The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore.
by Saint Mochuda.
PREFACE
It is solely the historical aspect and worth of the two tracts herewith presented that appealed to their edition and first suggested to him their preparation and publication. Had preparation in question depended for its motive merely on considerations of the texts" philologic interest or value it would, to speak frankly, never have been undertaken. The editor, who disclaims qualification as a philologist, regards these Lives as very valuable historical material, publication of which may serve to light up some dark corners of our Celtic ecclesiastical past. He is egotist enough to hope that the present "blazing of the track," inadequate and feeble though it be, may induce other and better equipped explorers to follow.
The present editor was studying the Life of Declan [Project Gutenberg Etext #823] for quite another purpose when, some years since, the zealous Hon. Secretary of the Irish Texts Society suggested to him publication of the tract in its present form, and addition of the Life of Carthach [Mochuda]. Whatever credit therefore is due to originating this work is Miss Hull"s, and hers alone.
The editor"s best thanks are due, and are hereby most gratefully tendered, to Rev. M. Sheehan, D.D., D.Ph., Rev. Paul Walsh, Rev. J.
MacErlhean, S.J., M.A., as well as to Mr. R. O"Foley, who, at much expense of time and labour, have carefully read the proofs, and, with unselfish prodigality of their scholarly resources, have made many valuable suggestions and corrections.
P.P.
INTRODUCTION--GENERAL
A most distinctive cla.s.s of ancient Irish literature, and probably the cla.s.s that is least popularly familiar, is the hagiographical. It is, the present writer ventures to submit, as valuable as it is distinctive and as well worthy of study as it is neglected. While annals, tales and poetry have found editors the Lives of Irish Saints have remained largely a mine unworked. Into the causes of this strange neglect it is not the purpose of the present introduction to enter. Suffice it to glance in pa.s.sing at one of the reasons which has been alleged in explanation, scil.:--that the "Lives" are uncritical and romantic, that they abound in wild legends, chronological impossibilities and all sorts of incredible stories, and, finally, that miracles are multiplied till the miraculous becomes the ordinary, and that marvels are magnified till the narrative borders on the ludicrous. The Saint as he is sketched is sometimes a positively repulsive being--arrogant, venomous, and cruel; he demands two eyes or more for one, and, pucklike, fairly revels in mischief! As painted he is in fact more a pagan deity than a Christian man.
The foregoing charges may, or must, be admitted partially or in full, but such admission implies no denial of the historical value of the Lives. All archaic literature, be it remembered, is in a greater or less degree uncritical, and it must be read in the light of the writer"s times and surroundings. That imagination should sometimes run riot and the pen be carried beyond the boundary line of the strictly literal is perhaps nothing much to be marvelled at in the case of the supernatural minded Celt with religion for his theme. Did the scribe believe what he wrote when he recounted the multiplied marvels of his holy patron"s life? Doubtless he did--and why not! To the unsophisticated monastic and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, the marvellous and supernatural is almost as real and near as the commonplace and natural.
If anyone doubts this let him study the mind of the modern Irish peasant; let him get beneath its surface and inside its guardian ring of shrinking reserve; there he will find the same material exactly as composed the mind of the tenth century biographers of Declan and Mochuda. Dreamers and visionaries were of as frequent occurrence in Erin of ages ago as they are to-day. Then as now the supernatural and marvellous had a wondrous fascination for the Celtic mind. Sometimes the attraction becomes so strong as seemingly to overbalance the faculty of distinguishing fact from fancy. Of St. Bridget we are gravely told that to dry her wet cloak she hung in out on a sunbeam! Another Saint sailed away to a foreign land on a sod from his native hillside! More than once we find a flagstone turned into a raft to bear a missionary band beyond the seas! St. Fursey exchanged diseases with his friend Magnentius, and, stranger still, the exchange was arranged and effected by correspondence! To the saints moreover are ascribed lives of incredible duration--to Mochta, Ibar, Seachnal, and Brendan, for instance, three hundred years each; St. Mochaemog is credited with a life of four hundred and thirteen years, and so on!
