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Terminology is sometimes problematic in the study of medieval religious communal life and its material remains in Ireland, especially in the period before 1100. The erstwhile assumption of scholars that all ecclesiastical sites of the early Christian period, up to and including the age of Viking incursions, were monastic has given way in recent years to greater caution, driven by an increasing awareness of the complexity of the early Church’s institutional and territorial structures, and of its provision of pastoral care to contemporary society. Strictly speaking, the designation “monastery” indicates the one-time presence of monks living in community according to a Rule, a code of behavior prescribed by one of the early church’s intellectual heavyweights, and while many of the sites were certainly monastic by this measure, the organization and practice of religious life at many other sites— especially those small, archaeologically attested but barely documented, sites—simply remain unknown.