completely wrecked. Bartlett’s map of Armagh in 1601
shows extensive ruins of stone houses, as well as eccle-
siastical buildings in Armagh by that time.
HENRYA. JEFFERIES
References and Further Reading
De Paor, Liam. “The Aggrandisement of Armagh.” In Historical
Studies VIII, edited by T. D. Williams. Dublin: Gill &
Macmillan, 1971.
Jefferies, Henry A. Priests and Prelates of Armagh in the Age
of Reformations. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997.
Ó Cróinín, Dáibhí. Early Medieval Ireland, 400–1200. London
and New York: Longman, 1995.
———. “Saint Patrick.” In Armagh: History and Society, edited
by A. J. Hughes and W. Nolan. Dublin: Geography Publica-
tions, 2001.
Ramsey, G. “Artefacts, Archaeology and Armagh.” In Armagh:
History and Society, edited by A. J. Hughes and W. Nolan.
Dublin: Geography Publications, 2001.
Sharpe, Richard. “St. Patrick and the See of Armagh.”
Cambridge Medieval Celtic StudiesIV (1982): 33–59.
Stuart, James. Historical Memoirs of the City of Armagh.
Newry: privately published, 1819.
See alsoAirgialla; Church Reform, Twelfth Century;
Ecclesiastical Settlements; Ecclesiastical Sites;
Ecclesiastical Organization; Emain Macha; Houses;
Malachy; Muirchú; Patrick; Pre-Christian Ireland;
Religious Orders; Tírechán; Uí Néill; Vikings
ARMAGH, BOOK OF
A vellum manuscript consisting originally of 222
folios (c.195 x 145 mm; folios 1 and 41–44 are now
missing) in three parts: The first contains a dossier of
texts mostly in Latin but partly in Old Irish, comprising
almost all the earliest biographical and historical mate-
rials relating to St. Patrick; the second part is the only
complete copy of the New Testament surviving from
the early Irish Church; the third contains the Life of
St. Martin of Toursby Sulpicius Severus (in a unique
recension). The manuscript is particularly important,
both for its contents and because it can be dated. In a
brilliant piece of detective work, Charles Graves, later
Bishop of Limerick, in the mid-nineteenth century
deciphered two partially erased colophons which
revealed that the book had been written (with perhaps
one or more assistants) by an Armagh scribe Ferdom-
nach (d. 846) at the behest of Torbach, heres Patricii
(i.e., successor of Patrick and abbot of Armagh) in the
year 807. The book was revered in the later Middle
Ages as a relic because of a colophon on folio 24v
which reads Hucusque uolumen quod Patricius manu
conscripsit sua(Thus far the volume that Patrick wrote
in his own hand); in later centuries, this text came to
be called Canóin Phátraic(Patrick’s Canon).
The Armagh collection of texts written by Patrick
himself appears to have been incomplete at time of
writing (807), if not before. Thus only his Confessio
is copied (in a defective version) into the manuscript;
Patrick’s Letter to the soldiers of Coroticusis miss-
ing, apparently deliberately omitted. Copies of the
two documents survive in continental transcripts,
however, thus revealing the defective nature of the
Armagh recension. Copies of the earliest surviving
hagiographical works on Patrick, by Tírechán and
Muirchú maccu Machtheni, appear also to have sur-
vived only in defective versions at Armagh, and it
has even been suggested that they may, in fact, have
been added at a later date to the rest of the collection,
after their respective texts had been procured from
elsewhere.
The gospel text in the Book of Armagh is classified
as Vulgate with some Old Latin admixtures. One recent
study has detected affinities between the Armagh text
and that of the Echternach Gospels main text (Paris,
BN lat. 9389). The other New Testament texts are of
more or less equal purity (the Acts of the Apostles and
the Apocalypse being especially so). At the end of
Matthew’s Gospel the scribe has added a collect for
that saint’s feast-day (on which day that particular page
was written), while at the end of John, excerpts from
Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Iobare arranged in
a geometrical design around the diamond-shaped
closing words of the Gospel. At the end of the additions
(Additamenta) to Tírechán’s Collectaneaof Patrician
ecclesiastical sites, two groups of cryptic catchwords
and abbreviations are inserted, neither having any con-
nection with the Patrician material. The second of
these groups (folio 53v.) consists of a number of allu-
sions to Pope Gregory, with the full text of the HancLeather satchel of the Book of Armagh. © The Board of Trinity
College Dublin.
ARMAGH