Clan, or tribe, rivalry was doubtless one of the things which made for the invention and multiplication of miracles. If the patron of the Decies is credited with a miracle, the tribesmen of Ossory must go one better and attribute to their tribal saint a marvel more striking still.
The hagiographers of Decies retort for their patron by a claim of yet another miracle and so on. It is to be feared too that occasionally a less worthy motive than tribal honour prompted the imagination of our Irish hagiographers--the desire to exploit the saint and his honour for worldly gain.
The "Lives" of the Irish Saints contain an immense quant.i.ty of material of first rate importance for the historian of the Celtic church.
Underneath the later concoction of fable is a solid substratum of fact which no serious student can ignore. Even where the narrative is otherwise plainly myth or fiction it sheds many a useful sidelight on ancient manners, customs and laws as well as on the curious and often intricate operations of the Celtic mind.
By "Lives" are here meant the old MS. biographies which have come down to us from ages before the invention of printing. Sometimes these "Lives" are styled "Acts." Generally we have only one standard "Life"
of a saint and of this there are usually several copies, scattered in various libraries and collections. Occasionally a second Life is found differing essentially from the first, but, as a rule, the different copies are only recensions of a single original. Some of the MSS. are parchment but the majority are in paper; some Lives again are merely fragments and no doubt scores if not hundreds of others have been entirely lost. Of many hundreds of our Irish saints we have only the meagre details supplied by the martyrologies, with perhaps occasional reference to them in the Lives of other saints. Again, finally, the memory of hundreds and hundreds of saints additional survives only in place names or is entirely lost.
There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives"--possibly one hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter--one in Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions.
There are, for instance, three independent Lives of St. Mochuda and one of these is in two recensions.
The surviving Lives naturally divide themselves into two great cla.s.ses-- the Latin Lives and the Irish,--written in Latin and Irish respectively.
We have a Latin Life only of some saints, and Irish Life only of others, and of others again we have a Latin Life and an Irish. It may be necessary to add the Acts which have been translated into Latin by Colgan or the Bollandists do not of course rank as Latin Lives. Whether the Latin Lives proper are free translations of the Irish Lives or the Irish Lives translations of Latin originals remains still, to a large extent, an open question. Plummer ("Vitae SSm. Hib.," Introd.) seems to favour the Latin Lives as the originals. His reasoning here however leaves one rather unconvinced. This is not the place to go into the matter at length, but a new bit of evidence which makes against the theory of Latin originals may be quoted; it is furnished by the well known collection of Latin Lives known as the Codex Salmanticensis, to which are appended brief marginal notes in mixed middle Irish and Latin.
One such note to the Life of St. Cuangus of Lismore (recte Liathmore) requests a prayer for him who has translated the Life out of the Irish into Latin. If one of the Lives, and this a typical or characteristic Life, be a translation, we may perhaps a.s.sume that the others, or most of them, are translations also. In any case we may a.s.sume as certain that there were original Irish materials or data from which the formal Lives (Irish or Latin) were compiled.
The Latin Lives are contained mainly in four great collections. The first and probably the most important of these is in the Royal Library at Brussels, included chiefly in a large MS. known as "Codex Salmanticensis" from the fact that it belonged in the seventeenth century to the Irish College of Salamanca. The second collection is in Marsh"s Library, Dublin, and the third in Trinity College Library. The two latter may for practical purposes be regarded as one, for they are sister MSS.--copied from the same original. The Marsh"s Library collection is almost certainly, teste Plummer, the doc.u.ment referred to by Colgan as Codex Kilkenniensis and it is quite certainly the Codex Ardmacha.n.u.s of Fleming. The fourth collection (or the third, if we take as one the two last mentioned,) is in the Bodleian at Oxford amongst what are known as the Rawlinson MSS. Of minor importance, for one reason or another, are the collections of the Franciscan Library, Merchants" Quay, Dublin, and in Maynooth College respectively. The first of the enumerated collections was published "in extenso," about twenty-five years since, by the Marquis of Bute, while recently the gist of all the Latin collections has been edited with rare scholarship by Rev. Charles Plummer of Oxford. Incidentally may be noted the one defect in Mr. Plummer"s great work--its author"s almost irritating insistence on pagan origins, nature myths, and heathen survivals.
