58
AN GAODHAL.
a large quarto paper copy, in the library of the
Royal Irish Academy, No. 25. 4; 25 5; both in the
same hand writing. The writing is tolerably good
but the orthography is often inaccurate, owing to
the ignorance of the copyist, whose name appears
at the end of the second volume in T.C.D., in the
following entry.
"Written out of an anciant vellum book, and fi¬
nished the 29th day of the month of October, in
the year of the Lord, 1764. by Maurice O'Gorman
This Maurice O'Gorman, a well known though
a very incompetent scribe, flourished in Dublin
before and for some time after this year of 1764.
The Trinity College copy was made by him for
Dr. O'Sullivan, F.T.C.D., and Professor of Law
in the University; the two volumes in the Royal
Irish Academy, for the Chevalier Thomas O'Gor¬
man, of the county Clare. in the year 1783, in the
house of the venerable Charles O'Conor, of Bala¬
nagare, in the county of Roscommon, as appears
from a notice in English prefixed to the first vol¬
ume. The scribe's name does not appear in this
copy. These annals in their present condition be¬
gin with the year of our Lord 1224, and end with
the year 1562; but the years 1394 =5 =6 and 7, are
missing; and this is the more to be regretted as
the same years are also missing from the annals of
Loch Ce. At what time, or by what authority the
chronicle received the name of the Annals of Conn¬
acht, it is now, perhaps, impossible to ascertain.
Usher quotes from the Annals of Connacht, and
from those of Boyle (Primordia, pp. 895, 966); but
it is to be feared that Usher was his own author¬
ity, as we shall see presently.
Sir James Ware gives the name of Annals of
Connacht to the chronicle now known as the Ann¬
als of Boyle, in these words: "An anonymous
monk of the Cœnobium Buelliensis, added an in¬
dex to the Annals of the affairs of Connacht up to
the year 1253, at which time he lived. The man¬
uscript book exists in the Cottonian Library, the
gift of Oliver late Viscount Grandison, of Limer¬
ick," (Ware's Irish Writers, 4to, 1639. p. 60). And
in Ware's Catalogue of his own manuscript, he
says, "A copy of the Annals of Connacht, or of
the Coenobium Buelliensis, to the year 1253. The
autograph exists in the Cottonian Library of
Westminster."
The book of which Ware makes mention in both
these extracts, under the names of the index to
the Annals of Connacht, and as the Annals of Con¬
nacht themselves, and the autograph of which, he
says, was then in the Cottonian Library of West¬
minster, is certainly that now known as the Ann¬
als of Boyle. The autograph which was then in
Westminster is now in the British Museum (under
the library mark of Titus A. 25), and has been
published by the Rev. Charles O'Conor, in his Re¬
rum Hibernicarum Scriptores.
When alluding to these Annals of Boyle in a
former Lecture, I was reluctantly obliged to take
the Rev. Charles O'Conor's very unsatisfactory
account of them from the Stowe Catalogue ; but
since that time, and during the summer of the last
year (1855), I had an opportunity of examining
the original book itself in the British Museum. As
there is much to correct in Dr. O'Conor's account,
I am tempted shortly to state here the result of
my own examination of the MS, but I shall do so
only in the briefest manner.
The book (the pages of which measure about
eight inches in length, by five and a half in
breath) contains, as I find, about 130 leaves, or
260 pages, of good, strong, but somewhat discolor¬
ed vellum; the remainder of the book is written in
the English language on paper, and has no con¬
cern with Ireland. It is written in a bold, but not
elegant hand, chiefly in the old black letter of (as
I should think) about the year 1300. The capital
letters at the commencements of years and articles
and sometimes proper names, are generally of the
Gaedhlic alphabet, and so gracefully formed that
it appears to me unaccountable how the same hand
could have traced such chaste and graceful Gaedh¬
lic and such rude and heavy black letter, in one
and the same word.
The annals commence fourteen years before the
birth of Lamech, the father of Noah; but those
years are only marked by the letters "Kl.", which
stand for the kalends or first day of January of the
year. They then give the years from Adam to
Lamech as 974. These blank kalends contain the
dates almost uninterruptedly down to Noah, then
Abraham; Isaac ; the Incarnation of our Lord, and
so to the coming of St. Patrick into Ireland, in the
fourth year of the monarch Laeghaire, A.D. 432.
Even from this time down to their present termina¬
tion at the year 1257, the record of events is very
meagre, seldom exceeding a line or two, generally
of Latin and Irish mixed, until they reach the year
1100; indeed even from that year down to the end
of the annals, the entries are still very poor, and
without any attempt at description.
The years throughout, to near the end, are dis¬
tinguished by the initial kalends only, except at
long intervals where the year of our Lord and the
corresponding year of the world are inserted. In
one instance the computation is from the Passion
of our Lord, thus : "From the beginning of the
world to the death of St. Martin, according to Dio¬
nisius, 5611 years; from the Passion of the true
Lord, 415." The year of the world is always given
according to Dionisius, but in one instance the
Hebrew computation is followed, and this is where
the chronology begins to agree with the common
era: as thus at the year 939. "Here begin the
wars of Brian, the son of Kennedy, son of Lorcan,
the noble and great monarch of all Erinn, and
they extend as far as the year 1014 from the Incar¬
nation of Jesus Christ. From the beginning of the
world, according to Dionisius, 6000 years, but ac¬
cording to the Hebrew, 5218 years."
There is so much irregularity and confusion in
the chronological progress and arrangement of
these annals (a confusion which the Rev. Doctor
O'Conor appears to me to have made more confus¬
ed), that it would have been hopeless to attempt
to reduce and correct them, without an expendit¬
ure of time, and a facility of collation with other
annals, which a visit to London on other and wei¬
ghtier purposes would not admit of. Nor should
I have deemed it necessary to revert to them a se¬
cond time in the course of these Lectures, but that
I feel bound to correct, as far as I can any small
errors into which such distinguished scholars as
Usher, Ware, Nicholson, and O'Conor may have
fallen for want of a closer examination of these an¬
nals.
In the first place we have seen Ussher, Sir Jas.
Ware, and his editor Walter Harris, Bishop Nich¬
olson, and Dr. O'Conor, call them the Annals of
Boyle; and it may, I think, be believed that Ussh¬
er was the father of the name, and that his succ¬
essors followed him implicitly.
(To be continued).
