ABSTRACT
I have written this new introductory chapter because I was asked to. More than one reader of the original book remarked that a gentle introduction to the sources for early Irish history would be very helpful to students and teachers alike. My feelings in the matter are similar to those that the Venerable Bede expressed in the preface to his great work on technical chronology, De temporum ratione,1 when he told of how the brethren for whom he composed his original work ‘On times’ (De temporibus, published in 703) complained at its excessive conciseness, and asked him to compose a longer, more detailed work which they could more easily follow. This he did, publishing his De temporum ratione in 725. Mindful that I too am writing twenty-two years after Early Medieval Ireland first appeared, while I have not expanded the text of the book very much, I have endeavored to make the materials for the history of Ireland in the Early Middle Ages accessible and understandable, without overwhelming readers with details. With that purpose in mind I have added the following introductory chapter on the principal sources that historians draw on to reconstruct the picture of that society: the annals, genealogies, and early Irish (‘brehon’) laws. These are not the only sources, needless to say, but a full description of these and the ‘ancillary’ texts – ecclesiastical (canon) law; saints’ Lives (hagiography); archaeology and literature in Latin and Old Irish – would swell this chapter into a book by itself. Most of these other sources will come into the narrative anyway, but I have not the space to discuss them in the same detail as I will the principal sources.2 On the other hand, if some readers should ask why there is no discussion at all of charter evidence or coins in the centuries up to c. 1000, the answer is simple: there are none.3 Uniquely, among the early medieval societies of western Europe in the period, Ireland appears to have functioned as an entirely coinless society, while the wealth of charter material (legal documents relating to ownership of property) that colleagues have to draw on when writing the histories of Anglo-Saxon England, the Merovingian kingdoms of Francia, or of Visigothic Spain has no counterpart in early medieval Ireland.4 The reason doubtless lies in
the fact – which can never be too often repeated – that Ireland was never a part of the Roman Empire, and never acquired the habit of using coins as currency or charters as expressions of legal title. Those innovations were to enter Irish society in the period after c. 1000.
