ANNALS AND CHRONICLES (Medieval Ireland)

The Irish Chronicles, kept in Ireland throughout the medieval period, are a major source for Irish society and politics. They are largely annalistic in form, being divided into years, called "annals," rather than having other time-periods, such as reigns, as the main structural principle. They record the deaths of notable ecclesiastical and lay figures, battles, military campaigns, droughts, plagues, and unusual events, such as eclipses and miracles, but they very rarely provide evidence for life among the lower grades of society.

The style of the Irish chronicles is generally terse and factual, generally lacking the long descriptions, detailed accounts, statements of sympathy, animosity, or references to causation that are found in many chronicles from the rest of Europe. Initially predominantly written in Latin, but increasingly in Irish from the ninth century onwards, the vocabulary and syntax of the Irish chronicles is very formulaic and repetitive, producing a highly artificial chronicle style shared by scholars in a number of different centers. However, in the twelfth century, the chronicles do start to become more verbose to some extent, although the lack of a narrative thread between events continues to be an important feature. At roughly the same time Irish chronicles were adapted in texts such as the Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (probably compiled in the eleventh century for Osraige dynasts) and Cogad Gaedel re Gallaib (from the early twelfth century, portraying Munster as the savior of Ireland from the Scandinavians) to form non-annalistic narrative chronicles with clearer political messages.


It is quite likely that the chronicles’ origins were in the practice of noting down events in the margins of Easter tables, although earlier continental chronicles may also have been influential. When such notes were subsequently copied without the Easter tables, "K" or "Kl," the same abbreviations for "Kalends (first) of January" used in Easter tables, were also employed in the chronicles to mark the beginning of each annal. The reasons for the subsequent maintenance of the chronicles afterwards are unclear, largely because the chroniclers themselves rarely give any indication of their motives. While a general interest in the past, common to all societies, is likely, the ordering of time according to Christian principles could also have been a factor, as Daniel McCarthy has recently shown in his studies of the Christian dating methods (such as a.d. dating) in the Irish chronicles. The high number of deaths recorded in the chronicles perhaps were designed to emphasize the transience of the earthly life. Political bias, mainly manifested through the selective inclusion and exclusion of certain events, could be another reason. Overall, it is likely that a combination of motivations were important, depending on the interests of the individual chronicler.

The Development of the Irish Chronicles before 1200

Attempts to reconstruct the development of the Irish chronicles have been complicated both by the tendency of the chroniclers to combine and rewrite chronicles, making it difficult to identify constituent sources, and by the lateness of the surviving manuscripts: They date from the late eleventh to the seventeenth century, usually centuries after the events they describe. Modern scholars have adopted varying methods for the identification of chronicle sources, using the frequency of references to particular places, local details, or the chronology of the chronicles to locate sources, producing different results. It is generally accepted that most of the Irish chronicles share a common source before c.e. 911 known as the "Chronicle of Ireland," but there is disagreement about whether events only recorded in one source were also part of this text or were derived from chronicles kept before c.e. 911.

It is likely that contemporary records of events found in the Chronicle of Ireland were kept as early as the late-sixth century for Scottish and Irish events, although the record is likely to have been subsequently altered to promote the powerful Ui Neill dynasty and St. Patrick. From about 660 to 740, it is clear that a chronicle was kept at Iona off the west coast of Scotland; this may have been the source for much of the Irish, as well as Scottish, chronicle records for this period. After 740, the Scottish element is greatly reduced, so it is unlikely that Iona continued to be a major source. From 740 to 911, constituent chronicles of the Chronicle of Ireland have been proposed for Armagh, Clonard in the midlands, and the area to the north of the river Liffey (called "Brega" and "Conaille" at the time). These views have been based on the interest the chronicles display in events in Armagh and the east midlands, although many events further to the west around the Shannon and Brosna rivers are also recorded. It is during the period from 731 to 911 that a number of non-Irish sources, including a "Book of Pontiffs" (from Rome), the "Chronicle of Marcellinus" (from sixth-century Constantinople), and early eighth-century works by the northern English monk Bede, were used by the Irish chroniclers to add Imperial and Papal events to the section from c.e. 431 to 720.

After c.e. 911, the Chronicle of Ireland was continued independently at different centers (although the Irishman Marianus Scottus also finished an unrelated chronicle in 1076 at a monastery in Mainz in Germany). The Annals of Ulster, found in a late-fifteenth-century manuscript, contains a continuation of the Chronicle of Ireland kept in Brega, Conaille or Armagh, but from the late tenth century it is clearly an "Armagh Chronicle," and from 1189 to the 1220s, this text was continued at Derry. The section from 1014 to the 1220s is also found in the Annals of Loch Ce, which survives in a sixteenth-century manuscript.

The other main continuation of the Chronicle of Ireland is found in a number of manuscripts called the "Clonmacnoise group," the main representatives of which are the fourteenth-century Annals of Tigernach (with a text which ends at 1178) and the seventeenth-century Chronicum Scotorum (which ends at 1150), but it is also found in the less-substantial Cottonian Annals, the Annals of Roscrea, the Annals of Clon-macnoise, and the Annals of the Four Masters. The high degree of interest in both the affairs of Clonmac-noise, and Brega to the east, in the decades immediately following c.e. 911 could be explained by the close links between the monasteries of Clonmacnoise and Clonard. However, the large number of detailed Clonmacnoise entries indicates that at least by the late eleventh century, if not before, the text had become a "Clonmacnoise Chronicle," with Clonmacnoise events from as early as perhaps the eighth century added to the Chronicle of Ireland.

