieval Irish Church, but many are as yet unpublished. The Calendar of Papal Letters contains breviates of letters from the papacy in response to individual queries relating to a great range of issues: dispensations from impediments to the holding of benefices on the grounds of illegitimacy, provisions to benefices or disputes over the possession of them, dispensations relating to marriage within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity or affinity, hereditary succession to an ecclesiastical office, and many others. They are of equal value for both the Gaelic and Anglo-Norman churches. The obligationes pro annatis relate to the payment of the first year’s income from a benefice to the papal camera and are a rich source of information about local nomenclature. Most papal bulls relating to Ireland are lost, destroyed as symbols of papal government during the Reformation. Valuations of Irish dioceses for the purpose of taxation by the crown survive in some numbers for most dioceses from the early fourteenth century.
The surviving records of episcopal secretariats relate to everything from the upkeep of buildings and the management of temporalities to the chastisement of clergy and laity, but they are not contemporary and are preserved for the great part—and then only imperfectly—in later compilations. Most of these functions in each diocese and their recording lay in the hands of the archdeacon, a functionary unknown to the pre-conquest Irish church but indispensable to the church inter Anglicos. Among the most important of episcopal registers is the Liber Niger Alani, a compilation made for John Alen, archbishop of Dublin, in the early sixteenth century. It contains copies of documents dating from as early as the twelfth century. Some of them are found in the thirteenth-century collection of grants, charters, and letters entitled Crede Mihi. For the archdiocese of Armagh, we have a series of registers from 1361 to 1535, from Milo Sweetman, who became archbishop in 1361, down to George Cromer in the mid-sixteenth century. They give us a fairly complete picture of the metropolitan jurisdiction of Armagh, but they are an inchoate source in which entries are made with no obvious chronological order or diplomatic principle, composed of miscellaneous notarial notes and drafts. No doubt, later rearrangements of material and regatherings of the manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts have contributed to that state of affairs. The famous Red Book of Ossory, compiled in the fourteenth century, contains much nonecclesiastical material, such as hymns and poems in Latin and Norman-French. There are only two surviving original rent rolls of episcopal estates, but later copies of the rentals of Dublin and Ossory survive in the Liber Niger Alani and in the Red Book of Ossory. Episcopal deeds and cathedral registers survive in very few numbers. Most parish records of the medieval period have also perished. Collections of deeds dating back to the thirteenth century survive for only two Dublin parishes, St. Catherine and St. James. The only surviving parish account is that of St. Werburgh, Dublin.
The separate communities with the Irish Church patronized their monastic foundations with grants of land, rentals, tithes, endowments, and other privileges. Monastic records show that such grants, in addition to the original foundation charter, where such survives, were scattered over several counties. Many English and Welsh monasteries also held possessions in Ireland. Cartularies of these survive for the Augustinian priories of Llanthony Prima in Wales, Llanthony Secunda near Gloucester, and St. Nicholas’s priory in Exeter. Records also survive of the possessions of each house at the time of their dissolution, 1540-1541. Each house would certainly have had some record of its possessions and their administration, including copies of charters, grants, deeds, and leases made to and by the mother house. Deeds of several monasteries survive, including the Cistercian abbeys of Duiske, Kells, and Jerpoint in County Kilkenny and of Holy Cross in Tipperary, the properties of which came into the Butler family of Ormond and are preserved among the family papers in the National Library in Dublin. The original cartularies of the abbeys of St. Mary and St. Thomas in Dublin survive, and copies of others now lost, were made by the seventeenth-century antiquarian James Ware. They are not solely cartularies but contain copies of episcopal and papal instruments and of miscellaneous grants and confirmations. The only obituary books—naming those to be commemorated in the prayers of the community—to survive are for Holy Trinity and later Christ Church, Dublin, and extracts made by Ware of the Franciscan monastery at Galway. Only two other books, miscellanies of administrative and literary material, survive from the entire medieval library of Christ Church, the so-called Liber Niger and Liber Albus, compilations of the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Almost the entirety of medieval Irish monastic and cathedral libraries has long since disappeared.