Besides the Marquis of Bute and Plummer, Colgan and the Bollandists have published some Latin Lives, and a few isolated "Lives" have been published from time to time by other more or less competent editors.
The Irish Lives, though more numerous than the Latin, are less accessible. The chief repertorium of the former is the Burgundian or Royal Library, Brussels. The MS. collection at Brussels appears to have originally belonged to the Irish Franciscans of Louvain and much of it is in the well-known handwriting of Michael O"Clery. There are also several collections of Irish Lives in Ireland--in the Royal Irish Academy, for instance, and Trinity College Libraries. Finally, there are a few Irish Lives at Oxford and Cambridge, in the British Museum, Marsh"s Library, &c., and in addition there are many Lives in private hands. In this connection it can be no harm, and may do some good, to note that an apparently brisk, if unpatriotic, trade in Irish MSS.
(including of course "Lives" of Saints) is carried on with the United States. Wealthy, often ignorant, Irish-Americans, who are unable to read them, are making collections of Irish MSS. and rare Irish books, to Ireland"s loss. Some Irish MSS. too, including Lives of Saints, have been carried away as mementoes of the old land by departing emigrants.
The date or period at which the Lives (Latin and Irish) were written is manifestly, for half a dozen good reasons, a question of the utmost importance to the student of the subject. Alas, that the question has to some extent successfully defied quite satisfactory solution. We can, so far, only conjecture--though the probabilities seem strong and the grounds solid. The probabilities are that the Latin Lives date as a rule from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when they were put into something like their present form for reading (perhaps in the refectory) in the great religious houses. They were copied and re-copied during the succeeding centuries and the scribes according to their knowledge, devotion or caprice made various additions, subtractions and occasional multiplications. The Irish Lives are almost certainly of a somewhat earlier date than the Latin and are based partly (i.e. as regards the bulk of the miracles) on local tradition, and partly (i.e. as regards the purely historical element) on the authority of written materials.
They too were, no doubt, copied and interpolated much as were the Latin Lives. The present copies of Irish Lives date as a rule from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only, and the fact that the Latin and the Irish Life (where there is this double biography) sometimes agree very perfectly may indicate that the Latin translation or Life is very late.
The chief published collections of Irish Saints" Lives may be set down as seven, scil.:--five in Latin and one each in Irish and English. The Latin collections are the Bollandists", Colgan"s, Messingham"s, Fleming"s, and Plummer"s; the Irish collection is Stokes" ("Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore") and the English is of course O"Hanlon"s.
Most striking, probably, of the characteristics of the "Lives" is their very evident effort to exalt and glorify the saint at any cost. With this end of glorification in view the hagiographer is prepared to swallow everything and record anything. He has, in fact, no critical sense and possibly he would regard possession of such a sense as rather an evil thing and use of it as irreverent. He does not, as a consequence, succeed in presenting us with a very life-like or convincing portrait of either the man or the saint. Indeed the saint, as drawn in the Lives, is, as already hinted, a very unsaintlike individual--almost as ready to curse as to pray and certainly very much more likely to smite the aggressor than to present to him the other cheek. In the text we shall see St. Mochuda, whose Life is a specially sane piece of work, cursing on the same occasion, first, King Blathmac and the Prince of Cluain, then, the rich man Cronan who sympathised with the eviction, next an individual named Dubhsulach who winked insolently at him, and finally the people of St. Columba"s holy city of Durrow who had stirred up hostile feeling against him. Even gentle female saints can hurl an imprecation too. St. Laisrech, for instance, condemned the lands of those who refused her tribute, to--nettles, elder shrub, and corncrakes! It is pretty plain that the compilers of the lives had some prerogatives, claims or rights to uphold--hence this frequent insistence on the evil of resisting the Saint and presumably his successors.
