GENEALOGY
GENEALOGY
Genealogical texts, written in Irish and detailing the
descent of the chief families of Gaelic (and later
Anglo-Norman) Ireland, are an important source for
the history of Ireland from early medieval to early
modern times.
It has been claimed that the body of medieval Irish
genealogies is the largest of its kind for any country
in Europe—“unique... in its chronological extent and
its astonishing detail.” The collections preserved in two
manuscripts, Bodleian MS Rawlinson B 502 and the
Book of Leinster (from the earlier and later twelfth
century respectively), contain the names of some
12,000 persons (mainly men, and from the upper ech-
elons of society), many of whom were historical fig-
ures living between the sixth and twelfth centuries.
They share over 3,300 personal names and belong to
numerous tribes, dynasties or family-groups. (By the
early tenth century some had begun to bear surnames.)
There is mention of thousands of further individuals
in several surviving genealogical collections from the
post-Norman period—the greatest of all, Dubhaltach
Mac Fhir Bhisigh’s mid-seventeenth-century Book of
Genealogies, lists about 30,500 individuals sharing
more than 6,600 personal names.
The genealogies relate to invasion myth—claiming
to trace the ancestry of virtually all the Gaelic people
of Ireland (and of Scotland) back to one or other of
the sons of Míl Espáinne (Irish for
Miles Hispaniae
,
“soldier of Spain”): most of the main dynasties (apart
from those of Munster and east Ulster) were suppos-
edly descended from his son Éremón. Various subject
peoples are traced to certain of the reputed pre-Gaelic
inhabitants of Ireland, such as Fir Bolg. The genealog-
ical scheme as a whole is made to complement and
support the body of origin legends that were, by the
later eleventh century, brought together to produce
Lebor Gabála Érenn
(The Book of the Taking of
Ireland). The entire scheme, in turn, is linked into, and
indeed modeled on, the genealogical scheme that
underlies the Old Testament—Míl’s descent being
traced back via Japheth son of Noah to Adam.
Irish genealogical texts are chiefly of two kinds: (1)
single-line pedigrees that trace an individual’s ancestry
back through the paternal line; (2)
cróeba coibnesa
,
“branches of relationship” (or
cróebscaíled
, “ramifica-
tion”), that detail the side-branches of a family down
through the generations. With the assistance of the
latter, it may be possible to construct a detailed gene-
alogical table for an entire sept or extended family.
Genealogical texts may also contain various incidental
materials, both prose and poetry, such as origin legends
and chunks of family history.
The oldest genealogical texts we possess are a series
of archaic poems detailing the genealogies of Leinster
kings, and which, according to some authorities, may
reflect a period as early as the fifth century. Certainly
some genealogical texts have roots that can be traced
back to the early seventh, or even late sixth, century,
and some early non-genealogical texts, such as Tíre-
chán’s late-seventh-century hagiographical account
of St Patrick (in Latin), also include brief scraps of
genealogical lore. The existing body of medieval Irish
genealogies is thought to represent a revision made
(probably in Armagh) about
A
.
D. 1100 of a text from
a lost Munster manuscript known as the Psalter of
Cashel, thought to date from about a century earlier
(although the Psalter is traditionally attributed to the
learned king-bishop Cormac mac Cuilennáin, who was
slain in 908).
Although members of the Irish learned classes may
have been been able to commit to memory quite
lengthy pedigrees, the early genealogical texts betray
their non-oral origins by extensive use of Latin.
Although recensions dating from the twelfth century
onwards are almost entirely in Irish, many Latin for-
mulae (
a quo
,
ut
supra
,
ut dixit
, etc.) continued to be
used in early modern genealogical texts. (Some inter-
esting Irish genealogical matter written in English may
be found in various compilations from the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, such as the collections by
Sir George Carew and, from the early eighteenth cen-
tury, Roger O’Ferrall’s celebrated, and still unpub-
lished,
Linea Antiqua
.)
Since genealogies were used in early Ireland to
bolster political and territorial claims, the forging of
pedigrees to reflect changing political relationships
and circumstances was something of a minor industry.
A particular pedigree, therefore, may be an entirely
accurate record of a line of descent, or it may be a
complete fabrication, or (more probably) a mixture of
both.
Women are generally mentioned only incidentally
in the largely patrilineal and male-dominated secular
genealogies, although they fare rather better in the
early Irish saints’ genealogies and, of course, even
more so in the genealogical work known as the
Ban-
shenchas
, or “Lore of Famous Women.” This eleventh-
and twelfth-century work—occurring as both prose and
verse—purports to trace the descents and marriage-
alliances of well-known women from Irish mythology
and, following the coming of Christianity, from the
Meath and Leinster royal dynasties.
There is also a substantial body of genealogies of
hundreds of early Irish saints, but these have been
characterised as “generally fictional,” their purpose
being generally “to conceal rather than lay bare the
saint’s true origins.” Nevertheless, they may be of con-
siderable value for the light they can shed, for example,
on the growth and spread of a saint’s cult.