At some point between c.e. 911 and about 1060, the version of the Chronicle of Ireland in this Clonmacnoise-group text was radically altered, by the addition of more material from Bede’s Chronica Maiora, and from lists of kings of Ireland and Irish provinces. These sources were also added to a possibly preexisting section (called the "Irish World Chronicle") which covered the period from Creation to the coming of Palladius in c.e. 431. Combined with events from the Irish Invasion Myth, this not only made the chronicle more international in content, but also projected back concepts such as the "kingship of Ireland" and the provincial kingships into the prehistoric past, to provide a coherent account of Irish history.

The Annals of Inisfallen are found in the earliest Irish chronicle manuscript, produced in 1092 or shortly after in Munster. The text written then, which is closely related to that used by the compiler of Cogad Gaedel re Gallaib, was a compilation of a Munster chronicle source and at least one other chronicle, including a Clonmacnoise-group text. At some stage many entries were omitted, abbreviated, and rewritten, turning it into a Munster-orientated chronicle. After 1092, the chronicle was maintained by a number of scribes, as can be seen from the manuscript, probably in Munster at Lismore from 1092 to 1130, and at Inisfallen in the next surviving section from 1159 onwards (with gaps). Another chronicle, Mac Carthaigh’s Book, is closely related to the Annals of Inisfallen from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, but it also contains material from South Ulster or Oriel and Giraldus Cambrensis’s account of the Anglo-Norman invasion.

The Development of the Irish Chronicles after 1200

In the late medieval period the Irish chronicles continue to have complex interrelationships; often, different sections of the same manuscript were originally unrelated to each other, rather than being continuations of the same text. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a chronicle from northern Connacht forms the basis for a number of sets of annals, including the seventeenth-century Annals of Clonmacnoise, the Annals of Ulster, and the fifteenth-century Miscellaneous Annals from 1237-1249 and 1302-1314. The section of the Annals of Loch Ce from the early thirteenth century to 1316, and the fifteenth-century Annals of Connacht both contain the north Connacht chronicle, which had been altered by the learned Ua Maelchonaire family in the fifteenth century and the Ua Duibgeannain historical family in the late fifteenth century or sixteenth century.

The common source of the Annals of Loch Ce and the Annals of Connacht also contains material from 1180 to about 1260 that, if not actually based on the Cottonian Annals, was derived from a text closely related to it. The Cottonian Annals, surviving in a thirteenth-century manuscript, contain an abbreviated version of the pre-Palladian Irish World Chronicle, the Chronicle of Ireland, and annals up to 1228 written at the Cistercian monastery of Boyle in northern Connacht. It was then continued to 1257, perhaps at the Premonstratensian monastery of Holy Trinity at Loch Ce.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries another common source was used in the Annals of Ulster, the Annals of Connacht before 1428, and the section of the Annals of Loch Ce from 1413 to 1461. This source seems to have concentrated on northern Connacht and south Ulster, to be continued by the Mac Magnuis family at Clogher in the late fifteenth century and incorporated into the earliest manuscript of the Annals of Ulster, produced under the direction of Cathal Mac Magnuis in the late fifteenth century.

In the later Middle Ages there were also a number of annalistic chronicles more concerned with events in England and the Continent, which were written in Latin rather than in a mixture of Latin and Gaelic, often linked to the new Continental religious orders, and kept in English-controlled areas after 1169. The basis for most of these texts was a chronicle probably brought over from Winchcombe in England in the late eleventh century by Benedictine monks and maintained subsequently in Dublin at Christ Church. This chronicle was combined in the early thirteenth century at the Cistercian monastery of St. Mary’s in Dublin with Irish Cistercian material, Giraldus Cambrensis’s works, and English histories. It was a major source for the Annals of Multyfarnham, compiled in the late thirteenth century by the Franciscan friar Stephen Dexter; the Annals of Christ Church, produced in the early fourteenth century; and Penbridge’s Annals, which also constitute a separate source from 1291 to 1370. The Fransiscan friar John Clyn, another continuator of this common source, produced a text at Kilkenny whose draft version was probably used by the Dublin friars who wrote the inappropriately named "Kilkenny Annals" at the same time in the early fourteenth century.

Use of the Irish Chronicles in Modern Scholarship

The Irish chronicles have been used by modern scholars as a prime source for accounts of the political and ecclesiastical centers in Ireland, mainly through turning the brief statements in the chronicles into historical narratives. Another approach has been to count the frequencies of certain types of entries, such as Viking raids and death-notices of types of ecclesiastics, to see trends. The degree to which such evidence reflected reality is debatable, depending on a detailed understanding of the chronicles themselves. However, many significant factors, such as the interests of the chroniclers, the contexts of the chronicles’ composition, and how the texts were altered in later periods, still require further research, before the usefulness of the chronicles can be determined.

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