One characteristic of the Irish ascetics appears very clear through all the exaggeration and all the biographical absurdity; it is their spirit of intense mortification. To understand this we have only to study one of the ancient Irish Monastic Rules or one of the Irish Penitentials as edited by D"Achery ("Spicilegium") or Wa.s.serschleben ("Irische Kanonensamerlung"). Severest fasting, unquestioning obedience and perpetual self renunciation were inculcated by the Rules and we have ample evidence that they were observed with extraordinary fidelity. The Rule of Maelruin absolutely forbade the use of meat or of beer. Such a prohibition a thousand years ago was an immensely more grievous thing than it would sound to-day. Wheaten bread might partially supply the place of meat to-day, but meat was easier to procure than bread in the eighth century. Again, a thousand years ago, tea or coffee there was none and even milk was often difficult or impossible to procure in winter. So severe in fact was the fast that religious sometimes died of it. Bread and water being found insufficient to sustain life and health, gruel was subst.i.tuted in some monasteries and of this monastic gruel there were three varieties:--(a) "gruel upon water" in which the liquid was so thick that the meal reached the surface, (b) "gruel between two waters" in which the meal, while it did not rise to the surface, did not quite fall to the bottom, and (c) "gruel under water" which was so weak and so badly boiled that he meal easily fell to the bottom. In the case of penitents the first brand of gruel was prescribed for light offences, the second kind for sins of ordinary gravity, and the "gruel under water" for extraordinary crimes (vid. Messrs. Gwynne and Purton on the Rule of Maelruin, &c.) The most implicit, exact and prompt obedience was prescribed and observed. An overseer of Mochuda"s monastery at Rahen had occasion to order by name a young monk called Colman to do something which involved his wading into a river. Instantly a dozen Colmans plunged into the water. Instances of extraordinary penance abound, beside which the austerities of Simon Stylites almost pale. The Irish saints" love of solitude was also a very marked characteristic.
Desert places and solitary islands of the ocean possessed an apparently wonderful fascination for them. The more inaccessible or forbidding the island the more it was in request as a penitential retreat. There is hardly one of the hundred islands around the Irish coast which, one time or another, did not harbour some saint or solitary upon its rocky bosom.
The testimony of the "Lives" to the saints" love and practice of prayer is borne out by the evidence of more trustworthy doc.u.ments. Besides private prayers, the whole psalter seems to have been recited each day, in three parts of fifty psalms each. In addition, an immense number of Pater Nosters was prescribed. The office and prayers were generally pretty liberally interspersed with genuflexions or prostrations, of which a certain anchorite performed as many as seven hundred daily.
Another penitential action which accompanied prayer was the "cros-figul." This was an extension of the arms in the shape of a cross; if anyone wants to know how difficult a practice this is let him try it for, say, fifteen minutes. Regarding recitation of the Divine Office it was of counsel, and probably of precept, that is should not be from memory merely, but that the psalms should all be read. For this a good reason was given by Maelruin, i.e. that the recitation might engage the eye as well as the tongue and thought. An Irish homily refers to the mortification of the saints and religious of the time as martyrdom, of which it distinguishes three kinds--red, white, and blue. Red martyrdom was death for the faith; white martyrdom was the discipline of fasting, labour and bodily austerities; while blue martyrdom was abnegation of the will and heartfelt sorrow for sin.
One of the puzzles of Irish hagiology is the great age attributed to certain saints--periods of two hundred, three hundred, and even four hundred years. Did the original compilers of the Life intend this?
Whatever the full explanation be the writers of the Lives were clearly animated by a desire to make their saint cotemporary and, if possible, a disciple, of one or other of the great monastic founders, or at any rate to prove him a pupil of one of the great schools of Erin. There was special anxiety to connect the saint with Bangor or Clonard. To effect the connection in question it was sometimes necessary to carry the life backwards, at other times to carry it forwards, and occasionally to lengthen it both backwards and forwards. Dr. Chas. O"Connor gives a not very convincing explanation of the three-hundred-year "Lives," scil.:-- that the saint lived in three centuries--during the whole of one century and in the end and beginning respectively of the preceding and succeeding centuries. This explanation, even if satisfactory for the three-hundred-year Lives, would not help at all towards the Lives of four hundred years. A common explanation is that the scribe mistook numerals in the MS. before him and wrote the wrong figures. There is no doubt that copying is a fruitful source of error as regards numerals.
It is much more easy to make a mistake in a numeral than in a letter; the context will enable one to correct the letter, while it will give him no clue as regards a numeral. On the subject of the alleged longevity of Irish Saints Ans...o...b.. has recently been elaborating in "Eriu" a new and very ingenious theory. Somewhat unfortunately the author happens to be a rather frequent propounder of ingenious theories.
His explanation is briefly--the use and confusion of different systems of chronology. He alleges that the original writers used what is called the Diocletian Era or the "Era of the Martyrs" as the "terminus a quo"
of their chronological system and, in support of his position, he adduces the fact that this, which was the most ancient of all ecclesiastical eras, was the era used by the schismatics in Britain and that it was introduced by St. Patrick.
As against the contradiction, anachronisms and extravagances of the Lives we have to put the fact that generally speaking the latter corroborate one another, and that they receive extern corroboration from the annals. Such disagreements as occur are only what one would expect to find in doc.u.ments dealing with times so remote. To the credit side too must go the fact that references to Celtic geography and to local history are all as a rule accurate. Of continental geography and history however the writers of the Lives show much ignorance, but scarcely quite as much as the corresponding ignorance shown by Continental writers about Ireland.
The missionary methods of the early Irish Church and its monastic or semi-monastic system are frequently referred to as peculiar, if not unique. A missionary system more or less similar must however have prevailed generally in that age. What other system could have been nearly as successful amongst a pagan people circ.u.mstanced as the Irish were? The community system alone afforded the necessary mutual encouragement and protection to the missionaries. Each monastic station became a base of operations. The numerous diminutive dioceses, quasi-dioceses, or tribal churches, were little more than extensive parishes and the missionary bishops were little more in jurisdiction than glorified parish priests. The bishop"s "muintir," that is the members of his household, were his a.s.sistant clergy. Having converted the chieftain or head of the tribe the missionary had but to instruct and baptise the tribesmen and to erect churches for them. Land and materials for the church were provided by the Clan or the Clan"s head, and lands for support of the missioner or of the missionary community were allotted just as they had been previously allotted to the pagan priesthood; in fact there can be but little doubt that the lands of the pagan priests became in many cases the endowment of the Christian establishment. It is not necessary, by the way, to a.s.sume that the Church in Ireland as Patrick left it, was formally monastic. The clergy lived in community, it is true, but it was under a somewhat elastic rule, which was really rather a series of Christian and Religious counsels. A more formal monasticism had developed by the time of Mochuda; this was evidently influenced by the spread of St. Benedict"s Rule, as Patrick"s quasi-monasticism, nearly two centuries previously, had been influenced by Pachomius and St. Basil, through Lerins. The real peculiarity in Ireland was that when the community-missionary system was no longer necessary it was not abandoned as in other lands but was rather developed and emphasised.
INTRODUCTION--ST. MOCHUDA
"It was he (Mochuda) that had the famous congregation consisting of seven hundred and ten persons; an angel used to address every third man of them."
(Martyrology of Donegal).
In some respects the Life of Mochuda here presented is in sharp contrast to the corresponding Life of Declan. The former doc.u.ment is in all essentials a very sober historical narrative--accurate wherever we can test it, credible and harmonious on the whole. Philologically, to be sure, it is of little value,--certainly a much less valuable Life than Declan"s; historically, however (and question of the pre-Patrician mission apart) it is immensely the more important doc.u.ment. On one point do we feel inclined to quarrel with its author, scil.: that he has not given us more specifically the motives underlying Mochuda"s expulsion from Rahen--one of the three worst counsels ever given in Erin. Reading between his lines we spell, jealousy--"invidia religiosorum." Another jealousy too is suggested--the mutual distrust of north and south which has been the canker-worm of Irish political life for fifteen hundred years, making intelligible if not justifying the indignation of a certain distinguished Irishman who wanted to know the man"s name, in order to curse its owner, who first divided Ireland into two provinces.
Three different Lives of Mochuda are known to the present writer. Two of them are contained in a MS. at Brussels (C/r. Bindon, p. 8, 13) and of one of these there is a copy in a MS. of Dineen"s in the Royal Irish Academy (Stowe Collection, A. IV, I.) Dineen appears to have been a Cork or Kerry man and to have worked under the patronage of the rather noted Franciscan Father Francis Matthew (O"Mahony), who was put to death at Cork by Inchiquin in 1644. The bald text of Dineen"s "Life" was published a few years since, without translation, in the "Irish Rosary."
The corresponding Brussels copy is in Michael O"Clery"s familiar hand.
In it occurs the strange pagan-flavoured story of the British Monk Constantine. O"Clery"s copy was made in January, 1627, at the Friary of Drouish from the Book of Tadhg O"Ceanan and it is immediately followed by a tract ent.i.tled--"Do Macaib Ua Suanac." The bell of Mochuda, by the way, which the saint rang against Blathmac, was called the "gla.s.san" of Hui Suanaig in later times.
The "Life" here printed, which follows the Latin Life so closely that one seems a late translation of the other, is as far as the editor is aware, contained in a single MS. only. This is M. 23, 50, R.I.A., in the handwriting of John Murphy, "na Raheenach." Murphy was a Co. Cork schoolmaster, scribe, and poet, of whom a biographical sketch will be found prefixed by Mr. R. A. Foley to a collection of Murphy"s poems that he has edited. The sobriquet, "na Raheenach," is really a kind of tribal designation. The "Life" is very full but is in its present form a comparatively late production; it was transcribed by Murphy between 1740 and 1750. It is much to be regretted that the scribe tells us nothing of his original. Murphy, but the way, seems to have specialised to some extent in saint"s Lives and to have imbued his disciples with something of the same taste. One of his pupils was Maurice O"Connor, a scribe and shipwright of Cove, to whom we owe the Life of St. Ciaran of Saighir printed in "Silva Gadelica." The reasons of choice for publication here of the present Life are avowedly non-philological; the motive for preference is that it is the longest of the three Lives and for historical purposes the most important.
The Life presents considerable evidence of historical reliability; its geography is detailed and correct; its references to contemporaries of Mochuda are accurate on the whole and there are few inconsistencies or none. Moreover it sheds some new light on that chronic puzzle-- organisation of the Celtic Church of Ireland. Mochuda, head of a great monastery at Rahen, is likewise a kind of pluralist Parish Priest with a parish in Kerry, administered in his name by deputed ecclesiastics, and other parishes similarly administered in Kerrycurrihy, Rostellan, West Muskerry, and Spike Island, Co. Cork. When a chief parishioner lies seriously ill in distant Corca Duibhne, Mochuda himself comes all the way from the centre of Ireland to administer the last rites to the dying man, and so on.
The relations of the people to the Church and its ministers are in many respects not at all easy to understand. Oblations, for instance, of themselves and their territory, &c., by chieftains are frequent.
Oblations of monasteries are made in a similar way. Probably this signifies no more than that the chief region or monastery put itself under the saint"s jurisdiction or rule or both. That there were other churches too than the purely monastic appears from offerings to Mochuda of already existing churches, v.g. from the Clanna Ruadhan in Decies, &c.
Lismore, the most famous of Mochuda"s foundations, became within a century of the saint"s death, one of the great monastic schools of Erin, attracting to his halls, or rather to its boothies, students from all Ireland and even--so it is claimed--from lands beyond the seas. King Alfrid [Aldfrith] of Northumbria, for instance, is said to have partaken of Lismore"s hospitality, and certainly Cormac of Cashel, Malachy and Celsus of Armagh and many others of the most distinguished of the Scots partook thereof. The roll of Lismore"s calendared saints would require, did the matter fall within our immediate province, more than one page to itself. Some interesting reference to Mochuda and his holy city occur in the Life of one of his disciples, St. Colman Maic Luachain, edited for the R.I.A. by Professor Kuno Meyer.
There are many indications in the present Life that, at one period, and in the time of Carthach, the western boundary of Decies extended far beyond the line at present recognised. Similar indications are furnished by the martyrologies, &c.; for instance, the martyrology of Donegal under November 28th records of "the three sons of Bochra" that "they are of Archadh Raithin in Ui Mic Caille in Deisi Mumhan" and Ibid, p.
x.x.xvii, it is stated "i ccondae Corcaige ataid na Desi Muman." Not only Imokilly but all Co. Cork, east of Queenstown [Cobh] and north to the Blackwater, seems to have acknowledged Mochuda"s jurisdiction. At Rathbreasail accordingly (teste Keating, on the authority of the Book of Cloneneigh) the Diocese of Lismore is made to extend to Cork,--probably over the present baronies of Imokilly, Kinatallon, and Barrymore. That part, at least, of Condons and Clangibbon was likewise included is inferrible from the fact that, as late as the sixteenth century visitations, Kilworth, founded by Colman Maic Luachain, ranked as a parish in the diocese of Lismore. Further evidence pointing in the same direction is furnished by Clondulane, &c., represented in the present Life as within Carthach"s jurisdiction.
The Rule of St. Carthach is one of the few ancient Irish so-called monastic Rules surviving. It is in reality less a "rule," as the latter is now understood, than a series of Christian and religious counsels drawn up by a spiritual master for his disciples. It must not be understood from this that each religious house did not have it formal regulations. The latter however seem to have depended largely upon the abbot"s spirit, will or discretion. The existing "Rules" abound in allusions to forgotten practices and customs and, to add to their obscurity, their language is very difficult--sometimes, like the language of the Brehon Laws, unintelligible. The rule ascribed to Mochuda is certainly a doc.u.ment of great antiquity and may well have emanated from the seventh century and from the author whose name it bears. The tradition of Lismore and indeed of the Irish Church is constant in attributing it to him. Copies of the Rule are found in numerous MSS. but many of them are worthless owing to the incompetence of the scribes to whom the difficult Irish of the text was unintelligible. The text in the Leabhar Breac has been made the basis of his edition of the Rule by Mac Eaglaise, a writer in the "Irish Ecclesiastical Record" (1910). Mac Eaglaise"s edition, though it is not all that could be desired, is far the most satisfactory which has yet appeared. Previous editions of the Rule or part of it comprise one by Dr. Reeves in his tract on the Culdees, one by Kuno Meyer in the "Gaelic Journal" (Vol. V.) and another in "Archiv fuer C.L." (3 Bund. 1905), and another again in "Eriu" (Vol. 2, p. 172), besides a free translation of the whole rule by O"Curry in the "I. R. Record" for 1864. The text of the "Record" edition of 1910 is from Leabhar Breac collated with other MSS. The order in the various copies is not the same and some copies contain material which is wanting in others. The "Rule" commences with the Ten Commandments, then it enumerates the obligations respectively of bishops, abbots, priests, monks, and culdees [anchorites]. Finally there is a section on the order of meals and on the refectory and another on the obligations of a king. The following excerpt on the duties of an abbot ("I. E. Record" translation) will ill.u.s.trate the style and spirit of the Rule: